“That’s It. We’re Done.” - Abbey Gate
A personal reflection from Kim Staffieri
Every August 26, I see the same thing.
Thirteen names.
They should be there. Eleven Marines, one Soldier, and one Sailor were killed at Abbey Gate five years ago today. They deserve to be named, and they deserve to be remembered.
And then, somewhere beneath those names, if they are mentioned at all, are the approximately 170 Afghans who were also killed.
No names. No faces. Just a number.
Every year, that hurts.
Those Afghans were not background casualties in an American tragedy. They were part of the tragedy. They were mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. They were people standing outside an airport in the final desperate days of a twenty-year war, hoping there might still be a way to safety. Hundreds more were wounded and maimed.
Five years later, most of us don't know their names.
I don't know their names.
And that bothers me deeply.
I am a military mom. I come from a family with generations of military service. I've spent more than a decade working alongside veterans, and somehow the Marines have always held a particular place in my heart. Several have become close friends.
Every August 26, I find myself wondering what the Marines who died at Abbey Gate would think about this. Would they want the Afghans who died beside them remembered only as a number?
I can't answer that for them. I would never try.
But I know the Marines I call friends, and I know why American service members were standing at Abbey Gate that day.
They were there to help people.
Thousands of Afghans were living through what was almost certainly one of the worst moments of their lives. American troops were standing at those gates trying to get as many of them to safety as they possibly could.
I think we do a disservice to that service when we separate the Americans who died from the people they died trying to help.
Remembering the Afghan dead does not take a single thing away from the thirteen Americans.
It completes the story of Abbey Gate.
I remember August 26, 2021, very clearly.
In the days before the attack, we had been receiving increasingly serious warnings about a possible threat at the airport. The U.S. government issued security warnings, and I reported every one of them to AWA members.
I had to. Our people needed to know.
But imagine what those warnings meant to someone standing outside HKIA. For days, Afghans had been fighting through enormous crowds trying to reach the gates. They had Taliban checkpoints behind them and American aircraft on the other side of the walls. For some, getting through that gate represented what they believed might be their last chance to escape Afghanistan.
And we were telling them to move away. To get out of the crowds and wait until the threat cleared.
There are moments in this work when there are no good choices.
That was one of them.
Then the warning became real.
When the report came that there had been an explosion at Abbey Gate, I had a visceral reaction. In my head, I heard a door slam shut and then the sound of a lock being forced into place.
I said out loud, to no one in particular:
“That's it. We're done.”
The evacuation continued, but the mass movement through the gates as we had known it was effectively over. For the thousands still outside HKIA, the possibility of reaching those aircraft had narrowed almost beyond recognition.
And there was another realization. Some of the people we had been warning to leave those crowds had just been standing where a suicide bomber detonated himself.
For roughly two years afterward, I received messages from people who were angry with me. They told me I had ruined their chance to come to America. They believed that because AWA had shared the warnings and suggested they remove themselves from the crowds until the danger passed, they had missed their opportunity to get through the gates.
As if I could know whether they would have made it through those crowds. As if any of us knew what the next hour would bring during those days.
I understood their anger. They had watched the planes leave without them.
But every time one of those messages arrived, I found myself thinking the same thing:
I'm glad you're still alive to be mad at me.
Those fifteen days did things to people. Not only the people trapped outside HKIA or the troops working the gates. All of us who were caught up in that evacuation in one way or another carry pieces of it.
For those of us trying to help from the United States, the days and nights simply blurred together. We didn't sleep. We forgot to eat unless somebody reminded us. Sometimes a neighbor quietly brought food. Sometimes someone sent money so food could be delivered because stopping long enough to feed ourselves apparently required outside intervention.
I spent much of those days where I had spent years doing SIV work: on my front porch.
One day, a neighbor came over. They didn't want to bother me, so instead they quietly asked my roommate whether I was okay. I didn't know about the conversation until later.
They had noticed I had been sitting on that porch day after day and night after night. They knew I was still there after dark because they could see two things from across the way:
the glow of my phone and the glow from cigarette after cigarette.
That image has stayed with me because five years later, the evacuation is something we can reduce to numbers, dates, flights, casualties, evacuees and acronyms.
But that isn't how any of us lived it.
There were human beings on both sides of every message coming across that phone. People at the gates. Troops trying to pull people through. Afghans trying to keep children from being crushed in crowds. Veterans in America desperately trying to reach interpreters they had served beside years earlier. Advocates, government employees, volunteers and complete strangers trying to solve problems they had never imagined having to solve.
And there were people who died.
A lot of people.
I have a Marine friend I check in with regularly, but I always check in with him on August 26. He was CONUS during the evacuation, but friends of his were at HKIA. Some of them didn't come home.
This year, when I reached out, he told me something I have been thinking about ever since.
He is beginning to notice a shift.
In conversations with friends who made it home, and in the way he himself is processing those days, there is beginning to be room for something besides the bad. Not instead of it, but alongside it.
There is room to acknowledge the good that was done by people trying to help.
That struck me because for five years, so much of the way we have talked about the evacuation has been defined by what went wrong. And plenty went wrong. Nothing about recognizing the good requires us to rewrite that history.
But perhaps five years gives us enough distance to begin seeing the people inside that history differently.
The service members who stood at those gates under horrific conditions. The Afghans who helped one another through the crowds. The veterans who refused to abandon the people they had served beside. The advocates and volunteers who simply kept answering the phone. Even the people who brought somebody food because they noticed that person had forgotten to eat.
And the thousands upon thousands of people who made it out alive.
There was good inside something terrible.
Maybe some of us are finally ready to acknowledge both.
But if we are going to do that, then I think we also have to remember all of Abbey Gate.
Today, thirteen American families know exactly whose life was taken from them five years ago. They know their names, their faces and their voices. They know their birthdays, the things that made them laugh, and the last conversations they had with them.
Somewhere, Afghan families carry those same memories.
They lost sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters. They know the names that most of us will never know.
And yet in our public remembrance, those human beings have largely become approximately 170 Afghans.
I don't think that's enough.
There were not thirteen lives lost at Abbey Gate. There were more than 180.
We know thirteen of their names.
We should speak those thirteen names. We should honor them and remember what they gave. And perhaps one way of honoring what those American service members were doing in their final hours is to refuse to let the people standing on the other side of that gate disappear into a number.
Five years later, I still don't know the names of the Afghans who died at Abbey Gate.
I wish I did.
But I know this:
They were there. They mattered. And they belong in our memory of that day.
Kim Staffieri
Founder & Executive Director
Association of Wartime Allies