Bryan Stern: 9/11 first responder, Afghan vet reflects on withdrawal from Afghanistan

Brian, welcome back. Thanks for your service. When they were going back and forth about what went wrong in Afghanistan and that exit, how important is it to you to find out whose decision that was and how preventable it turned out to be?

Well, extremely important. Number one, I'm a veteran of the Afghan war. I've spent a lot of time there, buried friends there. As an intelligence officer where I've recruited assets, where I've asked Afghans to help us and in trade, we won't leave you behind. And we did. And we did my outfit.

Graybullrescue.org. We're international. We're a veteran led international rescue organization. We're still pulling people, Americans and green card holders out of Afghanistan three years later. So and we're entirely donor funded. So purely from a selfish perspective, the cost of the withdrawal and the way it went down is extreme.

Just from a very personal perspective is who runs a team of people that have to go in and go get people. So it's extremely important. It's a it's a black mark on our handshake. As Americans, our values are about honor and integrity. We're supposed to be the beacons of morality. Other there's a reason why Guatemalans are flocking to America and Americans are not flocking to Guatemala because we're an awesome country.

We have our problems and that's great. But when we talk about Afghanistan, it's a it's a very dishonorable thing. And the reality is there are only two people in our system of government that are allowed to deploy troops. The president of the United States and the secretary of defense.

That's it. All the generals think they're the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. His title is to be the principal military adviser to the president. He actually can't deploy anybody. He has to salute smartly. General McKinsey, who was the CENTCOM commander during during the withdrawal of Afghanistan, caught a lot of flak. I know General McKinsey personally. He is one of the most honorable officers I've ever had the pleasure of shaking of meeting or engaging with.

He he was he was directed and ordered what to do. And that's just the fact of life. That's not a Republican thing. That's not a Democrat thing.

It doesn't matter who's in the White House. That's the way it goes. But if you want to make if you if you want to not make that decision again, it's important to get to the bottom of it. But it doesn't seem like anyone's interested in hearing what this report says what previous report said President Biden's refused to get the briefing from the people that put it together in the military.

That's got to be bad. You know, today's 9-11 and I'm a 9-11 first responder. I was here for both collapses in the plaza and the 9-11 motto is never forget. That's what the 9-11 community always says.

Never forget. That's not just about 9-11. It's important to understand what happened, why it happened. That's why we did the 9-11 Commission, the 9-11 Commission, which generated the 9-11 Commission report.

Which was the best selling book that everyone bought and people discussed. We did it on this show, on TV. We did it on this show. We did it on this show. We did it on this show. We did it on this show. We did it on this show. We did it on this show.

We did it. There's lots of reasons that went into the withdrawal of Afghanistan. Some of those are are easy to understand.

Some are hard to understand. But bottom line is the questions need to be asked and answered by everyone, not just, you know, I think people are very quick to put this at the doorstep of the White House and that's true. But there's lots and lots and lots and lots of people who told the president what to do, what not to do, who advised him who didn't.

All that needs to get fleshed out because the stain of the withdrawal of Afghanistan. That's why I was in the White House. I was in the White House. I was in the White House. And I was watching the news and I was watching the news for weeks before the 20th anniversary of 9-11. It's what you know, it's why I started my organization. I started my organization because I was working on a keynote speech for the for the 20th anniversary of 9-11.

I was asked to give a talk and I was working on my speech and talking about hearing and seeing people jumping. inspired me to spin up my team, get the band back together, we're all volunteers, go to Afghanistan, go to these crazy places, we've done 617 missions since then, we rescued Americans, American citizens, whose passports look like yours and mine, weeks and weeks and weeks after the withdrawal of Afghanistan, months and months and months and months and now years and years and years later. You disappointed that didn't get brought up before in the public square, whether it's in Congress or whether it was on that debate stage. I think that there are lots of folks that are trying to bring it up, my good friend Congressman Mike Waltz, who's one of the greatest Green Berets that ever lived, he's an awesome, awesome, awesome, very loud and vocal member of Congress, which I like as a soldier.

