The thousand-yard stare has become a documentary trope: interviewees, only semi-aware that they’re being recorded because they’re not answering a question at that moment, are caught gazing into space, thinking about the experiences they’re here to discuss. Lost in their thoughts, their defences down, they let us see how they really feel.
It can be a cheap trick, but it’s seldom been more justifiably and effectively used than in Evacuation, a three-part recollection of British armed forces’ efforts to rescue British citizens and selected Afghans from Kabul after the Taliban regained control of the city in August 2021. Backed by Ministry of Defence footage and some stunningly immediate smartphone pictures, service personnel who were involved tell the story. Every one of them ends up distant and glassy-eyed at some point as they re-live the horror. Episode one is mostly scene-setting but by the end of it, we’re wearing thousand-yard stares at home, having seen one of the most shocking sequences any documentary will show this year.
At first, what the soldiers and civilians experience is bewilderment and dread – uncertainty rather than outright fear. The US-set deadline for vacating Kabul is still 19 days away as Diana, squadron leader with the RAF Police, arrives with a group of young recruits, many of whom have not been on real battlefield ops before. “I was taking 19-year-olds,” she says. “I basically took a sixth-form field trip to Kabul.” As they commandeer Casa Italia, an abandoned Italian building near the airport, news of Taliban advances in the provinces begins to trickle in.
Meanwhile Peymana, a young British-Afghan woman visiting relatives, is told by a family elder: “If you stay and the Taliban come, I can’t guarantee that you’ll live.” A phone call to the British embassy brings reassurance that the Taliban won’t take Kabul, but within hours that advice changes: get to the Baron Hotel next to the airport today. On her way there, crowds of people are bustling in the same direction, dragging suitcases. The sound of semi-automatic gunfire is getting louder. The walking turns to running.
Inside the Baron Hotel is Mike, the Joint Force lieutenant-colonel who has turned the building into a processing centre. Those inside are safe and are only a short journey from the airport, but Kabul is falling rapidly. They can’t get out of the hotel because the crowds outside the gate are far too dense. Mike has to wait until the early hours of the next morning to sneak his people out, every seat in every vehicle occupied by women and children.
Just outside Afghan airspace, RAF squadron leader Mark is incoming, piloting a C17 troop carrier stuffed with colleagues who have been warned to keep their weapons handy from the moment they disembark. Stepping on to the runway, Parachute Regiment sergeant-major Adam sees scores of civilians gathered behind thin coils of barbed wire, with only a few Turkish forces to keep them in check. An aerial photograph shows them as a thick, jagged mass lining the edge of the tarmac, close to parked aircraft. “If all of them decide at one moment to break through,” Adam remembers thinking, “how can we control this situation?”
In Casa Italia, Diana has begun checking passports and documents, finding a moment to be fascinated by what people fleeing for their lives include within their strict baggage allowance: “lots and lots of velvet curtains”. On the ground, Mark has loaded up the C17 with its first couple of hundred evacuees – in interview, he’s in tears at the memory of two Afghan girls in matching outfits, innocently dancing their way on board in ignorance of the countless others who won’t get this chance. As he flies away, he looks down and sees that the scenario Adam feared has come to pass. The crowds have burst on to the runway, intent on boarding planes and getting out.
Now come the images that nobody watching this programme will forget. An imposing US air force troop carrier is shown in phone footage accelerating along the ground. At the bottom of the fuselage is an area that’s not even a ledge; it’s just a slight outward flare of the plane’s body. But perched on it are upwards of 20 young Afghan men, jammed together with nothing to hold on to, all of them driven by desperate panic to make a horrifically unwise choice.
Another phone camera tracks the plane as it takes off and banks upwards. A few hundred feet up, a tiny black dot leaves the side of the aircraft and plummets back to the tarmac. “Someone fell,” someone says. “And another one, and another one … Look, they dropped the rest too, Allah!”
“I looked out across this sea of people,” says Diana, whose blunt candour only makes her testimony more moving, “and it was just like: fuck, fuck.” There are two episodes of Evacuation left and it’s going to get worse, but already the programme has painted an astonishingly vivid picture of the purest terror.
Evacuation is on Channel 4.
