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Bryan:Alright. We're ready for departure here at the pilot project podcast, the best source for stories and advice from RCAF and mission aviation pilots brought to you by Sky's Magazine. I'm your host, Brian Morrison. With me today is Major Ian Wookie, a TACHEL pilot on the CH one forty seven F Chinook and executive assistant to chief Air and Space Force development in Ottawa, Ontario. Ian, welcome back for part two of our chat.
Bryan:I'm really happy to be talking with you today.
Ian:Happy to be here, Brian.
Bryan:So listeners can tune in to part one of our chat to hear about Ian's posting to the eighty second Airborne Division in Fort Bragg in the beginning of his time in Afghanistan as the situation there began to deteriorate. Today for part two of our chat with Ian, we're going to pick back up with the evacuation of the US embassy in Kabul as well as the eventual fall of Afghanistan. So we spent a lot of time here kind of providing the background, setting the stage. At this point, you had transitioned to Hamid Karzai International Airport or HKIA with a limited debt of 12 helicopters and a 115 people. What is your mission?
Ian:So the mission, as it's been confirmed at this point, is to support the diplomatic mission. So we're operating in direct support to the Department of State with a small contingent of, we call The US forces Afghanistan. So US 4 a, was the was the mission that we were now in, and it was very much a defense and security posture. So we're not conducting operations outside in different parts of the country. We've limited our operations now to Kabul and the surrounding area to make sure that, the Department of State has support to support the embassy mission, which is occurring at the embassy in the green zone in Downtown Kabul, and that they can support their operations as required at, at HCAI, at the airfield.
Ian:For for those who aren't familiar with the with the geography of Kabul, it's a very dense city at about 6,000 feet elevation and then surrounded by mountains. But the the the airfield where it's located is about two to three miles, three to five kilometers north of, on the north side of the city. And the the secure zone was in the middle of downtown. So there was no, we'll say, secure way to transition between the green zone and the airfield, which is the, really, at this point, the only point of entry in in into or out of the country, because the the commercial aviation in, in Afghanistan just didn't have the capacity to support large scale commercial operations at at any other airfield at this point. So the the security mission that we were protecting was really the airfield to make sure that we had the that secure foothold for the diplomatic mission and the embassy itself.
Bryan:And so, basically, while you're supporting the embassy, the challenge that you're encountering is that there's no secure route between those two places, between the embassy and HKIA?
Ian:Yep. So that's and from an aviation perspective, we're very well suited to now supporting that. Right? The Department of State did have, its its own aircraft. It had some 60 and CH 46 aircraft that it was using to be able to to move people back and forth, for that mission.
Ian:But they neither of those aircraft quite had the lift capacity of the CH 47, and neither of them had the the self protection and security capacity of the a h 64. So, we were able to bring a little bit of extra capability, on top of what the what the Department of State aircraft, which was really just utility lift. Right? Kind of a a medium lift platform to be able to get in and out of downtown and and not force people to to use the the ground routes, through the city if if they didn't have to or if if it wasn't viable. Because the other thing too is, streets of Kabul are very narrow.
Ian:There's not necessarily a great ability to move convoys of large trucks through the city. So to be able to to use a Chinook or use another, CH 46 like a frog aircraft to be able to get equipment to and from the embassy, that that that's useful to them. Right?
Bryan:Yeah. For sure. So, unfortunately, at this point, the country began to collapse. In mid July to mid August, the situation on the ground began changing rapidly. Can you tell us about that?
Ian:Yeah. Through really through kind of the the July, we started to get a sense that things were really not going well in the rest of the country. We started to see provincial capitals fall to the Taliban. We started to see abandonment in the the Afghan the the Afghan security forces that were in the country. We started to recognize that the situation on the ground was becoming more and more strained, in and around Kabul, but it was a direct result of, kind of the lack of security that was occurring around the rest of the country.
Ian:District centers and provincial capitals started being overtaken by Taliban forces with relative ease all around the country. And that kind of that intelligence picture was really shaping, Kabul as the the the last bastion of safety and security in the country, which, you you did see movement of civilians into Kabul as a secure location. But at the same time, you also saw the the threat increasing as Kabul in Kabul as the the main hub of activity, for for the country, which is also makes it a a a target for the Taliban or the the folks who wanted to take over the country. We really kinda started to see it mid July kinda leading through late August. And as the the intelligence picture continued to develop, it you really got a sense that something was going to happen in the country.
Ian:It was an interesting dichotomy to to see what was happening from inside the country and shape it with some of the information we were getting from outside the country. As I said, kinda dealing with, our contingent equate, they had a pretty good intelligence picture, but, information coming from from The United States, right, or coming coming from back home. We were still looking at a planning horizon that was out to October, November, December 2021. And then it was a decision, okay. Are are we going to hand over the mission to whoever comes in next?
