Abby Gate

Excerpt from the book “Life and Death at Abbey Gate” by Mikael Cook & Robert Conlin

Chapter 9

Abbey Gate

“You Could Feel the Desperation to Your Core”

When the 2/1 Marines arrived at HKIA, the chaotic conditions that

existed inside the airport on August 15 and 16 had improved. Like many

horrified people around the world, they had seen the video images of

Afghan civilians falling from taxiing Air Force C-17 Globemasters onto

the tarmac.

That frenzied push by Afghan civilians onto the HKIA runways was

stoked by news of President Ghani’s departure and the evacuation of the

U.S. embassy. Tens of thousands of people stormed into the airport.1

According to the Central Command summary report, there were only

an estimated 1,600 U.S. and coalition military personnel at the airport

initially to stop them.

But they were able to piecemeal a large enough deterrent force to clear

the airfield after a Herculean two-day effort. The arrival of elements of

82nd Airborne helped greatly. So too did a contingent of 1,200 Afghan

National Strike Force (NSU) members.

Also known as “Zero” units, they were CIA-aligned soldiers who

had a reputation for playing fast and loose outside the lines. The

CENTCOM report notes that they offered to help clear the HKIA

airfield in exchange for a promise of evacuation for them and their

families. By some estimates, over 7,000 of the evacuees ended up being

“Zero” unit members and their families.

The most unorthodox assistance to the beleaguered HKIA protection

force came from the Taliban, who offered Rear Admiral Peter Vasely,

the overall commander of U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, help in clearing

the airfield. Maybe they thought it would buy them goodwill from the

U.S. government and improve their reputation in the eyes of the world.

Or maybe they simply wanted to limit the number of Afghans who were

able to leave by pushing them back outside the gate. Whatever the case,

with flight operations at a standstill and a number of incoming troops

like 2/1 Marines en route or scheduled to be shortly, Vasely accepted.

Nothing will make an Afghan crowd disperse as quickly as a heavily

armed Taliban force baring their teeth. Using batons and metal rods and

firing their AK-47s into the air over the crowd, they made short work of

the job. When the ramp dropped on the C-17 the afternoon of the 17th

and they stepped out, Sergeant Zielinski and other Weapons Company

guys were surprised at how calm it was at the airfield.

A former defensive end on his high school football team, Zielinski

said he had the same feeling stepping off the ramp as he did stepping on

the football field on game day. “On the plane, I had the same pre-game

jitters. But once my feet hit the ground at HKIA, they disappeared.”

Before they got off the plane, Sergeant Williamson recalls telling

the guys in his squad that there was no contingency plan to get them

out. “I wanted them to know how serious a mission it was. It would

be a lie to say we weren’t scared some. It’s every Marine’s dream to see

action, but there’s some fear mixed in with the excitement. So I had a

serious ‘proud Dad’ moment when they just looked at me calmly and

said, ‘let’s do this.’”

They dropped their gear in a gym along with Echo and Golf

Company, and then went immediately to replace 1/8 Marines to

provide security on the perimeter between the civilian and military

sides of HKIA. There, they dug foxholes alongside Fox, Golf and Echo

Companies, along with elements of the Army’s 82nd Airborne, and sat

through a mostly uneventful night.

The quiet was short-lived. The next morning they were sent to the

PAX terminal to clear a route for a busload of journalists scheduled to

arrive. The terminal was set up as a secondary-screening area for evacuees

who had been passed through the gates. Even there, they got a sense

of the desperation of the civilians. They also had their first face-to-face

encounters with Taliban soldiers.

Williamson saw two women and a boy leaning against the terminal

building, when a Taliban soldier called them by name and pushed them

inside. “I’ve never seen human beings look as terrified as they did.”

He watched Taliban soldiers drag two men away, and recalls that he

instinctively knew from their body language that they were taking them

to a location out of sight to shoot them. The mission rules of engagement

(ROE) prohibited him from intervening.

“I was standing face-to-face, about 10 feet from them. My eyes were

glued on them the whole time. This was the enemy that wanted to kill

us, and had killed so many of our Marine brothers over the years. It was

very, very, difficult to restrain ourselves.”

Civilians weren’t the only ones who were terrified of the Taliban.

Sergeant Ramirez remembered having a quiet conversation with an ANA

soldier outside the terminal. When he asked the soldier where he was

from, he responded, Kandahar, but it didn’t matter, because he knew

he’d never be able to go home again.

