In the last two weeks of the war, an ad hoc team armed with group chats, QR codes, and satellite maps launched a mad dash to save imperiled Afghan allies.
To date, Team America and Task Force Dunkirk have gotten more than 1,500 Afghans safely out of Kabul. Schuette estimates that an additional 2,000 might eventually, via a green card status or Special Immigrant Visa, be able to board a flight to America and be marked “Mission Complete,” as five of Zac Martin’s former interpreter’s family now are. (The other four are still alive, it turns out, and still in the database.) In total, that is 5 percent of the Team America database. Some 65,000 other people—all of them hoping to escape a country where starvation is rampant, the economy has collapsed, and schools are closed to the vast majority of girls—will likely remain on the lists forever. It can be hard, the case managers say, to come home from work, open Airtable, and see the unending rows of names. Instead, they try to focus on a single row at a time and remind themselves of the motto Worth Parker and Task Force Dunkirk used as their rallying cry during the mad dash last August: “Just one more.”
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