Ian:Like, or is this gonna become a a mission transition, that that we're gonna start planning? Are we gonna continue to draw down to zero? Like, what are we maybe just gonna look at taking the diplomatic force and move it out of the country depending on the security situation? Or are we gonna continue with the with the neo planning, which was really the focus, in this interim period through July while we were in Cabo was, at least from a from a military security force perspective, was trying to plan to the best of our ability what a noncombatant evacuation operation would look like in Kabul. How how would we set conditions to be successful in evacuating American citizens, American entitled personnel, special immigrant visa holders, all of these people who, had some sort of security guarantee from a NATO country or The US to make sure that they were safely out of the country in in an unknown security situation to occur at some point.
Ian:So we we were trying to kinda plan for all of these eventualities, at the same time being forced into a position where the security situation was really driving toward, at some point, this mission's not gonna continue. Mhmm. But even up until the August, we were still we were still looking like, we were still doing calls with US Army back home to discuss with the force that was kind of had been warned that they were gonna take over from us. We were still doing calls with them to discuss transition activities. At the same time that we were planning the noncombatant evacuation operation.
Ian:And I remember one night in early August where I I was on a I was on a video teleconference, like a a phone call with, a couple of commanders back stateside, and we were discussing the the transition activities and the predeployment operations that the that the next unit was going through to come and take over for us. And in the middle of that call, as we're as we're discussing kind of the the week's horizons leading up to, okay, what what are their predeployment activities? What kind of leave are they gonna take to be able to set themselves up? What's their inflow plan gonna look like? In the middle of that conversation, the large prison in the middle of Kabul was was overrun.
Ian:And there were about 5,000 prisoners escaped that prison Wow. In into the middle of Kabul. And the the that was kind of a really eye opening situation where, a, the threat situation in the city, just increased tenfold. And, b, the the kind of long range planning horizon really started to seem infeasible. Like, there there was really an acknowledgment that night that, we probably weren't gonna be able to make it till October in in the way that we were that we were continuing to plan to from a from from a stateside perspective.
Ian:And kinda through the through the initial weeks of August is when we really realized that things were were starting to turn sour.
Bryan:It must have been so weird to, on the one hand, be planning this handover in October as if everything is gonna be fine. And on the other hand, be privy to these intel reports and be right near Kabul as, you know, there's this massive prison break going on and just the two things are not matching each other at all.
Ian:Yeah. I mean, this this is what we do in the military. We're we're we're planners. Yeah. We plan for eventualities.
Ian:We we come up with branch plans. We come up with sequel plans. We know that of of every plan we make, one in five might get executed. True. And even that plan you're executing isn't gonna look like the plan that you come up with because it's just things change.
Ian:Right? No plan survives first contact with the enemy. Yeah. So it it wasn't it wasn't unnatural for us to plan things that were that were a little bit isolated from the events on the ground. But what what was a little bit tough was actually relaying the ground circumstances and how that was going to influence what any future plans would be.
Ian:There were there was there was really only one commander that we had in theater, who was able to, on a on a daily basis, kinda, like, put a refined point on it. It was the commander of third brigade, tenth mountain at the time. Tenth mountain had the they had the two two infantry companies that were doing all the force protection. And in our routine meetings with him, he was very, very focused on reminding everybody of what the security situation was and how to be prepared for negative eventualities, negative outcomes. Right?
Ian:Even kinda like August '21 when we knew things were not, like, not going well, but, you know, only a couple of provincial capitals had been overrun. Like, we still couldn't get a great sense of what the Afghan security force was. I just I wrote down a quote in my notebook because it it really stuck out as, like, a point for me, kinda to to refocus what that task force was looking at too when he was just like, this has not been an awesome week for the Afghans, And you you have to start now getting as ready as possible for the worst day of your life. Wow. Now he didn't he he was not a fortune teller.
Ian:He was not looking forward to exactly what we ended up seeing. But he knew that the security situation was not getting better, and he knew that there was a a mind mind frame perspective that we needed to shift going from what was very much a kind of like a diplomatic support mission, which was we we were working on we were working on force protection. We were constantly increasing our force protection levels. We were working on hardening where we could to make sure that we had all all our physical security square. But we were still trying to reconcile that with we were on a facility with a bunch of diplomats who had been in the country for twenty years who didn't necessarily see the deteriorating situation as negatively as they maybe ought to or maybe as we did as not having been in Afghanistan for as long as they had.
Ian:To the point, like, we we were told that we were not allowed to carry long guns around the the department state facility that we were at for our force protection, just sidearms. And from a military perspective, that's like kinda rule one in force protection is all like, always be prepared, right, or at least have have that ability to do that. And it it was a it was a bit of a mindset shift to make sure that we did have the right people with the right mindset in the right position to be able to secure and defend facility we were at. I wanna say that was that was that was still just the August. So there we we knew things were not looking great, at the same time that we were planning for transition activities, at the same time that we're planning for Neo.
