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Let's start at the beginning.
How... how did this all come about?
I mean, one minute
you're at Tim Kennedy's
house working on his book,
and the next minute
you've been in the Middle East
in Afghanistan for the past seven,
eight days.
Yeah,
I can definitely say
that I never expected
to be on a mission like this.
You know, the...
the Taliban
just blasted through Afghanistan so fast
that it put
both our troops
and our allies
in a really precarious position.
Is the Department of Defense surprised
at how quickly
it seems that the Afghan National Army
has collapsed under Taliban pressure?
Is... is the military
or the Pentagon or the administration
everyone surprised
by how fast the Taliban
has been able
to move through parts of the country,
taking these major cities
like Kandahar, Herat? Lashkar Gah
looks like it's fallen.
Can you...
offer any guarantee
to the Americans and Afghan allies
that if they remain there past
the end of the month, U.S.
troops will help them evacuate
past the end of the month?
Our focus right
now is on doing the work at hand.
On July the fifth,
in the middle of the night,
the Americans left Bagram for good
without telling the base's Afghan commander.
This map shows Taliban controlled
areas in red,
contested territory in yellow,
and regions under government control
in blue.
The embattled government controls
only the capital, Kabul,
and the areas marked in blue.
I cannot believe the world
abandoned Afghanistan.
Our friends are going to get killed.
They're going to kill us.
Our women are not going
to have any more rights.
It was so frightening for me
when I heard their stories like girls
weren't allowed to go to school.
Boys were needed to obey
what Taliban told them.
Like,
it was so horrible for me
that when I heard the girls
need to marry at a very young age
to a man that they don't want to.
And that was just devastating.
And then watching, just being like
everyone in America glued to the news,
watching the Taliban march
across a country that had held U.S.
troops for 20 years,
many of whom took their,
you know, had their last moments on earth
occur there or left pieces of themselves
there, literally and otherwise.
And it was just devastating.
Helping liberate
those people and...
And send little girls to school
and all these things we did.
And it came at a cost.
And we... we lost so many American lives.
I buried 15 friends
personally that served in Afghanistan.
So it was always personal to me.
To the community of people
who either had lost
a loved one in Afghanistan
or whose lives had been forever
impacted by Afghanistan,
we had to do something to try to,
not only make them whole, but
make it all count.
Having uncles that were in Vietnam,
both of them were texting me
while Afghanistan was falling and
painfully pointing out the similarities
between the two.
It didn't look like
the government
was going to be able to react fast enough
to get people out.
Our good friend
Chad Robichaux had been trying
to get his interpreter out.
He had done ten deployments
with this interpreter named Aziz.
You're forward deployed
and it's kind of
just you and an interpreter sometimes.
And Aziz was his interpreter.
He quickly became my teammate
and then my sole teammate.
He and I worked together
on hundreds of combat missions.
I knew that if I
didn't personally intervene,
Aziz would die.
He was individually already identified.
He was on the run.
His days were numbered
and he was going to die.
These people are being slaughtered.
We made a promise to them.
They're being slaughtered.
They're being hunted for the crime of fighting alongside
our own military.
For six years
I had been fighting to get this guy the visa
he deserved. A SIV, special immigrant visa.
And that process is only supposed
to take nine months.
To not be able to get him here in six years.
And a nine month process
was really disturbing to me.
And he was getting desperate
because it didn't look like
the government had... had a plan in place
that was going to get him out in time.
So he was
he was planning a trip of just four
or five guys
just to get Aziz out
and started making connections.
For me, it was a choice of
do I do
nothing or do I
save my friend's life who saved mine?
I knew I needed
not only help, but the right help.
People that had the experience,
but also people I trusted.
Chad and I connected.
We had worked together
over the last several years
and I just said, you know, how can I help?
While I was talking to Chad,
Nick,
who is here writing Scars
and Stripes with me,
is talking to Sarah Verardo,
both asking us the same question of,
Can you go?
But more importantly,
giving us and providing us the answer with
this is what we're doing.
They were
figuring out a way to land some planes
into Kabul.
Initially, it was a very clear mission,
which was to go
rescue Aziz.
