Al Buford Transcript
Clint Betts
Al Buford, so honored to have you on the show today. You are doing some incredible work in the world and because of that we thought we should have you on. You're building a company called Patriot Group International. You're the president, you're a board member of that company, but you have lived an amazing life, my friend. I think to start, it'd be interesting just to know your background and what brought you to what you're working on today.
Al Buford
Right out of high school, I went into the Army and I went to Second Ranger Battalion in the Ranger Regiment. That was my foundation for everything that occurred afterward. I had really good leaders. I won the leadership lottery when I showed up in my platoon. I had great Team Leader and Squad Leader and Platoon Sergeant and they just received me very much as a valued member of the team right off the bat. And it was all about focusing on the mission and all about treating each other with respect. As long as you pulled your weight, they were going to support you and help you succeed. And those who couldn't keep up or broke all the hard and fast rules, those folks got invited to excel elsewhere. And so—
Clint Betts
I like the way you said that.
Al Buford
Yeah, that was my foundation. And then from there I went to Special Mission Unit Selection Process and served there for a number of years and then went back to the Ranger Regiment to do my Platoon Sergeant time, this time to Third Battalion at Fort Benning, where I met my current business partner, Greg Craddock, our CEO, and he was a good Ranger buddy of mine there. Then I went back eventually to my same Special Mission Unit, he went off to work for the government in various capacities. After that, I went to a First Ranger Battalion to be a First Sergeant and taught ROTC at Central Washington University. Finished a master's degree in organization development and got out of the army. Retired with 20 years in 2003 and got right into business with a startup company, Triple Canopy that grew really fast and I was-—
Clint Betts
Boy, I'll say it grew fast.
Al Buford
Yeah, I was the first employee hired by the founders, one of whom was a friend of mine from my Special Mission Unit. And so it went from zero to a $100 million in the first year and I think it was about $450 million after about four or five years. And then from there we decided to go into business with Patriot Group with Greg Craddock as our CEO and Rob Woodfield our COO, who's a former Marine scout sniper and worked within the government organizations as well, doing mission support overseas and just a really brilliant guy. All former enlisted guys from the military.
Greg eventually got his MBA from Liberty and Rob is one of the most active learning, self-educated people I've ever met in my life. He's brilliant and really, really good at his job. And so we've been together since August of '09 in business with Patriot Group, starting with zero in revenue and zero in employees. And now we're around $60 million in gross revenue growing very fast and we have probably around 400 people and we expect we could double in the coming couple of years.
It's going really well. It's all about mission, focus, and respect, trying to recreate some of the best teams that any of us had ever been on in the military, for example, in the contractor space. And it's through leadership and caring and focusing on the mission that we accomplished that.
Clint Betts
What motivated you to become a Ranger?
Al Buford
I played Army as a kid. Nobody in my family really had a military background or anything. I'd been in the Boy Scouts, we didn't really have any money growing up. That was one of those things where college was not something anybody in my family ever talked about. And so it was a way to go and be on my own. Going in the army, being on my own, and having a place to live, having a paycheck, having healthcare, and learning and growing. And they provided a great system to become something. And I mean even public speaking, I learned that in the Ranger Regiment. Leadership—
Clint Betts
Is that right? I imagine you've learned so much about leadership in those circles and it being a Ranger. And is it the regimen-tality of it? That's probably not even a word, but what is it about it that just spins off these incredible leaders? It just has such an incredible track record, the military does, of doing this and in particularly these advanced forces like an Army Ranger, which is no small thing. What is it really about that, for those of us who have never even been in there? I would be throwing up within an hour and I'd be one of those people you invited to excel elsewhere, as you said. So what is it about it that spawns such great leaders?
Al Buford
I think the idea that you're serving something bigger than yourself, the mission, the country drives people to give a lot more to that kind of a job and career than they would if they were working at FedEx or any other just regular job. And as a kid, I didn't have a lot of mentoring as it relates to sports. For example, I did little track and cross country and stuff like that, but it was all individual type things. I didn't have the skills to play basketball or baseball or football or anything like that. I tried a few of those things and I was terrible at it and I thought somehow I was a little bit defective as it related to those kinds of things. But then when I got in the Army, I went to Infantry training and we all went through the same training path and then we got evaluated on these combat skills. I saw my scores posted and I did very well relative to my peers. And I thought, "Oh, okay." I had a bit of an epiphany. “I'm not defective, I just needed the same coaching everybody else had.”
