Abbey Gate survivor describes chaos before attack, says pullout was botched from the start

Vargas-Andrews told Fox News that the failures leading to the attack began well before the first explosion and renewed his call for accountability.

"Everything we were doing while we were there was like figuring it out on the go," he said, even as he acknowledged that Marines are trained to "adapt, improvise and overcome."

He recounted that day, comparing it to something out of the movie "World War Z," saying, "It was just hundreds of thousands of people. And if I filled up the whole room with sand, that's how many people it felt like [were] there."

"We were just put in a very, very precarious situation that could have been better prepared for over the weeks and months prior leading up to that," Vargas-Andrews recalled. "And that decision was never made."

Vargas-Andrews said troops had received intelligence warning of a threat, but maintained that nothing was done proactively to prevent it. He did not place responsibility on any single person or group, instead pointing to multiple administrations, the State Department and other organizations and citing "decades of action and inaction and just poor decision-making."

Vargas-Andrews welcomed the recent recognition by the Department of War of Marines who served during the evacuation, but said he did not want these awards to overshadow the fact that there has still been no accountability.

"It's a good step in the right direction, is what I will say. I think that the real important things still haven't happened, but we hope it does and we pray that it does.," Vargas-Andrews said.