In the final days of the Afghanistan War, 12 veterans fly to the Middle East and spend the next ten days evacuating as many American citizens, permanent residents, and special immigrant visa holder Afghan refugees as possible before they, and the Americans and Afghans who served alongside them for years, run out of time. An emotional, brutal, and honest account of what really occurred on the ground in the waning hours of the war that defined a generation of Americans.
Sarah Verardo, the wife of a catastrophically wounded Afghanistan Veteran, wanted to do all she could to help the people her husband had fought for and with, to include his interpreter. Chad Robichaux desperately wanted to save his interpreter Aziz before he was killed by the Taliban, as his friends had been already. So they did what the military community always does in times of crisis: they leaned on their friends. In short order, a team of twelve men, most of whom had never met each other before, had established a Joint Operations Center in the United Arab Emirates. Hours later, they were running flights into Kabul on C-17s donated by UAE, and 737s they procured themselves.
These men knew the clock was ticking and that the United States Government was going to cease evacuations on 31 August, so the entire team, led by three ground team members that were going "outside the wire" to save those who needed help, worked with little to no sleep or food until the horrible moment when the IED went off, claiming 13 American and many more Afghan lives.
This story pulls no punches and shares the ground truth of what it was really like in those final hours of the war.