Ramirez also got a sneak preview of the absurd scenes he would

witness for the next 10 days when he saw another ANA soldier pistol

whip a man in the face. Bleeding profusely, the man kissed the soldier

on the cheek in return. “Believe it or not, I saw crazy shit like this all

the time,” he recalls.

While they worked the civilian terminal area to help process the flow

of evacuees who had been vetted through the airport checkpoints, the

crowds were swelling in numbers outside the gates.

After clearing the airfield to accommodate the arrival of the

remainder of 82nd Airborne, 24th MEU, the remainder of 1/8

Marines and 2/1 Marines, Rear Admiral Vasely and Major General

Christopher Donahue of the 82nd Airborne turned their attention

to the HKIA gates.

24th MEU were assigned to man the North and East Gates. The unit

had been informed of their planned involvement for the NEO in June

and had been preparing at a base in Kuwait since July, including staging

a number of rehearsals. Of all the U.S. troops at HKIA, they appeared

to be the best trained specifically for the mission.

However, the gates they were assigned to ended up being less than

adequate to handle potential threats and crowds. CENTCOM notes in

its report that North Gate was vulnerable to VBIED (Vehicle-Borne

Improvised Explosive Device) attacks due to its lack of standoffs and

barriers and its proximity to civilian roads. It operated intermittently

and was eventually closed on August 23 because of the VBIED threat.

East Gate consisted of a single gate, and was at risk of being breached

by the growing swell of Afghan civilians desperate to get into HKIA.

Even before the giant, agitated crowds outside the airport on the 25th

and 26th, people were frequently crushed along a perimeter wall. It was

also vulnerable to incoming mortar fire, the report notes. It too operated

intermittently, and was permanently closed on the 24th.

The closure of North and East Gates left two gates. One of them,

Glory Gate, didn’t even exist on paper and was kept a secret from

the Taliban. The reason for this subterfuge was that it was operated

by the CIA, manned by an Afghan paramilitary group known as 02,

and used only for high-priority assets, including those selected by the

White House.

The gate was located on the north perimeter of the airport about

two miles from Abbey Gate. It was made of Hesco barriers and blast

walls and extended as a corridor from the perimeter fence to the road,

across the street from a gas station used as a meeting point.

I became aware of this gate later on when we attempted a last-minute

evacuation of the family of a soldier from my unit. They made it to the

gas station, but after a series of miscues, we had to abort the attempt,

which led eventually to a long, harrowing bus ride for the family to

Mazar-e Sharif and an agonizing month-long wait in safe houses.

As you could expect from an operation that involved so much

risk, chaos, and had such a high level of personal commitment, the

CIA and Special Ops guys thrived in that environment. It demanded

improvisation, relationship-building skills, risk assessment, and big balls,

and these guys could deliver on all those. This mission was right in

their wheelhouse.

One of these guys was Air Force Major Jared Lefaivre. The 39-year

old Bardstown, Kentucky native is a helicopter rescue pilot who arrived

in Kabul in July. Normally assigned to locate and recover downed pilots,

on paper Lefaivre seemed like an unlikely candidate to get involved in

covert civilian exfiltration missions.

But nothing about the HKIA operation was typical, and neither is

anything about Lefaivre. For one, he’s one of the few guys who can say

that he’s served in the Marines, the Army and the Air Force, all as an

aviator. His skill set as a Marine officer and Air Force rescue pilot aligned

perfectly with the demands of the mission.

Two, because he arrived at HKIA a month before the NEO got going,

he was already familiar with the infrastructure, the terrain and the assets

available at the airport.

Finally, he was in the same platoon as Major Schueman at The Basic

School in Quantico, Virginia, so when Schueman needed help in getting

his interpreter Zak out, Lefaivre was able to grab two Air Force Special

Operations Pararescue Specialists (PJs) and head to Abbey Gate. It was

the day before the gate officially opened to process evacuations.

“It was a Hail Mary pass,” he told me in a Zoom interview a year

plus later. “I knew that Major Schueman needed some help and I had

some spare time, so that’s what I did.”

As soon as he agreed to help, the Marine in him switched on,

Lefaivre recalled. His parents are both Marine vets, and it runs in his

bloodstream. The three-man team geared up, trekked down to a spot

near the Abbey Gate entrance, and threw a ladder up to climb up to

the concertina wire. When he got to the top, he looked down to see a

Taliban soldier looking up at him. They both grabbed for their weapons,

barrel down, but at the ready. Like Lefaivre, the Taliban soldier clearly

knew that raising the barrel meant a close-quarters gunfight.

“For the longest time we just stared at each other and didn’t blink.

It was a stalemate,” he explains. The Taliban soldier finally turned and

walked back to the ANA armored vehicle they had commandeered.

