In secret texts, U.S. military officials lamented leaving Americans behind in Kabul

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resident Biden declared to a puzzled country on Tuesday that the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan was an "extraordinary success," while his Pentagon portrayed a prosaic, workaday process to repatriate Americans still stranded in the war-torn country.

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But text messages between U.S. military commanders and private citizens mounting last-minute rescues tell a far different story

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"We are f*cking abandoning American citizens," an Army colonel assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division wrote Sunday in frustration in a series of encrypted messages that detailed the failed effort to extricate a group of American citizens, hours before the last U.S. soldiers departed Afghanistan.

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"We had them out there waving their passport screaming, 'I'm American,'" Yon said Tuesday while appearing on the John Solomon Reports podcast.

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"You guys left American citizens at the gate of the Kabul airport," Yon wrote Tuesday to the commander. "Three empty jets paid for by volunteers were waiting for them. You and I talked on the phone. I told you where they were. Gave you their passport images. And my email and phone number. And you left them behind."

He added: "Great job saving yourselves. Probably get a lot of medals."

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Yon's account, backed by three dozen text and email exchanges with frontline Army officials in Afghanistan, stands in sharp contrast to the claims of the Biden White House that U.S. citizens would not be left behind in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

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