Veterans Weigh In on the Fall of Afghanistan

CLAY: Mark in Ohio. Fourth generation veteran. Mark, we appreciate your service as well as your family’s service. What do you want to share with us?

CALLER: Well, thank you, gentlemen. Just real quick, my dad called. He was watching the fall of Afghanistan. He witnessed what happened in Vietnam, obviously, he did two tours over there. And he said it just made him sick to see it all over again. I was in Iraq, and it made me sick to see that handed over to ISIS. And now we’ve had the trifecta of having the Taliban take over here in Afghanistan.

And I just cannot believe that we are gonna have much credibility with allies left in the world after this, never mind the humanitarian angle of just being a decent person and keeping your word to people. But just from a tactical point of view, down the road, the long-term implications of this are just going to be tragic, and hopefully something as bad as 9/11 doesn’t come back to bite us again.

BUCK: So, Mark. Hey, it’s Buck. I just wanted to ask you, Mark, so you obviously… We all know the withdrawal from the Biden planning and tactics perspective, it’s just a complete debacle. It’s horrific, and we just hope it doesn’t get worse. But it sounds to me like you’re saying as somebody who is a veteran, comes from a long line of veterans, that you actually would have preferred a permanent presence of U.S. military based in Afghanistan at some level. Is that correct?

CALLER: Absolutely. Absolutely.

BUCK: Yeah.

CALLER: You took the time to go over there and take the ground. Make sure that that was not in vain, and you cannot do that by phoning it in. You have to have people there and involved. It didn’t take a large number of people to get ISIS back under control when President Trump decided to actually drop the hammer on ’em. We have technology that will keep you up at night. We just need a few people there to make sure that we deliver it to our enemies in a timely manner.

BUCK: Mark, thank you for your service, and thank you for sharing your perspective here on the Clay and Buck show. Appreciate it. Josh in California, another veteran of Afghanistan has got a specific story wants to bring to our attention. Josh, welcome.

CALLER: How we doing, sir?

BUCK: We’re good.

CALLER: My name is Josh. I’m from California. Basically, I’m calling in because I’m a sponsor for an Afghan interpreter, and he has been trying to get to the airport for three days now with his family and his 5-year-old kid. He hasn’t been able to get there. The Taliban has the whole place surrounded, and they are kidnapping tons of people, he says. He says he’s watching people right in front of him get kidnapped as people try to go through the Taliban.

CLAY: Josh, I’m sorry to cut you off, but would he be interested in talking to us over the radio and telling his story and maybe we can have people who are listening give him some assistance. I know there’s been a lot of senators out there that have been helping. If you could… We’re about to finish off this hour, but based on what you’re telling us right now, if you could share information and/or give a phone number for him, we would be happy to help as best we could.

CALLER: I can try to do that. I’m trying to get a hold of him this morning and I’m really worried because every time I message him, he answers almost immediately, and he hasn’t answered this morning so I’m getting really worried.

CLAY: Yeah.

CALLER: He’s either on a plane or he’s gotten kidnapped. That’s pretty much I’m almost positive one of those two scenarios because he lives right outside of the airport — like, right outside — and he saw when those people got shot the other day him and his whole family saw it. They all witnessed it, and he said that Christian people missionaries are also getting kidnapped a lot right now.

CLAY: Well, we appreciate your service, and we appreciate the call, Josh. And, by the way, to the extent that we can help in any way, we’ll talk, like we said, with one of the senators from Tennessee, Bill Haggerty, who’s gonna join us next. And there have been a lot of people — Tom Cotton, for instance, among others — that have been doing everything they can to help people.

BUCK: And if there’s way to get somebody through, you know, a Skype call from on the ground in Afghanistan, we’ll do that, too. So we’ll get the team here working on it.