As he was climbing in, he simulated shooting Lefaivre with his thumb

and index finger.

Relying on the photo and code words that Schueman had provided

to him, his team found Zak and his family up against a wall near the

entrance to the Baron Hotel complex about 300 yards from Abbey Gate.

From there, they were able to lead them to an access door that led to a

courtyard outside the hotel, and eventually through Abbey Gate proper

into HKIA. After months of effort by Schueman and others, Zak and

his family were safe.

Major Lefaivre and his team would repeat that mission countless times

over the next week, including the day of the Abbey Gate bombing,

when he frantically tried, but failed, to get an Afghan family in as the

gates were being prepared for closing.

He also worked with Major Chris Davis to exfiltrate Afghan interpreter

“Lucky,” who survived a number of combat encounters with the Taliban

while attached to Marine units. Altogether, Lefaivre was individually

credited with evacuating over 200 Afghan allies, while the Personnel

Recovery Task Force he was attached to during the HKIA NEO is

credited with evacuating 3,800. He was awarded the Bronze Star for

his efforts.

As the sun came up on August 19, Abbey Gate became the focal

point of the NEO mission. It’s a name that will be seared in the

memory of the 2/1 Marines and everyone else who was there for the

rest of their lives.

The gate was located on the south side of the airport, just east of

the main road that ran in a straight line for three miles from the Green

Zone, where the U.S. embassy, the presidential palace and many other

significant government buildings were situated, to the main entrance of

the airport. The gate was also just several hundred meters from Camp

Sullivan, where I had spent a short time while on deployment.

It actually consisted of two gates, an advantage to controlling crowds

that East Gate didn’t have. It was structured from north to south, with

the 10-foot-high steel inner Abbey Gate at the north end opening to

the actual airfield. There was a 240-yard corridor between the inner

gate and the outer gate to the south. That stretch was referred to as the

inner corridor. The corridor had originally been designed to serve as a

sally port for searching and processing incoming vehicles.

About 100 yards south of the outer gate, an egress road led to a complex

of buildings known as the Baron Hotel. This was where paratroopers

from the UK’s 2nd Parachute Brigade (2nd PARA) had set up a gate to

screen and process British citizens and their Afghan allies.

Corporal Moore of 2/1 Marines Golf Company said his unit got a

chance to train extensively with 2nd PARA in Jordan prior to being

deployed to HKIA. He described them as excellent soldiers, and said

the British and American troops were often shoulder to shoulder

pushing back against the crowd during the time they were at Abbey.

Sergeant Zielinksi said the Brits were a “great unit. Very professional

and friendly.”

When Abbey Gate opened on August 19, 2/1’s Golf and Fox

Companies, along with battalion snipers, were assigned to the outer gate.

They joined 2nd PARA and some members of an Air Force Pararescue

team in an effort to open the gate and begin processing applicants.

But, as the CENTCOM report makes clear, they were almost immediately

overwhelmed by the size and desperation of the crowd, which

pressed forward with a combined mass and ferocity that none of them

expected. It became clear almost immediately that the Marines would

need to reconfigure the gate, or there was a good chance the crowd

would breach the airfield again.

For the Afghans, it was a classic Catch-22 situation. In their desperation

to get into HKIA, they posed the threat of shutting down flight operations

again. That would, of course, limit everyone’s ability to get out. But

given the fact that the Taliban were roaming free beating and sometimes

shooting them, that logic went out the window.

After processing just 750 evacuees that day, Golf Company’s commanding

officer, Captain Geoff Ball, tapped his 1st Platoon to lead the

way in pushing the crowd of thousands back 200 yards beyond the outer

gate past the egress road to the Baron Hotel to establish a choke point

and additional checkpoint.

Corporal Moore can never forget the sight that he saw when he hopped

out of the back of a truck commandeered by 2/1 and then lined up to

form a wedge with his fellow Marines by holding each other’s tactical

vest straps and pushing forward as one.

“The level of desperation of the Afghans was insane. We just looked

out on a sea of desperate people, screaming, pushing papers in our faces.

They were trampling on each other. The men, especially, were acting

insane. Kids were getting trampled by them and they just kept pushing

forward, shoving their documents at us.”

In the day-long rugby scrum that followed, it took the Marines more

than eight hours to move the crowd back. By the end of their first day

at Abbey Gate, the Marines had already gotten a sense of the physical

and emotional demands of the mission.