Ian:And the the the challenge with planning the Neo as well is noncombatant evacuation operations are complex. Like, there's they're without actually being given an order, you have to plan for several eventualities even in the evacuation operations. So as we look at how many people we might evacuate and how we might evacuate them, We knew that HCAO was the only secure secure location we had in Kabul to be able to move these people to. So we knew that it was going to take a lot of airlift, but we also knew that we were gonna have to have staging. So how do you set up the airfield to be able to stage hundreds to thousands of people on the airfield prior to getting them on on aircraft?
Ian:How do you process these people? Like, how do you how do you confirm identities? How do you validate that they are who they say they are? How do you differentiate between them? I mean, we ended up seeing that in in the rapid evacuation.
Ian:But even as you look at in a organized noncombatant evacuation operation, how many people are you flying out? I mean, the the number we were given at any given point was, okay, there's there's 2,000 people at the embassy. Okay. So 2,000 is our baseline number. We know we're gonna be evacuating 2,000 plus ourselves.
Ian:So let's say 2,500 people. That's that's kinda your baseline planning number of how many people you need to outflow. Okay. Well, what what facilities you need at the airfield set up to be able to stage 2,500 people to move out of the country. How many aircraft do you need to bring in to get those 2,500 out?
Ian:What's that rate of evacuation gonna look like? And this again, this is this is planning in the absence of orders. So this is all kind of us coming up with our best tactical guess at how to make this happen. And I I say us. I mean, broadly, The US contingent at large to include the, the Marine Corps crisis response task force that was positioned outside the AO.
Ian:I mean, we're working with our planners daily Right. To to come up with this plan. How do how do you move them from the embassy? Well, if there's 2,000 people at the embassy, I mean, that's the Chinook has 30 seats on it. How do how do you move 2,000 people, 30 people at a time to get back to the airfield?
Ian:How far in advance do you have to start doing that? So there there's that level of planning at the at the baseline level, and then you say, okay. Well, how many other people are entitled? Are there other citizens in the country that aren't hanging out at the embassy right now? Are there other entitled personnel or family members?
Ian:Are there people that have signed up for the special immigrant visa program that The US has approved? So we were working with a number that could have been anywhere from 2,500 to really 200,000 was the upper echelon of the number of people that Wow. Might be eligible for evacuation, within within the American slash NATO context. So the the complexity of trying to plan that operation was not lost on us either. And the the commander of the the Marine Corps one star who was in command of that Christ response task force was very rapidly trying to push to get staged, like, prepositioned items into into Kabul.
Ian:Like, how like, just baseline equipment, like, security equipment for the airfield. Like, how do how do you set up a processing facility? Well, you definitely need to have physical barriers to be able to to separate the entitled personnel from the non entitled personnel. You have to have bed spaces. I think of the logistics of how many cots do you need on the airfield just to make sure that people have a have a place to stay.
Ian:How many washrooms? How many meals do you need to have prepositioned on the airfield to support thousands of people over a span of several weeks to be able to conduct that level of evacuation operation. Right? Like, it's a it's a it's a wildly complex task that you're that you're trying to plan for Yeah. In a deteriorating security situation.
Ian:So the there's there there was a lot of really, like, challenging discussions being had. And then when you frame it in light of what's going on on the ground and recognizing that, hey, we we may not have some of the same secure facilities that we thought we had access to, it it really put a different security perspective on what we're trying to accomplish.
Bryan:So what was it like to hear like, you mentioned that essentially district capitals, provincial capitals are being toppled. There's this huge prison break in Kabul. What's it like to hear that this is happening while you're still in country? And not just in country, but with a severely reduced security force.
Ian:It it's just intelligence reports. Right? So I it's just something to react to. From from a tactical perspective, you you don't always control the situation you're put in. So it it was just one of those things that we we knew was happening, and we had to be prepared to make sure that we were as prepared as possible for any situation that was going to occur.
Ian:It was probably about the August when there was kind of an internal declaration that the any sort of Afghan security force was not going to be viable in the country. It was the August 12 when I think that's kind of like the Hey guys, this shit just got real, kind of day that we had, where we hit a tipping point of provincial capitals that had fallen. I want to say it was like 13 or 14, now we we could confirm we're in control of the Taliban. And they just started going one after the other. Right?
Ian:You could you could tell that the the security situation in itself was collapsing. At that point, we were still working with folks on the ground forward trying to figure out, okay, now that things are starting to happen, what what can we do to draw down our footprint here? We know that this noncombatant evacuation operation that we're looking at planning is not going to occur in the large scale way that we thought it was gonna occur. At this point, contingency plans are being made back stateside. I think it was that same day that there was an activation of the, the eighty second Airborne Division at Fort Bragg to be able to send a security force forward.
