Last Deployment

A new, human history of the end of the Afghan War, told by those there at the end, this book discusses the withdrawal from Afghanistan and looks forward to the lasting effects of those final chaotic weeks on service members deployed there. Negotiations between the United States and the Taliban led to the 2020 Doha Agreement, which intended to end the American presence in the country and bring peace. Despite the failure of the Taliban to honor all aspects of the agreement, the Biden administration then determined to completely withdraw from the country, a withdrawal that would play out alongside Taliban advances into August 2021. After the Taliban took control of Kabul and declared victory on August 15, the next two weeks of August saw an increasingly chaotic non-combatant evacuation operation. Marines, soldiers, sailors, and airmen were deployed to Afghanistan, to Kabul's Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) to oversee the evacuation. The horror peaked during the traumatic hours of August 15-16 as thousands of desperate civilians, with the Taliban immediately behind them, overran HKIA while a few hundred Marines and soldiers fought to prevent complete disaster. An attack by a suicide bomber at the Abbey Gate of the airport on August 26 killed and injured hundreds of civilians, and also killed 13 US service members. This period of evacuation is covered at the human level through individual stories of desperation, hope, death, and life. The book also addresses what came after the evacuation, for Afghanistan as well as the countries and persons who took part: what the "new" Taliban rule means for the country as well as opposition and cooperation with that regime; and the return of service members from their deployment and how they eventually began to process what they had been through, some to disastrous results. An intimate, raw and honest look at the true human cost of history-making events.