Send Me

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.