I think lots of people are asking these hard questions and they need to be asked and I think it's important to not make it political, we need to be fair and square about this. There's also got to be a situation where generals, if they know better, they've spent their whole time in uniform, they're experts. They have to be able to say, Mr. President, if you do this, the whole thing's going to fall apart. I got guys, like you said, that died there. You've wasted their lives and their time, 20 plus years.

If you do it like this, it could fall. And when they do it and they don't take the order, if Milia turned around, put those stars on the ground and go, I got to leave because he's such a critic of Trump, for him to leave for Biden, it would have stopped Biden from doing it. And this becomes very personal at that point. That's not a bureaucracy issue. That's not a policy issue that becomes a very much I'm a four star general. I've never met General Milley, but I from what I know, I have respect for General Milley. He served.

He did his thing. He served Democrats, Republicans, all the admirals and generals to be our system, to make them a flag officer, to get them their star looks very much like the political appointment process. It doesn't have to be Senate confirmed.

It's the way it is. That's why colonels are the most important rank in the army, because colonels, oh, six by politics. They they're not required to. Every general, every admiral that you meet, every single one at some point had to go and sell themselves to members of Congress and the Senate and explain why they were the good people, the right person, man or woman for the job and all those things. But it's very much it looks that they have to be Senate confirmed and go through a process. Our system, the way it is under Title 10 lends itself when these issues happen to criticism.

Right. I want you to hear how it came up last night. Well, I will tell you, I agreed with President Biden's decision to pull out of Afghanistan. Four presidents said they would.

And Joe Biden did. And as a result, America's taxpayers are not paying the 300 million dollars a day. We were paying for that endless war.

And as of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone, in any war zone around the world, the first time this century. But let's understand how we got to where we are. Donald Trump, when he was president, negotiated one of the weakest deals you can imagine. Your thoughts. I don't believe in putting a price tag on honor.

I don't know. We're spending you know, we saved millions of dollars a day in Afghanistan. But good news, we're spending billions of dollars a day in other places and we're also funding the Taliban, which is interesting.

I think the money argument, just as a soldier, this is way above my pay grade. But as a guy who runs a team of patriots who have we've we've conducted six hundred and seventeen operations, Afghanistan, Operation Pineapple. No, we're different. We're Graybull Rescue.

So Pineapple Scotty Mann is a great guy. We're a little bit different because we're in the field. So I just got back from Beirut rescuing an American being stuck with Hezbollah two and a half weeks ago. Wow. We flew helicopters into Haiti. We did the evacuation in Sudan. We did. We did Hurricane Ian. We did Maui. We did Russia. We did Ukraine.

In fact, on your show years ago, you interviewed the first American victim of war crimes alive since World War Two that we broke out of jail from Russia. Wow. Right. Six hundred and seventeen missions. My crew is done. Six thousand people and counting.

Wow. So all those people ask the government for help. So just because we're not doing it doesn't mean that we can't. It's a choice that we don't know.

Some of those choices, again, are easy to understand. But when I hear when I hear the vice president talk about saving money from my perspective, drive you crazy. Well, I you can't put a price tag on a life course.

You just can't. Well, you have billions behind in equipment and you have 56 million just in cash in Afghanistan. You know, my team and I went into Afghanistan December 2021.

This is months after the withdrawal months. The Taliban are now running the DMV. Right. Like everything they are. Oh, well. Right. I mean, God bless.

In those women's photos. Right. Exactly right. And we go I went I have a Taliban visa on my passport as I talk to you right now. Right now we go. And it was fascinating because every single person that we rescued asked someone else for help.

And that help didn't come. Wow. So is it right that we left Afghanistan?

100 percent. I'm actually a supporter of leaving Afghanistan, but it's the way that you do it. It's the way. Right. That is where honor and integrity matter. Right.

That's where that matters. I want to talk about 9-11, too. But if you explain to the American people by leaving twenty five hundred there and twenty five hundred contractors and maybe two thousand NATO members and you're able to keep an eye on what's happened with ISIS-K, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, you're keeping America safe.

You're not just sitting there because you don't know how to get out. You're sitting right between China, Pakistan, Iran, and you have a looking glass on what the hell is going on there. And you still got Bagram Air Base. You explain that the American people. So we would understand civilians would understand that.

