Marine Corps Cpl. Greg Whalen peered over the barbed wire and surveyed the chaos below the wall, guarding Hamid Karzai International Airport days before America withdrew its last troops from Afghanistan.
“We have thousands of people outside,” Whalen told The Federalist. “We had to keep it closed and keep control.”
August 30 marks the third anniversary of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. After the disastrous exit, a 2022 report estimated that up to 9,000 Americans remained in Afghanistan, along with $7 billion worth of military equipment for the Taliban. In the final days of the withdrawal, an ISIS suicide bomber killed 13 American soldiers and hundreds of Afghans outside the airport.
“I’m not going to say, ‘It’s Joe Biden’s fault.’ It’s much more complicated than that,” Whalen said. “But all of them together as a group? Someone should have held someone accountable.”
As The Federalist previously reported, not a single senior official has resigned or been fired in the three years since the disaster.
The purpose of the withdrawal is clear, said Whalen, but how it should be implemented and how the situation could have become so bad seems to be a “mystery.” He was merely expressing his opinion, he noted.
“The fact that this situation came about and we weren’t called until two weeks before the deadline to do anything is crazy,” Whalen said. “There are videos of people clinging to airplanes and falling out of the sky because they’re so desperate to get out. That was the situation on the ground. In my opinion, someone could have realized much faster, much sooner, that more help was going to be needed.”
Whalen released three songs commemorating the tragedy on August 23. One song, “Kabul 2021,” commemorates the last Americans to leave Afghanistan.
Don’t you see what’s going on?
Which cowards are in charge here?
How is it right to promise life
When do we want to get up and go home?
Before the fight
Whalen, who is no longer on active duty, joined the Marines out of high school in 2017. He served at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and was then ordered to 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment. He deployed with that unit on his first overseas deployment in 2021. “The deployment was basically going on a ship with the Marines, sailing around and then the Marines would disembark at different locations to train and just be on standby in case something happened,” Whalen said.
His unit had planned to leave the Middle East in July, he said, but Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wanted them to stay in the region, officials said. So the unit spent a full month in Kuwait on standby. In the meantime, the Taliban had taken over Afghanistan since the U.S. began withdrawing in May. “We knew we might leave. It really looked like we weren’t going to,” Whalen said. “I thought to myself, ‘We’ve been sitting here all this time. If they really needed us, they would have used us.'”
But that changed, Whalen said, when authorities ordered the troops to Afghanistan on Aug. 12 or 13 – just weeks before the Aug. 31 withdrawal deadline. “All of a sudden, it was, ‘Yes, we’re going,'” Whalen said. “We had everything packed and ready, so the guys hit the road immediately.”
On site
After arriving in Afghanistan, Whalen patrolled the perimeter of the airport in a “combined anti-tank team.” He said the walls weren’t very high, so people would occasionally climb over them. “We were basically driving all the time, so we did a mix,” Whalen said. “We spent most of our time at the east gate.”
Whalen said so many Afghans had gathered outside the gate that the Marines parked a truck behind it to prevent the crowd from pushing in.
The Marines kept the gate closed and opened it just enough to let individuals through. As the mob approached, they forced it shut again, Whalen said. Parents gave the Marines their babies and begged them for help.
“The issue with the babies was because they were either overheating or getting crushed,” Whalen said. “So the parents would say, ‘Please take them.’ And then we would grab them as they came in.” Whalen appeared in a viral video at the time, to the left of a Marine lifting a baby over barbed wire.
According to Whalen, officials later ordered the Marines to close the gate permanently.
He said the situation became worse as thousands of Afghans – many of them translators or American sympathizers – gathered inside and outside the airport in hopes of escaping. “Dealing with the people trying to evacuate was just the weirdest, really tense situation where you had to get in their faces and maybe physically push them back,” Whalen said. He thanked commanders and other Marines for maintaining some degree of order, although he said it was “hectic.”
“One of the biggest frustrations is that we bring people in, search them, place them in the collection areas, and then load them onto buses so they can go to the terminal,” Whalen said. “For days, there were no buses running.”
Marines escorted Afghans to the airport. Courtesy of Gregory Whalen
He said the crowd included pregnant mothers, many of whom had given birth under the stress of the situation. He called it the “perfect storm.”
“It was just weird,” Whalen said. “It was everything from ‘Be prepared for a combat-like response if the Taliban or someone else tries to come in by shooting’ to ‘Get baby formula for the newborn baby whose mother just gave birth.’ The whole spectrum.”
He said the military’s arrangement with the Taliban – in which the Taliban secured the outside while the Americans focused on the inside – was one of the “strangest and most frustrating things.”
“We were kind of at odds with each other the whole time,” Whalen said. “It was extremely tense.”
Although the Taliban primarily wanted the Americans to leave, the situation could have easily escalated, Whalen said. “There were moments when they threatened to shoot,” Whalen said. “I don’t think they would have done that.”
But on August 26 three years ago, an ISIS member killed 13 U.S. troops and more than 150 Afghans in a suicide attack outside an airport gate in Kabul. Whalen said the gate was “just down the street” from where he was, but he was on patrol at the time.
“For hours that afternoon, we came to the trucks and sat there waiting, in case we had to rush out if everything happened,” Whalen said. “The strangest thing was that I don’t even remember hearing the bomb go off.”
Former President Donald Trump laid flowers at Arlington National Cemetery on August 26 of this year to commemorate fallen Americans. President Joe Biden issued a statement.
The last American troops left Afghanistan on August 30, 2021.
Permanent consequences
Vice President Kamala Harris played a “key role” in the decision to withdraw, according to Politico, saying she was the “last person in the room” with Biden before he made the decision.
Whalen said he did not know who made the decisions, but someone on the front lines “completely failed to plan.” He said the failed withdrawal destroyed the partnership between troops and Afghans.
“Our country has made promises to many people for decades: ‘We will help you. You work with us and for us,'” Whalen said. “The way this has unfolded has also shaken the lives of many Americans because of the intensity of the relationships they built during their deployment.”
Logan Washburn is an editor who covers election integrity. He graduated from Hillsdale College, was an editorial assistant to Christopher Rufo, and writes for the Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller. Logan is originally from central Oregon but now lives in rural Michigan.
