800 people evacuated on one C-17 flight

Palmpilot said:
I don't know the answer to your question, but I heard that far fewer civilians (about 7,000) were evacuated during the withdrawal from Vietnam than have been evacuated from Afghanistan so far.
Click to expand...

That depends whether you count self-evacuation. Are you old enough to remember the boat people?

Wikipedia cites a total of 130K civilians evacuated, with another 1 million fleeing by boat. Between 200K and 400K died at sea. Another 300K wound up in reeducation camps.
 
Last edited:
Ed Haywood said:
That depends whether you count self-evacuation. Are you old enough to remember the boat people?
Click to expand...
Boat people (Vietnamese) that I worked with on a large federal installation are very successful. Several with engineering and computer science degrees and remarkably good at their jobs. All are highly motivated. Afghans deserve the same opportunity.
 
Piperonca said:
Boat people (Vietnamese) that I worked with on a large federal installation are very successful. Several with engineering and computer science degrees and remarkably good at their jobs. All are highly motivated. Afghans deserve the same opportunity.
Click to expand...
Because they are highly educated too? And will assimilate well to American culture?
 
CJones said:
Question from the back of the room... Based on the lack of a sense of common nationality there, does it make sense to break the whole place up into distinct entities and parse them out to the existing groups? At least then you would have borders to 'enforce'.
Click to expand...

This is, as my old grad school professor would say, is a Big Question. Mismatches between national and ethnic boundaries have been the cause of most warfare for the last 30 years. Usually the borders were internal administrative boundaries in some past empire. The Durrand line is a classic example. In most cases the distribution of people is not clear and resolution along ethnic lines defies easy implementation. Once in a while you get a reasonable split like the Czechs and Slovaks, but more often things get horribly out of control a la Yugoslavia.
 
Ed Haywood said:
This is, as my old grad school professor would say, is a Big Question. Mismatches between national and ethnic boundaries have been the cause of most warfare for the last 30 years. Usually the borders were internal administrative boundaries in some past empire. The Durrand line is a classic example. In most cases the distribution of people is not clear and resolution along ethnic lines defies easy implementation. Once in a while you get a reasonable split like the Czechs and Slovaks, but more often things get horribly out of control a la Yugoslavia.
Click to expand...
You can add a couple zeros to that 30.
 
Morgan3820 said:
Because they are highly educated too? And will assimilate well to American culture?
Click to expand...
Most of the Vietnamese refugees were not highly educated when they came here. As with other Asian immigrant groups, their cultural values proved a good match for their new country.
 
Piperonca said:
Boat people (Vietnamese) that I worked with on a large federal installation are very successful. Several with engineering and computer science degrees and remarkably good at their jobs. All are highly motivated. Afghans deserve the same opportunity.
Click to expand...

Guess they should have fought a bit harder to preserve that opportunity. I don't say that lightly, as I'm sure there are plenty of deserving folk, but the loss of those opportunities is the cost of not fighting to keep the country free of ISIS/Taliban rule.
 
SoonerAviator said:
Guess they should have fought a bit harder to preserve that opportunity. I don't say that lightly, as I'm sure there are plenty of deserving folk, but the loss of those opportunities is the cost of not fighting to keep the country free of ISIS/Taliban rule.
Click to expand...
I don’t think it’s a question of fighting harder but that could start a whole new debate, not to
mention thread drift. The Vietnamese that I know were not combatants when their country was overrun. They started from ground zero when they came to the United States. They got their technical educations in the US.
 
Piperonca said:
I don’t think it’s a question of fighting harder but that could start a whole new debate, not to
mention thread drift. The Vietnamese that I know were not combatants when their country was overrun. They started from ground zero when they came to the United States. They got their technical educations in the US.
Click to expand...

The reasons Afghans didn't fight are admittedly complex, so I don't mean to make it seem like it was a simple situation. I just mean that the failure of their people to commit to driving out Taliban/ISIS influence (which is as much a tribal/religious issue as it is political) is what dissolves much of their opportunity to seek a better life. Hopefully those Afghans who have sought refugee status in the US will make the most of their opportunity, so that in a generation or two, their children will have achieved what their countrymen could not.
 
Ed Haywood said:
That depends whether you count self-evacuation. Are you old enough to remember the boat people?

Wikipedia cites a total of 130K civilians evacuated, with another 1 million fleeing by boat. Between 200K and 400K died at sea. Another 300K wound up in reeducation camps.
Click to expand...
I'm definitely old enough, but I think I was not paying close attention to the details in those days. Another Wikipedia article says "The final evacuation was Operation Frequent Wind which resulted in 7,000 people being evacuated from Saigon by helicopter," so that's probably the 7,000 that I heard about recently.
 