Ian:And they started loading up on c seventeens and staging in a in a emergency activation posture to be able to come forward and help secure the airfield from whatever security situation was going on in Kabul. We we really didn't have, like, two hundred and fifty two hundred and fifty troops, two companies worth of infantry to secure. The the embassy is probably the minimum viable number to conduct that task, let alone force protection activities at the airfield. Yeah. We did have the Turks at the airfield who were who had forces who were able to support.
Ian:But once once you start setting up a firmament on the airfield, like, 600 people gets spread out very, very quickly, especially when you're running twenty four hour security operations. Right? So they were they were able to secure about 50% of the perimeter. Mhmm. So now we're trying to work on, okay.
Ian:How do we how do we increase force protection levels? What what is going on in the walls in the walls outside of us? And what is happening on the civilian side too? So we're recognizing that as provincial capitals are falling, there are now thousands of internally displaced people who are flooding into the city.
Bryan:Yeah.
Ian:So the security situation is not just a like Taliban threat situation, it's now bordering humanitarian crisis of like what is actually happening in the city. We're looking at, okay, now maybe we do have to start drawing down our footprint at the embassy. And that's I think it was probably the It was the thirteenth that we actually started to do some limited retrograde of personnel from the embassy. So basically any non essential personnel or people who weren't absolutely required to support the military or ambassadorial mission at the center of Kabul started moving back to to be able to begin their outflow. The Department of State folks who were on the facility that we were at, the Department of State facility at HKIA, They were reducing their footprint.
Ian:They were starting to flow people out of theater with chartered aircraft coming in. So we we were we were definitely ramping up our operations for several weeks and days leading up to to the to the eventual fall just based on what was happening around us.
Bryan:So you kind of answered my last question in terms of tactically what it was like to have all this going on in the country. What was it like for you personally? Like, what did this feel like? Did you have any sense of dread or what, you know, what what were you feeling at the time? Were you just focused on the mission?
Ian:To be completely honest, it was a sense of mission. There was there was really not a lot of time to start, like, thinking about like, I I never there there's there was no impending sense of doom, right? There There was an impending sense of a changing situation
Bryan:Okay.
Ian:That we had to respond to at a tactical level, at an operational level. Right? Was the security situation different? Yes. Were we increasing force protection levels on the airfield?
Ian:Yes. But at the same time and I think we we talked about this in in in a in a previous podcast where when when you go into a when you go into a deployment like that, you never really know what to expect. But if you're prepared for eventualities, like, you're you're prepared. Right? Like, it's it's not like Mhmm.
Ian:It's not like we went into Afghanistan thinking that it was the the safest place in the world.
Bryan:True.
Ian:Like, you you know the threat is out there. You're you're you're trying to be able to respond to it. You're you're trained to be to be prepared to mitigate the the risks that you're facing. So it it was never a sense of, Oh my God, this is the end. It was a sense of, Well shit, things are changing.
Ian:This is getting a little more challenging. We're gonna have to do something about it.
Bryan:Okay.
Ian:And the doing something about it is really From the perspective of the task force on the ground, that's that's what we we really focused on is what is within our control? What can we continue to do to be as prepared as possible for whatever comes next? And at that point, that really turned into us taking a bit more of a leading role in establishing, like, real life support operations. Because as the Department of State Mission started to draw down, we had initially kind of been leaning on them for support in terms of like, how were we getting food every day? Mhmm.
Ian:Where like, where were we where were we living on the airfield? Well, we we were collocated with the department state camp. As they started driving on that camp, we started to have to take over some of those operations at a at a task force level and for security as well. Right? So in in that transition is where you're kind of finding, okay, who who can do what and and what is what is my next task?
Ian:What can I affect or achieve in order to be successful in this mission? So you just had
Bryan:so much going on almost, so much to focus on operationally. There's just maybe no no room for those personal feelings. Plus, as you said, you go in prepared, you go in ready for a situation that's going to be unstable, unsafe, and and those this is just sort of meeting expectations.
Ian:Yeah. I don't I I wouldn't say it's necessarily within expectations, but, I mean, at a at at the at a personal level, I mean, you're you're all in it together too. Right? Like, we had a team of a hundred and hundred and fifteen hour many people. It it's not like we can change the immediate situation we're in.
Ian:We can only work within it. Right. So as as we look at that, okay, now we're starting to think, hey, if if department stay starting to draw down, maybe we should start thinking about drawing down ourselves. Like, what what what equipment, what assets do we have here that we don't necessarily need to be operationally viable? Can we start maybe thinking about retrograding some personnel or equipment?
Ian:Yeah. Do we do we need all 12 aircraft? Like, what what is the next mission set going to be? Are we going to be put in a position where we're evacuating folks? So that's that's kind of the focus as we looked at it moving forward.
Ian:And what can we do right now to support the troops that are here? What can we do now to support the mission that is in location? What can we do to support the government of Afghanistan that is in a pretty bad situation right now. So that's I think the focus was still there.
