Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEHXfB8wwGk
the jurogan experience so since we've talked last on the podcast you have been well let's go all the way back to afghanistan because you were there um oh god indeed you were there during the worst of it when the pullout was happening yeah so yeah with 20-something deployments overseas i've never seen anything like afghanistan during the fall of afghanistan uh i don't know who was at a strategic level not anticipating that the taliban every time that we moved an inch on the ground that the taliban would not move an inch on the ground so every myself and all of my peers all my colleagues uh fully forecasted what was going to happen so as soon as we started collapsing that exte that that ground there's no doubt in any of our minds that every every inch of ground that we gave up was ground that the taliban was going to take so we gave up you know kandahar and bagram the two strategic military bases that means that we just gave up the rest of the country and um we having been at war there for 20 years and you know multiple trips over there we have lots of friends that deployed with us there you know afghans the afghans have a special operations unit called the commandos we worked alongside them um our interpreters are obviously from afghanistan so they live in afghanistan but they work for us the these people have security clearances they love the idea of democracy and freedom they love the idea of a free independent uh afghanistan they want their daughters to be educated and those ideals that philosophy does not align with the taliban so as taliban start taking over afghanistan our my phone just starts exploding from all of my friends and asking me to go contracting companies saying hey i'll pay you 10 grand a day to go grab this guy
but none of it was altruistic you know like none of it was um the right call to action it was lots of people yes it was gonna go and save life but it was it was for money and uh and and i was just waiting for i don't know what i was waiting for i i wasted two days trying to figure out what is the right thing to do here until my phone rang i was in the middle of writing this that book and i was with uh nick palmiciano who's my co-author on this book he's sitting next to me where we're working my phone rings chad robichaux calls me and he was a marine special operations guy that had multiple deployments there and he had a translator named aziz and aziz worked specific specific to special missions units like the tip of the spear type units and aziz had already been told that they're coming to find him and aziz was on the run with his family and they were very very explicit about what they're gonna do to his wife and his children in front of him before they kill him and um and then like aziz's friends start being murdered and uh so chad calls me and says hey man i'm gonna go get aziz can you help me and i said yes i'm on my way at the same moment next to me nick is talking to a young woman named sarah varado sarah is this like powerhouse she runs the independence fund which is a vet a military veteran non-profit that takes care of severely wounded uh veterans and give them chairs like track automatic track chairs her husband is one of the worst this is a weird title to hold but he is one of the worst wounded veterans veterans from the afghan war that's her husband and she's the provider and care and soul care provider i don't know what the right word is she takes care of him and uh he was wounded in afghanistan so her heart is like just but she has lots of friends in the government so in this moment we have the right kind of two people i have a good mission i i know what i'm going to do it's morally right and somebody has to do it or aziz and my
my friend's friend is going to be murdered and i have a method sarah can get us routes and approval from the government so the four of us started this ngo called save our allies and that literally that phone call was the beginning of what is now you know what was the most successful ngo movement was an ngo a non-government organization a non-profit so save our allies like that call initiated it nick and i were on a plane into the middle east the next day and we flew into the uae the crown prince was like the most generous host that you could imagine uh one of our friends used to ride motorcycles with the crown prince and he said i will give you a c-17 plane if you can land it fill it up with a perfect manifest of people and get it out i'll give you another plane and that was that was the initial promise and 10 days later we moved 12 000 people out of afghanistan 11 percent of everybody that left the country during the evacuation me and three of my friends on the ground and 12 of us total in the middle east moved um everybody remembers you know people hanging onto the landing gear of aircraft and falling to their death like that that was peak afghanistan withdrawal and that is uh that is when we got there yeah so when you say that it was like nothing you had seen in 20 years of being deployed yeah in what in what way i mean taliban's gonna taliban so they are definitely doing their thing but it was it was the the desperation of the people trying to find a way to live so at each of these gates a neo operation it's a non-combat non-combatant evacuation operation it's a it's a military operation if a neo
takes place they keep calling it a neo but that's if the military ran it and if the military ran it you would see you know a special forces unit with a big like the ranger regiment or 82nd airborne that come in that build this huge exterior perimeter that control the ground strategically then it would be like the clockwork of a military operation as planes are coming in and planes are coming out we're building manifests we're confirming that everybody that goes on the plane are the right people this was not a neo this was run by the state department so instead of that thing a big strategic military operation instead of think the airport became an embassy and like in the movies you're running the embassy and if you get in you're like you're safe and then they'll get you out that's how they started treating hkia the um the airport in kabul as an embassy so the military just secured the perimeter of the embassy the airport and anybody that got on the