It's a system that grows. It is a machine that has developed and grown leaders, and you're taught as a leader, and every exercise, every training exercise you have thrown into that equation, a leader who is taken out of play, injure, fake, real, whatever, and somebody else has to step up and be the leader. You're a machine gunner, now you're going to go be a squad leader or a team leader or whatever. You're a team leader now you're going to be a squad leader, you're a squad leader now you're going to be a Platoon Sergeant because in the moment they continually develop subordinate leaders and people to step in and step up at a moment's notice. And it's an ongoing developmental process, it's a part of the culture. And specifically within the Ranger Regiment, they are probably better than as good as or better than anybody in the military at documenting their processes and procedures, measuring them and continually improving them over time. They're very much a learning organization.
Clint Betts
You said something about what makes it so great. One of the aspects that makes it so great is you're about something bigger than yourself. And it does feel like the best leaders, the best organizations, the best whatever, the best movements come about when you're about something bigger than yourself. And to have that instilled in you, and I can't even imagine what it would be like in the military. Because I always hear my and my grandpa, great grandpa, everybody was in the military, they would always tell stories. My brother was in the military for a little bit. And it's always like, "Yeah, we're there for the country, we're there for the flag." All of that type of stuff is true. But more than anything, you're there for the people right next to you. You're there for your brothers in the fox hole with you for lack of better words. And doesn't it seem like you forge something pretty special in those moments that just, look at, you started a company with one of your brothers. It just feels like something special comes out of that.
Al Buford
Absolutely. It's one of those things where the brotherhood, the bond, the tribe, tribes a great word for it because tribes depend on each other for their very survival in primitive times. Well, in modern day, your tribe, regardless of what shirt they're wearing, what organization they work for, the guys and gals help each other with their next job, with their next promotion, with their mentoring and coaching and counseling and resumes and all these things that it takes to survive in the modern world. It's very much a tribe. And so when you have dumped gallons of sweat onto Fort Benning and blood in some cases overseas with your teammates, and then you come back to this civilian world and it's about economics and jobs and opportunities and teamwork to achieve whatever the business objectives are and customers' objectives, you can rely on that.
And if my car breaks down anywhere, I know I can call somebody and they'll come from, and I could be in a state where I haven't talked to this guy for 10 years, but we served in the same unit together and I go, "Hey man, my car broke down." "Dude, I will be there." And it's just that it's strong of a bond that you can call in a favor from somebody you haven't talked to for 15 years. And it's amazing. It's a powerful thing and I feel very honored to have left that life with a reputation intact enough to be able to call on my friends and to be able to help them as well.
Clint Betts
Does the civilian world feel almost small compared to being an Army Ranger for as long as you were and being in the military and all that type of stuff? Does it feel small?
Al Buford
Well, it might for me if I had gotten out and gone into a normal job where I couldn't relate to any of the people because the worst thing that happened to them in their life was they messed up their order at Starbucks or something.
Clint Betts
Right.
Al Buford
But I went to what I kind of refer to as the halfway house. I went into the defense contractor space where a lot of the same people that I worked with in the military are in some of these companies. And so I didn't really have to leave the tribe at all. And for my livelihood and for my sense of belonging, I'll give you a sense of how strong this is. There was a former Marine who was working with a contractor company doing protective operations overseas. He was on the Karzai Detail when DynCorp had that contract and I was recruiting him to come and work with the first company that I was involved with, Triple Canopy.
And I saw on his resume that prior to him being on the Karzai Detail, he had been a 747 pilot for seven years accident free. And I asked him, I said, "Why did you leave being a 747 pilot to go be on the Karzai Detail?" And he said, "I really missed being a part of a team." It was that profound for him that he gave up a career as an airline pilot. He was at the pinnacle flying the biggest planes for the biggest airline and had an accident free record. He was doing a great job, but he really, at a primal level, he missed being a part of the brotherhood. He missed being on a team and being focused on something bigger than himself.