The effort was worth it though. 24th MEU engineers were able to

move some heavy equipment down about 40 yards past the Baron Hotel

egress and hoist six shipping containers into position to form what became

known as the Chevron—named for its inverted V-shape pattern. That

configuration eliminated VBIED threats, and also established a bottleneck

to keep the crowds from gathering en masse.

Once the Chevron was established, the Taliban began screening Afghans

outside the containers before passing them through to 2/1 Marines in the

outer corridor between the Chevron and the outer gate. There, 2/1 had

established a holding area for evacuees to search them and examine their

documents, before moving them to the inner corridor between the two

gates for a more thorough search. Finally, evacuees were passed through

the inner gate into HKIA for a final screening with State Department

personnel before they were approved for evacuation.

On paper, it seemed like the best quick-fix solution to a bad

problem. The CENTCOM report noted that, “between August 20th

and August 25th, gate operations took on a structured and predictable

battle rhythm. Crowds were desperate but manageable, able to be

kept calm at Abbey Gate because Marines interacted with the people

continuously.”

On the ground, though, it was a different story. Yes, the crowds were

more “manageable,” but as the days went on, their desperation increased.

The “calm” that the report describes is a word that only a public affairs

officer sitting in a climate-controlled room back at HQ would use to

describe the conditions at Abbey Gate. For example, seven Afghan

civilians were reported to have been crushed to death in the crowds on

August 21 alone.

“The smell was grotesque,” Zielinski recalls. “There was an overwhelming

aroma of death at the gates and it increased as time went on.

People got trampled to death and their bodies lay where they fell until

UK 2nd PARA could sweep the area, pick them up and stack them near

the Baron Hotel egress road.”

“I saw a kid of about five or six get trampled out in the crowd.

I tried, but I couldn’t get to him. There were just too many people.

Grown men were stepping on him in an effort to get closer to us to

show their documents. I saw the life leave his eyes,” Sergeant Williamson

recounts in a voice that leaves little doubt that the horror of that sight

remains with him.

The desperation was unlike anything the Marines had ever witnessed.

Some Afghan mothers were throwing their babies over the 12-foot

T-walls (concrete barricades topped with concertina wire) blindly

hoping there were Americans on the other side to catch them and

take them to safety.

Some didn’t clear the walls and got caught in the wire and bled out

before they could be rescued by medics. It was a horrific sight that

witnesses will never completely erase from their memories.

Sergeant Zielinski was standing near the Chevron with two 2nd PARA

soldiers when a woman came to him and wordlessly placed a young boy

of about four years old in his arms and then slipped back into the crowd

and disappeared. He looked down to see that the boy was dead.

“I held that boy in my arms before I held my own son [who was born

during the deployment],” he recalls. “I wanted to be mad at the woman

for doing that, but I couldn’t be. She had no chance to bury her son in

those conditions. It was pretty fucking heartbreaking.”

While the installation of the Chevron did play a major factor in crowd

control, the involvement of the Taliban in acting as gatekeepers had a

predictable result. Instead of filtering in through the shipping containers

as intended, the crowd avoided it like the plague and started looking for

alternative ways to access the Marines at the outer gate.

Every 2/1 Marine I spoke to was unanimous in their opinion about

the Taliban soldiers they encountered at HKIA. To sum it up in one

word: evil.

Of all the hardships and frustrations they endured, the one that produces

the rawest reaction is their memory of how they could only stand and

watch as the Taliban brutalized Afghan civilians.

“In my opinion, the Taliban are evil, evil people,” Zielinski says.

“No matter how much they try to convey to the rest of the world they’re

not, we saw nothing but evil from them. Beating and killing innocent

people. Using kids as pawns. They’re absolute evil.”

As hard as it was for him and other Marines, it was worse for the few

combat-tested members of the battalion, he points out.

“They said that this mission [Abbey Gate] was way worse than

any combat mission, because we couldn’t retaliate for what they did

to civilians or we might go to jail. It took a huge emotional toll on

everyone.”

The threat of a court martial and jail time was definitely effective,

because Marines had every opportunity in the world to settle some scores

for the Afghan civilians they saw getting brutalized.

Corporal Moore said a Taliban soldier leveled his AK-47 at a Marine

in another Golf Company squad. In return, he said, a number of squad

members trained their weapons on him, which led to a standoff before

the Taliban soldier wisely lowered his weapon. It could have ended

up much differently with less professional soldiers. That episode helps

explain why 2/1 Marines are called “The Professionals.”

After days of witnessing beatings, abductions and reported killings

by the Taliban at the Chevron, Afghan civilians found a way to bypass

them by circling around the checkpoint and climbing through a hole in

a chain-link fence to access a sewage canal that ran parallel to the gate

corridors.

