Anonymous

Photo: The  image from this article was gifted to us by our friend, Neelab. While Neelab is not part of our Storyteller’s journey, she left Kabul before August  2021 and was unable to come to the United States with her mother and sister. The Founders and Editors of Living Crue are so grateful to you, Neelab, for allowing your image to be aligned with this story of  service to strangers. Our hearts are with you and your family.

Editor’s note: For her protection, we will not publish name, location or any identifying information about the author. Similarly, the names of the men and women referenced in this story have been changed.

The military spouse community is built on the support and service provided to each other when moving from base to base. This Storyteller was able to extend that code across the world when the call for help came from Afghanistan.

Here is her story:

I would argue there is no better person to have in your corner than a woman because I know the strength of our gender: how we can share our hearts with each other in ways men often don’t, as well as how we carry the mental load for our families, never switching gears because we are always firing on all cylinders.

Women make incredibly powerful advocates not because we are ever singularly focused on our causes, but because we live them. What people need from us is always on our minds: while we drive to work or to drop the kids off at school, while we are changing diapers or making doctor appointments, sitting in a board meeting, working out at the gym, cooking dinner, or lying awake late at night, trying to finally quiet our thoughts so we can sleep. A woman’s mind is a relentless workhorse. We consider our problems and to-do lists over and over again and from many different angles until we navigate our way to a solution.

I think the biggest challenge for women who embrace causes bigger than themselves is not to lose ourselves in the process. For me, that most recently meant not leaving my sanity in the streets of Kabul, Afghanistan.

As a military spouse, I likely pay more attention to current events since our family is so directly impacted by them. My husband has served in the Army since the day he graduated from West Point, through multiple tours of duty in both Iraq and Afghanistan. When the summer news headlines began to pivot from the pandemic to our upcoming withdrawal from the latter, I became curious about how he might be feeling. He told me he was proud of what we accomplished and smiled as he glanced over at our young daughter.

Yet, my husband hadn’t remained in close contact with any of the Afghan interpreters, so I think it took him by surprise when, on a sunny day in early August last year, an interpreter managed to track him down on social media. This man was looking for help evacuating his family from Afghanistan before the Taliban gained control. One of his brothers had been taken by Taliban soldiers and his father had been shot, but luckily survived.

My husband quickly agreed to help if he could, but wasn’t sure how. I watched him try to track down information for a couple of days, but he was so bogged down in his own extremely long and busy work days that it was hard for him to dedicate himself to the task. That’s when I made the fateful decision to step in.

“Surely there are some other military spouses out there whose husbands or wives are more directly connected to the withdrawal and may have more information,” I reasoned.

The military spouse community is heavily connected online and across many social media platforms. As often as we all move across the country and world, it is the easiest way to keep in touch with all of our friends and family while also searching out information on the best school system, dentist, pediatrician, or even hairdresser at a new duty station. Just as our service members depend on each other for their lives, so too, do their spouses for keeping our families up and running and finding jobs and activities in new areas.

I began to reach out online for information that would help. A web of useful connections quickly began to form, both in the military spouse community as well as from my own personal network. Before leaving my career to stay home with our kids, I had worked in public relations and advertising, yet I had always been staffed in part to military and government contracts. And it just so happened that in the course of my travels, I had made friends with people who held far more interesting and complex international careers in service to our country than I’d ever fully known before. It didn’t take long for a motley crew of us to come together to try to help this man and our other allies in Afghanistan.

Does anyone ever really know what they are getting into when they volunteer for something so completely outside their wheelhouse? I don’t think it is possible. The job of a stay-at-home mother to little kids can feel like an invisible and thankless one, made all the more isolating by a global pandemic.

I was at a point in my life when I had been feeling more anonymous and unseen than ever, and yet before I even realized what was happening, I found myself working alongside some of the most high-caliber people I’ve ever met. Without going into too much detail in order to protect them, I ended up connected to the people working within Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) in Kabul, the focal point of the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan. The State Department, U.S. soldiers, Marines, and special forces from the U.S. and other countries were all there, helping the thousands of Afghans that were trying to leave ahead of Taliban taking leadership.

For many reasons, it is really hard to talk in detail about everything that transpired in August, but I am proud to be a part of what I believe to be the greatest all-call extraction mission of our time. For better or worse, the advent of the internet and social media platforms have removed the barriers of both time and space from global communications, including requests for help.

