‘This Man Served Honorably. I Depended On Him. I Know Him’: Afghan Vet Gets Emotional on MSNBC Over Her Former Translator Stuck in Afghanistan

A former U.S. Army officer who served in Afghanistan was overcome with emotion during an appearance on MSNBC on Tuesday, particularly while talking about the translator who helped during her service in the nearly-20-year war.

On Hallie Jackson Reports, Kristen Rouse, founder of NYC Veterans Alliance, started with a message for Afghan allies now stranded in Afghanistan, which is under Taliban control: “We’re not giving up.”

Our government may have left, it may seem that our government has turned away from you, that our government has turned away from the promises that we made. That we would not leave you behind, that you would have a visa if available to you if you worked with us. So many of the folks we’re in touch with, they’ve and been through bureaucratic processes for ten years and more, trying to go through this sometimes impossible rigor of paperwork and appointments and all of this bureaucracy to prove that they served with honor and that they are people of integrity, that everything, all of the documents that they have provided over and over and over again are actually real and true.

There is no embassy in Kabul anymore to process this visa paperwork, yet they are still getting emails saying ‘No, you’ve been rejected. See our previous email. You will have to process in another country.’ But, as you just pointed out, the borders are effectively locked down, and we don’t know how to move them through. We don’t know how to get them through to Tajikistan, to Uzbekistan, through to Pakistan, to places where they can process all of this paperwork. The P2 visa process that was opened up for lives in danger, it has to be proved with extremely rigorous paperwork and processing and, again, there’s nobody on ground to do the visa processing, and people are running for their lives.

They are having to move safe houses every few hours because the Taliban keep finding them, pounding on doors, messaging them saying, ‘We know who you are, we know where you are and we’re going to kill you.’ They can’t move through Taliban checkpoints without fear of being dragged out and beaten and murdered or their children being harmed. People are locked in. They are terrified and we are doing the best that we can to say ‘We are not giving up hope. Do not give up hope. We are not abandoning you. We, the allies you worked with, the veterans who served side by side with you. We wore the same uniform. We shared meals. We worked together. You all enabled us to do our mission in Afghanistan. We are committed to not leaving you behind.

Rouse mentioned that her interpreter, whom she said she worked with for more than 10 years, has been facing “barriers in this visa process.”

“This man served honorably. I depended on him. I know him. He is a friend,” she said. “He deserves to be out just like so many thousands of others deserve to get to a safe place and to not be murdered. He told me just this morning, he said, he said, ‘We are killed mentally. We are killed mentally.’”

“This is emotional for you,” remarked host Hallie Jackson.

“Yes,” said Rouse.

Rouse said that her former interpreter told her that he “will keep trying to my last breath.”

“The least that I and these countless other veterans, the Association of Wartime Allies, all of these folks doing good work to stay with our allies, to find any way that we can out, we will also try to our last breath or ‘til theirs,” she said.

“They’re being hunted. We are in a race against time,” continued Rouse. “We need our government to act, to make arrangements for safe border passage, to put pressure on Taliban to stop the murders of our allies and friends, to stop the targeting, to allow them safe passage, to allow clearance for flights at other airfields that have been planned and shut down. We need to see ways out, and those of us, I’m operating from my apartment in Brooklyn. I only have so much power. We need our government to make ways for people to get out. It’s possible.”

Rouse added that she doesn’t see signs of such activity happening and called on the State Department to contact Association of Wartime Allies, which has helped evacuate Afghan nationals that helped the United States in Afghanistan who are now at risk of being killed by the Taliban.

She said she worked “for 10 days” to try to get her “interpreter and many others just into the airport, and they were not able to get into the airport [in Kabul].”

“They were in all measures of danger and so many of them just were never able to get in the walls, despite our best efforts to push, pull, communicate, anything that we could do to find a way to get them inside but it’s because the flights were not prioritizing them,” said Rouse. “If you’re an Afghan national and, G-d forbid, you had troubles with your visa process, you have been left behind, and your family, and your children, and everyone you’re related to.”

“Families of U.S. citizens, that’s, those are some folks on our list,” she continued. “A U.S. citizen has been trying to get his family out, who are in danger because of his service to the United States. They are being hunted down, and he cannot get them out.”

Watch above, via MSNBC.