Three Lessons from the Gate: A Platoon Commander’s Take on the Kabul NEO By Captain Mitchell Teefey, USMC

Charlie-2, 1/8, in Kuwait after departing Kabul, Afghanistan.

Credit: Image provided by author.

I’ve written a lot of platoon-level AARs over the years. Most of them live and die in green notebooks or PowerPoint graveyards. This one doesn’t.

This one comes from the dust and chaos of HKIA in August 2021. My platoon was on the line during the final days of the Afghanistan evacuation. We didn’t plan it. We didn’t rehearse it. We just got thrown into it, like many other Marines. And for two weeks, we did the best we could in a situation that swung between humanitarian crisis and urban combat hour by hour.

This isn’t a critique. It’s not a sob story, either. It’s a rifle platoon commander’s honest assessment of what happened, what mattered, and what I want the next guy to know before he finds himself on a flight line surrounded by thousands of civilians, screaming kids, pregnant women, mutinying foreign soldiers, and the enemy—sometimes all within ten feet of each other.

Here’s what I learned and what I need the Marine Corps to remember.

1.     NEO Training Has to Be Deliberate.

Let’s get this straight up front: NEOs aren't a “soft skill.” They're not a PME elective. They're combat, logistics, riot control, foreign diplomacy, and mass-casualty triage all rolled into one. And we didn’t train for it nearly hard enough.

Most of our MEU workup leading up to deployment focused on raids. Maybe we’d do one NEO lane at Stone Bay, just enough to check the box. But it wasn’t real. No screaming civilians. No impossible gate control. No one holding up a baby, begging, screaming in utter desperation, for you to take it. No enemy inside the crowd. No Americans you recognize walking toward you, desperate to get out.

At HKIA, we had to learn on the fly—how to control a human wave, how to establish an evac line when there is no “inside the wire” anymore, how to use fire team-level judgment to de-escalate a riot while scanning for suicide vests. If you think that’s “non-combat,” you’ve never done it at night with 300 people pressed up against your platoon, having no idea if the guy pushing to the front has a passport or a bomb.

So, sure, we can keep doing our raid packages. But if you’re not dedicating meaningful white space to train realistic NEO reps—with role players, chaos, language barriers, emotional scenarios, LZ security, and murky command relationships—you’re not preparing your Marines for the mission they will most likely to execute. [1]

NEOS aren't rare. They occur with relative frequency. Train like it.

2.     Discipline Has a Half-Life: The 72-Hour Rule is Real.

Here’s something I noticed that stuck with me: For our first 72 hours at HKIA, my worst Marines were machines. Laser-focused. Helping kids over barriers, watching sectors like they were born doing it, giving their food to Afghan kids without being asked, and being pure professionals—everything we ever hoped they’d be in a crisis. They did, in fact, rise to the occasion.

Then the fatigue hit. The adrenaline wore off. The novelty of the mission became the harsh reality of heat, dehydration, sleep deprivation, and moral exhaustion. And I watched garrison habits crawl back in—cutting corners on gear, drifting in posture, losing focus. Not because they didn’t care, but because that’s what humans do when systems aren’t in place to preserve discipline.

It was a gut check as a leader. Discipline is not just a boot camp virtue—it’s a survival trait in chaos. And it doesn’t sustain itself. You need to enforce it, every day, especially when things start to blur.

We adapted. We built routines. We reset expectations. We brought back small inspections, spot gear checks, basic field hygiene standards, and enforced designated rest cycles. Not because any of those things won the fight—but because they kept the unit functioning when the initial burst of energy wore off.

Discipline in combat doesn’t fail suddenly. It decays, quietly, unless you guard it.

3.     Officers and SNCOs Must Be Ready to Fight—For Real.

This one hurts to say out loud, but it needs to be said.

There were moments at the gate where I was no longer “maneuvering” Marines—I was physically fighting. I was pushing people back with my hands, pulling kids out of the crowd, firing my rifle at the enemy. And I watched my squad leaders and team leaders do the same. We weren’t “coordinating” anymore. We were part of the contact.

I’ve seen some leaders try to plan their way out of this possibility. “I’ll be in the COC.” “I’ll be the one talking to the interpreter.” Fine—until it’s 0300, the crowd breaches the gate, and the only thing between your Marines and an explosion is your own presence at the line.

As an officer, you better be fit enough, aggressive enough, and confident enough to close with when the situation goes sideways. Because it will go sideways, and when it does, the platoon doesn’t need a guy with a radio. They need a leader who’s willing to be in the stack, on the wire, in the crowd, in the fight.

NEOs aren’t clean. They aren’t controllable. You don’t get to pick whether you’re a combatant that day. The fight shows up when it wants. You better be ready to answer.

Final Word: Remember the Gate

Every Marine at HKIA remembers the smell, the noise, the faces. We remember the dust, the sweat, the desperation. We remember our guys standing tall behind a fence, watching hell come toward them and not backing down.

But most of all, we remember the things that actually mattered in that moment.

Not who had the best PowerPoint slides. Not who executed the cleanest training package. But who was trained, disciplined, and physically ready to make the hard calls when things went bad.

That’s the standard now.

So, if you’re a platoon commander or squad leader, here’s what I’ll leave you with.

• Train your Marines for real NEOs. Not just the easy version.

• Guard their discipline like it’s ammo—you’ll run out fast if you don’t ration it.

• And be ready to fight, yourself. Because one day, the fence may fall, and when it does, they’ll need you at the front.

We didn’t get to pick our moment in Kabul. But we answered it.

Make sure your platoon is ready when their gate comes.

In remembrance:

HM3 Maxton Soviak

SSG Ryan Knauss 

LCpl Kareem Nikoui

LCpl David Espinoza

Sgt Nicole Gee

LCpl Jared Schmitz

Cpl Hunter Lopez

SSgt Darin Hoover

Cpl Daegan Page

Cpl Humberto Sanchez

Sgt Johanny Rosario Pichardo

Cpl Dylan Merola 

Cpl Rylee McCollum

[1] Marine forces, including MEUs, have executed numerous NEOs since 1975. These include South Vietnam (1975), Cambodia (1975), Lebanon (1976), Lebanon (1982), Grenada (1983), Liberia (1990), Somalia (1991), Rwanda (1994), Central African Republic (1996), Albania (1997), Sierra Leone (1997), Zaire (1997), Eritrea, (1998), Liberia (2003), Lebanon (2006), Japan (2011), South Sudan (2014), Yemen (2015), Afghanistan (2021), and Haiti (2024). Compare this to zero contested amphibious landings. See Annette D. Amerman, The Marines Have Landed: Eighty Years of Marine Corps Landings, 1935-2015, Marine Corps History Division, 2016, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-D214-PURL-gpo83508/pdf/GOVPUB-D214-PURL-gpo83508.pdf.

Author Bio: Captain Mitchell Teefey currently serves as the operations officer for Recruiting Station Sacramento. He served as Second Platoon Commander, Company C, Battalion Landing Team 1/8, and fought in Operation ALLIES REFUGE.