Clint Betts
So what does Patriot Group International, what do you guys focus on? It's been incredible, the growth as you mentioned a little bit earlier. But yeah, tell us about Patriot Group International. I think it's fascinating.
Al Buford
Well, we provide mission support services, and I'll describe that in a minute, primarily for government customers. But our commercial side of the business is picking up in a pretty big way too on a large scale. And so it's essentially, a lot of it is security, physical security and access control with a lot of the former military combat arms type guys, Rangers, Marines, Special Forces guys, some SEALs, Infantry types. And then we have pre-deployment preparation training for some specialized organizations, combat skills, medical skills, things like that. And we have a range support contract for the Marine Corps.
We have access, we have construction surveillance technicians where they're building facilities that require specialized kinds of people to monitor and make sure that listening devices aren't getting planted in the concrete and things like that. It's a really broad range of things. Ultimately it comes down to attracting and employing and supervising and retaining really good talent on specialized government requirements. And it really wouldn't matter if it was building a surgical clinic overseas and running that, it's the same thing. It's project management and it's leadership and it's finding the right talent.
Clint Betts
And then you went on an incredible mission where you, or something, where you've been working with these two girls from Afghanistan. How did this come about?
Al Buford
I was in my house and I got a phone call from my friend Geno Garsha in Arizona. His interpreter in Afghanistan when he was over there as a contractor, was trying to get into the airport in Kabul after the Taliban had taken over. And we're trying to basically figure out how to help him maneuver himself and his family through the streets of Kabul and not get rolled up by the Taliban and get pulled into the airport somehow in these throngs of thousands of people who are all a target of some kind. And eventually, the bombs blew up and all that. And so we were able to do that. We were able to coach him how to recon the route at night and by himself and then eventually get his family into the vicinity of the airport into a holding area that we coordinated. And then we had somebody inside the airport, a friend of a friend in our tribe.
Instead of going where the crowds were and standing in line and waiting to try to get pulled in by some military guy, we had a guy who team crawled out of a culvert pipe on the back side of the airport and drug them in through the water into the airport and then eventually got them on a manifest and got them into Abu Dhabi at the refugee camp and now they're here in the U.S. And that's how it started. And then it was we'd done some work, our company has done some work for Mercury One, Glenn Beck's organization and the Nazarene Fund. They often help Christians and often many other people escape persecution. And so the Yazidis, a few years back, we helped support that project where we ran an evacuation operation with foreign airplanes and pilots and coordinating the airspace and all this to get in and get those folks evacuated to some European country. I can't remember where, but it was hundreds of them.
And Glenn Beck's organization paid for all of that. Well, they called on us to help them again with some of the Afghan stuff. And part of this commercial task force of volunteers that they were working out of the Willard Hotel in DC, they asked, "Can you send some folks to coordinate in Macedonian for planes of refugees to be able to land there and refuel and figure out where they're going next, be prepared to feed them and all that.” And so that's why I was in Macedonia and I had a team of people there, including Geno Garsha, my friend from Arizona, a guy named Chris Sims who is a former Special Forces guy. He owns a glass company near Atlanta. Blaine Boyer, former professional baseball player who was with an NGO, now E3 Ranch Foundation, and Chris Schmid, former Special Forces Officer friend of mine.
We were all there along with a lady who's an Afghan American named Soraya, she was our interpreter. And all of this came together where we're there waiting to receive these airplanes, which we end up not being able to coordinate because nobody would cooperate between governments and all that. And when all that's happening, this young girl, Asma, is stuck outside the gates of the Kabul Airport with seven buses, 150 school girls that were from the Asian School for women. They had been going to school in Bangladesh, but Covid happened and they got sent back to Afghanistan and then the Taliban happened. And so her sister Osida is 24, she was in Nebraska finishing her MBA in international banking and finance. And she called everybody in the government that she could possibly call to try to get some help for her family. And meanwhile, her sister is stuck outside the gates of the Kabul Airport with these girls.