While soldiers fought on the  ground in Kabul, message boards sprang up stateside on secure servers so we could collectively work to aid Afghan colleagues and communicate and pool requests for aid. This is part of what I monitored. Given the level of access I could offer to the HKIA command center, I tried to pitch in wherever I could, whether that meant fielding requests to extract American citizens, helping gather the information needed to place people on flight manifests, answering calls for medical attention inside the airport, or trying to help vetted Afghan allies gain entry.

For every person in Afghanistan we were able to assist, there were too many we could not. Every Afghan man and woman deserves to be known, risking their lives for their country. It quickly becomes all too easy to drown in the vast number of people asking for help. Instead, I will tell you about a woman who, for me, most captured the chaos of our evacuation efforts in Afghanistan. For security reasons, I will refer to her as “Ara.”

Ara served as an interpreter for U.S. forces, but also ran a radio station on a U.S. forward operating base. Ara was first brought to my attention by a retired soldier named “Rob”. I learned that she had long ago applied for a Special Immigration Visa (SIV) to the United States, but our country has been slow to process SIVs and her case was still pending as it had been for years.

I thought the trifecta of Ara (1) being a woman, (2) supporting our military as an interpreter, and (3) working in radio allowed us to make a strong case to  HKIA. Together, we hoped we could “categorize” her as someone who would be a “high value target” by the Taliban, hoping that with such a designation, Ara could be picked up by an extraction team.

I don’t know if people in the United States understand just how congested it was around the airport in Kabul. Imagine the crowd around an American football stadium, in high, late-summer heat, everyone fighting for the chance not to see a concert or sporting event but for their very lives. With each day that passed, the situation grew more violent and dangerous. The Taliban used violence to take control and ISIS-K planned its own attacks to undermine the Taliban.

After a day or two of working on Ara’s case alongside many others, it became clear to us that we were running out of time for her to be picked up. We decided the next best chance we could give her and her husband was to navigate them on foot through the streets of Kabul and up to the airport.

So many of us in this network held a piece or two to this puzzle, and more often than not, I found that once I could help someone with what they needed, they could offer me something equally valuable in return. This meant that at any given time, I could usually track down information on which of the multiple gates into HKIA was the least crowded and who was staffing it. I also would field information about Taliban checkpoints and other security threats.

Ara and her husband carried their charged phones and packed just one light bag each with enough food and water to last them for days. Rob and I kept electronic copies of all their important documents in case the Taliban waylaid or attacked them.

We started our operation in the late afternoon in Kabul, knowing the gates into the airport would be a little less crowded overnight. We used a secure messaging app to communicate. I passed on intelligence to Rob, and he used it to guide Ara.

All of the operations I worked were like this—where only the person who contacted me for help knew of my involvement or some variation of my name. I thought it was safest for my family if I remained as anonymous as possible, but I also think it was best for Ara to receive guidance from the person she already knew and trusted.

It took us hours on the phone together to get Ara and her husband into a positive position outside the airport. We had to reroute around the Taliban more than once, change which gate to the airport we sent Ara to wait outside, and then help her locate cooperative soldiers or marines to help her gain entry. Complicating our efforts, the Taliban began to cut local cell towers, so there were windows of time when the three of us would lose connection with each other and to the people providing security guidance..

After what felt like forever, Rob and I finally maneuvered the couple as close as we could to the airport gate, but based on what Ara was telling us, we realized she still wasn’t quite near enough for U.S. forces to pull the two of them in. The crowds were tightly packed, and no one was giving up an inch, even in the dead of night. At one point, Ara messaged Rob that guns were being fired nearby, but she and her husband stayed the course. Her bravery and trust were utterly humbling.

Desperate to help protect Ara, I reached out to a friend who I knew in vague terms had worked for a clandestine organization. I begged for any help he could offer in getting a woman whom I described as a “high-value female target” into the airport. He wasn’t on the ground in Kabul, but he was well-connected and came through for us. Before I knew it, we found ourselves connected via another secure messaging app to the Marine snipers positioned on overwatch above HKIA. They could peer through their rifle scopes looking for trouble in the crowd, but also keep an eye out for Ara. And since it was night in Kabul, she was able to use the flashlight feature on her phone to signal back and forth with the snipers. They were then able to get Ara and her husband into the airport for processing and placement on a flight out of Afghanistan. Thus began their immigration through one of our processing centers in Doha, Qatar, and on to one of the refugee camps in the U.S.