As we were putting that plan together
we kind of pause for a second and said,
Hey this great, we're going to go help Aziz,
but I'm talking to this orphanage over here.
That's 3500 orphans that need help, too.
Why don't we help them?
And I think there was another pause
and we said, man,
we really have the right group of people here.
We have the skills.
We have the ability to do this.
The passion's there.
Let's not just help this limited group.
Let's help as many people as we can.
Interpreters and their families,
women and children that would be vulnerable.
Christians that would be persecuted
for their faith,
these different vulnerable groups.
Let's help as many people as we can.
And so I started
just putting together
different lists and trying to help.
We knew it would be a difficult situation,
but we thought that we had,
you know, a couple of weeks
to make real substantial change.
And as these requests started to build
and we started vetting
these requests, resources
also started to be organized.
And so Tim and I
just looked at each other and said, okay.
Then we're getting on a plane.
24 hours later, tickets are booked.
We're boarding a flight to the Middle East.
100.
70.
60, 50, 40.
We get through all COVID screening
and we arrive at the UAE
military's headquarters for their officers,
like their officer academy.
We just jumped right into the rotation.
There was no time for like,
oh, we're going to sleep.
We're going to...
you know... we're going to figure things out.
We're still in a whirl
trying to figure out what everything is,
where everything is.
Sean Lee, who works for Sarah Verardo,
he had already arrived in UAE
and they had set up a forward TOC.
UAE is our Lily Pad launch base and our forward
Tactical Operations Command Center.
Nick and I were basically running
the evacuation
of 2500 people
from two cell phones and a laptop.
So we just kept working
and working and working.
A number of people
in Congress, in the Senate,
in the State Department, D.O.D.,
were happy to have us.
People wanted to help.
And so it was just connecting
people who wanted to help
that would be effective at helping.
Back home in the States,
Sarah Verardo set up
operation center in Washington, D.C.
to process people that needed help, help
vet people, work
directly with the Joint Chiefs
to make sure that we're vetting our groups.
Senator Tillis, his team,
I mean,
it was really whatever we needed, they were
they were doing
they were legitimizing our efforts.
DOD was legitimizing our efforts.
We saw so many great people
drop their lives and do whatever was needed.
One of our team members
had a personal relationship with the
royal family in United Arab Emirates.
We thought,
hey, let's ask them
if they want to participate
in this and help. So we asked for support.
I got several Congress members on a call.
We basically proposed to the UAE
what we're going to do.
And they had faith in us.
They believed that we could do it.
I knew I would be more of an asset
working with whoever's on the ground.
Nick and Tim are in Abu Dhabi and are like,
Can we do a kind of a quick call?
And so I'm thinking, okay,
we're going to get on the phone
and they're going to talk about
getting on a plane
landing and loading people and going back.
And they were like, Yeah,
we're going to do a little bit
more than that.
Leaving the officer's club, it is Joe
who was the
the originating contact for the UAE.
He throws myself and Nick in a truck.
We grab our bags,
check my body armor,
change my batteries in my night vision,
change the batteries in
my thermal imager,
did a couple of tests in a new country
with a new country code
with my SAT radio and my satcom.
Then we drove to the military airstrip.
And shortly thereafter
we were on a flight from Abu Dhabi to Kabul.
And Nick and I boarded a 737, a very weird,
eerie feeling of getting on a 737
with no one on it
besides the crew,
which are all people from Afghanistan.
And the pilots were three pilots
from Afghanistan.
They asked us
if we could get their families out,
and we promised that we would try
and we meant it.
You know,
we got everybody's information
and built
a manifest and tried to get locations
and all that.
And we...
went wheels up around sunrise to fly
into Afghanistan.
Everything you've ever known about
an airfield is wrong here.
I've never seen an airstrip as wild as...
People are everywhere.
There's no tower.
It's like one guy on a radio
running the airstrip. Just nuts.
I mean, it is a mess.
Plane lands.
Taxi stops in front of Ramp nine.
Honestly, I was thinking
how impressive
everybody was,
how hard everybody was working,
and then how bad it was on the ground.
Like, the media is not doing it justice.
I mean, the humanity of it.
Like, you know, kids are sleeping on the ground.
There's... there's, you know, literally
piss and shit everywhere.
