On Monday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Sam Aronson, a State Department official during the withdrawal from Afghanistan, stated that he arrived to “complete chaos” where “rules on the ground didn’t necessarily match the reality” and he had to learn “how to hotwire cars, hotwire buses in case I needed to get people to safety” and kept flashbang grenades in his pocket, “in case we had to fight for our lives.”
Aronson said, “I came over right around the time that the evacuation started. And it was just complete chaos on arrival. The day prior to arriving, the hardest thing I had to deal with was finding a dogsitter for my dog. And then arriving in Kabul, immediately being taught how to hotwire cars, hotwire buses in case I needed to get people to safety, keeping flashbang grenades in my pocket in case we had to fight for our lives.”
He added, “So, the rules on the ground didn’t necessarily match the reality that we were seeing. So, along with some colleagues from the State Department, from [the] CIA, from the military, we had to make the rules fit the situation. So, we became aware of this secretive gate on the outskirts of the airport that was outside of the airport into beyond a no man’s land zone onto a major thoroughfare where there were market stalls, there was a gas station with essentially daily commerce…and we started using that gate to bring people in, bring them back into safety.”
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