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We want to welcome to Veterans Radio today.
We have a great author to talk to, a staff sergeant from the U.S. Army, six years, Michael
Cook.
Michael, welcome to Veterans Radio.
Hey, thank you so much for having me.
I'm really excited.
Well, you have written a book called Life and Death at Abbey Gate.
It's really not only about the fall of Afghanistan, but the operation to save Afghanistan individuals,
taking them out through the gate, but also afterwards.
That's really what we're going to talk about.
The book is published by Case Mate.
Let's start with a little background.
You're a guy who went to Eastern Michigan University primarily to play hockey, if I understood
reading you right.
Later on, said, well, you know what?
I'm going to join the U.S. Army.
Kind of an unusual step at that point.
Tell us why you did it.
Yeah, so I grew up a local guy here in Michigan growing up in Ann Arbor and then going to
Eastern Michigan.
Hockey was always a big part of my life as it is with many people in this area.
I think I always had that camaraderie, that teen feel in my life through my hockey experiences.
Then once I graduated college and moved out to California, I kind of lost that.
I was out there for about five or six years and was just feeling like I really needed
something more, like I needed to be a part of a greater organization.
That's really what I think led me down to the recruiter's office down in Huntington
Beach, California.
I went in and talked to the Marine recruiter, talked to the Army recruiter, decided that
Army was the branch that I was more interested in and started pursuing a career with them.
Could you talk a little bit about your MOS, your engineer battalion I think in construction?
Tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, so as an engineer, 12 WISC is the designator that I started at.
Mainly we did all the Army's construction work or security or anything like that.
Anything that would need to be built or erected essentially, engineers do that job.
That's what most of our training consisted around.
On our deployment to Afghanistan in 2019 and 2020, that's primarily what we were doing.
It's just building bee huts like barracks or joint operation centers or fences for security,
whatever the military needed from us, we built it.
While the general population, 99% of the US population doesn't serve, they only think
of guys in the Army with a rifle going forward at the pointy end of the spear.
Somebody back here is building stuff, cooking meals, doing all the logistics things, taking
care of the mechanics on tanks and planes and what have you.
We don't think much about what the construction engineers are doing, so you probably find
that pretty frustrating.
Yeah, I mean everyone in the military has a specialty, right?
There's a million jobs that need to be done, so you just have to make sure that we have
guys in the field of operations that are able to complete those tasks when needed.
It's really through that effort of being an Army engineer that you came to work with a
couple of Afghanistan men and got to know them and their families.
Set that up a little bit because it's really the cornerstone of the rest of the story.
Yeah, so when I was in Afghanistan in 2019 and 20, the first part of my deployment was
up in a city called Mazari Sharif, which is the second largest city in Afghanistan.
It's in northern Afghanistan, right on the side of the Hindu Kush mountains.
It's one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen in my whole life.
On that base, we were stationed on a NATO base up there that was ran by the German forces.
But on that base, there was two men, two Afghan nationals named Abdul and Mohammed, who I
developed a very strong relationship with.
They started as a working relationship and turned into a friendship.
So they were contractors and they would essentially supply us with whatever materials that we
would need to accomplish our mission.
So going through the military pipeline of getting materials while you're in Afghanistan
can be very time consuming.
It could take multiple weeks or months to get things, but these guys could get them there
on the next day, right?
So they were very useful to us.
We worked with them every single day, but they also took really good care of us.
So they bring us home cooked meals from their wives just because they knew that we were
eating deployment food for a whole year.
So like I said, it just really turned into a friendship and they took great care of us.
So when I left Mazari Sharif to move on to my next base in Afghanistan, I was in the
winnings and said goodbye to them.
And it was pretty much with the understanding that we were never going to see each other
again.
Not knowing what was coming down the road, right?
Not knowing that the Taliban was going to recapture Afghanistan in summer of 2021.
So that's kind of to tee it up how the relationship started with them.
And if I understand it right, these men, Abdul and Mohammed were brother-in-laws.
Yes, that's correct.
So there's a tight family relationship among them and you and your team were, some of them
were at least brought into that and got that sense, I take it.