Bryan:Right.
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Bryan:So at this point, you've been told on the eleventh that the Afghan National Defense Force is probably not going to be successful in standing up to the Taliban. Recognizing that things are not going well in the country, did you have any indications that Kabul itself was at risk of falling?
Ian:So we knew that the that the security forces in and around Kabul were not necessarily gonna be up to the task. We we knew that there was large scale abandonment. We knew that there was the leadership infrastructure of the Afghan Defense Forces was not sustaining any level of momentum. Mean, people were making personal decisions for their survival, for their family, that they they didn't have the capacity to to fight with how rapidly that Taliban were seizing territory. Inside of Kabul, we'd had a couple events in the in the prior couple weeks leading up.
Ian:There was a there was an attack on a government official, during the August that led to a a pretty chaotic night of, of kinetic activity downtown where a couple of bombs went off and a few Taliban members were killed by defense forces securing the diplomatic mission the government offices in Kabul. We had the prison break on about the the August that that flooded the city with several thousand prisoners. Now whether or not they were all Taliban members or not, there there's no way to say, but it definitely didn't it definitely didn't help stabilize the situation any. Kabul itself was the only kind of resemblance of a safe haven remaining around the country from Taliban influence because it still it still had a sitting government. Right?
Ian:It's it still had a a functional government. But as more and more people started to flow into Kabul, you could tell the security situation was getting to a point where it was very quickly going to become unstable to a point of of disrepair. Did we know it was gonna fall in the next two days? I I don't think we really had that indication, but we did start making plans to to move more rapidly on our retrograde ops and and start considering, if if not shutting down the diplomatic mission, at least securing securing it it and and putting it on a pause until we saw what happened with the security situation.
Bryan:Okay. So basically an acknowledgment that things are not good, but it wasn't the writing was not yet on the wall in terms of what's gonna happen in Kabul?
Ian:I'd say the writing was on the wall that that Kabul was next to go. I don't think anybody had an appreciation for the rate at which it was going to happen.
Bryan:Okay. So basically, at this point of our discussion, we've established that a rapid and complete destabilization of Afghanistan has spurred a less controlled neo or again, a noncombatant evacuation operation for the US embassy in Kabul. Can you describe to us the situation and events of the 08/14/2021?
Ian:Yeah. The August 14 is kind of the the first day when we started to take action to to close down the mission. The the two days previous had been the task of kind of removing nonessential personnel from the situation and getting some chartered flights out. But at this point, I think the world started to recognize that things were really not going well in Kabul. We, as the the aviation task force, started to conduct kind of a a full retrograde of the of the embassy, save for the diplomatic folks who needed to remain in location for the viability of the diplomatic mission.
Ian:So we started probably midday on the fourteenth, took three of our Chinooks and just started flying turns in conjunction actually with the Department of State aircraft that were there, some of their CH-46s, to just 15 to 30 people at a time start moving people out of the embassy. Start moving some of the some of the sensitive equipment out of the embassy, bring them back to the airfield. At least set conditions for the point where if we needed to rapidly transition to the country, we were we were at least, out of the city and secure on the airfield to a point where we could achieve some level of airlift. So that went on through most of the day of the fourteenth and even well into the night, probably near midnight, I think. So we did about twelve straight hours of flying, got five to 800 people out of the embassy, managed to get the airfield security level to a situation where we felt relatively comfortable.
Ian:We started to draw down some of the non essential personnel. We had some charter flights come in. Department of State was slowly drawing down their activities, and they'd they'd ceased kind of their their operational outputs at this point. And everybody was just kinda trying to figure out where we were gonna settle in terms of how to still support the mission while making sure that our our force protection situation wasn't so dispersed. I think that that was the big problem in sustaining the embassy in the middle of the city is that it was a it was a large dispersal from from where the security and the forces were at HKIA.
Ian:At the same time, we saw some of the international missions were starting to do the same. I remember seeing on the fourteenth, the last Canadian C-one 130 fly out of Kabul went went past me on the tarmac as it took off, and I I remember that pretty vividly as a recognition that I was probably the last Canadian on the ground in Afghanistan on the afternoon of the fourteenth. Not not just the Canadians, not just the Americans, but a few other partner nations also had aircraft flowing in and out. So HCAO was a was a bit of a hive of activity for for that day leading into kind of the the the situation deteriorating in in the city as well.
Bryan:What did that feel like to realize like, to watch that Canadian c one thirty leave and to realize you're the last Canadian in Afghanistan, like, is that pretty surreal?
Ian:It it wasn't. It wasn't. I mean, I I I knew like, I I I was not assigned to the to a Canadian mission. I was assigned to to an American mission with US forces. I was embedded.
Ian:I was one of them. I was part of the team. There was an element that that's interesting. I might actually be the last Canadian in Afghanistan right now. At least uniform Canadian for sure, I'd do that.
