These veterans won’t rest until they’ve kept a wartime promise
FREDERICKSBURG, Va. — Rex Sappenfield does not sleep well. A former Marine who served in Afghanistan, he is tormented by the fate of his interpreter, an Afghan with a wife and three young children to whom Sappenfield made a battlefield promise: We will never abandon you.
Now a high school English teacher who tries to instill a sense of rectitude in his students, Sappenfield has thought about his pledge every day since the United States pulled out of Afghanistan on Aug. 30.
“We broke a promise, and I just feel terrible,” Sappenfield, 53, said. “I said it to the faces of our Afghan brothers: ‘Hey, guys, you can count on us; you will get to come to the United States if you wish.’ ”
But if the U.S. has withdrawn from Afghanistan, Sappenfield and many other veterans have not. He is part of an informal network — including the retired general who once commanded his unit, retired diplomats and intelligence officers, and a former math teacher in rural Virginia — still working to fulfill a promise and save the Afghan colleagues who risked their lives for America’s long fight in Afghanistan.
The network has evacuated 69 people from 23 families from Afghanistan since mid-august. But 346 people from 68 different families remain on its list of endangered Afghans, including the interpreter, whom Sappenfield regards as a brother. He says the interpreter kept his unit alive in Helmand province “by telling us where to go, and where not to.”
Every day, Sappenfield is in contact with the interpreter, who went into hiding after the Taliban took control of the country in mid-august and for security reasons is being identified only as P, the first letter of his given name. He hid in Kabul for nearly a month, before the network managed to shepherd him, in a harrowing 15-hour bus ride, to another city in Afghanistan.
As of last week, P was waiting for a possible charter flight out as he was shuttled between safe houses. “The Taliban can easily spot us in this area because we are not from this part of Afghanistan,” he wrote to Sappenfield this month.
In pulling out of Afghanistan, President Joe Biden declared that he would not pass the conflict to another president and another generation. He would
bring closure. But the shambolic withdrawal and the failure to evacuate thousands of now-threatened Afghans whose help was essential to the U.S. effort have only deepened the alienation felt by many veterans.
Sappenfield’s emotions rise and fall with each message from P, who tried and failed three times to reach the Abbey Gate, one of the Kabul airport’s main entries, during the U.S. evacuation.
“I tell my students in 11th grade that they are the only ones who can betray their integrity,” Sappenfield said. “It’s theirs to give away if they choose to lie or cheat. But in this case, someone else broke my word for me. It just irritates the heck out of me.”
“The key takeaway is just how let down they feel by the government not helping these people who saved American lives umpteen times.”
Bruce Hemp, 67, a retired math teacher and grandmother who lives with her husband on a farm in Staunton, Virginia
If not me, then who?
Did our service matter?
The question gnawed at Lt. Gen. Lawrence Nicholson as he drafted a letter in August to the men and women with the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade who fought alongside him in Afghanistan. “Nothing,” he wrote, “can diminish your selfless service to our nation.”
Nothing — not the Taliban’s sweeping takeover after two decades of war, not the desperate Afghans falling from planes, not disbelief that Afghanistan had fallen overnight to the same enemy that the U.S. had vanquished 20 years ago.
“I felt I had to say to the guys, ‘Hey, get your heads up,’ ” said Nicholson, who retired as a three-star general in 2018. Recalling the 92 Marines who died under his command in Helmand province, the 2,461 American service members overall who died in Afghanistan and the untold treasure lost, he wrote to his fellow Marines:
“You raised your hand and said, ‘IF NOT ME, THEN WHO?’ ”
The letter was dated Aug. 17. Soon after, one of the recipients posted it on Linkedin, and it quickly circulated onto veterans’ chat groups, where anguished questioning was already being aired about how the U.S. withdrawal could be squared with a core Marine creed: Leave no one behind.
Nicholson’s letter ended with a hint that, in fact, some Marines were honoring that code. “You may be interested to know we are working through several channels to provide safe passage out of Afghanistan,” he wrote.
One of the channels was run by Jack Britton Jr., a retired Marines intelligence officer who served with Nicholson in Iraq and had gone into corporate security in Texas. On the encrypted messaging app Signal, Britton had set up a group called “Support-hkia” — an acronym for Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport.
“#Digitaldunkerque,” he wrote.
Quickly, an informal rescue operation came together, sometimes interacting with other such informal networks. “Jack was the master facilitator,” Nicholson said.
The master coordinator, though, was Bruce Hemp, 67, a retired math teacher and grandmother who lives with her husband on a farm in Staunton, Va. She had met Nicholson in 2007 and soon was organizing friends to put together care packages for his Marines. From 2011, she began organizing an annual party — or muster, as the Marines call it — at her farm.
Now the same people who gathered there were the nexus of an Afghan evacuation network.
“The key takeaway,” Hemp said, “is just how let down they feel by the government not helping these people who saved American lives umpteen times.”