Yes, absolutely.
And as time goes on and you're out of Afghanistan, but in 2020, a year later or so, you begin
to see what's going to happen.
Talk us through kind of what you were watching from the outside and had concerns about.
Yes, so obviously the Taliban starts encroaching on all of Afghanistan and taking perimeter
cities slowly as they march towards Kabul.
By this point, all US troops have left Afghanistan.
We've made the decision to give up Bagram, the most, probably the most strategic base
in all of Asia in the Middle East.
And when I look back on it, on my deployment, I can see signs of where things were going
wrong.
Like I was there during the Doha agreement that Trump signed and I remember the Afghan
contractors that were there coming up to me after hearing about it and saying, sir, you
can't leave because if you guys leave, we're all going to be slaughtered, is exactly what
one of them said.
And again, I couldn't see the writing on the wall, but they could see it so clearly, like
they knew exactly what was going to happen.
And all of our intelligence assets were saying that the Afghan National Army, the Afghan
government that we put in place is going to be able to hold up after we left for different
periods of time.
But most of them said a year, five years, 10 years, infinite.
Of course, all of them are wrong because as soon as we left the Taliban to control the
country in, I think, five days or something.
It happened so fast and the, I would say, the American planning was so bad that these
inevitabilities just crashed upon the Afghan Nationals that had been working with the US
military, didn't it?
Yeah.
I mean, in my book, I do a deep dive into exactly what the failures were at the highest
levels as well as doing a deep dive into what the DOD report says happened versus what boots
on the ground were saying that happened.
But there's just so many failures at the highest levels that we ended up paying for
in blood, unfortunately.
Well in your words, in the book, the withdrawal was a clusterfuck.
And everybody knows it was and unfortunately a lot of Afghan Nationals had to live with
that cluster.
This is everybody from interpreters and translators and drivers and as Abdul and Muhammad were,
folks working on the construction side, materials, logistics.
I mean, it's a pretty big group of people plus their family members that are sort of
left in the lurch, isn't it?
Yeah, it is.
And a lot of those people are still there.
Hundreds of thousands of our allies are still stuck there and a lot of them are in hiding
and on the run from the Taliban because if they get caught, there's a very strong likelihood
that them and their families will be killed.
So it's incredibly vulnerable.
There was something created, and we're talking to Michael Cook, author of Life and Death
at Abbey Gate.
Michael, there was something created called the Special Immigrant Visas, SIV.
I don't know that the general public actually understands what that was supposed to be and
how it actually worked.
Yeah, so the Special Immigrant Visa, commonly referred to as the SIV, was a visa that came
into existence in the early 2000s, I believe, during the Iraq War.
And essentially the visa was supposed to get awarded to our local allies that had worked
with us for a certain amount of years.
I want to say it's two years.
So if you're an Iraqi, if you're an Afghan, and you devote your service to the United
States and help us against our enemies, we're going to make sure that you're protected should
you ever need protecting and we'll bring you here to the United States under a Special
Immigrant Visa.
That was the point of it.
The program was wildly unsuccessful because they just weren't prepared for the amount
of people that were going to be applying.
Again, just backed up very poor government planning at the highest levels.
So due to the influx of applicants and not enough resources to process them, that's why
so many of them got left behind in those summer months of August 2021.
Well, and some of it was just whoever planned this thing or thought this thing through,
you had to prove up that two-year status.
You had to prove up how important you were to the American cause.
It's not like there was somebody sitting in a desk cranking out paperwork on the computer
system, was there?
No, and one of the big problems actually was that a lot of paperwork got lost.
So these contractors, these Afghan allies that were working for like a third party,
like an American contractor, you know, anytime those contractors would go out of business,
all that paperwork would be lost.
So now we get stuck with this position where we have these Afghan allies that have devoted
their lives to the United States and helping us while we're overseas.
And now we don't have any of their paperwork to prove that they're qualified for these
visas.
So just one of the failures.
Yeah, there's this view that, well, we'll vet people.
Well, if there's no paperwork or not a cooperating government, you can't vet them.