Ian:But to I I don't think I ever took stock of what was going on in the moment outside of making sure that our task force was still able to still able to fly and still able to to achieve its outcomes for the for The US forces.
Bryan:Okay. So listeners are gonna notice that we're basically going through it day by day right now. And that's just because so much was happening each day and we're gonna try to divide it into chunks of time here. Can you describe for us we've talked about the fourteenth and your unit was flying slow evacuation of nonessential personnel up until about midnight. Can you describe the situation on the 08/15/2021?
Ian:Yeah. Kind of by the night of the fourteenth, we'd receive an indications from the from the embassy that, like, we we were gonna have to start picking up the pace of movement. We'd kind of been given the indication that we were seventy two ish hours from from closing down the embassy and that we we would be continuing the the same kind of flow outflow, back to HCAA for the next few days to try and secure the the the American forces that were there. The morning of the fifteenth changed everything pretty dramatically because we woke up to an announcement that the government had collapsed and that the president had fled the country and that that changed the security situation almost instantly from one of, I guess, destabilization and uncertainty to, certain panic. Right?
Ian:That that's kinda what happened in the the city was that there was a recognition that the government was no longer viable. The government really no longer existed, and that the Taliban were starting to take over various parts of the city. At that point, it was about midday, we were at the Department of State facility and there were a few Afghan contractors who were working on the facility and they all vanished at once while we were working around them. We couldn't really tell what was going on and then we asked one of them and it turned out that another one of their colleagues had come back and said, hey, the Taliban is going around and knocking on the doors of anybody they know has worked with the Americans. So they all fled to go home to try and get back to their families
Bryan:Wow.
Ian:And figure out what they were going to do from there, whether they were gonna try and make it back to the airfield or whether they were gonna try and hide somewhere in the city. That that was kind of the that was the point of realization for us that that things had really, really gone sideways. At a mission level, we started kind of our destruction operations, right? Kind of taking any sensitive material we had. We didn't know what the security situation kind of was outside the gate.
Ian:We knew there was sporadic gunfire outside the airfield, we knew that it was occurring in the city. So we started to burn or destroy any sensitive information we had, any of the files or records we had. We kept our, obviously, our mission command and control systems up. We kept the aircraft running. But that afternoon, as things were getting more and more sour and they started to realize that the physical security of the embassy was actually in jeopardy and there was a risk of breach at the embassy.
Ian:We got the order to move and basically move now and pick up evacuations to as fast as possible. So we we scrambled our crews, went in and woke up some of the people who had been flying till midnight, the night before. Got them out on on a little bit of short rest but that's how it goes sometimes. Yeah. Pulled them into a mission briefing and said, Hey, we gotta go.
Ian:I remember too, as we were walking out to the aircraft that day to start the final evacuation of the embassy, it was a surreal scene. All of sudden you look out on the airfield and there's dozens of airplanes taken off a couple of Super Tucanoes, Cessna Caravans, Mi eight helicopters, taking off from the runway, taking off from the taxiways, barely getting off the ground, like clearly over gross, like way out of weight and balance, like no no CG on them.
Bryan:And C of G for the listeners is center of gravity.
Ian:Yeah. The the they they were not properly weighted or balanced to actually fly. It was Afghan air force aircraft taking off, and it was the the Afghan air force pilots and probably families loaded into those aircraft just taking off to the west and turning north to go somewhere that wasn't Kabul. So as we're as we're walking out to get into our Chinooks, fly down to the embassy, we're kinda watching this happen around us and not really wreck like, recognizing the gravity of the situation from an Afghan perspective too, that these people were just doing whatever they possibly could to get out of the AO. I think a lot of them ended up heading heading north toward the Tajikistan border.
Ian:I think at that point, I there were two aircraft that were shot down by the Tajiks. Luckily, sounds like well, at the time, we were informed that everybody survived that. But it was a bit of a surreal situation in terms of what the security on the airfield in the city was. And it was an acknowledgement that like, we were no longer a situation to be patient, we had to execute a pretty rapid evacuation. So we took all the crews we could, we packed them into our Chinooks and we just started flying turns down to the embassy.
Ian:So we would take off at a Kabul, fly to the embassy and just fly turns back and I think we ended up doing that for another six, seven hours until we had everybody out.
Bryan:So things are starting to get pretty frantic on the ground. Can you describe the evacuation of embassy in Afghanistan over the August 2021?
Ian:Yeah. So it was a little bit later in the day on the fifteenth when we actually started to to when we got confirmation that the embassy was ready to to start evacuating. Right? Because they they were going through all their protocols at the same time and destroying what material they could and making sure that everybody was staged and postured to move. So we we started flying.