Last edited:
Ed Haywood said:
That depends whether you count self-evacuation. Are you old enough to remember the boat people?

Wikipedia cites a total of 130K civilians evacuated, with another 1 million fleeing by boat. Between 200K and 400K died at sea. Another 300K wound up in reeducation camps.
Click to expand...
My Dad was on a destroyer that rescued a group that had fled by boat and exhausted their food and fuel. They were in pretty bad shape when they found them but he says all they wanted to know was if "we go freedom now?".
 
Ed Haywood said:
This is, as my old grad school professor would say, is a Big Question. Mismatches between national and ethnic boundaries have been the cause of most warfare for the last 30 years. Usually the borders were internal administrative boundaries in some past empire. The Durrand line is a classic example. In most cases the distribution of people is not clear and resolution along ethnic lines defies easy implementation. Once in a while you get a reasonable split like the Czechs and Slovaks, but more often things get horribly out of control a la Yugoslavia.
Click to expand...
Or Damned Yankees and everyone else.
 
This is tactically much more viable than trying to screen thousands of people bunching up at the gates for suicide bombers. No worse feeling as a soldier than being a sitting duck, hoping the roulette wheel of fate does not land on you.
 
Piperonca said:
Have no idea, but that's an excellent question. Looks like sand lot football to me. For high stakes.
https://www.politico.com/news/magaz...an-rescue-volunteers-signal-evacuation-506886
Click to expand...

I have friends involved in these efforts. There are multiple organizations and actors with various backing. All have large brass ones.

Sand lot football is sometimes necessary. Take advantage of chaos and make it your friend. Wait for certainty and the opportunity may pass. In the military we call it "exercising initiative". Special Ops trainees are selected in part for their comfort with that environment. Required psychological attributes are adaptability and tolerance of ambiguity.
 
Ed Haywood said:
I have friends involved in these efforts. There are multiple organizations and actors with various backing. All have large brass ones.

Sand lot football is sometimes necessary. Take advantage of chaos and make it your friend. Wait for certainty and the opportunity may pass. In the military we call it "exercising initiative". Special Ops trainees are selected in part for their comfort with that environment. Required psychological attributes are adaptability and tolerance of ambiguity.
Click to expand...
I am fortunate enough to have a friend or two involved in these efforts as well. Some of the information shared with me regarding what is happening is horrific. What we are doing there as a nation is criminal.
 
Arm3 said:
The past couple of days have left me feeling sick to my stomach. I cannot imagine the terror and desperation someone must feel that would drive them to cling to the landing gear of a C-17 as it takes off. From videos I’ve seen a handful stayed on through takeoff only to fall to their death when the gear was retracted. I also can’t imagine being the pilot and having to push the throttles up knowing there were likely people going to be killed by your action trying to save those you’d managed to cram on. I sincerely hope they know they did their best in an impossible situation and commend them for saving the ones they were able to.

I’m praying for our aircrew conducting the evacuation and the troops securing the airfield. And hopefully those that helped our cause in Afghanistan and their families are able to find their way safely out of the country.
Click to expand...
This article has more details that I hadn't been aware of. It sounds like the plane may not even have come to a stop on the landing rollout.

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/the-story-of-an-afghan-man-who-fell-from-the-sky/

At the airport that morning, Air Force officials have since explained, the cargo plane in question was landing. It was surrounded almost as soon as it touched down by civilians who had breached the airport zone’s perimeter, and the crew decided almost immediately to take off again without unloading its supplies for the evacuation effort.

Andrew Inman, a former British Royal Air Force pilot who has conducted evacuation operations in Africa and has flown into the Kabul airport on numerous occasions, said the crew would have been able to see people in front of them on the runway but were unlikely to have seen or heard people suddenly clinging to the undercarriage.​
 
Piperonca said:
Taliban fighters upset, feel betrayed that US military left non-working helicopters: report
Militants reportedly believed helicopters would be untouched following US departure

https://www.foxnews.com/world/taliban-fighters-helicopters-kabul-airport-afghanistan
Click to expand...

Even if they weren’t disabled, those aircraft would be essentially useless in any real ADA threat environment. All it would take is CIA intervention (Northern Alliance) and we’d have the Soviet Afghan War debacle again. I sure wouldn’t take the Black Hawks we gave to them (ANA) to war.
 
The Afghan war came along after my enlistment ended. So anyone on this board that participated over there: THANK YOU!
 
Velocity173 said:
Even if they weren’t disabled, those aircraft would be essentially useless in any real ADA threat environment. All it would take is CIA intervention (Northern Alliance) and we’d have the Soviet Afghan War debacle again. I sure wouldn’t take the Black Hawks we gave to them (ANA) to war.
Click to expand...

The next 5 years will be Taliban fighting other Taliban, for that having helicopters could give one side the upper hand.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top