So it's very simple. If you go to the Pentagon website, there's this thing called the National Defense Strategy. And that's the the primary document that governs everything that we do. How many ships we buy, how big the army is, what our priorities are and list four key threats. China, Russia, Iran and terrorists, violent extremist organizations.

The title of the document is called Integrated Deterrence. Yes. And the idea is that we're so awesome. We're like Apple.

Everything just works. We're so integrated and so awesome that you have to be out of your mind to pick a fight with us. Four key threats.

Today, we are kinetically engaged in three with three of the four. That means an integrated deterrence isn't working very well. No. The way you lose deterrence is by not being a credible threat.

Thank you. So does that mean I'm a warmonger? No. Does that mean.

But you need to you know, it's just the opposite. Actually, I do a lot of work with the police departments and there's a famous saying, an old saying from old old cops and they'll say most people respect the badge. But everyone respects the gun. That's just like the American flag. The American flag. I've been in mud huts in the middle of Africa where they don't have plumbing and they still know what an American flag is.

It's the most recognized symbol in the world, whether we like that or don't, whether it's convenient or not. But with that comes responsibility. With that comes responsibility. And it's on us as Americans. That makes sense.

To be responsible. Of course. That doesn't mean. Do we? We don't have to be the world's policemen.

We get it. We do not. But there is something to be said for the British Empire can't conquer half the world with the use of flags.

There is something to be said for having a presence. And if we and if we look, how many countries is the United States gone and gone to war with where we don't currently have troops? There's two Vietnam and Afghanistan. Unbelievable. We still have troops in Germany and Spain, although we were convinced Vietnam was not going to follow us home. We knew it.

They weren't looking to do that. Real quick, 9-11, your your reaction to how it relates to you? I'm a survivor of 9-11. I was here as a kid. I was in the army as a kid. I was here.

Both collapses. Where were you located? I was standing right at the base of Tower 2 when Tower 2 got hit. What were you doing? I was in the army. Were you stationed there or just happened to be a civilian?

And I was going to school at John Jay at night, doing my thing. And it's one of those days, for those that experienced it, that all the pictures don't do it justice. I've never seen a movie or pictures or whatever that capture how I felt and what I saw. I've never been that afraid. So you saw the bodies, people jumping?

I saw everything. And I've seen a lot of war. I've been deployed or in combat or getting ready to go to combat or doing stuff since about noon on 9-11. So 23 years I've been in this fight, my team and I, and I think about it every day.

I do. It's the only day that is like tattooed on my head kind of thing. So I live every day like it's September 12th. It's important to not forget, you know, the younger kids are, this is like Pearl Harbor for them. They don't, when we read about Pearl Harbor as kids, it was, that's what grandpa did, you know?

Oh yeah. It didn't impact us. So it's important to not forget. But most importantly, when we say never forget is that it can happen again. And when you read the 9-11 commission report, I've read both versions of classified and the unclassified versions.

There's a theme in there about milestones, right? The embassy bombings and USS Cole, the first, the first World Trade Center bombings. And it goes through the stepping stone to this culminating event that we call 9-11. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed called it Operation Bojanka. I submit to you that there will come a time and I hope never, and I really hope I'm wrong, but there'll come a time where we're going to look at 9-11 and we're going to say, oh, only 3000 people died that day. Yep.

That's not so bad. We have got, it is on us, Republicans, Democrats, black, white, purple, whoever you are, whatever you are to make sure that it does not happen again. That's why when you had these people in the FBI watch list, when they come in from Chazekistan, are you nuts?

Does anyone remember anything? Makes me crazy. The books are available. This stuff is available to civilians.

Brian Stern, thanks for all you've done and do and will do in the future. Former first responder. If you want to support your organization real quick, where do we go? Graybullrescue.org and also on Facebook and social media and all that stuff. That is how people find us. Gotcha. So you can help us just by following and sharing our stuff.

That is how people find us. It helps me save lives every single day. Doesn't cost you a penny. From the Fox News Podcasts Network, subscribe and listen to the Trey Gowdy Podcast.

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