And they tried five times to get in and couldn't, The Taliban kept beating up the drivers and turning them around and all this. Well, this time was different. It was one o'clock in the morning and they were between rings of Taliban, in front of a Taliban, essentially a building that had become a barracks for them. And they were starting to clear out the civilians. And she had this real ominous feeling that something really bad's about to happen to all these girls because it's one o'clock in the morning and they're clearing out all the witnesses and they're not letting them move forward to go into the airport. And I believe those buses have been coordinated by the Asian School for Women. Kudos to them for doing that for those girls. And it just got stuck, they just couldn't get in. They couldn't make it happen. And so Osida in Nebraska is doing everything she can. She's working like 23 hours a day just driving herself crazy trying to make something happen for her sister. And her sister Asma sends her a text, "I think this is about to get real bad if you don't hear from me again, I'm telling you what's happened."
And the Taliban had warned them not to communicate, not to use their phones, not to take pictures and all that. She was taking some risk, even communicating. Osida had purchased a LinkedIn premium subscription, facial recognition software, and she was scanning images of all of these military, Americans that her father had worked with in the Afghan National Army, he was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Infantry. And he'd spent 17 years working with the U.S. Forces. And so she found some Americans that had worked with her dad. She actually got in touch with him and one of them—
Clint Betts
Through LinkedIn?
Al Buford
Through LinkedIn, yeah.
Clint Betts
Oh wow.
Al Buford
Through the scanning of the facial images and sending cold messages and all that. Well, one of those guys was a Special Forces Officer named Marcus Ruzek, and he was good friends with Chris Sims, the Special Forces guy that was in our team. He gets Osida in touch with Chris and they end up communicating about this and how to get their family out. And so they started with Asma and we got her information about, he would drop a map pin. This was Chris and Gino and the guys in the car there coordinating with Asma and Soraya was helping. And so they got a map pin. She took pictures without a flash and communicated a lot of the information about what was happening. And Chris and his team passed that information up to somebody they knew, a friend of a friend that knew somebody in the Pentagon.
And they got that information to the commander on the airfield there, the U.S. Commander of the 82nd. And eventually they coordinated with the Taliban to get those seven buses of girls into the airport. But three of those girls have been taken by the Taliban and everybody's high fiving, all the girls are high fiving, they're all happy that they got in. But Asma is losing it because three of those girls were in the Taliban hands. And so she's running around talking to every Army person she can find to explain to them what needs to happen next. These girls need to get brought in and nobody would really take action.
And so she ends up getting this Captain at the gate on the phone with Chris, our Special Forces guy who's on our team, a former SF guy. And Chris is kind of explaining to him the whole situation. He says, "Look, I've got to hear from the chain of command before I can do anything." And so we do the same thing. They communicate with the Pentagon and the Commander, and the same thing happens. They get these three girls in. And so planes, trains, and automobiles. These 150 girls are in the U.S. days later after going to several bases and getting their biometrics done like seven times and Covid vaccines and testing and all this, and they bring them to the U.S. Asma was the only one who was destined for Canada because she had a visa to go to Canada to study. She had been accepted to a college there, but the Taliban messed up the timeline and her college had already started, the money that her dad had saved, her mom had saved for her college was in Taliban hands. So she was stuck.
She was in the Holiday Inn up by the Dulles Airport. And when I figured this out, I told my wife, I said, "Hey babe, let's go talk to this girl and see if we can help her." And so we took her to get a new phone and some clothes and food and all this. And over a period of days we began to develop a little rapport with her. And she was within 12 hours of being on a plane to go to Canada, but there was nothing there for her. She was just going to go into a camp and then probably have to get some manual labor job somewhere because she had nothing there. And so we offered to host her and she was very scared, of all that she had been through, the anxiety and the fear and the post traumatic stress. She had all that and she just wanted to be safe more than anything.
And she said, "Well, if my sister could come then I would feel safe." And so we invited her sister Osida from Nebraska to come from Nebraska and be with her. And we picked her up at the airport at Dulles and we went and wrestled Asma away from IOM, this UN entity that handles moving refugees and they have legitimate concerns about human trafficking and all this. And so I had to give them all of my identification and tell them who I was and how I knew her, where we lived and you can come and inspect or whatever just to make it above board. And so I went through that whole process to legally get her released and they got some State Department authorization and we did that. They've been with us for a year. Asma applied to a lot of colleges, and now she's in Virginia Tech studying.
