The message came from an Afghan man who had worked closely with the U.S. State Department: “I have also moved to another place today because of fear. I’m very tired of my life because cannot handle anymore running and keeping safe, my kids and wife.”

The Taliban had captured his brother while searching for him, and now he was afraid that calling home would put his family at even greater risk. 

The text is still on my phone. 

So are hundreds of others, all from people who had worked with the U.S. government and were in danger as Afghanistan collapsed. The messages detailed families trying to reach evacuation points, reported that people were being beaten and shot, and warned that the Taliban was searching house-to-house through districts in Kabul.

There are also photographs, videos, and firsthand accounts of the aftermath of the Abbey Gate bombing at the Kabul airport. We had warned evacuees to stay away after receiving intelligence about a threat, but some were already there, waiting for a plane to safety. 

Five years later, I still have this accidental archive of the fall of Kabul on my phone.

Why do I keep the messages? Part of the answer begins long before August 2021. 

As a Marine, I spent nearly a year deployed to Afghanistan, where I saw how indispensable local workers were to the success of our mission. We asked them to interpret our words, facilitate access, work alongside our government and military, and attach their names and families to the United States. For many of them, doing so threatened their lives.

By the time of Afghanistan’s collapse, I was no longer in the military. But I volunteered with Team America, a volunteer network helping people evacuate, as a battle captain and movement coordinator. I gathered information from people trying to leave, built records to track them, and shared escape routes. 

Our aim was to help evacuate those at risk due to their U.S. government affiliation until the immigration process could catch up with their cases.

Afghans who came through our network had different legal statuses and pathways out. Some were U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents. Others held or qualified for special immigrant visas they had earned after working with the U.S. government for at least one year. There were also family members whose relationship to people who worked with our country had now placed them in danger.

Much of the work happened remotely, which added another layer of surrealism to a situation that barely felt real. I coordinated movements from Arlington, Virginia, while others worked from their homes across the United States and abroad. We built so-called “baseball cards” for individuals and families—compact profiles containing photographs, identifying information, immigration status, and family members. 

These profiles became part of an improvised system for tracking people through a city changing by the hour. 

Routes were established and abandoned. Pickup locations moved. Buses were organized and stalled. Information poured in constantly. Some of it was useful, some was outdated, and some was impossible to verify. 

And some of it was a trap. 

Everything moved too quickly to build a formal communications infrastructure, so many of us used the phones we already had. Our personal phones. 

Eventually, our numbers started circulating. In addition to pleas for help, we began receiving strange calls and texts, like when a Taliban commander called one of my teammates on his personal cell phone. 

We didn’t stop. There was barely time to absorb one message before another arrived from someone else desperate for help. 

One night, we tried to move a group of young women to a staging point for our buses to take them to safety. They were traveling unescorted through Kabul on foot when they saw Taliban fighters nearby. We directed them to hide until it was safe. 

They hid and waited for the Taliban to pass. 

Thousands of miles away, so did we.

We stared at our phones, not knowing whether they had been seen, whether they were still safe, or whether another message would come. Eventually, one did. They had not been discovered. We found a driver to get them safely back home; by then, they were too afraid to try the bus.

Another time, a man told us that his son had been held for four hours and beaten. The Taliban were looking for the father because he’d worked with the United States. Another family said they were running out of money while waiting for an immigration interview that could not happen because there was no longer a U.S. embassy in Afghanistan.

They were not asking us to resolve an administrative inconvenience. They were asking us to help keep them alive. 

For me, the urgency went beyond the immediate threats. 

The United States had entered their country and relied on these Afghans for 20 years—a relationship that marked them and their families as targets. In doing so, we made a promise whether or not anyone wrote it down. 

“I wish I could not done work for US,” one text said. “Now paying with my life and my family life.”

I felt guilty being able to leave when they could not. But more than guilt, there was loyalty. They stood beside us. Loyalty must run in both directions. 

I was reading messages from Afghanistan while watching Americans talk about the evacuation from a distance, often as though it were a simple logistical exercise: Identify the qualified person, verify the paperwork, move that person out.

When families or paperwork did not fit neatly into the mold, the complication was treated as the Afghans’ fault. Why bring so many relatives? Why couldn’t they produce straightforward evidence? Why couldn’t the eligible person leave everyone else behind? 

The effect was to make Afghans responsible for the difficulty, and make helping them seem less urgent.

But our immigration categories did not align with the way many Afghan families lived. Parents, siblings, in-laws, grandparents, and children shared homes, money, caregiving, and responsibility. The danger of working with Americans didn’t conveniently stop at the edge of whoever our forms defined as “immediate family.”

For instance, in one family, the parents were American citizens but their son, who had worked with the United States and was their primary caretaker and translator, was not. They spent considerable time in Afghanistan trying to resolve his status. When the evacuation began, the parents refused to leave without him, knowing that his work had made him a target and they might never learn what happened to their son once they were gone.

Our government had failed to account for the many lives placed at risk, and the August 2021 evacuation did not resolve those failures. 

In December, another family was booked for a flight.

The flight was canceled.

They checked in on December 9. Then December 14. December 17. December 21. December 22. December 26. December 31. January 5. January 12. January 16. January 19.

Eventually, we sent instructions for manifested passengers: Bring two days of clothing, essential medication, baby supplies if needed, and one small bag per person.

Then the thread ends.

I do not know what happened to them.

That gap is what separates helping the Afghans from my previous crisis work. 

I have worked with the Wounded Warrior Project, both sitting with badly injured service members and as a high-acuity mental health case manager for veterans, service members, and their families. I do not keep their information on my phone today. I never needed to. 

When my part was done, a system remained around the patients. There was a trusted handoff. Someone knew their name and what came next. 

I cannot say that about the Afghans whose names are still on my phone.

I keep these messages because nearly every one of them represents people we abandoned. A person who trusted that when the United States government said it would help, someone would remain on the other end of that promise. 

And for so many, waiting is not benign. 

This year, Pakistan has accelerated deportations of Afghans, including people with pending U.S. cases. The group AfghanEvac reported more than 4,000 people returned across the Afghanistan border in a single day in July. 

Meanwhile, more than 200,000 Afghans eligible to come to America as refugees or U.S. government employees were inside Afghanistan as of last year.

For some, that waiting means months or even years navigating America’s immigration process. But while the paperwork crawls, their permission to remain in a third country may run out. Delay can mean being sent back to the country they fled. 

Five years later, that is difficult for me to reconcile with what the Marine Corps taught me: 

Semper fidelis. 

Always faithful. 

For two decades, we asked Afghans to serve beside us. Doing so placed their and their families’ lives within reach of retaliation. 

I do not respond to the texts now because it is no longer my place to intervene. But I still read them. And sometimes, after years of silence, someone writes again. In December 2024, a U.S. citizen who had escaped Afghanistan with Team America’s assistance wrote again about his sister and her family, who had been living in a humanitarian camp outside Afghanistan since 2021. Their children had been out of school for years, his sister’s health was worsening, and the family was still waiting. 

Days later, he wrote that her husband and two children had finally been approved to travel to the United States. His sister had been denied. She was seven months’ pregnant; her husband would not leave her behind. 

That is why I keep the messages.

They keep people from turning into statistics, or our abandonment of them into a tidy finished chapter. The Afghans who worked with us haven’t moved on. My phone has numerous messages asking if a flight is coming. 

Some Afghans made it out. 

Some are still waiting. 

And some have disappeared from the chats. 

This Reflection from The War Horse was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copyedited by Mollie Turnbull.