Since I’d never spoken with Ara directly, Rob was considerate enough to keep in touch with me and provided periodic updates on how Ara was doing as she and her husband made their way to the U.S. He told me once here, Ara continued to shine by voluntarily serving as translator at the refugee camp where she stayed. She was also teaching her compatriots about our American customs. She distinguished herself to the point that she was invited to meet with a team from the White House to discuss her experience of evacuating from Afghanistan.

Eventually, Ara and her husband were granted their release from the refugee camp and were flown to the final destination they had petitioned for in their original visa application. Rob was there to welcome them at the local airport when they touched down; he texted me a photo of their reunion.   

As you might imagine, I quickly became so immersed in these operations, that I barely existed outside of my phone and computer.

The TV babysat my three young children during the day, or they toddled along beside me outside on walks through our neighborhood while I continued to field calls. Despite the long hours he has always worked, my husband came home every day as early as he could for the final weeks of August. He watched the kids, cooked dinner, put them to bed and cleaned up the house. Meanwhile, I couldn’t “sleep” in our bedroom because of how often my phone would ring throughout the night with literal life or death situations.

In fact, I don’t think I slept for more than a handful of uninterrupted hours at the end of August. If I wasn’t actively engaged in an extraction effort, I’d lightly doze with my phone ringer set on the highest volume possible so I wouldn’t miss any calls. My nerves were shot: I couldn’t bear the thought of eating and often couldn’t find the time, yet living on coffee and anxiety had me frequently heading to the bathroom. I lost eight pounds in one week. My husband grew concerned. Between working his full time job, covering running the house for me, carrying a heavier parental load, and watching me grind myself to dust, his patience with the overall situation grew thin.

My kids started to frequently break down in tears about how much they missed me, even though I was still always physically with them. But I was just a ghost, always distracted. They’d plead with me to read them a bedtime story and to be the one to put them to bed, but I’d get four pages into a book and then receive a phone call that an American citizen was being beaten at a Taliban checkpoint, or a suicide bomber was headed to a certain area outside of the airport, and I’d have to rush out of the room, noting the look of disappointment and frustration on my husband’s face as I went.

As the final days of August grew closer, more and more of the calls I received pertained to threats rather than extractions. As a matter of context, various non-government organizations (NGOs) trying to evacuate folks from Afghanistan had hired transport buses with local drivers to pick up passengers and safely navigate them through Taliban checkpoints and into the airport via a designated bus entrance. By that point in time, the command center within the airport was increasingly concerned with security, and many of the buses were left to circle the airport while waiting for permission to enter.

It was not uncommon for these buses to wait upward of 17 hours, I was told by someone who contacted me for help. They’d heard I had lines of communication into the airport. This allowed us to work together to get their contingency to finally be granted entry to HKIA. I soon began fielding additional requests with other NGO transports, until I received one message in particular that made my blood run cold. A woman was contacting me because she suspected there might be a suicide bomber on one of the buses her group had hired.

I quickly gathered all of the information I could. The bus in question had stopped at one of the Taliban checkpoints on the way up to the airport, and as was normal practice, the bus driver had stepped out to talk with the guards to discuss clearance for the bus to proceed. But at this particular stop, the Taliban forced the bus driver to take on an additional female passenger without allowing her to be searched. The concern was that she was wearing a suicide vest. I gathered a description of what she looked like, the license plate of the bus, coordinates of its current location, and the contact info of passengers on the bus who spoke English.

I quickly sent the information onward to the command center within the airport, along with the clandestine friend who had helped me before with the snipers. I was told I would soon receive a call from an unregistered number and to answer it and provide all the information I could. I did so as succinctly as possible, praying the whole time. My kids were in the background, watching a children’s show on Netflix, thankfully oblivious and for once, quiet.

After ending that call, I circled back to my friend to ask him if I’d ever know the outcome—if the woman truly was a suicide bomber or if it was a false alarm. He gently told me it wasn’t in the nature of the work to get a report back.

When the last day of August passed and our official withdrawal from Afghanistan was considered complete, an abrupt silence descended upon my world. September was disorienting in its emptiness. It felt like I went from riding in a race car going 110 miles per hour to the driver suddenly slamming on the brakes. After my world had expanded so quickly to reach across the globe and be a part of a team conducting life-saving missions, I felt like I immediately and unceremoniously tumbled back into what had been my largely invisible and restrictive pandemic existence at home with my kids.