There's very little food.
There's
just mounds of plastic bottles.
Nick hops in a side by side with Seaspray
to start going
and helping
these people load onto this aircraft
and start documenting
what is happening on the ground.
And I'm off to go do work.
You know, I open the door to this up
armored Land Cruiser.
The four guys that end up being
there are Seaspray, Dave,
Sean G, and myself.
So our team was comprised of
some of the best
in the business
in terms of special operations
and extraction professionals.
I flew over to Abu Dhabi.
I speak French, Russian, Arabic.
I'm a former Special Forces guy
and I'm a former Army
strategist and planner.
So I thought I'd be in Abu Dhabi
in an operation center helping out to plan.
So I found myself on the runway with
Sean and Seaspray for a couple of days,
and then we had Tim Kennedy roll in.
Sean G's first question is,
"What do you need?"
I need a gun,
I need some local comms,
and I need to know what we're doing.
Sean G and Seaspray
who are already on the evac team
and man, immediately
I think Tim was on the ground
and walking and getting briefed
and walking out of the wire.
The military was not allowed to
go outside the wire, period.
That was the rules of engagement.
They were not allowed
to go outside of the wire.
The way the White House set this up,
they took the NEO operation,
the noncombatant evacuation
operation away
from the Department of Defense
and gave it to the State Department,
which is not the way
things are supposed to be done.
And so when that happened,
the State Department
treated the NEO operation in the airport
like an embassy.
So now the US military can only support
what's inside.
They can't go outside
and help people. Americans.
Something can happen right in front of them.
They can't go outside and help.
They can't go outside and get interpreters.
They have to control that airport.
The way that you wage war.
You have kind of four different elements
you have diplomatic, information,
military, and economic.
On the ground in Afghanistan,
all of those are currently being controlled
by the Taliban.
The Taliban now control the airport.
You'll hear people say that the U.S. military did.
Anybody who knows
military strategy knows that
whoever controls the outside
perimeter, controls that ground space.
So anybody inside of that perimeter
was there
only because the Taliban
allowed them to be there.
Who's coming on to bases?
How the military is going to be screening?
Who's coming on? Who's taking passports?
Like, that's happening by the Taliban.
A lot of people were murdered
right outside of the wire by the Taliban
to show that they could do it.
Soldiers used to shoot... shoot with their guns
to avoid the crowd. But in between,
I saw people dying over there.
They got hit by the bullets.
I saw them dying there.
The ground was full of blood.
I saw children crying over their mothers.
Worried that the time
to take care of their kids,
their small babies.
I saw some of the babies fell on the ground.
People were running on them.
That was the most horrible part.
Another team had a woman
put on the hood of their car
and as the Taliban looked right at them,
they just executed the woman on the hood
just to try to elicit a response.
Just to be like,
just so we're super clear
about who is in charge here,
I'm going to murder this woman
right in front of you.
And there's nothing
that you can do about it.
This is the Taliban I know.
And this is the Taliban
that is outside the gates of HKIA.
It was probably one
of the more traumatic things
I've been through.
I've been in
six or so conflicts, in two wars.
I have two combat infantry badges.
I've seen a lot of stuff.
Refugees are innocent civilians.
So when something happens to them
intentionally,
you know, yes,
you have collateral damage in a war,
but something happens to them intentionally.
It really hits home hard.
It's impossible to explain the
the level of desperation that people felt.
I mean if you just think about the first couple of days
when people were trying
to hang on to the bottom of C-17s.
That's desperation
that Americans... like Americans
don't understand that level of desperation.
I don't... I don't understand.
Yeah, I think...
I don't think the news captured it.
And I don't think people
could really comprehend
the environment of HKIA.
So many guys that I know
that have tremendous amount
of experience in combat
and special operations
and seeing horrific things,
all describe it as one of the most chaotic
and horrific things they have ever seen.
I've never seen desperation
like what I saw
in Kabul, what I saw in HKIA.
You know, the Afghans knew
that we would take children.
So if it was an infant,
we would take the infant.
Not that the troops were trying to.
But if somebody, like,
climbed up the wall and handed,
you know, a Marine or one of the 82nd
Airborne guys, an infant, they were taken.