There's no way to do this.
And while this maybe made sense in creating the SIV program, boy, it did not work at all,
did it?
No, it was, I sat down with Senator Blumenthal after the evacuation and when I was writing
my book, and he straight up told me that the system is completely broken and needs to be
rebuilt from the ground up.
You talk in the book about what happens at Abbey Gate and also talk about kind of what
happens afterwards, the digital Dunkirk I want to talk about.
But give us your view on what happened at Abbey Gate there in August of 2021.
Yeah, so I guess there's a few ways to go down that path, but Abbey Gate was essentially
an entrance at the Hameed Karzai International Airport, which is in Kabul.
It's the civilian airport that's at Kabul.
It's the airport that the US government decided to run the evacuation out of, why we decided
to run out of there, civilian airport and not Bagram, a military base that was very
well fortified.
It's a big mystery.
But essentially Abbey Gate was one of the main gates where a lot of people ended up escaping,
but also was the site of the suicide bomber, the ISIS K suicide bomber that ended up killing
13 of our troops.
And it was just utter confusion at the gate.
There was no good way to get good people out.
While a lot of people evacuated over that week, not nearly enough, which sort of left
people like Abdul and Muhammad in this position of getting in touch with old friends like
yourself and saying, what can you do for me?
How did that develop and walk us through that couple of days of craziness trying to make
something work thousands of miles away?
Yeah.
So I had kept in touch with Abdul and Muhammad via WhatsApp after deployment.
So communication kind of slowed a little bit in the years that passed, but then July and
August of 2021 when the Taliban's coming up on Kabul is really when our communication
picked up heavily.
So at that point, both men and their families had fled from Mazar Shariq down to Kabul because
that was the last remaining stronghold of the Afghan National Army and the Afghan government.
So the Taliban essentially had them surrounded as well as all of our allies surrounded.
So I get a call from our FaceTime from Abdul.
I'll never forget at this use holding his little daughter, his baby daughter, and I'm
sitting in my kitchen with my mother and we're FaceTiming.
I remember my mother had to step off screen because she was just so devastated because
she understood what was about to happen, not only to Abdul and Muhammad, but to their
families and their daughters.
These daughters, if they survive, they're going to grow up in a country where they're
not allowed to go to school, they're not allowed to work, they're not allowed to leave their
homes without a mail-ass quarter, without their faces covered.
Their entire futures are being stripped from them in the moment that we're having this
phone conversation.
So that was obviously very tough, but Abdul just essentially asked if I could help him
find a way out.
And that's really when we started looking into the visas and found the special immigrant
visa process.
So I reached out to Senator Debbie Stabenow here in Michigan.
Her and her team were amazing and very helpful in trying to expedite the process of getting
these visas going.
Unfortunately, there just wasn't time to get a visa in those short weeks.
It can take years.
And a lot of people that applied for SIVs still don't have case numbers today, years
later.
So at that point, we pretty much just knew we needed to make a run for the airport because
even Debbie Stabenow was set up for failure by the State Department because the guidance
that she was getting and passing on to me was have them shelter at home, wait for the
call to get their visas, and then they can proceed to the airport.
Well, like I just said, that was never going to happen.
So at that point, we knew we had to make a run for the airport.
And they had a pretty disastrous first run at the airport.
They ran into a tailband checkpoint.
Muhammad got roughed up real good.
They beat him with their rifles.
And when I ended up seeing him a few months later, he was still covered, had the tailband
bruising.
So at that point, we knew we needed to make some deeper connections.
And that's really what led to the Digital Dunkirk Network of People, essentially the
underground group of people that were working online, veterans and civilians alike, just
to try to find ways to help these Afghan allies get out of the country.
And this Digital Dunkirk Network is working outside, really, the US government process,
if I understand it.
It was.
I mean, there was a lot of active duty military and there were a lot of veterans, a lot of
guys and girls that understood the processes that would need to take place, but weren't
subjected to the same red tape that government evacuation was.
So we were able to kind of run a little loose outside the lines, which was a lot more effective
than whatever the government was doing.
