Fred Smith
The Sparrows of Kabul
Puncher & Wattman, 2023
The Sparrows of Kabul is Fred Smith’s personal account of Australia’s mission to evacuate visa and passport holders from Kabul International Airport (KIA) in the two weeks after the city fell to the Taliban in August 2021.
Soldiers and diplomats worked 20-hour days, in uncertain and difficult conditions, to help people in through the airport gates and out of Afghanistan, while millions around the world worked their phones all hours of the night, desperate to extract friends, family and former colleagues.
It was chaos and his epitaph for the mission is “it was what it was.” We are left admiring the courage and tenacity of so many Afghan men, women and children who braved the human cattle yards outside the gates of Kabul airport in a last-ditch dash for freedom.
This is not an official history but an extraordinary first-hand account touching on the things that matter: trust and transparency, hope and despair, sleep and insomnia, creativity and bureaucracy, self-help and self-sacrifice, family and friendship.
“In Fred Smith’s hands, this insider account of the evacuation of Kabul is a rare bird; viscerally honest, packed with self-doubt,suffering and grace. Not just the facts but the feelings as the mission saved many but failed others. Profoundly moving.”
About the Author
Fred Smith is the poet and storyteller of Australia's mission in Afghanistan. He was the first Australian diplomat to be posted to Uruzgan in 2009, and the last to leave in 2013, returning to Kabul in 2020-21 in the lead up to the collapse of the Afghan republic. His album Dust of Uruzgan was on the iPods of every Australian soldier deployed. The lyrics to his song ’Sappers Lullaby’ are engraved in marble at the Australian plot of the British War Cemetery in Kabul. His first book, The Dust of Uruzgan, was described as a “convincing a picture as we will ever have of the tragedy, hope, oddness and courage of Australia’s Uruzgan enterprise… an astonishingly vibrant piece of reportage from the heart of our longest war.” (Hugh Riminton, Political Editor, Channel 10)
