The Fifth Act
America's End in Afghanistan
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
“The American betrayal of Afghanistan took twenty years. Elliot Ackerman, a participant and witness, tells the story with unsparing honesty in this intensely personal chronicle.” —George Packer
A powerful and revelatory eyewitness account of the American collapse in Afghanistan, its desperate endgame, and the war’s echoing legacy
Elliot Ackerman left the American military ten years ago, but his time in Afghanistan and Iraq with the Marines and later as a CIA paramilitary officer marked him indelibly. When the Taliban began to close in on Kabul in August 2021 and the Afghan regime began its death spiral, he found himself pulled back into the conflict. Afghan nationals who had worked closely with the American military and intelligence communities for years now faced brutal reprisal and sought frantically to flee the country with their families. The official US government evacuation effort was a bureaucratic failure that led to a humanitarian catastrophe. With former colleagues and friends protecting the airport in Kabul, Ackerman joined an impromptu effort by a group of journalists and other veterans to arrange flights and negotiate with both Taliban and American forces to secure the safe evacuation of hundreds. These were desperate measures taken during a desperate end to America's longest war. For Ackerman, it also became a chance to reconcile his past with his present.
The Fifth Act is an astonishing human document that brings the weight of twenty years of war to bear on a single week, the week the war ended. Using the dramatic rescue efforts in Kabul as his lattice, Ackerman weaves a personal history of the war's long progression, beginning with the initial invasion in the months after 9/11. It is a play in five acts, the fifth act being the story’s tragic denouement, a prelude to Afghanistan's dark future. Any reader who wants to understand what went wrong with the war’s trajectory will find a trenchant account here. But The Fifth Act also brings readers into close contact with a remarkable group of characters, American and Afghan, who fought the war with courage and dedication, and at great personal cost. Ackerman's story is a first draft of history that feels like a timeless classic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A veteran ponders America's "harried withdrawal" from Afghanistan in this haunting memoir. Journalist and novelist Ackerman (Dark at the Crossing) served in Afghanistan as a Marine and CIA officer until 2011; here he recounts his efforts last summer during the Taliban's takeover of Kabul to help Afghans who worked with the U.S. to flee the country. It's a harrowing portrait of chaos and collapse: working mainly by text message from Italy, Ackerman—with the help of an improvised personal network of journalists, officials, and sympathetic Marine buddies—helped thread evacuees through a gauntlet of Taliban checkpoints, desperate crowds, and suspicious American sentinels to get to flights out of Kabul's besieged airport. The nerve-wracking operation frames his recollections of weathering firefights in Afghanistan, witnessing the deaths of comrades, and agonizing over dangerous missions to recover their bodies. Writing in evocative, gripping prose—"Blood, like spilled paint, stained the side of the hood and wheel well.... The major sat inside the RG-33, dazed like a prizefighter between rounds, clutching a radio handset he wasn't talking into"—Ackerman provides a clear-eyed indictment of America's failures in Afghanistan while paying homage to the soldiers who fought there. The result is a moving elegy for a blighted struggle. Photos.
