Kabul Airlift Vol. IV

    
    Zachary Johnson served with the 82nd Airborne, a partial element of the unit being on the Immediate Response Force. Historically the 82nd Airborne at times has been called upon to react to an issue both abroad and domestically. As with many military units that go through these kinds of emergency response rotations, there are plenty of false alarms, drills or spin-ups to a situation that is resolved on its own and no longer requires that force. That's exactly what Zach thought when he first got the call.

"Everyone was recalled, so we all came back, got our shit and started consolidating. You know to be honest we had done this a couple times before so even when we got bussed to our departure location (redacted from interview), I still thought it may just be a drill. It wasn't until when we were on a plane in Qatar that we found out exactly where we were going and for what. We were told it would only be a couple days, go in, evacuate a few people and we'd be out."

Zach's plane landed in the early morning hours of August 15th and as the plane was taxiing to a stop, the ramp lowered. Zach and a fellow soldier recall incoming rounds skip across the ramp.

"The ramp went down and I swear two or three rounds skipped across the ramp. I looked at my buddy Chris who also heard the same thing. We later found out the air force personnel flying did report it as incoming rounds. We never knew who did it but they probably just used the cover of darkness to try to take potshots at a plane."

"They ended up pushing us to the other side of the airfield, that's where we got off. There wasn't any transportation at first so we were just running around the flight-line grabbing whatever vehicles were laying around. You could hear gunfire in the background, there were random civilians walking around the airport, tracers going up nearby and over the city."

"We immediately got posted up by a nearby gate. It wasn't even open yet, but we were securing all entrances and exits to the airport."

"The next morning, that's when shit got real. Taliban technicals were rolling down Russian Road, just flagging our positions with machine guns, they were maybe 150-200 meters away from us. It was crazy to see, the guys we've been fighting for 20 years just right here in front of us. When our gate opened it was like the floodgates, within the first hour we had maybe 5,000-10,000 civilians showing up trying to get in"

"It was brutal man. There were civilians, you know kids even, dying in the crowd. Dying from wounds or heat exhaustion, there was just so many. There was only so much we could do, you know we tried throwing water bottles to the kids but we needed our own and even the ones we threw, sometimes the Taliban would just take it."

“Some dude came out of a hangar on our side of the airport with a backpack and started sprinting towards the gate. Myself and Chris took off toward him, we didn’t know if it was a suicide bomber or what. We didn’t want him getting to the gate. We kind of accepted whatever fate we may get and tackled the dude to the ground and began searching his bag. He had two disassembled M16s with loaded mags in his backpack. We took that shit and sent him back out the gate.”

“The Afghan NDS guys were doing a lot of crowd control at our gate. It was getting out of hand and these guys opened it up, pushed out and immediately started throwing flash bangs, beating people with buttstocks, yelling at people, firing warning shots. The Turks even pushed their gun trucks up, they calmed down the crowd after that.”

“The breach itself was pretty crazy. I mean thousands of Afghans were just flooding the flightline. Flights were trying to come in and out and they couldn’t. It got so crazy. I went to one of the towers and you could hear over the radio; ‘The civilian plane taxiing right now is not cleared for takeoff. We need to stop that plane, it’s been hijacked.’ - These Afghan civilians essentially just hijacked a random plane in an attempt to leave, but our gun trucks went out and parked right in front of it, and the boys get them off the plane and out of the way.”

“The vetting process was tough man. We’d take people who were vetted at the gates and then drop them off at the terminal to be further vetted and cleared. Man for some of these people it was like a 24-36 hour wait. It was a crazy long line, nobody wanted to get out of it and lose their spot so some people were just pissing and shitting themselves in line.”

“At some point there was an indirect fire incident. The air attack alarm went off, 2-3 rockets had been fired from several hundred meters away. Not sure how close they came but I think the CRAM took some out and maybe one of them landed within the airport area I’m not entirely sure.”

“After the bombing on the 26th, we didn’t really know what happened. We were driving around dropping some water and MREs off and when we saw some Marines we asked what had happened. They told us there had been a bombing and some of our guys (Americans) had been killed. The mentality of the whole operation changed after that. I just wanted to fuck people up. I think a lot of us did.”

“You know they just pushed people through, we don’t even know how many of them actually get vetted. It stills upsets me, still bothers me. I felt like we got hit, we lost brothers and sisters and we didn’t do a fucking thing about it. That bothers me. We got to blow off some steam though. We were told to render some of the vehicles inoperable. We were slashing tires, throwing sand in the gas tanks, fucking up the helicopters, doing anything we could to deny the Taliban any sort of materials.” 

“I still think about this stuff from time to time, but I think at the end of the day we just need to remember those who were killed there.”