On Wednesday afternoon—three days after the United passengers had been processed and dispersed to military bases throughout the United States—I went to Dulles airport to speak to other evacuees as they emerged from a security checkpoint near the Saudia ticketing desk.

They’d already spent so much time waiting. Some of them had waited for days in the Kabul airport, days more in Qatar, hours on a hot tarmac, and hours more on the flight from Ramstein or some other air base. Now here they were, waiting again, in a row of folding chairs behind a navy-blue privacy curtain. They waited on COVID-19 test results, and after that, they waited for a man in an Army T-shirt to escort them onto a bus, which would take them to a nearby facility, where they would wait a while longer before traveling elsewhere to begin the resettlement process.

While I watched, I thought that if I had to spend so much time waiting in airports and checkpoints, I’d be screaming at agents or crying with impatience. But the Afghan evacuees I met were calm. They filed out of the security checkpoint quietly, a few groups every 20 minutes: men in beige waistcoats, veiled women with curly-haired babies, toddlers clutching juice boxes. Each person wore a stripe of blue electrical tape on their shoulder with a four-digit identification number.