745: Getting Out
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. From WBEZChicago, it's This American Life. I'm David Kestenbaum, sitting in for Ira Glass. Hi, Jamal. Can you hear me? Hello? Hello? Yes, I can hear you. Okay, so are you still in front of the Canadian or not? Yeah, in front of the Canadian interwater. You're in the water right now. Yeah. This is a phone call between a man in California and a man standing in a canal outside the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. That'll make more sense in a minute. We had a totally different show planned for you today, but then we came across this phone call and it just seemed important to put it on the air now. It's from Monday before the explosion around the airport that killed dozens of people. But it's a snapshot in a way. From the last hours of this war as the U.S. leaves Afghanistan, when who would get out and who would not was all still being decided hour by hour. So what we're going to do on the show today is we're going to hear the story of that phone call and then we're going to play you some other stories about getting out, about people trying to extricate themselves from seemingly impossible situations. So the first guy you heard on the call, the guy in California is Kirk Johnson. We've had him on the show before. And when things started to fall apart in Afghanistan, he reached out to us because years ago, he did reconstruction work in Iraq for the U.S. government. And since then, for a long time now, he has been trying to get people in Iraq and Afghanistan who have worked with the U.S. government and who are in danger out of those countries. He started an organization back in 2007 called The List Project. So these past weeks, Kirk has been on the phone constantly. And on Monday night with his kids asleep in the other room, he had this series of phone calls which he recorded. With the man you heard, his name is Ajmal. And Kirk is trying to talk him through the crowds and the confusion and chaos around the airport in Afghanistan to try to get Ajmal and his family past all the barriers, hopefully onto a plane and out of the country. All this is happening over the phone from half a world away. Nancy Updike here has known Kirk for many years. She talked to him about what happened. Here's Nancy. Kirk didn't know Ajmal before Monday night. He never met him. He just heard this was a person who needed help. One of the many people who needed help, whose names have been piling up in these threads, Kirk has been on all week, group chats with U.S. veterans, active military, current and former diplomats and aid workers, some Afghan citizens of the U.S. and other countries, all on their phones day and night, trying to help Afghans get out Monday night, Kirk called
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