Well...
people got desperate
and...
so that you understand
it's like people were crowd surfing babies.
They were passing babies
so that the babies would get up front
so that they could then, you know,
hand them to troops.
And this was their best hope
that that child might live,
that their best hope was
that they could beach ball
a child forward into the crowd
and that some soldier
or Airman or Marine
on top of this wall
could reach down, pull this child up,
and this child would have a better chance
at life than staying in Afghanistan.
These troops down on that wall,
just having people beg all day, all night,
please get them out.
And... and,
you know,
if they don't get in,
they're probably going to die.
And then some people,
you know, I don't...
I don't know what level of desperation
you need to be at to do this.
But there were people that threw the babies
over the wall
when Americans didn't take them.
This is like a frail, small Afghan woman
taking her infant child
and throwing this child as hard
and as high as she could
in the hopes
that somebody might catch this baby.
Not realizing that on the other side of
the wall was concertina.
So like there were
some babies that,
you know, that bled out
on the concertina wire.
Um...
And that's...
That's...
That's the desperation that you...
that you can't...
you can't put that on TV.
You know, you don't...
you don't see that anywhere.
And as I'm moving past these gates,
whether it's Black Gate or Abbey Gate or,
you know, the U.N. gate,
those babies are still in the concertina wire
and those women are still stuck out there
screaming. The nightmares and like the...
So everything that was outside of that lane,
you know, like I'm focused on this
with everything
I'm trying to save a woman and her children,
but off to like five feet away from me
is a... is a dead child.
You know, is... is a smoldering, burning body.
And having smelled bodies
my whole entire adult life,
but then seeing it's a small one.
And that's a burning body of a child
that was lit by the Taliban.
There's nothing I could do about...
That's already gone. But I'm still here.
But it was just...
everywhere.
The only way
to effectively evacuate
those who were the most
vulnerable was to go out and get them.
I'll just say special units.
And so our ground team was essentially
one of those special units
that were allowed to go outside the wire.
We were targeting specific individuals
that were passport and SIV holders
that were external to the base
and needed to get on in a safe way.
Couldn't necessarily
go through the Taliban checkpoints
because they had been working
with the United States.
The Taliban knew
which women were educated and could read.
The Taliban knew
who the Christians were like,
"These are all the targets."
And back in the JOC,
you know,
we were communicating with these targets
before we would pass them on to the guys.
And, you know,
we put target packages together
and we'd be talking to them
and sending the information
down to the ground team.
But a lot of these targets would go dark.
Looking at this problem set,
you know, it's really no different
than any other situation,
you know, that involves a mass movement.
It's a logistic challenge,
you know,
but it's based on the same framework
of any NEO.
So we go out to do a
recon of a potential evacuation site.
As we approach the first spot,
I see some Taliban overwatch positions
on top of a few two, three story buildings,
and those observation
positions can clearly see
pretty much everything in that area.
We start exploring a couple
more evacuation spots.
I clamber up to this gate and
I realize really
quickly that there's just one single bolt
on the inside of this gate,
keeping this gate
closed from the outside of the Taliban
and access to this big empty parking lot.
That just has a bunch of these buses
lined up.
And the buses were perfect
because it provides cover.
And then immediately adjacent to that
were these
retention, I don't know
if they're oil or water tanks,
maybe a kilometer of them,
and then moved into this urban, albeit
very poor
suburb, and that seemed mostly vacant.
This was a not observed portion of our
perimeter for HKIA.
Nobody would notice
some people moving through there
and there were people
kind of constantly moving through there.
So it looked awesome.
They were just
pulling targets through the wire
all night, nonstop,
and they were coming back in the wire
around the time the sun came up.
Before leaving UAE,
we kind of set up
the five W's for initial linkup.
What proves to be
the most difficult thing in
the evacuation is linkup.
So we start building
these packages of people
with information to validate who they were,
and that would build manifest.
And those manifest would get...
Will get sent to the Joint Chiefs
to get approved.
There were some lists
that were DOD approved,
but not DOS approved.
There were some lists
that were DOS approved,
but not DOD approved.
There were some lists
that were Pentagon approved.
DOD, Pentagon, DOS
approved, but not Taliban approved.
