Marine Corps Cpl. Greg Whalen peered across barbed wire, overlooking chaos below the wall. He was guarding Hamid Karzai International Airport, days before America withdrew its last troops from Afghanistan.
“We’ve got thousands of people outside,” Whalen said to The Federalist. “We had to keep it closed and maintain control.”
The Afghanistan withdrawal marks its three-year anniversary on Aug. 30. The disastrous exit left as many as 9,000 Americans in Afghanistan, according to a 2022 report, along with $7 billion of military equipment for the Taliban. An ISIS suicide bomber killed 13 American service members and hundreds of Afghans outside the airport in the closing days of the withdrawal.
“I’m not going to say, ‘It is Joe Biden’s fault.’ It’s way more complicated than that,” Whalen said. “But all of them together as a group? Somebody should have held somebody accountable.”
Not a single senior official has resigned or been fired in the three years since the calamity, as The Federalist previously reported.
The purpose of the withdrawal was clear, according to Whalen, but how to accomplish it and how the situation became so dire seemed like a “mystery.” He noted he was simply giving his opinion.
“The fact that it got to the situation that it was, and we weren’t even called to go in and do anything until basically two weeks before the deadline, is insane,” Whalen said. “There are videos of people clinging to planes and falling from the sky because they’re so desperate to get out. That was the condition on the ground. To me, somebody could have seen that this was going to need more help, much faster, much earlier.”
Whalen released three songs on Aug. 23 in remembrance of the tragedy. One song, “Kabul 2021,” recalls the last Americans leaving Afghanistan.
Can’t you see what’s been going on
What cowards are running the show?
How is it right to be promising life
When we intend to up and go home?
Before the Fray
Whalen, who is no longer on active duty, enlisted in the Marines in 2017 after high school. He served at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, then was ordered to the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines. It was with this unit that he deployed in 2021 for his first tour overseas. “The deployment was essentially getting on a ship with the Navy, sailing around, and then Marines getting off at different places to do training, and just be on standby in case something happened,” Whalen said.
His unit was planning to leave the Middle East in July, he said, but officials said Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin wanted them to stay in the area. So the unit spent an entire month in Kuwait on standby. Meanwhile, the Taliban had been taking over Afghanistan since America began withdrawing in May. “We knew we might be going. It really looked like we weren’t going to,” Whalen said. “I’m like, ‘We’ve been sitting here this whole time. If they really needed us, they would have used us.’”
But that changed, Whalen said, when officials ordered the troops to Afghanistan on Aug. 12 or 13 — just weeks before the withdrawal deadline of Aug. 31. “Suddenly, ‘Yep, we’re going right now,’” Whalen said. “We’d been packed and ready, so guys immediately just started going.”
On the Ground
After arriving in Afghanistan, Whalen patrolled the perimeter of the airport in a “combined anti-armor team.” He said the walls were not very tall, so people occasionally climbed over. “We were kind of constantly driving, so we did a mixture,” Whalen said. “Most of the time we did spend at East Gate.”
Whalen said so many Afghans gathered outside the gate that Marines parked a truck behind it so the crowd could not force its way in.
Marines held the gate closed, opening it just enough to let individuals through — forcing it shut when the mob surged, according to Whalen. Parents passed their babies to the Marines, begging them for help.
“The baby thing came from, they’re either going to overheat or get crushed,” Whalen said. “So the parents are like, ‘Please take them.’ And then we’d grab them when they’d come in.” Whalen appeared in a viral video at the time, just to the left of a Marine lifting a baby over barbed wire.
Officials later commanded Marines to close off the gate for good, according to Whalen.
He said the situation became more dire as thousands of Afghans — many of whom were translators or sympathetic to America — piled up inside and outside the airport, hoping to escape. “Dealing with the people that were trying to evacuate was just the strangest, really tense situation where you’re having to get in their face, maybe physically force them back,” Whalen said. He credited commanding officers and other Marines for keeping some semblance of order, though he said it was “hectic.”
“One of the major frustrations is that we were bringing people inside, searching them, getting them set in the staging areas to load them up on buses so they can go to the terminal,” Whalen said. “For days, there were no buses.”
Marines escorted Afghans into the airport. Courtesy | Gregory Whalen
He said the crowd included expectant mothers, many of whom gave birth under the stress of the situation. He called it the “perfect storm.”
“It was just weird,” Whalen said. “It was everything from, ‘Get ready for a combat type reaction if the Taliban or somebody does try to come through shooting,’ to ‘Get baby formula for the brand new baby whose mother just gave birth.’ The whole spectrum.”
He said the military’s arrangement with the Taliban — in which the Taliban secured the exterior while Americans focused on the interior — was one of the “weirdest and most frustrating things.”
“We were face to face, in a way, for the whole time we were there,” Whalen said. “It was extremely tense.”
A member of the Taliban (center right) and a translator (center left) speaking to Whalen (far left) and the Marine who lifted the baby in the viral video (far right).
While the Taliban primarily wanted the Americans to leave, Whalen said, the situation could easily have escalated. “There were times where they threatened to start shooting,” Whalen said. “I don’t think they would have done that.”
But on Aug. 26 three years ago, an ISIS member killed 13 American service members and over 150 Afghans in a suicide bombing outside an airport gate in Kabul. Whalen said the gate was “just down the street” from where he was stationed, but he was on patrol at the time.
“For hours that afternoon, we would get to the trucks and we’re sitting there waiting, just in case we had to zoom off after it all happened,” Whalen said. “One of the weirdest things was, I can’t even remember hearing the bomb going off.”
Former President Donald Trump laid flowers at Arlington National Cemetery on Aug. 26 this year to honor the fallen Americans. President Joe Biden issued a statement.
The last American troops left Afghanistan on Aug. 30, 2021.
Lasting Consequences
Vice President Kamala Harris had a “key role” in the decision to withdraw, according to Politico. She said she was the “last person in the room” with Biden before he made the decision.
Whalen said that, while he did not know who made the decisions, someone along the line “completely failed in the planning process.” He said the failed withdrawal destroyed the partnerships between troops and Afghans.
“Our country has made promises to a lot of people for decades, saying, ‘We’re going to help you. You’re working with and for us,’” Whalen said. “The way that it fell out has shattered a lot of American lives too, because of the intensity of the relationships that they made when they were deployed.”
Logan Washburn is a staff writer covering election integrity. He graduated from Hillsdale College, served as Christopher Rufo’s editorial assistant, and has bylines in The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller. Logan is originally from Central Oregon but now lives in rural Michigan.
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