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Frankly, that seems to be the problem.

Welcome to Angry Planet, I'm Jason Fields.

Matthew Galt is in a small box somewhere.

We're now a year out from the fall of Kabul and what looks like the end of America's

uniformed involvement in Afghanistan. There are as many as 70,000 Afghans who helped the United States

during the war who are still looking to get out.

Elliot Ackerman, who served in the region as a Marine and as a CIA operative,

was trying to help as the last flights were taking off from Kabul's airport.

It was, as Ackerman saw it, the fifth act of the Afghan war.

He's joining us today to talk about his war and his views of the fall.

He's the author of both novels and non-fiction, including Dark at the Crossing, and Green on Blue, and Red Dress in black and white. We'll put a full list in the show notes. His

latest book looking at these final days is the fifth act, America's end in Afghanistan.

Thank you so much for coming back on the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me on, Jason.

So as you saw America counting down to the end of the war, was there anything that came as a real surprise to you?

Or did it play out kind of as you expected it to?

I think that the speed of Afghanistan's fall

on how quickly the Taliban were able to march into Kabul

was a surprise to me. I would say the just sort of debacle we witnessed at the airport was a

surprise to me. I had never I frankly had never seen anything like it. So yeah I was like like many others I was surprised. I after

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