But in that disheartening quietude, I started to receive notes and photo updates on these men and women as they made their way to the United States, and I cherished these missives as I struggled to come to terms with everything that had just happened.

I realized I could finally sleep through the night without worrying about missing a desperate phone call. I returned to reading my children bedtime stories and snuggling them into dreamland.

I forced myself to slowly begin to choke down real food again, both so I wouldn’t get dizzy every time I bent over to pick up one of the kids’ toys, and so I’d actually have the energy to go running again, which has long been my biggest source of stress relief. That first time I laced up my sneakers, I was so calorically deprived and emotionally raw that I wondered if I’d even make it half a mile. I surprised myself. I ran and ran and ran, barely even registering the feel of my feet connecting with the pavement.

But you cannot outrun grief, and I could not outrun the thought of the allies we left behind in Afghanistan—the people I personally knew of and hadn’t succeeded in getting out, let alone the thousands of others. And, I discovered I could not go quietly back to my previous existence. I realized I missed connecting with others, and that while I know what I do at home on a daily basis means the world to my husband and children, I miss feeling like I am contributing to the world at large.

In embracing a cause so much bigger than myself, I felt like I was both losing and finding myself all at once. My husband could sense the upheaval in me, but I couldn’t find the words to properly express it to him at the time. I am thankful he has been patient with me as I work through these intense experiences.

I soon learned I was mistaken in thinking the withdrawal was over. Officially, it was. But for our allies still stuck in Afghanistan—the interpreters who served our military, the Afghan special forces who fought alongside ours, the former government officials, and female rights activists—many non-profit groups continue to work alongside our government to determine what else might be done to safeguard them and/or help them find safe passage out of Afghanistan.

Under this premise, when I was first approached to share the story of my advocacy work in Afghanistan, I didn’t hesitate to accept because I believed doing so would help bring much needed attention to the cause. Yet, I found sitting down to write about this journey quite daunting; I didn’t know where to start or how to organize my thoughts. Aimlessly, I began to pour out my experiences. I typed out 25 pages and kept going, becoming lost in the catharsis of it all, even though I knew I’d have to cut my draft way, way back to suit the format of a magazine.

Self-consciously, I sent that first draft to my clandestine friend who helped get Ara out. I wanted to make sure I didn’t share too many sensitive details or any information that might get anyone in trouble, but I also nervously awaited his overall feedback. I thought maybe he would be able to decipher a theme in my writing that would better help me structure the next draft.

“The main thing that comes through to me,” he ended up telling me, “is how much all of this has impacted you. I don’t mean to sound sexist at all, but women just give so much. They give and give and give.”

This friend pointed out, in his profession, he has been trained for, and receives support for such operations, whereas I do not. And I think he is wise enough to worry about what my husband has seen first hand and that my mother and mother-in-law understand all too well: that in serving others, we can lose ourselves.

Perhaps I lost myself in trying to help. I’ve gone from feeling the highest of highs when I could help someone, to the lowest of lows when I could not. When the stakes are so extreme, emotions can be equally intense, and there have been days when I’ve struggled to pull myself out of bed, when dealing with the many needs of my young children has felt like an impossible weight on top of everything else. But I’ve fought my way back from that by doing the things I’ve learned to help keep my head straight: not shunning negative emotions but owning and working through them, establishing and sticking to routines when I need them, eating well, exercising, and reaching out to others for support, but also knowing just to give myself some time and grace. So often we give these things away in spades, yet save none for ourselves.

I know I lost myself for a while. I gave my mind, body, and soul over so completely to what I’d argue is the worthiest of causes—trying to help save lives. But I know now it was dangerous to leave so little of myself for myself, and hurtful, for a time, to both my husband and kids to have nothing left for them. These were important lessons.

Today, I would argue that sometimes in losing ourselves, we find ourselves, too. We find our limits and our guardrails, and if we are lucky, we realize that to be the best advocate we can be for others, we need to find our own balance. We learn that we need to fight as hard for ourselves as we do for others. Over time, our lives change and so may our causes, and maybe the experience of losing ourselves is what informs us going forward. But the realization of finding yourself again on the other side can serve as a guiding light to always bring you back home.