‘It looked apocalyptic’: Crew describes Afghan departure

The US military pilots and aircrew who departed Afghanistan described a scene like something from a zombie apocalypse movie, including an airfield littered with battered shells fo airplanes and destroyed equipment.

By

World News

September 2, 2021 - 9:10 AM

Afghan people climb atop a plane as they wait at the Kabul airport in Kabul on Aug. 16, 2021, as thousands of people mobbed the city's airport trying to flee the Taliban's feared hard-line brand of Islamist rule. (Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images/TNS)

WASHINGTON (AP) — It looked like a zombie apocalypse.

For the U.S. military pilots and aircrew about to make their final takeoffs out of Afghanistan, the sky was lit up with fireworks and sporadic gunfire and the airfield littered with battered shells of airplanes and destroyed equipment. Stray dogs raced around the tarmac. And Taliban fighters, visible in the darkness through the green-tinged view of night vision goggles, walked the airfield waving an eerie goodbye.

Lined up on the runway at the Kabul airport Monday night were the five last C-17s to leave the country after a chaotic and deadly airlift evacuation that marked the end of America’s involvement in the Afghanistan war. In the final hours, there were no more rocket defense systems to protect them on the runway, and no one in the airport control center to direct them out.

“It just looked apocalyptic,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Braden Coleman, who was in charge of monitoring the outside of his aircraft for artillery fire and other threats. “It looked like one of those zombie movies where all the airplanes had been destroyed, their doors were open, the wheels were broken. There was a plane that was burned all the way. You could see the cockpit was there, and the whole rest of the plane looked like the skeleton of a fish.”

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