airport was able to get out except the military wasn't allowed to go outside of the airport so all the people in the city of kabul were stuck that's where we had to come in so we had to go out into kabul and grab the people and then smuggle them past the taliban to get them onto planes and uh to answer your question the that perimeter of the base where the gates there's tens of thousands of people that were lining up here and they maybe walked a few days so by the time they get there they're dehydrated they have nothing there there's no food there's no water the taliban if there's too many people they'll just take a magazine and just dump it into the crowd to move them back or to like crowd control them they'll just dump a magazine into a crowd of people the women they would they would float babies like you're at a baseball game with a beach ball they would float the babe baby towards the gate and then hope in the hopes that a marine or soldier would
reach down and grab the baby and bring it into safety and when that didn't work the moms would take the babies and they'd try to throw them over the walls well guess what's on either side of the wall constantino wire there's [ __ ] constantino wire on both sides of this wall so these babies would land in the in the wire and we're in the middle of moving you know hundreds of people at a time like smuggling them past the taliban and i'm stepping over a baby in water or there's like a small body that's on fire that was burnt alive by the taliban you know one of the teams is there they went out into kabul and they they they just missed it by seconds they're going to go pick up this woman that was a journalist for um that the afghan uh one of the afghan news organizations but the taliban got to her first they pull up the taliban see these guys in the car they drop her on their hood of the car and they execute her on the car as they just look at the dudes in the car there's nothing that they can do just execute her this was every day so when i said a level of desperation i've never seen before this is i mean this is like no american no no american can imagine that type of desperation and that was everywhere you looked and how long were you there for while this was happening the our ground team there's myself and three other like personnel recovery experts that we were there total for 10 days and did it dissipate somewhat did the no no just got more desperate so everybody that was watching on television they saw curated controlled um information you know is way worse on the ground so what looked like this a semblance of an assembly line of planes taking off and planes coming in um well that is inside a controlled environment you know that was in on the
base outside if you if you know if you go a thousand meters outside of the wire it is just chaos anarchy apocalyptic level madness you know like really really really total taliban uh experience out there man and so when you're leaving 10 days later what what are you how are you feeling what one of our one of the guys with us is his code name's tea spray he didn't eat in those 10 days he lost 20 something pounds in in the 10 days that he was there and you know he could like nibble on a cracker and drink water just because he didn't have any enzymes left in his stomach to break anything down you know when you're running out the wire to grab a family and come come back in you don't really have time to think about what you're stepping over but you still see it and that was that's the thing that tortures my mind is i still saw it all but i didn't have the time to address it emotionally think about this dead body i'm stepping over because i'm really busy trying to get to this family then i get to this family and i confirm we had to be really judicious in how we confirmed who the people were you know if i bring if i brought back one person that wasn't the right person to bring back i i would consider myself a failure in the whole entire mission if i bring back one radical terrorist that's not escaping but trying to get to the united states and everything would be for naught so we had a really deliberate department of state department of defense approved manifest that would go officially through the government they would submit all their paperwork they would have you know digital versions of it so i would then give them a location on the ground where they would have to meet me and then once i met up with them they would have a far recognition signal that would be uh not to like give up the tradecraft but they'd have a way to let me know that
that is the right person and that then would come face to face and then they'd have another thing like a secret word that they had to sneak into a sentence and that's a near recognition signal and then they have to give me their documents and the documents have to be real and it has to be the right person and the same ones that were submitted so cool i got the right person so come on i got your family why are these other 40 people with you they're like oh it's it's like it's my cousin and you know and her family and it's um you know my brother and his family and it's like they gotta stay like you're coming with me and they're staying sorry you can get in the car you can't you have five seconds then uh by that time usually the taliban have spotted us and it's a foot race to make it back into the wire before they catch us and what happens to the people that get left behind they're murdered or used you know there's pilots and they're doctors and they're engineers and they run the sewage system they run the electrical plant so they're trying to get out but the taliban want them to stay because all the infrastructure that's built there are operated by people that were friendly to the americans so they want like if they want their power plant to work they have to have all the engineers that ran it so they don't want them to leave they don't want the pilots to leave because their airport won't work they don't have anybody to run their air traffic control they don't have anybody to you know make sure the water purification system works properly so they're trying to keep all those people there but all those people know that they'll then be slaves to the taliban so they're trying to get out and that's that's the that's the tough catch-22 position that we're in