The Final Mission

When America pulled out of Afghanistan in August of 2021, over 220,000 Afghan U.S. allies and their families were left behind in Afghanistan, their lives in jeopardy. But three brothers from Omaha, Nebraska, two of them special forces veterans, have already evacuated more than 15,000 of them and have committed to getting out the remaining 200,000-plus over the next three years, to begin to atone for America’s conduct of the Afghan War. The work of these three brothers, which incurred the wrath of the Taliban, leading to two of the brothers being imprisoned for 105 days by the Afghan secret police and tortured to the brink of death, is called The Final Mission, and it “is our plan in Afghanistan,” according to one high-ranking State Department official.

This is an amazing story—of setting up a network of safe houses throughout Afghanistan, negotiating directly with the Taliban, organizing humanitarian missions to refugee camps, and even successfully rescuing President Biden’s Afghan bodyguard, Aman Khalili, after the US government demurred and Blackwater failed, in a harrowing week-long, overland journey across the entire length of the country—and by design it is almost entirely unknown.

Journalist and historian Kix, author of You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Life: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America and The Saboteur, is setting out to write the book that aspires to take the war’s measure in the way that books like A Bright and Shining Lie or Dispatches or The Things They Carried aspired to define the Vietnam War and became classics of the American canon.