And you go through in the book, which is an easy good, informative read, Life and Death
at Abbey Gate, you go through various, talk about various individuals who helped along
this process because you were stumbling in the dark.
You didn't know how to make this happen.
And everybody was learning from everybody else and the line I wrote down was about the
individual courage displayed, not only by the Afghan nationals, but also by civilian,
veterans, active duty military, that individual courage, which was running up against the
inept bureaucracy.
It had to be frustrating.
Yeah, it was.
And like you said, we didn't, you know, you didn't really know what we were doing.
We just knew that it had to happen fast.
So I think one line in my book is we were building the airplane mid-flight is essentially
what we were trying to do.
So we were setting up all these essentially joint operation centers online through all
these encrypted messaging apps and just passing information as fast as possible on what was
happening at the airport in different ways.
And there's a whole range of people who help out on this.
I mean, some sort of big names, maybe bigger influences than others, but a whole range of
people are helping on this effort that not only you are engaged with, but, you know,
tens of thousands of other Afghan nationals are trying to get out.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it took everybody.
If you were useful, you were put to work.
So whether that you were a famous politician or just some veteran like myself that deployed
Afghanistan a couple of years prior, everyone was put to work and did whatever they could
to help.
This was in a 24-7 exhaustive effort as you were writing about what you're trying to do
in the time zone differences.
And I just felt reading it how exhausted you were, but how exhausted Abdul and Muhammad
and their family was.
Yeah.
And I can't even imagine because I do remember how tired I was because, you know, when I
stayed time over there, it's nighttime here.
So I stayed up every single night for probably a week in a row and I was exhausted, but I
kept putting myself in their shoes.
I mean, they're being hunted by a brutal enemy and just trying to escape with their
lives, you know, and adding small children into that equation is just terrifying for
any American to even think about.
But that's the situation that they were in.
So I knew, and everyone else working on it knew that there was nothing that was going
to stop us.
So I had to give everything we had.
And it was really some active duty military marines and others who are sort of violating
or breaking and bending protocol to make some of this work.
And that's an amazing part of the story that those men and women, active duty men and women
ought to get credit for their humanity and what they're doing right for the country.
Absolutely.
I mean, I hate to say that a lot of the marines were set up for failure at the gates as well,
but they really were.
I mean, the State Department just really botched this evacuation and they just weren't the
marines that were at the front lines were not giving the proper guidance to execute
this evacuation properly.
So yeah, like I said, a lot of times they had to kind of go against policy and just
do what they knew was right to save lives.
So I was just so proud to share the same uniform as those men and women that stood on the
front lines at Abbey Gates.
I do want to say before we run out of time that Abdul and Muhammad and the family was
able to get out and relocate.
Give us that synopsis quickly.
Yeah.
Thank you for asking.
They're doing great.
They, I won't say exactly where they live, but they live very close to me.
I get to see them constantly.
I'm going over to their house this weekend for dinner.
They're doing great and are fluently speaking English and they're in school and playing
soccer and you know, the money to have jobs and they're have their own apartments.
So they're doing fantastic.
And we're just so happy to have them here safely.
Well it's an American success story and we hope they are embrace it, enjoy it.
Michael Cook, author of Life and Death at Abbey Gates, somebody wants to read your very
candid, straightforward account of the fall of Afghanistan, the operation to save our
allies.
Where can they find the book?
Yeah, anywhere you buy your books, Amazon obviously, Barnes & Noble.
You can go to my website, which is Michael Cook.com.
That's M-I-K-A-E-L Cook.com and you can purchase it there as well.
Well your service to the country and the army was really quite noble, but more importantly
the work you did afterwards to honor a commitment made to these Afghan nationals and their families
is even more noteworthy.
So Michael, we are very happy to have you here on Veterans Radio.
Yeah, thank you so much.
I really enjoyed that conversation.
And I want to thank everybody for listening to Veterans Radio today.
I am Jim Fossone.
It's been a pleasure to be your host.
I'm a Veterans Disability Lawyer at Legal Help for Veterans and you can reach us at
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