Ian:We launched as many aircraft as we could, went to the 1LZ that was available at the embassy. It was a converted soccer field in the back of the compound. And we'd land on with the aircraft we had, and we would take as many people as we could fit in the back of the aircraft. I think at this point, there were still about 1,100 people. I want to say, seven hundred and eleven hundred people at the embassy that night.
Ian:And we were just packing them into the Chinook as of as densely as we could to a point where we'd do our power check on departure to make sure that we weren't over grossed and that we had performance to do the vertical departure. If we had the performance, then we were gonna go, right? There was really not a lot of time to sit around and wait. Mean, that's part of the challenge too, some of the struggle was that there were people in that embassy who had been there for years and years, right? Like Department of State, people who had had their families living there, contractors who had been set up and established fixtures at that embassy.
Ian:And I still don't think, like even in the middle of what was happening in the city, there wasn't a complete recognition of like the severity of the situation as it was going on outside. We had people walking out trying to bring their lives with them, right? You're getting in an evacuation, you're in a foreign country, grab all your suitcases, grab your guitar, grab your flat screen TV off the night table and walk out to the LZ. That's the kind of level of panic and disorganization that we're facing with some of the people coming onto the LZ to a point where we we didn't have a choice. We were we were pulling people onto the aircraft and we were leaving bags and suitcases on the LZ because we didn't we didn't have the ability to waste the space or the weight in the aircraft before we could get them back to, to the airfield.
Ian:So there there were people who were who were forced to evacuate basically with what they could fit in their backpack. It was absolutely not an ideal situation. As we continued through the night, we got through to a point where we were starting to get down to the last few evacuation shocks, which was mostly gonna be our own forces. So the the force protection company that we had that was in the embassy had finally managed to go through, clear the building, make sure we had we'd moved however many hundreds of people, got them back to the airfield. And then as we were as we were flying at, I wanna say it was about eight or 09:00 at night, we were making a turn back to the airfield and we lost contact with air traffic control.
Ian:And there was no longer any air traffic controllers, in the tower. And we couldn't quite figure out what was going on until we had a call from ops on the radio who had identified that the airfield had been breached. Wow. So we we actually looked across on the airfield, and there was a flood of hundreds of people, like, walking on the middle of the runway, moving from south to north across the airfield. Just you could tell like, it was chaos in the city.
Ian:Right? So you didn't you didn't know who they were. We couldn't tell if it was Taliban. We couldn't tell if it was civilian. We just knew that people were panicking.
Ian:The security perimeter that had been established on the south side of the airfield had failed. So those security forces were also collapsing back to the north side of the airfield. But we still had people that we were trying to evacuate, and HCAA was really only the secure place we had to go to. And ultimately, it was the only place we could get out from. So we we still had to land on at HKIA.
Ian:As this is occurring, coincidental timing, we're also starting to get the first chalks of c seventeens arriving from stateside with the eighty second airborne. Now we'd been coordinating with them for the previous couple of days to try and let them know, hey. This this is the situation you're coming into. Like, we acknowledge you're coming direct to to the international airport. Like, Bagram doesn't exist anymore.
Ian:But now you've got c seventeens coming into the AO while you've got Chinooks flying in evacuation, while you've got an Apache's in the overhead trying to kinda run run security, and you've no longer got any air traffic control in the airfield. So we were really just using the ATC frequency as a common frequency between all the aircraft and trying to individually deconflict which aircraft were where. There were probably close to a dozen C-17s trying to flow into the AO Wow. To bring in this response force of the eighty second from The US. Not only that, there were active threats in the AO.
Ian:So as we were flying back and forth between the embassy, we'd already spotted that there were a couple of Dushkas in the middle of the city or at least it it looked like it.
Bryan:Can you explain what a Dushka is?
Ian:Yeah. That's a it's an anti aircraft, belt fed machine gun, Soviet era 12.7 millimeter round. They they fire about 600 rounds a minute, and they'll pierce an inch or so armor, so it's not not a bullet you wanna you wanna get in front of with an aircraft, but we could see the tracer fire coming out of the city. There were there were two of them located central in the city, and they were just firing at noises in the night. Right?
Ian:There was there was really no effective fire, but it was also coming from a densely populated area where there was nothing we could do to to shoot back or have have effect on on those threats. So we really just had the our age 60 were in the overhead, and and we were able to to mark out where those weapons were shooting from and try and avoid those locations. But now we're also now trying to pass that information to the c seventeens that were flying in. I I do know we found out afterwards that at least one of them did not make it in. They overshot and ended up going back, turning around heading back to the Middle East because they had received semi effective fire on approach at the while they were on final from the from the east end of the airfield trying to fly in.
Ian:So it it was just it was really just chaos. Like, was there's really no other way to describe it. So we when we found out the airfield had been overrun and the the the reinforcements, I guess, were flowing in, we we didn't really know what to do. So we we briefly paused evacuation operations to make sure we saw a safe place to go to drop people off. And I think we were on the ground.
