Joshua Mast
speaker
189 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Joshua Mast’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, first, thank you for having us on. We really appreciate it. Growing up listening to you and Rush, it's just surreal to be able to sit here and talk with you. Thank you. So I'm an active duty Marine. I'm a major in the Marine Corps. Active duty. Active duty. So all this is my opinion, not on behalf of the government or anybody else.
In fact, a lot of it will be kind of focused on some government action that's happened to our family. I would say describing us, we're a family of five, grown up traveling with the Marine Corps. I've had a child born at every duty station. I'd say we're a pretty archetypical military family.
what um tell me that scenario what happened sure so um i was deployed in 2019 in afghanistan i was attached at operational headquarters of the four star in overall command of both u.s and nato forces and so i i will never forget i was walking to dinner one night with our staff my colonel was a senior uh staff judge advocate phenomenal leader really appreciated my time under him
But he said, he said, what the heck are we going to do with this baby? Walk into dinner. And what baby, sir? And he said, oh, the operators had knocked over an Al-Qaeda facility last night, and there was only one survivor. It was a baby. And we didn't know if it was boy or girl or much details about it, but it sounded like it was bad.
And so your gut reaction and the reaction of folks from the rangers on the ground to medical staff to us was like, well, what can we do? You immediately volunteer. How do we make sure a safe outcome for this child? And it kind of developed from there. And we learned more about it over time.
And now we have like eyewitness testimony and declassified information from the most sophisticated unit in Afghanistan at that time in a 19 year, you know, developed theater with with I guess, a significant amount of intelligence about exactly who was there, exactly what were they doing, and where they were from. Okay, but the actual mission that night has been classified, right?
So a portion of it has been declassified, and two eyewitnesses have testified... That they were there and they saw... They were there and saw and recovered her.
mom and dad dying? Well, I guess I should probably just give you an overview of the mission. Okay. So it was 6 September 2019 in the period of darkness between the 5th and the 6th at night. That's when they own the night. So it was a Ranger Regiment mission, which was one of our most sophisticated units in Afghanistan at that time.
And so they infiltrate to an area where there's a known Al-Qaeda compound, and they're trying to capture or kill three Al-Qaeda leaders. And they also had another series of compounds nearby that had more fighters in them.
And so they had two platoon-sized elements of Rangers in the cover of darkness, basically sneaking up on these compounds, surrounding them, and then issuing a demand to surrender or die. And they were briefed. And what happened exactly as they were briefed, they expected them to fight to the death.
And that's exactly what happened in brutal close combat over an hour and a half where they sustained multiple U.S. casualties. Two guys partially paralyzed, almost a dozen, I believe, rangers wounded. And then a dozen of the Afghan partner force were also wounded in a very kinetic engagement.
So a little bit of both. So the multi-purpose canine handler, or dog handler is how we colloquially refer to them, he described when they initially breached the structure, seeing a man holding a little baby, which we believe was her, and having an AK-47 and firing at them, engaging them. And then that weapon jammed. And so the man disappeared. The baby was no longer with him.
And a grenade rolled out. So he says he had a distinct memory of looking down and seeing this grenade. And as he described it, it was like a homemade explosive. And so he says, I covered my dog.
I yelled grenade because there was Ranger stacked up on the breach and he said even though I was the closest one somehow I didn't get hit and his several of his buddies did got fragmentation wounds and So they had to they were forced to with knowing there's a child in there throw grenades back in In exchange there was an exchange of grenades at close range and they had sympathetic detonations of other explosives going off from the grenades I threw into the room and
And from there, they did a series of what they call barricaded shooters. So it is a suicidal terrorist who will barricade themselves in with the presence of their family in a room and engage whoever's coming in that room and not surrender no matter what. They will even blow up their families rather than surrender.
And that's exactly what they experienced in room after room after room through this relatively small leadership compound. And so you asked, where did she recover? So as they culminate and they get to one of the last rooms in this structure, they had run out of breaching explosives. And so they used what's called a Carl Gustav or a goose gun, which is a bazooka for lack of a better descriptor.
And they used that to blow a hole in the final room to clear it of the remaining terrorists. And that blast killed that original, what we believe was the biological father. And the ranger testified under oath that he observed what ended up being her biological mother
run out of that hole that they created screaming at him as he's like obliquing around a corner covering whoever's going to come out and exploded a a suicide device about 15 feet from him so that was so on her she blew herself up correct and she was holding sparrow so he didn't realize that at the time so as an american we treat you know friendly enemy we treat wounded
And so she was incapacitated. He dragged her behind a berm, checked her medically, noticed that she had the signs of recently giving birth. And he's kind of looking around with his night vision and saw her moving out of the corner of his eye. And so she was about six weeks old.
she suffered a fractured skull a fractured left femur so bad they had to put a rod in to put it back together and second degree burns on her face and neck from from the carl gustav round or the mom's vest cooking off you know it's it's hard to say with that many kinetic events happening around her what exactly caused it but i mean we're talking six inches and she's you know six inches higher and and she's she's in vital areas and an inch an inch deeper into her skull and she's she's she's dead and um
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