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
what was more remarkable is there's an afghan partner force there and they were engaged in clearing that room that they just breached and uh they had they sustained a casualty and um were very angry about that and so they wanted they they literally came to our our rangers and like let a shooter in the head like just maybe the baby like let's just throw in the creek
And so they didn't want her to grow up to be a foreign terrorist in their country because they're engaged in a brutal civil war at that point with a lot of foreign terrorists. And these are the cultural experts. It's their culture. Who knows better than them? And so our guys physically resisted murdering our little girl now on objective.
And like, honestly, the moral courage while you have your own guys bleeding and you're in a kinetic firefight, they still have that instinct as an American soldier to protect innocent life. I mean, I'm humbled.
So we've gotten to meet a bunch of phenomenal Americans at every level of government over the last five years in this. And one of them was the...
he was what's called a civil affairs officer for the special operations task force afghanistan and and i had some of those same questions as i'm kind of researching this and we didn't know all this at the time but over time we've learned and um he had asked the same question well how do you safely you know advertise in an area controlled by al-qaeda or hakani network in afghanistan how do you safely advertise that you've recovered a child and then we had a lot of reports of
foreign children, you know, doing very poorly in the Afghan orphanage system or being treated prejudicially, you know, just because of the brutality of the war going on there. And so he had, he'd actually asked some of the ICRC staff like, uh, that were like, Oh, we found somebody who might be able to take her. And he's like, well, are they related? Like, we don't know.
And so he was very concerned that, um, they were having to rely on the word of basically Taliban, uh,
local nationals in this taliban controlled area um for any sort of potential claimants and that was that was a huge concern at our level at the headquarters level as well it's like how do we safely vet people so you're walking uh with your fellow marine and he says what are we gonna do with this baby when did it occur to you maybe we should adopt
Honestly, I think the gut instinct was we wanted to ensure the child's safety. Initially, it was just as an American, anybody downrange, I bet there's a million guys that could close their eyes and say, hey, I can remember someone I was trying to help on deployment. That's what this was for us originally. What happened was is we were trying to, as a legal shop, guarantee a safe outcome for her.
And I think DOD did a great job of doing that initially, and then we hit some interference later on with some other agencies. But what really caused us to seek adoption was getting her a visa.
Yeah, and I would say that we were very aware at the time of the negotiations going on that our presence is going to end very rapidly. And then what's going to happen? Because a lot of the funding is going to be attached to that. And so our concern is just asking basic questions like, how bad is she hurt? What unit picked her up? Why do they say she's foreign?
And then as I used kind of the skill set that I had to pull some of that information for decision makers, it was very clear exactly who she was and where they came from. And then as you did research on, hey, what does an orphanage in Afghanistan look like? And then add to that, what does it look like when the U.S. leaves?
that was especially for a girl yes especially for a foreign child so so she was not from afghanistan yeah so the all of the us intelligence and everything has been declassified and there's a significant amount that's still left that has not been declassified pointed to a foreign origin for her uh the the specific group is a um a turkistani or uighur um al-qaeda branch okay yeah um so you decide to adopt
Yeah, I say, Glenn, that we initially just advocated to elevate the priority of this child's life in the U.S. government's eyes. So when did you decide she needs to be with us?
Well, I think it was in the midst of pursuing all the administrative requirements to get a visa. They kept saying, oh, well, she needs a name. how do you get a name for a Jane Doe baby that got blown up on an objective? And that was what the problem was. And then there was like, well, how do you arrange medical care in the US, which was a requirement for the visa? How do you pay for that?
How do you authorize surgery on a child, a minor child? Well, you have to have some sort of legal rights. And so as this developed, we're like, okay, well, I'll volunteer to be the financial sponsor for the visa. I'll volunteer to try and get some sort of legal ability to order medical care. And so it really evolved pretty organically from that.
So I think initially there was a perspective that this is like as an Afghan problem, it's a distraction from operations. And they were trying to use our commands influence to force the Afghans who'd multiple times that we don't have the capacity to care for a child like this. Like I was in some of those meetings, but they're trying to force them to to to take them anyway.
And so that's when we did a little bit of advocacy trying to find. to elevate her, her status, her status. Yeah. Her priority of this life because we had options and, and that was successful. And then the, the administration, the first Trump administration reached out and directed us to act in her best interest and try to get her back to the U S which is pretty reasonable under the circumstances.
And so we were, we were thinking, Hey, that's good to go. She's going to be safe. And as we're working that new direction, that new U.S. policy as an office, and then I was volunteering with some of my skill sets in my free time to get a visa. That's when all of this kind of developed. And then I would report that back to my husband. Hey, great news. We got guardianship. Great news.
We got her added as a DOD dependent. Great news. She has a military ID. Like, we had everything lined up to get her home. And we just had some significant opposition at some point. Mm-hmm. And that was kind of the first from Department of State.
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