JUST ONE MORE

AS KABUL FELL LAST YEAR, THE US MILITARY ABANDONED THOUSANDS OF ITS AFGHAN ALLIES. FROM 7,000 MILES AWAY, A VETERAN-LED TEAM OF VOLUNTEERS ARMED WITH GROUP CHATS, QR CODES, AND SATELLITE MAPS LAUNCHED A MAD DASH TO RESCUE THEM.

- Michael Venutolo-Mantovani

AT 11:12 PM ON August 15, 2021, Worth Parker's phone pinged with a message. Sir. I hope you are well, it began. By any chance do you know any Marines who are on the ground right now?

Parker did not. He was in his bed in Wilmington, North Carolina, 7,200 miles from "the ground" of Kabul, having retired from the United States Marines six weeks earlier. He was trying to stay as disconnected as possible, even shutting off notifications to all of his apps. But, as a self-described "49-year-old Luddite," he'd accidentally left Facebook turned on. The message continued:

My brother, who was an interpreter with the Special Mission Wing, and my father, who used to be the fixed-wing aircraft squadron commander until he retired and then he worked for an American defense contracting company as an advisor, are stuck in Kabul. Of course, my and my brother's enlistment in the US military make them even bigger targets. I tried all the official channels but no one is responding.

The note was from Jason Essazay. A native of Mazar-i-Sharif, Essazay had watched US troops arrive in Afghanistan in 2001 when he was 12, and he had spent the first eight years of his adulthood working with them as an interpreter and fixer. Alongside American special operators, he had engaged the Taliban in dozens of gunfights and survived three IED attacks, the last of which hospitalized him for a month. In 2014, after two years on the waiting list, he acquired a Special Immigrant Visa. He left his family behind, settled in Houston, and for 18 months worked at a gas station, then a Walmart, then a steel plant, before joining the Marine Reserves.