Shafo Sahil and Matt Waters on The Bond of the Battlefield

Story in the Public Square

Soldiers know what it means to keep the faith—a character trait valued in others given the grim realities of fighting on distant battlefields. Shafo Sahil and Matt Waters know the bond borne of shared battlefield experience and can help us understand what recent Hollywood portrayals got right and what they got wrong.

Shafo Sahil was an interpreter who was assigned to work as a Special Forces interpreter and completed over 100 missions in Afghanistan, including one where he saved for Matt Waters’ team from an IED. Sahil grew up in rural Kabul and was a good student who dreamed of going to college but sought work as an English teacher to help support his family after high school. After the Taliban tried to bomb his school, he decided to work as an interpreter to help defend his country from insurgents. As the U.S. prepared to withdraw from Afghanistan, they laid off interpreters and Sahil went back to work as a teacher. The Taliban started sending him death threats, and he went into hiding when they began searching for him at his home. He applied for a United States special immigration visa but was denied. When the Taliban overran Kabul, Waters and his team helped Sahil, his pregnant wife, and two kids get into Kabul airport and onto a military evacuation flight to the U.S. Sahil, his wife, and three kids now live in New Jersey at Waters’ parents’ home. Sahil now works as an IT Support Technician at Pfizer and is planning to purchase his first home in the United States.

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