Lucky's Last Wish.
An Afghan interpreter got out in 2017. In 2021, he returned. This is what happened next.
Welcome to The Experiment, where this week I’m telling you a bonkers story about an American hero who’s not even American, and Jack Hughes is saying “I told you so” about an American punchline who really is an American.
As always, we offer recommendations on what to do (buy this T-shirt for democracy and Charlie Bonner), read (“The Secret to Happiness at Work”), watch (Stephen Soderbergh’s Let Them All Talk), and listen to (new Charlie Crockett, people!).
But first, do you feel lucky?
In August, when the world was focused on the crisis in Kabul, Lucky Manan was in Urgun, a village 250 kilometers away, and the Taliban was closing in and looking specifically for him. The only reason he was in Urgun in the first place was that he had heard they were advancing, so he left his wife and two children back in Kabul to help defend his home village. Now, after two sleepless days of fighting, he was surrounded, tired, about out of ammo, and to top it all off, he couldn’t get a good cell signal. So he walked to the top of a mountain to text his friend Shawn back in San Diego that he wasn’t sure he was going to make it out.
“My last wish is if I don’t make it out please please try to get out my wife and kids. These Taliban are not human they are killing innocent people and they are even killing kids,” texted Lucky. “Please please save my family if I don’t make it.”
And then another: “I love you my friend.”
“Lucky, I promise you I will do everything I can to get them out and they will be a part of my family here in San Diego when they return,” answered Shawn. “I love you.”
Lucky was running out of luck.
***
I should tell you about why Lucky was texting my friend Shawn in San Diego, but to do that I first need to tell you how he got the name Lucky.
“It’s a long story,” said Lucky, but it wasn’t really, just unlikely. In the middle of the last decade, when Afghanistan was still the good war, Lucky saw the U.S. military building schools, roads, and everything. An officer visiting his brother’s tire shop struck up a conversation with Lucky in English, which led to him being recruited to interpret. He knew it would be dangerous, but if they had flown halfway around the world to help his country, didn’t it make sense to do his part? In 2005, lured by the promise of good pay and an SIV, or special immigrant visa that would be his golden ticket to America, Lucky signed up.
It wasn’t until he survived his second explosion in 2007 that he got his nickname. Out on reconnaissance, they got hit by an IED. They lost a sargeant, and Lucky injured his back and neck, but not badly. “One of the captains, he said, you're lucky,” he said, “so after that, all the people in the base, like, everybody started calling me Lucky instead of [his first name]. And after that, I become famous with Lucky.”
Like all Afghans who helped American troops—especially someone who had worked a decade alongside intelligence officers—his name ended up on a Taliban kill list, so in 2013 it was time to get out. A cousin got him a work visa so he could work in a clothing shop in Dubai while he waited to get his SIV. What should have taken a couple months took much longer.
“One of the captains, he said, you're lucky, so after that, all the people in the base, like, everybody started calling me Lucky.”
“After three years, they approved my visa,” he said, but there was another problem. He was engaged and wanted to take his her with him, which meant they had to go back to their village and get married.
The wedding was September 30, 2016, he and his wife got married. They only told close relatives and friends, but the Taliban found out anyway. They killed two friends of his, including one who coincidentally shared the same name with Lucky. “Then I had to leave the village,” said Lucky. “I immediately left my wife there.”
More bureaucratic foulups kept Lucky in Dubai and his wife in Afghanistan until he pulled rank, calling a high-ranking officer he’d served under who got things sorted. In 2017, he and his wife and first child arrived in San Diego, which is where he met Shawn Van Diver.
***
Imagine Popeye crossed with a golden retriever with a billing rate of $500 an hour. That’s Shawn. A retired petty officer with tattooed arms and an unflagging supply of good humor and bouncing energy, Shawn is now an executive with a global consultancy, a member of the tourism board of San Diego (seriously, do not get him started on San Diego), a former faculty member at San Diego State University, and a member of the Truman National Security Project, a group of progressive national security folks who think the world works best when the United States is leading with better angels.
It’s that last bit with the Truman Project that led to his path crossing with Lucky. In 2017, Trump imposed the Muslim Ban, which cut off immigration from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen and promised “extreme vetting” for immigrants from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia. Opponents, who knew these immigrants already faced extreme vetting, saw this as a cover to stop Muslims from coming into the country. Behind the scenes, White House aide Stephen Miller was slashing the SIV program. To the rest of the world, this just looked super racist; to the Truman Project, this looked like America pulling up the draw bridge and leaving the people who had earned SIVs to the mercy of the Taliban.
Veterans such as Shawn wanted to rally in San Diego to oppose a policy they thought would make it impossible to keep their promise to all those who had helped them. But when he looked at everyone he had recruited for the protest—business people, politicians, churchmen, and activists—he noticed that he didn’t have a single Afghan, so he called Matt Zeller, another Truman member (and a frequent Experiment contributor). Matt had started an organization to advocate for and resettle interpreters in the U.S., and he had helped this nice guy and his wife and kid find a place in San Diego. “Have you met my friend Lucky?” asked Matt.