So night looks like this:
sun goes down.
I pre-position at a linkup location
where I say, at the corner
of this outside of this gate at this time,
you're going to do a far recognition.
And then once they get close
they have to do the near security check.
Maybe it's a proword, maybe it's
a secret phrase,
maybe it's a word
that you have to slip into a sentence.
And there were lots of different
far and near recognition
signals that we were using
and we were changing them every few hours.
Once we had that near recognition signal,
then I need to confirm that
the documents that you digitally sent to us
were the documents
that you physically have in hand.
Basically the places
where nobody would actually want to go,
that's how they were bringing people in.
And they had...
They had four different good rat lines
into the complex.
Even preplanned routes, as I'm like looking at a map,
and I'm having to go from point A to point B,
I might set up one, two, three, four, five
different routes to get there.
Well, my life and the life of these people that we're trying
to get out is on the line...
And... um...
Figuring out multiple ways to get right back
onto HKIA proves... um... to be pretty important.
They were crawling through sewage,
ditches, gross... you know, literally through crap
under... under concertina and barbed wire.
Digging holes.
Sneaking past Taliban checkpoints
and then sneaking onto the airbase
and then through the airstrip to our hangar
to be manifested for the next flight out.
Let's say each of those takes
45 minutes to 90 minutes.
Multiply that by the ten,
11 hours of darkness.
That's the night.
We slept maybe an hour a day
and just some moving...
it became a blur.
The second day, we got 800 people out
and then again it became a blur.
My phone would die like three
times in a 24 hour period.
I knew that I lost my voice
probably like around
August 19th, temporarily, just because I had...
I just didn't stop talking.
I didn't stop collecting information.
Sean G is off
talking to thousands of people
on his seven different phones
that he's using.
If you have the ability to help someone,
you help someone.
And like I've always
I've always believed that so strongly.
And so I was willing to use
any ounce of political capital or anything
I had to throw it at this problem
knowing that, like,
maybe this is like my one favor
I'm ever going to ask of this person
in my lifetime.
And now this is what I've been waiting for.
Like this is the time to use it and to do it.
I'm able to make a far recognition,
near recognition.
Their paperwork aligns with the paperwork
that are sent digitally.
They were vetted, it's approved.
I'm able to bring them in
and behind them,
as I'm bringing in these four people,
behind them was another 40 people
that those four people had told
they're going to be able
to get onto the base and maybe get out.
And then I have to look at those
other 40 people and be like,
No, bro, like, I can't do anything with you.
Yeah, we're making differences.
We're picking up pieces of sand
and you pick up enough of them,
you'll eventually have a bucket.
But...
I'm looking at a beach,
you know, and I'm moving a grain of sand
at a time.
We're so focused on what we had to do that
every one of those
pieces of sand was a life.
A life that fought for us, and a life
that deserved
to live and a life that deserved
a better opportunity than
what the Taliban was going to give them.
You know, we're a drop in the bucket.
And every life
that has moved off that beach
and into a bucket is a life that is
that is saved from...
indescribable acts.
Now it's how many people can we get out
in the little bit of time
that we have before, ultimately,
that base crumbles.
Finally, as things were starting to get tight,
New Caption
that a whole lot of government agencies
had their people still out there by name.
We knew we were getting close to the end.
So we... our team
physically bought seven buses.
We had a location for 300 orphans.
We had a location for about 100 Christians.
And then we had
several high value
individuals that were requested
by government entities for us to pick up.
And then we also had the families of
the crews that had been flying the charter airplanes.
We send out buses to multiple places
throughout the city.
The most elite intelligence agencies
in the world
have their people on these buses.
Afghan Special Forces commandos,
interpreters, Christians, orphans.
All of these on these buses.
The guys worked all night
and then filled those buses
with those individuals.
We thought we could
we could just get one big, big lump through.
We had this great little gate
that we had arranged
ahead of time with the Marines.
We have five of them
lined up at this
at this one gate; Black Gate.
I got a SAT call.
Hey, we got
300 orphans, 100 Christians,
the HVT's, and the families of about
half the crew through the gate.
We danced a jig.
Like we were like, you know, fuck yeah.
Like... one of the happiest moments
that we had during the whole event.