The canal originally served as a natural barrier for the Marines on

the east side of the perimeter wall and fence. It contained roughly 2 feet

of fetid sewage runoff, which in usual circumstances is a deterrent for

most human beings. Lance Corporal Bair spent the last two days of the

deployment on the wall above it.

“The smell was unbearable,” he remembers. “It sticks with me to

this day.”

But as the crowd began to bypass the Taliban checkpoint and enter

the canal area, that deterrent no longer mattered. It began to fill up

with Afghans waving documents at the Marines who stood on the

6-foot-high wall above them. Soon, it was so crowded, there wasn’t a

crack of light between them. By the 26th, Pentagon officials estimated

10,000 people were packed into the canal.

As bad as it was witnessing the behavior of the Taliban, 2/1 Marines

say it was equally as hard having to decide who would be allowed in the

gate. It was, they all say, an agonizing responsibility for young Marines

trained to fight, not screen visa applicants in the midst of chaos.

“Nothing could prepare you for the emotion at the gate,” Ramirez

says. “When I got overwhelmed by it, I tried to empathize and put

myself in their shoes. They were hungry and thirsty and desperate. You

could feel that desperation to your core.”

It didn’t help, he says, that they received constantly changing

instructions on what documents to accept. They supposedly came from

State Department officials, he said, but he never saw one of them at

the gate the whole deployment.

“First the yellow embassy cards were good, then they weren’t, then

they were again. I had sent a bunch of people with those cards away.

I can’t describe the guilt I felt over that.”

Ramirez’s buddy, Zielinski, has a vivid description of what that

experience was like.

“It was like having to play God. Who got picked, who didn’t? You

had people’s lives and their futures in your hands.” He choked up as he

finished that thought and struggled to compose himself.

“I couldn’t imagine being an Afghan in that crowd and watching that.

I just want to let them know that we tried as hard as we could to help

them. Our guys would go back for a break and they would break down

because they were so upset by what they were seeing. Then they’d put

their helmets back on and get back to work.”

Their empathy didn’t extend to every Afghan civilian they saw,

however. The Marines say they knew there were cultural differences

between Americans and Afghans, but the behavior of many Afghan men

at the gate shocked and angered them.

“They had a complete disregard for anyone but themselves,” Williamson

recalls. “I saw a man throw a kid into the canal to make room for himself

on the wall. They used kids like carpets to get over the concertina wire.

They acted like animals.”

Moore said he was so incensed after watching adult men swipe bottles

of water that the Marines had passed out to children right out of their

hands, that he tackled one man and took the water away from him.

“I hate to say it, but a lot of the Afghan men acted like scum,” Ramirez

adds. “They would leave their own families behind just so they could

get through.”

In the sea of humanity all around them—estimates of 20,000 or more

around HKIA from August 20 on—it was the faces of the kids that they

remember the most.

Ramirez said it was the face of a girl of around 13 that has stayed with

him. “She didn’t have any documentation, so I had to reject her. She

was crying and crying. I felt like I was rejecting my own sister who’s

that age. She’s the first face I see in my dreams.”

Zielinski too is haunted by the memory of a young girl. She approached

him with another girl and a man, and ended up hanging on to his legs

crying, “Please let my family live.” But they had no documentation, so

he had to bring them over to the British-run checkpoint where they

would be released back into Kabul. The girl had incredibly bright green

eyes, he recalls.

“I told them over and over, ‘I’m so sorry,’ as I brought them out. I still

have trouble sleeping. I see her eyes.”

There were some success stories, and they tried to cling to those.

“I tried to have a ‘win’ every time we went out,” Bair explains. “Getting

a family through was a win, so I tried to remember that when I witnessed

all that other shit.”

Ramirez said a young girl speaking very good English asked him for

help. When he questioned why her English was so good, she handed him

her father’s Virginia driver’s license and explained that they lived there,

but had come back to Kabul for a wedding. She helped him translate

until he was able to round up her family of 10 and escort them into

the airport.

This was the “structured and predictable battle rhythm” the

CENTCOM report described during that time period. But to be fair,

despite the shit show of coordination and the chaos that ensued, the

number of evacuees getting through the gates and number of flights

going out increased.

On August 23, the State Department announced that the U.S. military

flew out 10,400 people in the 24-hour period, while coalition members

evacuated an additional 5,900. That number set a record for the most

evacuees in a 24-hour period, despite frequent shutdowns of the gates

to relieve the pressure inside HKIA.

Back home in Michigan, I was hoping to add 10 more to that total.