Ian:We were shut down for maybe five or ten minutes when we basically got the order from the admiral, what the hell are you doing? Like, get back in the like, there's still people who need to be brought back. We'll figure out the security situation later. So we we got back in the aircraft, flew back to the south side of the city, and just kept bringing people back. Each turn we came back, there was more troops being offloaded who were able to actually help secure the airfield and kinda push the perimeter back.
Ian:We ended up wrapping up the evacuation, I wanna say, just after midnight. That's that's when we finally got the last the last troops, the last forces out of the embassy and and back to HK. And at that point, we're still the the eighty second airborne folks who had flown in were still trying to secure the airfield and push that perimeter back to the south. We managed to land shut down, get fuel in case we had to go again. And over the course of the next three to four hours, we were able to secure the remaining perimeter of the airfield and actually push all the civilians.
Ian:Turned out it was mostly just panic civilians who had run onto the airfield. We managed to push them back out through the south side of the airfield. Now, once we had that perimeter secure, we managed to briefly reset our crews, but we we kept our Apaches airborne. We didn't we didn't really have any choice. Right?
Ian:The security situation dictated. We finally managed to make contact with some of the leadership of the the eighty second who had flown in. A number of them actually took over the the area of the compound that we were at on the Northwest corner of the airfield, the Department of State facility, because Department of State had mostly left it unoccupied. So they were able to to to take up kinda hasty residence there. The colonel one eight two was using our CP initially because it was the it was the one functioning c, US Army CP on the airfield with with proper comms and c two.
Bryan:And for the listeners, CP is command post and c two is command and control.
Ian:So we we kinda got that distribution laid out, managed to get everybody set up there. And the situation seemed to be stabilized. They pushed out their perimeter, started to secure the perimeter of the airfield, and we kind of started to draw down our operations through the successful embassy evacuation. And I think we managed to bed down for about two hours before the airfield perimeter was breached again on the morning of the sixteenth. Oh wow.
Ian:And then that's kind of when all hell broke loose. And I think if any of the listeners remember back to of the memorable scenes from that event on the fifteenth, sixteenth, that's the morning when the perimeter was breached on the airfield and there were just thousands of civilians, panicked civilians again, flooded onto the airfield. There were still c seventeens flowing into the AO. At this point, that's when you see the pictures that you've got of civilians on top of, large passenger aircraft on the south side by the passenger terminal. You've got civilians running in front of a c 17.
Ian:You've got one of one of our Ah 60 fours that's actually flying in front of the c 17, trying to use its rotor wash to move people out of the way so that the C-seventeen could safely taxi around the airfield or the runway to take off. Wow. It was not something you would have ever expect to see, like, regardless of what the security situation is. The the random mass of bodies on a on a in use airfield, was that that was kind of the surreal scenes that I'll that I'll always remember from that is seeing our own task force members, technicians, pilots, crews holding a force protection perimeter around the airfield ramp to try and keep the civilians off of our off of our ramp and away from our aircraft, which we were gonna need to continue to use for the next few days. That that was really a a tenuous situation that we were in for, for most of that day.
Ian:As more and more troops started to flow in, both from the eighty second and the US Marine Corps, the Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force Crisis Response, the ones that came in from The Middle East. The security situation started to get better on the airfield. Took about a day. We regained control of the airfield. We were able to establish some sort of command and control structure where the eighty second airborne was responsible for for the perimeter of the aircraft or the perimeter of the airfield and kinda like the outer ring of force protection.
Ian:The the marine forces were gonna be responsible to actually conduct whatever evacuation options whatever evacuation operations were gonna occur. So once we finally got that stabilized, we were actually able to start coordinating a little bit on how the evacuation was gonna go now that we were suddenly in in the middle of one. And this was really the start of, of Operation Ally's refuge as it's as it's understood now.
Bryan:Alright, Ian. That'll do it for part two of this series. Just wanna thank you so much for being here today. I'm really enjoying hearing this story, and, I look forward to, hearing the rest of it on part three.
Ian:Thanks, Brian. I look forward to our next chat.
Bryan:Alright. That wraps up part two of our chat with major Ian Wookie. Tune in next week as we hear the conclusion of his story of being the last Canadian in Afghanistan as well as his firsthand view of Operation Allies Refuge. Do you have any questions or comments about anything you've heard in this show? Would you or someone you know make a great guest, or do you have a great idea for a show?
Bryan:You can reach out to us at the pilotprojectpodcast@Gmail.com or on all social media at at pod pilot project. And be sure to check out that social media for lots of great videos of our RCAF and mission aviation aircraft. As always, we'd like to thank you for tuning in and ask for your help with the big three. That's like and follow us on social media, share with your friends, and follow and rate us five stars wherever you get your podcasts. That's all for now.
Bryan:Thanks for listening. Keep the blue side up.
Ian:See you. Engineer, shut down all four. Shutting down all four engines.