Nick and I,
as the call came in
that they were approaching the gate
and that they were getting ready to come in,
were high fiving
and kind of jumping around.
And it's 3:00 in the morning,
there's nobody else around.
And we're doing as much as we can
as fast as we can.
But we can't make mistakes.
You know,
we can't let one person
through that shouldn't have gotten through.
And so we're being thorough.
And we were talking to one of the
government representatives
who is the regional
representative for that agency.
Calls are going up chains of command,
and ultimately
the full bird Colonel
who is in charge of the base arrives on...
on scene at Black Gate.
And he just makes the call,
"Turn everybody around...
put everybody back out...
I don't care who they are."
Tim calls on the SAT phone.
He's like, they're kicking them out.
They're going to kick them all out.
I got a message from Sean Lee
that says a colonel from the 82nd
is seriously about to kick out
300 orphans
and Christians and American citizens.
G... tried to talk sense into them.
Can we at least go through all these people
and make sure we pull out
the American citizens
and the green card holders?
Pump the brakes here.
Let's talk about this. And he's like, "Nope.
It's my decision.
It's a command."
Like, well, I'm not in the military.
I'm not here for the military.
And that's not really a lawful order.
Let's talk about this.
Like, is this an unlawful order
or is he just a terrible human being?
What is happening?
From his perspective, even though Tim wasn't
the team leader,
Tim was the only guy that he knew.
He thought, "This is some fuckin' guy
that's just showing up in Afghanistan
running seven buses in,
you know,
fuck this guy, I want to kick him out."
These were people that fought
and had their relatives die for us.
They lost their limbs for us.
They lost their adult lives and youth and
their innocence for us.
Yes, they're fighting for Afghanistan.
Yes, they're fighting for their people.
But they are fighting with us.
That's who... that's who
we're trying to save here.
From our perspective,
this was possibly the most valuable load
of people we had brought in thus far.
I said, Hey, look, I'm
a West Pointer too.
I've been to your school.
Trust me on this.
We have the manifest for you.
He said, "I don't care where you've been to school".
But the next decision he made
was just unconscionable.
It embarrassed me for the Army.
If I have somebody with a blue passport,
if I have an American
hold up a blue passport,
can that person get on a bus?
If I have somebody hold up
an SIV,
a special immigration visa,
can that person get back on the bus?
If I have a P1, if I have a green card,
I have a spouse of an American citizen...
can these people get back on these buses?
"No, I don't care who they are.
You get back on those buses
and those buses go back into Kabul.
Get them off this base."
Can we just keep the blue passport holders?
Tim yells.
And he says,
"Everybody goes back on these buses
and I want them escorted back off the base."
And the colonel said, kick them out.
Whoever just made the decision
to turn his bus around
essentially just killed...
Just murdered... these people.
And by the way, some of those people
are children
and some of these people were women.
But some of these people are Americans
that we just sent back to the Taliban.
Whoever got killed by the Taliban
because of that decision,
that decision was on him.
And I called Senator Tillis.
Senator Tillis called multiple generals.
Those generals called to the ground.
But by the time
the generals connected
with the colonel to stop it,
he had already kicked the buses off.
And we... we did not see them again.
Every Taliban
around the airport
saw them come through the gate
on a bus with Americans
and now every Taliban member
at the gate was going to see them leave
and go back into Kabul.
And that's heart wrenching.
There's not enough emotional capacity left
in my soul to be able to mourn
four busloads of people that are about to die.
Because the time spent in anguish
and mourning, is time
that could have been spent
trying to save other people.
We continued to do what we had to do
because we knew these
people were counting on us.
We knew that the guys,
our friends
who were at HKIA trying to help
people needed us to do this work.
The Afghans trying to get into HKIA
needed us to do this work.
So we put it behind us and put our noses
the grindstone and continued working.
And we worked for the rest of that day.
The guys,
unwilling to quit,
tripled their efforts and worked
and pulled out hundreds more people that night.
Everything is starting to collapse on HKIA.
People are breaking down,
people are loading up,
they're taking bulldozers
and driving them over night vision.
You see Marines with sledgehammers
going into aircraft
and starting to smash control panels to aircraft.
