One last mission: when our allies needed us, veterans saved them

Like so many veterans, the end of the Afghanistan war a year ago was devastating for me. As I watched Taliban fighters rolling into Kabul on U.S.-made vehicles, white flags of the Islamic

Emirate of Afghanistan snapping in the wind, I thought, _Twenty years of fighting and dying — for this?_ Rather than succumb to despair and anger, however, I decided to do what my training

and combat experience as a Green Beret had taught me — and what my patriotism as an American citizen demanded. I focused on the problem, gathered some allies, came up with a plan and worked

to fix what I could. Part of me was screaming: Don’t get involved. For a split second, I was transported back to that moment in 2015, when I was sitting on the floor of my bedroom closet,

the door closed, room dark, a loaded .45 in my hand, tears in my eyes. Guilt gnawing my stomach lining. That was rock bottom. I had been ready. That was my time. Only, it hadn’t been. I was

happily married and had three sons. The only thing that stopped me that day was that one of my boys came home early. I had survived, and despite my trauma, I was now thriving. The last thing

I wanted to do was to jump back into the morass I had pulled myself out of. But jump in I did. I sent out an SOS call, and soon I was reconnecting with special operations veterans who had

deployed to Afghanistan year after year, in three trips, or maybe 10, or even 15 times since 9/11. Men and women who forged bonds with Afghans they fought and worked alongside, shoulder to

shoulder, to whom they made promises. We became the shepherds, forming a group that came to be known as Operation Pineapple Express, dedicated to getting Afghans out before the Taliban could

kill or oppress them. Volunteer groups have always been an integral part of any successful civil society, and in the U.S., veterans are always at the heart of citizen action. What followed

was a desperate last mission in Afghanistan as we struggled from thousands of miles away to save people while the clock ran out. Tragically, we had to contend with carnage as the terrorists

detonated a device by Abbey Gate outside Kabul’s airport, killing over 200 hundred people, including 13 U.S. service members. Our group was just one citizen liaison network among many, made

up of can-do Americans — most of us veterans — who looked at a humanitarian catastrophe and stepped forward to show our country, and the world, what could be achieved in the darkest of

times. We were working with limited information, limited resources and limited access. We were volunteers with experience and relationships who were using cellphones to address an “Uncle

Sam–size problem.” Yet the 125,000 people evacuated would not have all gotten out were it not for the volunteers involved in the effort to get people to that airport and a plane to freedom.