“Lucky showed up on my doorstep, which was great. Not my actual doorstep. No, no, no. At the city hall. And, he was fantastic,” said Shawn, who thought Lucky was a regular dude when he showed up, but when he started telling his story to the media, he saw the kindness, quiet confidence, and sincerity shine through. “Like, we prepped him a little bit, but not very much,” said Shawn. “And he did a ton of interviews. He's just a really compelling guy.”
“I am one of the lucky ones.”
They stayed in touch, and when last spring the Truman Project started sounding the alarm about getting SIVs out, Shawn recruited Lucky to write an oped.
“I am one of the lucky ones. I wake up every morning in San Diego County, a place of opportunity where I know that if I work hard I can succeed beyond my wildest dreams. I do not walk down the street in fear, worried about who’s just around the corner waiting to do me harm. I am a success story of the war in Afghanistan. I fear there are not many more,” wrote Lucky, which is what makes what happened next so unbelievable.
***
Shawn did more than organize press conferences and solicit op-eds. When the fit started hitting the shan in August, he started raising money to get people out of Kabul, and when he noticed myriad disparate efforts doing the same thing, he roped them all together in a loose coalition that was originally known as Digital Dunkirk but they rebranded as #AfghanEvac. Dozens, if not hundreds of Truman Project members started working around the clock, coordinating resources and spreadsheets, even using old national security contacts to use satellite imagery to talk interpreters around Taliban checkpoints so they could get to the airport in Kabul.
On Saturday, August 14, the same day President Biden sent 5,000 troops into Afghanistan and ordered our ambassador to lead “a whole-of-government effort to process, transport, and relocate Afghan Special Immigrant Visa applicants and other Afghan allies,” Shawn got a text.
“Hey Shawn, I am sorry, my internet is very slow. I had to walk to the top of a mountain to get a signal,” texted Lucky, who explained that he had returned to Afghanistan with his wife and now two kids, one American-born, because his mother had fallen ill. Then he heard his village, Orgun, was under attack and came to see if he could get his relatives out, “but I am stuck and surrounded by Taliban,” he texted. “We are still fighting.”
“You’re in Orgun?” asked Shawn.
“You’re in Orgun?”
Shawn could get him and his family out of Kabul, but he told Lucky he first had to figure out how to get there.
“I can’t go anywhere because they are everywhere and checking every single thing,” texted Lucky. “I am not sure I will be able to get back to Kabul but if I did I will get back with you.”
“Please, please take care of yourself,” texted Shawn. “We love you.”
Shawn followed that up with “What is her email address?”
Lucky did not answer that day or the next, when Shawn texted, “He brother, I’m here for you. When you come up for air make sure you hit me up on WhatsApp or signal,” but this text was at least partially aspirational.
“I thought he was dead,” said Shawn.
***
A jingle truck is about the size of a U-Haul painted with intricate, brightly colored patterns and covered with thousands of chimes that jingle when they drive into town, most often carrying firewood into the city from the country to sell. This answers the what but not the why.
“This is something kind of traditional culture,” explained Lucky. “And when those people buy a big truck, they put all the jingle stuff on it. You know, when they go on that mud road, they make noise and it looks good to them. If they don't hear those jingles, it means you don't have a luck on that. You're not entrusted on the job or the driver is not taking care of that.”
A jingle truck is also a working man’s vehicle, not one where you’d expect to find an educated interpreter. Lucky had an idea and called one of his relatives.
“Can you guys find me a jingle truck?”
“What are you going to do?”
“Don't worry. Just bring it to me.”
Lucky stuffed his phone and his documents into a hole in the body of the truck and stuffed old, dirty clothes on top of them and then, for good measure, poured oil on top of the clothes. Without a cell phone, he had to drive by his wits, but the good thing for him was that he had gotten his commercial drivers license back in San Diego and could handle the jingle truck, even on Kabul’s rural roads. On a good day, with GPS and without the Taliban hunting you, Orgun to Kabul takes five or six hours on Highway 1.
Instead, he had to piecemeal a route past Taliban checkpoints for two days on rural roads. They would stop him and look him and his jingle truck over while Lucky pretended to be a poor truck driver. They’d ask him for his Tazkira, or national ID card, and he’d say he didn’t have one.
“What kind of driver are you?” they would ask.
He’d explain that he was just a local driver and local roads where the Tazkira wasn’t required. The longer the conversations went on, the more the Taliban noticed that Lucky’s clothes stank, so they let him pass. At one checkpoint they searched the jingle truck for weapons but discovered only the oily rags. At another, he told them he was headed to Kabul and they told him he was going the wrong way.
“You're a jingle truck driver, you don't know the roads?”
“The main roads have IEDs, that's why I'm scared. I don't want to hit the IEDs, you know?”