Like, everything is starting to crumble
and fall back to like this last Alamo.
The only thing staying out is security.
And one of those security checkpoints
is at the Abbey Gate.
And the Abbey Gate
was one of the few places where
if you had all the documentation,
the American government would
vet and proof you there.
And if you were on their list,
you could come through that gate.
There are offshoots,
factions of the Taliban.
Name them whatever you want.
ISIS-K. I don't care what you call them.
It's the Taliban. It's just factions.
They're pragmatically organized.
So the Taliban sent in a suicide bomber
to that gate, an IED, and... um...
blew it up.
The attack took place at Hamid Karzai
International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan.
As a result of this attack,
13 of our nation's best and brightest,
our heroes
paid the ultimate sacrifice
in an effort to save the lives
of American citizens
and thousands of Afghans
during the Non Combatant Evacuation of HKIA.
There's so much of their life
that is left to be lived.
So many things they haven't experienced.
So many things they don't know.
They haven't been married, they haven't had children.
They haven't traveled the world.
They haven't,
you know, found what they're good at.
They... there's so much they don't know.
And... uh...
you know, and now they're gone.
And they were all kids, 13 kids, you know.
You know, they were out there
helping people, you know, giving people aid,
helping people get through the wire,
trying to do the right thing,
trying to represent, you know, themselves,
the country,
the military in the best way possible, like,
you know, just
absolute heroes.
We knew that we would not be able
to send another flight in
and we wouldn't be able
to get anybody else out.
When the last airplane lifted out of HKIA
at the end of August. That was their hope.
The United States ended its
20 year war in Afghanistan today
with the conclusion
of the largest noncombatant
airlift in American history.
I remember at one point Sean G
was still sending me names
and this was like
right around the time we were learning that
this would not be possible any more.
And he said,
"We have to keep making a list.
And this is going to be a list of the people
that we were forced to leave behind."
And it just felt so haunting to
put their names in these spreadsheets,
knowing that we would have all kept going
as long as we were able.
And the choice was taken away.
And we just thought, we had more time.
We're waiting on the ramp.
The four of us are at the very back
with the air crew.
And as the ramp closes
and the last little bit of light
from Afghanistan finally
closes out,
it's...
It's like this resounding gong of failure.
I'm surrounded by hundreds of people.
We had a...
we had a woman that started fainting.
Is there a doctor here?
14 people stand up.
All of them speak perfect English.
All of them have worked
for the Americans as doctors,
orthodontists, dentists,
and orthopedic surgeons
and open heart surgeons,
like they're on this plane.
That's who's on these planes.
These were amazing,
educated, hard working people
that worked and fought with Americans.
What our government did,
the decisions our government did
cost American lives.
They cost the lives of innocent
Afghan people.
And it made the world
a lot less safe of a place.
I didn't have to go pull a baby
out of the concertina wire.
But I saw it.
You know, I didn't have to go and try to pull
baby up and over the wall. But I saw it.
You know, I didn't...
I didn't have to go pick a baby off
that was floating atop the crowd,
but I saw it. I was too busy.
And... and that hurts, too.
Like, I was too busy, you know?
Like did that life not value
more than this life,
especially with this life.
This mission got failed
or this mission got botched
or the Taliban interdicted
this group that's trying to link up with
and I never was able to make a link up
and I just lost 90 minutes of time
and had to flex off to another operation.
When I finally get there,
I link up and it's the wrong person,
or they brought too many people
and I have to tell those people
they can't stay. Like,
"You either come
and they stay or you don't come."
Like those are...
Those are calls
I shouldn't have to have had to make,
but those are the calls that we had to do
at that time, in that moment.
And that was just unfair.
It was kind of a bittersweet moment.
We were like,
okay, we got this many people out.
But we all knew at that moment
that as the United States military left,
we knew for a fact that there were Americans still there.
And despite what the news was saying,
that there was 100 Americans,
we knew there was many more.
I'm feeling as if
a bit conflicted,
certainly,
because you can't
go into something like that
and think that you're going
to be 100% successful.
That's just the reality.
Everybody brought something different to the table.
This perfect scenario.
People all came together
and converged at one moment.
It really is terrible
to get those messages, because
I feel like the world has quickly
tried as fast as they could to forget these people.