Working with the Signal group, Hemp compiled a manifest of 400 at-risk Afghans, which included passport and visa application details, the names of U.S. sponsors as well as phone numbers for Afghan mechanics, interpreters and translators.
Her farm became a command center, with phone calls and messages pouring in. From the fall of Kabul on Aug. 15, the network worked with soldiers and intelligence officers on the ground in Afghanistan. She showed The Times a list of Afghan names, including large families, a few marked in purple with the words “GOT OUT!!!”
“She is the den mother with her Cub Scouts,” Sappenfield said.
A cup of milk tea
For the U.S. service members trying to evacuate Afghans and others at the Kabul International Airport, the low point came Aug. 26, when a suicide bombing killed 13 U.S. service members and 170 Afghans.
That day, an Afghan man, Matiullah Matie, his wife and their six children stood near the Abbey Gate holding a sign that read “Chesty Puller.” For Marines, that seemingly odd name was not odd at all; Chesty Puller was a Marine Corps hero for his exploits in World War II and Korea.
Matie was a businessman in Helmand province who for several years worked as a facilitator and fixer for Nicholson. Now he held the Chesty Puller sign aloft — an idea from Maj. Mike Kuiper, an active-duty Marine who had served in Helmand.
Spotting that sign, a Marine stationed at the airport pushed Matie’s family through the gates to safety. Later, Matie and his family were evacuated to Ramstein Air Base in Germany, where they were housed for more than a month in a tent while awaiting transport to the U.S.
“When a Marine approached me in the crowd, I had the password on my phone, which that day was a photo of a cup of milk tea,” Matie said in a phone interview. “My Marine brothers saved me.”
On Oct. 14, Matie and his family were flown to Philadelphia from Germany. “Reached Philadelphia airport safely thanks to my American brothers and sisters who helped me,” he wrote in a jubilant message.
The U.S. evacuated more than 100,000 Afghans before withdrawing from Kabul, but many had never worked for the U.S. while thousands who did remain. Many veterans remain fixated on why generals or presidents have not been held accountable for a lost war. They asked whether their buddies gave their lives so that the Taliban could march unopposed into Kabul.
One Marine, who requested anonymity because he is still in the service, put it this way: You lose two rifles at the Camp Lejeune Marines training base and the entire chain of command is relieved. But you lose tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons now in the hands of the Taliban, 13 service members (10 of them Marines) in the Aug. 26 terrorist attack at Kabul airport, and you lose America’s longest war, and there seems to be no reckoning.
In rural Virginia, Hemp and others are still working to save more Afghans. She has three young grandchildren and doesn’t have to do this, given that many Americans have already forgotten Afghanistan, or scarcely paid attention to it before.
“I was raised with the Golden Rule, an honor code,” she said. “You do not lie to people. You honor your promises.”
She looked out at her crabapple tree and the rolling green fields. “People today don’t want to take responsibility for their actions. ‘Choices have consequences’ is now ‘choices have consequences for everyone but me.’ People are just so angry.”
‘Sorry this is so murky and chaotic’
On many days, Sappenfield speaks on Zoom with P. They exchange videos of their children but more often they talk about fear and frustration. The fear is about the Taliban. The frustration is with the Department of State, which has been slow-walking P’s visa application for many years.
“They are not taking any action,” P said in a Zoom call. “I feel hopeless. I feel I will be killed in front of my kids.”
For more than a decade, P has been caught in the Catch-22 labyrinth of the Department of State’s special immigrant visa, or SIV, application process. He has already had two visa interviews — on March 3, 2020, and April 6 of this year — at the now closed U.S. Embassy in Kabul.
Yet in a Sept. 21 email to Hemp, a foreign service officer wrote that P still needed another interview. “Obviously,” the officer added, “that will not be happening in Kabul.”
He concluded, “Sorry this is so murky and chaotic.”
Hemp responded bluntly. “In this day and age of online meetings, Zoom conference calls, Facetime calls, Messenger video chat, why can’t they do an online interview?” she wrote.
The foreign service officer checked with a colleague in Washington, who confirmed that, given the closure of the embassy in Kabul, there was no way for P to get another interview unless he managed to leave Afghanistan.
“Then the SIV case can be transferred to that country,” the officer wrote. “So, it seems to be a Catch-22 situation.”
Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, said on Capitol Hill last month that only about 3% of the Afghans evacuated to the U.S. during the American withdrawal actually have special immigrant visas.
P’s application was first submitted in April 2010, when Sappenfield’s unit was rotating out of Helmand. Had the process not been so labyrinthine, P would have gotten out of Afghanistan before it fell to the Taliban. Now he is trapped.
In an email, a Department of State spokesperson said the effort to help people like P was “of utmost importance” but acknowledged that “it is currently extremely difficult for Afghans to obtain a visa to a third country” in order to have a visa interview.
P has not given up. Every day there is a different word on flights. So far, none have had a spot for him.
Hemp, Sappenfield, Britton and Nicholson haven’t given up, either.