{"id":10019,"date":"2022-09-26T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-09-26T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10019"},"modified":"2022-10-03T07:50:44","modified_gmt":"2022-10-03T11:50:44","slug":"just-one-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10019","title":{"rendered":"“Just One More”"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Michael Venutolo-Mantovani has written a riveting piece for the October 2022 issue of Wired<\/em>, \u201cJust One More.\u201d<\/a> Late on the night of August 15, 2021, Worth Parker\u2019s North Carolina cell phone received a Facebook message about the chaos in Afghanistan. It read: \u201cSir. I hope you are well. By any chance do you know any Marines who are on the ground right now<\/em>?\u201d Having retired from the US Marines as a Lt. Colonel six weeks before, Parker thought he\u2019d cut those ties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The message described the plight of the sender\u2019s brother and father who had both worked for the US military in Afghanistan. With the American pullout scheduled for the end of the month, their lives were in increasing peril. The sender, Jason Essazay, had also worked for the US, but had obtained a Special Immigrant Visa for his service and was living in Houston. \u201cParker was Essazay\u2019s last resort,\u201d Venutolo-Mantovani writes. At the time the pullout was announced, 81,000 Afghans had pending applications for a SIV. US intelligence reports predicted it would take several months for the Taliban to take Kabul, but as we now know, the fall of Kabul occurred only days later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Parker read that the 24th<\/sup> Marine Expeditionary Unit was helping with the evacuation, he called an old friend in the unit who said he\u2019d try to help. Working in the eye of a fast-moving hurricane of fragmentary information, changing requirements, and coordination difficulties involving violent extremists and desperate families, Parker\u2019s initiative succeeded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three days before Essazay\u2019s contact with Parker, Joe Saboe, who\u2019d left the Army 20 years earlier received a call from his younger brother, wanting help to get a friend and his family out of Afghanistan. Saboe didn\u2019t know how he could help, but \u201ctried the closest thing to a Noncombatant Evacuation Operations tool he had: Facebook. His post asking for help generated a message from a friend of twenty years before also trying to rescue someone. The two men strategized. Soon he heard from more veterans, each worried about a single contact. By August 17, Saboe had a group of volunteers working on the cases of 128 potential evacuees. A story in the Military Times<\/em> generated more than a thousand contacts from Afghans looking for help and Americans wanting to provide it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Parker, the former Lt. Colonel, enlisted his high-powered connections in the military establishment to form a group calling itself \u201cthe Graybeards.\u201d Learning about Saboe\u2019s operation, Parker hoped to convince Saboe\u2019s volunteers to support the Graybeards\u2019 efforts. \u201cBut almost immediately, Parker realized (the younger generation) was comically more tech savvy\u201d than the retired military and civilian leaders. \u201cIt was time to reject the chain of command that had been drilled into him from the minute he joined the Marines.\u201d He put the Graybeards\u2019 Project Dunkirk in direct support of Saboe, giving him \u201csome of the best-connected people in the US military and intelligence worlds.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Heroic efforts were made in a fluid and increasingly dangerous Kabul. They achieved the rescue of more than 1,500 Afghans and, even today, more people continue to be evacuated in ones and twos. Each is a victory, but, collectively, they represent only five percent of Saboe\u2019s database. Volunteers continue to chip away at that list, trying to save, as Project Dunkirk\u2019s motto has it, \u201cJust one more.\u201d This whole inspiring and infuriating article is well worth a read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Venutolo-Mantovani has written a riveting piece for the October 2022 issue of Wired, \u201cJust One More.\u201d Late on the night of August 15, 2021, Worth Parker\u2019s North Carolina cell phone received a Facebook message about the chaos in Afghanistan. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"A riveting story about the Afghans who worked for the US military, their desperate attempts to get out of the country, as the Taliban seized power in 2021, and the US veterans and military who tried to coordinate their escape.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[366,1749,261,35,104],"tags":[129],"class_list":["post-10019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drama","category-international","category-journalism","category-real-life","category-the-morgue","tag-wars-and-conflicts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2BB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10019"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10021,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10019\/revisions\/10021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}