On a Thursday, Pete Lucier got drunk.
It was Aug. 12, just a few days before the fall of Kabul in Afghanistan, after American troops pulled out and the Taliban quickly took over. Lucier, a third-year law student at ºüÀêÊÓƵ University, hadn’t been particularly paying attention to the happenings overseas.
A former Marine who served in Afghanistan, he was supportive of President Joe Biden’s decision to end the forever war. But then he got some calls about how quickly the Taliban was rushing through the country with no resistance from the Afghan military. He thought about his interpreters and their families.
He self-medicated a bit. Then he got to work.
Over the past month, Lucier hasn’t slept much. He’s been one of an army of veterans and anybody they could recruit in the massive effort to help the American government evacuate Afghans who supported the American war effort from the country. Using encrypted text message platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal, Lucier and others like him communicated with Afghans they knew in Kabul and elsewhere. Then they worked with nonprofits putting together paperwork to qualify them for evacuation and helped get that information to the American military forces on the ground.
People are also reading…
They recruited friends and total strangers on Twitter and Facebook. They helped Biden and the Marines evacuate more than 100,000 Afghans. This was, in so many ways, America’s Dunkirk, a moment that brought together veterans, Marines, diplomats and folks who just wanted to help with perhaps the most massive air evacuation in history.
Why was it so important for veterans like Lucier to give up their time for a few weeks to help evacuate people they had never met? Here’s how former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander, an Army vet who has also been involved in the effort, put it:
“These people are our friends, and we were taught never to leave our friends behind,†Kander told me. “And frankly, when the war is over, it doesn’t mean you stop trying to win it even in small ways. Everyone we rescue is a win, a way to derive undeniable value from something of such questionable value as war.â€
Lucier joined the war effort out of high school. A ºüÀêÊÓƵ native, he spent much of his youth in Dallas but came back and graduated from ºüÀêÊÓƵ University High School in 2008. As most of his classmates were going off to college, he enlisted. In 2011, he found himself in Afghanistan as part of the “surge†intended to turn the war effort around. He went in with the 1st Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion. His unit had two interpreters during his time there: Jafar and Muhammad.
By the time his service in the Marines had ended, Lucier came to believe the war was a misguided endeavor that should come to an end.
“Afghanistan is just a depth of sadness,†he says. “It’s a failed mission.â€
The effort to rescue Afghans who wanted to flee the Taliban pulled Lucier right back in. At first, he thought he’d just raise some money by setting up GoFundMe pages for some nonprofits working to evacuate people, such as . Lucier has been active in some progressive veterans groups and knows enough people to help rally folks behind a cause. Before he knew it, other veterans were sending him names of people they were trying to get out of the country. He started working with a couple of other nonprofits — and Afghan Evacuation Alliance.
Lucier became a case manager, connecting people on the ground to nonprofits that could get their information to the Department of Defense, and then trying to coordinate to get people to a gate at the airport in Kabul where they could safely evacuate.
It was heart-wrenching work that failed more than it succeeded for a variety of reasons. There were families whose names were on a manifest for a plane, for instance, but wouldn’t head to the airport without one more family member they were afraid to leave behind. There were instances where circumstances on the ground led to one group of evacuees getting preference over another. He worked on the effort to evacuate 250 women Afghan judges. Only 15 made it out.
There were late-night Zoom calls with veterans and those in their network, going over names in spreadsheets, with one person or another agreeing to stay up all night just to try to get one more family to the airport.
“We lived on Kabul time,†Lucier said, working 20 hours a day.
He went through a wave of emotions. At first, he was angry at Biden for setting a deadline to end the mission, but in the end, working so closely with others on the evacuation, he came to believe it was the safest decision for the servicemen and women on the ground in Kabul.
“The president stood tall and took the criticism from all sides,†Lucier said.
In the end, more than 122,000 people were evacuated in the effort, many of them the result of the painstaking efforts led by veterans whose work still isn’t finished. Lucier, who plans to take the bar exam next summer, has turned his attention to helping the as it prepares to help the Afghan refugees who will be coming to town.
Drop him a note at on Twitter if you want to help. His next mission is just beginning.