Quill Lawrence

speaker

2,044 appearances 248 recordings 4 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard yesterday

Quill Lawrence’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 211 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 29.

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Up First from NPR · Venezuela Earthquakes, Trump Senate Fight, Pentagon Shuffles · 25 Jun 2026 podcast

In Europe, he's worked with Ukrainian military leaders.

He's very highly respected across the military.

But he was only in this four-star Army job in Europe for a year and a half.

And Defense Secretary Pete Hicks did come into office saying that there were far too many flag officers in the military.

He shrunk down the possible jobs that four stars can go to.

But Donahue would have seemed like a competitive candidate for any of those remaining jobs up to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

So do we know anything about the backstory behind the abrupt news of his retiring?

No one has any official explanation.

If you follow military Twitter, and the Trump administration does seem to be concerned about what's said on social media, there are some trolls focusing on the fact that Donahue was in charge of trying to evacuate Kabul airport.

You may remember from five years ago this green-tinted night vision photo of a man walking up the ramp of an aircraft, the last man out of Afghanistan.

And people are sort of pinning that whole debacle, that messy conclusion of 20 messy years of war, a cat by the death of 13 U.S.

troops and 170 Afghans in this suicide bombing at Abbey Gate.

They're pinning that on Donahue.

So is Donahue to blame for any of that?

There's really no evidence that he was.

He arrived in Kabul after the city had fallen to the Taliban.

He wasn't in charge of Abbey Gate.

He came to run the withdrawal and coordinated hundreds of flights that probably saved thousands of people's lives.

And that photo of him being the last man out is widely seen as what Wright looks like in the military, the way a commander takes responsibility.

You know, it was a general who was the last man to board the plane, not some unlucky private.

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