Graciously Mercury One, Glenn Beck’s organization paid for all of her dental care. She had never been to a dentist in her life and they paid 12 visits, Smiles for Centerville in Centerville, Virginia. And they were just wonderful taking care of her root canal and bolting in a new tooth, the whole thing. And they did it all. And same for Osida, Mercury One was just great about that. And then they also, Mercury One, did interviews with both of them. Glen Beck interviewed them and they did a fundraiser for her and they paid for Asma's first semester at Virginia Tech.
Clint Betts
Wow.
Al Buford
And so she's there right now studying Computer Science. We have a GoFundMe to help try to raise more money to keep her in. She's on out of state tuition, which is incredibly expensive. It's like $55 or $60,000 a year with out of state. But the rules just changed in August so that she should now be able to get in-state tuition. And so she's appealing that process.
She should have all the rights and privileges of a refugee. She's here as a parolee and so she should, under the new laws in August, be able to get in-state tuition based on that Parole Equals Refugee Status. We're pushing that. She's got a rebuttal reply letter that she's submitting and we're getting it reviewed by a legal team here. Raising money, her GoFundMe, go to GoFundMe and look up Asma, A-S-M-A Piageer, P-A-I-G-E-E-R. And that brave young girl who risked everything to help get herself and her friends into that airport, she did all that risk, took all that risk and stepped up to the plate. And now she's here in the deep end of the pool swimming, trying to get through college. And I told her, "Look, you just jump in and start swimming and we're all just going to chip in and figure the money thing out." And that's what we're doing.
Clint Betts
Well, my goodness, kudos to you and your wife for what you've done there. What has the past year been like with these two girls?
Al Buford
They're amazing. Her sister Osida, the one with the MBA in international banking and finance, she's been studying for eight months for the Project Management Exam.
She has experience in financial analysis in Dubai and Singapore. We've got her set up on some job interviews, things like that. She finally got her work permit and so we're working on getting that set up. And she's got her driver's training and she'll have her driver's license here in a couple of weeks. And so in all of that, their parents were still stuck in Afghanistan along with their 13 year old little brother.
And again, E3 Ranch Foundation helped a lot with the initial expenses and with the team that we had in Macedonia, Blaine Boyer and Adam LaRoche, former pro baseball player for the Nationals, and then Mercury One. Mercury One evacuated their dad and mom and little brother up to Mazar-i Sharif in the north where they had airplanes, cycling through NGO planes to get people out. And they were stuck for a long time on the news. You could see 5, 6, 7, 8 planes sitting on the tarmac and the Taliban wasn't letting them leave.
And so we had all these people in safe houses. And so Mercury One had their parents in a safe house for months up there. Eventually we're able to get them on a plane and get them to Abu Dhabi to this refugee camp that was there. Oh, after about seven or eight months of being in that refugee camp, they eventually were able to get their parents to land right here at the Dulles Airport. They were in a processing facility and then they were ended up in Philadelphia with the Catholic Charities, because that's where they had some opening space for them to be temporarily housed. And so little brother’s in school and he's a big gamer and when they evacuated Kabul, he put his gaming stuff in his backpack and their mom came in, she saw it. She's like, "We can't take that. We have to run. We can't. That's too heavy." And he just cried. He just cried.
And so when he got to the refugee camp in Abu Dhabi, I asked my son, Matthew, who's a gamer, I said, "What can I send this guy?" And he said, "Send him a Switch." I think it's a Nintendo Switch gaming thing, so we had that delivered to him pretty quickly so he could get back into some gaming in some sense of normalcy. And then when he got to Philadelphia, my son had built him a full on gaming computer with a big monitor and all the headset and all the gamer stuff. And Asma had worked the summer job at the local pool and she had saved up some money. She bought him the card that he can go online and register for the streaming games and all that.
He was on a cloud and he just started school. He tested and did well and his English proficiencies were great. And so they're hanging there and Asma is in Virginia Tech. Osida is here. Once she gets a job and gets settled, then her mom and dad and little brother are going to come and live with her. And her dad will do whatever job he can do here. He'll be an Uber driver or a security guard or whatever he can get. It's a crazy story, the whole thing. Even this guy that runs the Afghan Kabab in Gainesville, I've been going there for 14 years and I took the girls there to meet him and speak Persian and Dari and all this and talk to them. And it turns out when I showed him a picture of the family reunion in Philadelphia, it still blows my mind. Their father was his commander when they fought the Russians.
