It was there, on the airfield in Kabul, Afghanistan on a hot day in the middle of August, that Air Force Master Sgt. Brian Cantu felt certain he was about to die.
Three days ago, Cantu had been eating dinner with his family at his home in New Jersey, but now he and a few other service members were all that stood between a crowd of thousands of terrified Afghan refugees and the operations center for the last U.S. troops in the country.
It was Aug. 16, 2021, about two weeks before the U.S. military was due to leave Afghanistan after twenty years of war there. The Taliban had reasserted control over the nation, and the refugees gathered at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) were desperate to flee the country. Cantu suspected that they feared the U.S. Air Force C-17 transport jet sitting on the runway at HKIA that day was their last ticket out of Afghanistan, so many of them rushed for it. This was the same day cell phone videos emerged of Afghans clinging to a C-17 as it took off, though that would not happen until later in the day.
