Marine vet describes Afghan interpreter's plight: 'It's an absolute nightmare'

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NB and his wife safely made it to the U.S. on Sunday, Taylor told Fox News.

Marine veteran Corporal Caleb Taylor was candid about the "nightmare" plight of his former interpreter who is stuck in Afghanistan as the Taliban have taken control of the country, as well as how the U.S. got caught "flat-footed" while withdrawing U.S. troops.

"Let’s be honest, the Taliban couldn’t care less if you were terminated or not," Taylor told Fox News. "You worked with the Americans. They’re going to kill you."

Taylor, who served with the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, has been working to get his friend and interpreter, whom he called "NB," out of Afghanistan along with his wife and child.

The two worked together in Sangin, Afghanistan in Spring 2011. NB, he recalled, was "instrumental" in helping soldiers communicate with the local population and allowed them to set up an intelligence network that enabled them to locate and dispose of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Sangin was "littered" with IEDs at the time, he said.

NB and 1st Squad, Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines prior to a patrol in Sangin. Spring/Summer of 2011. (Instagram)

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After his unit left, NB stayed on with the next Marine unit, before moving on to Kandahar with an Army unit, Taylor explained. He applied for a special immigrant visa in 2015 but was rejected, Taylor said, because he was terminated from one of his contracts after too long a leave. Then, he was fired "because they hired more interpreters than they needed so they gave him the boot."

But Taylor, who now works at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said it doesn’t matter to the Taliban that NB was terminated. 

Cpl. Caleb Taylor and 'NB' inside a compound while on patrol in Sangin, Afghanistan. Spring/Summer of 2011. (Instagram)

Taylor said he's reached out to members of Congress in an appeal to get NB an SIV. 

"It’s an absolute nightmare," he said. "It’s the most stressful thing I’ve ever been a part of in my life. It’s incredibly upsetting. I would rather do a deployment to Afghanistan again than to go through this, and I’m not the one doing it."

Taylor went on to marvel that high-level Afghan government figures have found passage out of the country, but many interpreters remain in limbo.

"These people are going to be murdered," he said. 

Asked to respond to the exodus of U.S. troops that led to a Taliban takeover of the country, Taylor said it was a "misunderstanding" of how quickly the Afghan security forces would collapse. 

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"Anyone with any nominal notion of the realities on the ground knows the government of Afghanistan is not/was not a well-functioning state and could not support their armed forces," Taylor said. "We built up an entire army based on the way that we do things, but Afghanistan does not have the means to support a military like America’s."

"There will be a time to debrief this to the fullest extent," he continued. "But suffice it to say, we didn’t read the tea leaves. We didn’t pick up what was being put down." 

Taylor reacted somberly to Thursday's tragic news that at least 13 U.S. service members had been killed in a suicide bombing outside the Kabul airport.

"Losing Marines is something that cuts to the core of anyone who understands what it’s like," Taylor said. "I wish I had better words to fully explain how I feel, but I am absolutely crushed by the news." 

The evacuation effort, he said, should have started months ago, adding he would have liked to have seen more airports open and more troops on the ground.

The veteran reiterated the heroics of the troops still working to evacuate Americans from Kabul.

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"The Marines on the ground are the last refuge for so many of these people fleeing exactly what took place outside the airport today," Taylor said. "And they’ve been doing it for a over a week, 24/7. Those men and women are heroes, nothing short of it. They are the epitome of Semper Fidelis."