You know, it's not okay.
I remember a member of Congress
saying to me,
"What's going to happen?
Like, we're going to be here
and they're going to still be messaging us
and we can't help them."
At the end of the day,
when you're getting
hundreds of texts from people
still pleading and begging
and asking for help to get out.
Well, you feel as though
maybe you didn't accomplish
quite as much as you might have.
We're still at it.
I mean, I can say we're...
we're not abandoning
our allies in Afghanistan. We can't.
It was sort of like
we've got to just get back to work
and figure out what comes next.
So just to throw ourselves
into, like, we're
still going to figure out
how to keep getting people out,
even if it's slowly.
And also we're going to make a difference
and really set the example for a welcoming
our Afghan allies to America.
Regardless of what they believe,
regardless of where they came from
and who they are,
it was just humans helping other humans.
You know, everyone came together.
There were some kids
that were on one of the flights
that I took out.
The first time I saw them heads down.
No eye contact, very quiet
fear in their eyes, wondering,
you know, who are these Americans?
And you know, who are these UAE folks?
Are they going to hurt us?
And then three days later, I see them again,
you know, at the refugee camp.
And now they're all running around and
laughing and giggling
in this, like, beautiful grass
in Albania on the ocean.
And it was like, man, like
these kids would still be in
Afghanistan right now.
But because of our group
here they are about to have
a totally healthy, normal life.
The seventh time was the first time
we were able to get into the airport.
And that was the time that
my whole life changed.
Finally, I can say being in
America is like staying
in a very nice place. Like, it is free.
You can do anything you want.
It's a place full of opportunities.
You can find what you want.
You can do what you want.
There is nothing going to stop you in here.
There's too much to say about it.
Like I cannot express my whole feelings
about staying in America.
I have never been more proud
to be an American in terms of more proud of
my fellow Americans
and maybe less proud of my government...
all at the same time.
Every person
had an obligation to do something about,
even if they didn't know what that was, like,
pick up the phone. Call your senators.
I mean, the number of times
I was just copying and pasting saying
when people are like,
I don't know what to do.
Call your senators, call the White House,
make your voice heard.
Like, you know, this is
people's lives are at stake.
People were saying,
you know, I'll go to Afghanistan,
I'll send my plane.
I will sponsor a family, I'll do whatever.
The generosity of the American
people was inspiring
and just something that I do
hope stays in my heart.
And I remember forever.
I mean, I can't name
everybody that was on the team.
Obviously, it was
it was really, really
inspiring
to be with those people
and to feel like we could make a difference.
I'm as proud of it
as I am about anything
that I've done in the military
or since the military.
I'm angry
(because A) it didn't have to be like this.
(But B) even after we got them out,
nobody wants to help them anymore.
It's not in the news anymore.
It's not in the stream of consciousness.
We owe the people of Afghanistan
more than we've given them.
The people who were left in Afghanistan.
I don't think we can ever repay
what they've done, because they've...
They're left with the problem.
It's a broken world, a chaotic place
where there's always going to be
people in harm's way.
And when governments don't respond,
there's going to be a need
for good men and women to step in and help.
This crossed all lines. It didn't matter.
Race, color, creed, religion. Nobody cared.
Everybody came together and said,
this is the right thing to do for humanity
and this is what we're going to do together.
What made you leave your family behind
and go do this?
Yeah. You know,
America is supposed to stand for something.
A lot of people
took huge risks
to try to make their country more like ours.
We think about risk here.
And we're talking about financial risk.
We're talking about pride.
We're talking about
what other people might think.
And these people are
talking about their lives.
I was either going to be sitting on my couch
tweeting about how
this is all fucked up, or I was going to be,
you know,
one of the 12 people
that was making it a little less fucked up
and a little more American.
What America is supposed to be.
So I just felt like I had to go.
Did you ever get to see all the guys that
rescued you and your family?
Did you ever get to meet them all?
Not all of them.
I met most of them, but not all of them.
I didn't get a chance to.
If they were all standing here right now,
what would you want to say to them?
I would stand up and hug them each one
and I would tell them,
thank you very much for saving my life.
And I owe
each one of them
my life and my family's life forever.