“Oh yes, we put the IEDs on the road.” But they were trying to get convoys of Afghan government vehicles, not jingle trucks, and they let him pass.
He ditched the jingle truck in a town along the way and left instructions for the owner to pick it up at a gas station before jumping in a taxi for the rest of the trip back to Kabul. There were more Taliban checkpoints, but they didn’t find his documents. He arrived in Kabul and reunited with his family at a hotel on Tuesday, August 17. “I was happy, but there was fighting going on outside,” he said. The Taliban was searching hotels, so they had to move, but not before he checked in with Shawn.
“Hey brother! I am really sorry I was not able to call or text.”
“Hey brother! I am really sorry I was not able to call or text,” he wrote. “20 minutes ago I reached Kabul and got together with my family. God saved me again! I am back with my kids in Kabul. I need your help to get a flight if possible.”
Lucky found out that the easiest time to get to the Kabul airport was early in the morning around 4am, but when his taxi dropped them off the scene was violent chaos.
“It was so crowded. People are running here and there. And there was like fighting going on. When I tried to get within a hundred yards, the soldiers were shooting, you know, and the other side was Taliban,” he said. At one point, he and his wife placed their hands over their children’s ears. “I don't want them to hear, but still they were seeing blood.”
At that point, in the middle of more than a thousand, desperate people and between two lines of warring soldiers, Lucky decided to retreat to the hotel before they got hurt. That’s when, back in the hotel, Lucky decided to use a lifeline and called a contact in the Defense Department. “He was a good dude. I contacted him,” he said. “He's kind of high-ranking officer.”
“I’m stuck here running around,” said Lucky. “I don’t think I’m going to make it out.”
The officer was shocked to hear Lucky was back in Afghanistan. “Just give me some time,” he told Lucky. “I’m going to find a way to get you out of there.” Now, what happened next wasn’t exactly by the book, and if the officer’s name got out, he could get in trouble.
“Just give me some time. I’m going to find a way to get you out of there.”
But it was worth it.
At 10:30 that night, the officer called Lucky and told him to get to a small staging area in 20 minutes. There were Taliban checkpoints along the way, but this time, Lucky had a secret weapon.
“When the Taliban would look inside the car, if there was a female sitting there with kids, they would let you just go. They will not search her. They will not because kind of cultural tradition,” he said.
Ironically, it was the Afghan army checkpoint that proved the most difficult. They stopped him outside the gate of the staging area to check out his story but knew that any car stopped there was a potential target. Mainly, the Afghan soldiers just wanted him gone, so Lucky called his DOD contact, who sent a truck to bring them inside where they were told to wait for a Chinook helicopter that his family doubted would show up.
“They were not believing,” said Lucky. “They were like, we don't know if that's going to happen.”
“Man, that dude, he knows me,” Lucky told them. “I have done so many things for him, I had saved his life. I'm sure he's going to save me from them.”
He did. The Chinook arrived soon and took off as soon as Lucky and his family were aboard. When they landed, two troops who had ridden with them, pointing guns out the doors the whole time, took out folded pieces of paper from their uniforms and handed them to Lucky.
“Thank you for a service and good luck,” they said.
“Thank you for a service and good luck.”
“I don't know how they knew my name,” he said. “I was so proud. I have backup. I have people that know what I’ve done. And now today, they returned to save my family and my life.”
After a sleepless, cold night in the airport, Lucky and his family boarded a C-17 for Qatar, where he discovered the military lost his luggage. Two days later another military flight took him to a refugee camp in Germany where he would have to stand in line for four hours to get meals. “It was very tough times there,” he said. “Especially with kids.” Five days later a commercial flight took him to Washington, DC., which is when Shawn got them tickets to San Diego.
Lucky has resettled his family in Texas, where he’s looking for a job as a commercial driver or a translator. He’s broke, but he speaks better English than a lot of Americans I know and has more than paid his debt to our country. In fact, we’re indebted to him. It should not have taken a Bruckheimerian odyssey to get Lucky out of Afghanistan a second time.
But it did.
Now Digital Dunkirk has become the Digital Underground Railroad. We airlifted 120,000 people out of Kabul but still left some behind, and the Taliban is looking for them. Assigning partisan blame to this situation is worse than useless. You actually need to do something, because people like Lucky need your help.
If you or someone you know still needs evacuation from Afghanistan, click here.
To learn more about Afghan Evac, the coalition Shawn helped lead, click here.
To help No One Left Behind, which helps resettle Afghans, click here.
And if you have a job for Lucky or just want to send him money, reply to this email.
Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
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Ever since Congress signed off on a war resolution a week after the 9/11 attacks, lawmakers have allowed two Republican and two Democratic presidents virtual free rein over fighting terrorists. …
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The Other Two, the Glen Weldon-endorsed sitcom has moved from Comedy Central to HBOmax. In season 2, it’s somehow become more ridiculous and more grounded.
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What I’m listening to
NEW CHARLIE CROCKETT!!!!
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