On April 14, 1975, as North Vietnamese divisions raced toward Saigon, the 32-year-old first-term senator from Delaware was summoned to the White House. President Gerald Ford pleaded with him and other senators for funding to evacuate Vietnamese allies. Biden refused. “I feel put-upon,” he said. He would vote for money to bring out the remaining Americans, but not one dollar for the locals. On April 23, as South Vietnam’s collapse accelerated, Biden repeated the point on the Senate floor. “I do not believe the United States has an obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals” other than diplomats, he said. That was the job of private organizations. “The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese.”

The shock in the Afghan army was widespread. The departure of foreign troops, contractors, technical support, and military intelligence dealt a fatal blow to morale. The Afghans’ job was now to hold out for a few months and then die in place. Hawa was transferred to the Afghan special forces’ base in Kabul. A few days later, in the predawn darkness on July 2, the Americans packed up Bagram, switched off the electricity, and flew out of the nerve center of the war without telling the new Afghan commander.

People were shouting and running back and forth based on rumors. Some Afghans, mostly single men with no American connections, had gotten inside the terminal and would eventually force their way, with guns, onto C-17s intended to transport U.S. personnel and matériel to Qatar. Monawari spent the night looking for some authority with a list of names that included his. But there was no such authority. There was no list. On that first night Monawari learned what everyone who dared to come to the airport would have to find out for themselves during the next two weeks: There was no system, no plan. They were on their own.

Khan saw that all kinds of people were trying to escape—ordinary shopkeepers, young men without even a national-identity card—while Afghans like him, who had checked every box, couldn’t get inside. (...) The family continued their odyssey until they arrived at the South Gate, the main entrance. Here there were U.S. Marines, but also thousands of Afghans. “All the looters and others came.”

Monawari possessed character and connections, but his ordeal suggested that a malign fate was working against him. He tried to get into the airport with his family four times through four gates and failed each time. Many of his relatives worked for the Afghan security forces, which controlled a “hidden” gate on the northwest side, but Panjshiris had lost their power overnight, and his relatives were unable to do anything. At the North Gate, Afghan guards—Pashtuns from an intelligence unit in Jalalabad—were letting in their ethnic relatives while jeering “Traitors!” at northerners like Monawari.

Children and parents lost each other. Troops saw children trampled underfoot. A Marine saw a Talib knife a boy who was climbing over a wall. A tear-gas canister struck the side of an 8-year-old girl’s face, melting her skin. A new mother staggered through the gate with her baby, who had just died, sobbing so hard that she threw up on the shoes of a consular officer checking documents. By the East Gate, a stack of corpses baked in the sun for hours. Outside the North Gate, the crushed bodies of four babies floated in a river of sewage.

The United States government estimates that it airlifted 124,000 people from Afghanistan before the last troops flew out on August 30, a day ahead of Biden’s deadline. This total counted everyone who left Hamid Karzai International Airport: the 45,000 on private and non-U.S. aircraft, as well as approximately 2,000 U.S.-embassy personnel, 5,500 American citizens, 2,000 citizens of NATO countries, 3,300 citizens of other countries, 2,500 SIVs and family members, and 64,000 “at-risk Afghans,” including the many thousands who found a way into the airport regardless of status or threat. The Biden administration declared the evacuation a historic triumph. (...) Human Rights First estimates that 90 percent of SIVs—including some with visas in hand—were left behind with their families.