Clint Betts
You're kidding.
Al Buford
He's his best friend, still communicates with him every single day, was at the parents' wedding. I still can't comprehend all this. It's his best friend and still is and they still talk every day on the phone.
Clint Betts
My word.
Al Buford
My jaw hit the floor and I learned this four days ago. So this story—
Clint Betts
That's unbelievable.
Al Buford
Yeah, man, it's crazy.
Clint Betts
Oh my gosh. A couple things there, and I know this isn't a political show or anything like that, but man, that's a crazy—that Afghanistan thing and the way that was handled and the way, I can't even believe that. Can you talk about that? Do you have any take on that? How do we end up like that? We're at war there for 20 years and that's the way we leave. That's quite—
Al Buford
Yeah. All I can tell you is that each of us as a citizen, we elect the leaders in our country who have real power. Everybody in our country that has real power, aside from the really wealthy people who have a lot of economic power and can influence things, the Legislative power, the Executive power, the Judicial, it's elected. They're all elected and so when the old saying elections have consequences, well they sure do. And so all I say to all of that is, if you care at all, go vote.
Clint Betts
Right.
Al Buford
Go vote for people who support the policies that you think are the right policies.
Clint Betts
And I imagine people when they hear the name Glenn Beck, it conjures something in them either a deep kind of love for the guy or a deep kind of hatred for the guy or whatever it is. Again, the political world, I can't imagine what that guy goes through every day just as a human being with a family and kids in the arena constantly kind of taking the proverbial bullets. But man, you got to admire someone who through Mercury One, through The Nazarene Fund, does something like this. Look at the difference, forget the Glenn Beck you think you know through the radio or TV shows or his stint on Fox News or any of that. Look what this guy did. That's being about something in the world in a good political show. But my goodness, how many lives did he save—
Al Buford
Well, and when we talk about racism, so in Afghanistan, the Pashtuns are the majority and physically they are of Arabic descent. So they look like Arabic people and all the minorities, Hazaras, for example, Asma and Osida, their whole family, their Hazara, they're, they look Asian and they look like the descendants of Genghis Khan, which they probably are. And so last time the Taliban took over in Afghanistan, they waged a genocide on Hazara villages. And under the Karzai administration, for example, even with peace and stability with U.S. forces and international forces, there was a power line coming from Uzbekistan into Kabul and between them was a Hazara village. They routed that power line intentionally 50 miles around that village to not put power in that village on its way to Kabul. So when we talk about racism and persecution and things like that, its genocide and the extreme and Asma's the top of her class but she can't go to the university in Kabul because she's not Pashtun.
Clint Betts
My word. That's crazy.
Al Buford
Then that's why she went to school in Bangladesh because she couldn't go to school in her own country because she was of the wrong ethnicity. You could talk all you want about microaggressions or whatever's wounding people's inner child here on college campuses in our country. When she talks about women's rights, she means women being able to leave their home unescorted by a male and without their face covered and to be able to drive a car and to be able to hold a job. Her sister Osida, personally since she's been in my house, evacuated two Hazara Christian families. These were women led families because both husbands had been killed by the Taliban for working with U.S. forces driving fuel trucks and stuff like that.
The Taliban would not let them work, kicked them out of their apartment and they each had five kids in one case, six kids in the other, mostly girls who would eventually become Taliban brides or sexual slaves or whatever. And they got ran out of their apartment at midnight on a Friday night and they came down the stairs crying. And so we immediately went into action getting them into a safe house and eventually getting them evacuated across a land gate called the Torkham Gate into Pakistan. Osida coordinated all that. She is like an operations manager, she's just brilliant.
Clint Betts
That's unbelievable.
Al Buford
And she did all the problem solving with all the visas and transportation and coordination and all that. And in some cases we had raised some money through friends, we raised money to help support them in Pakistan in a safe house. One of those two families made it to France. Kids are in school and everything. They had some family relationship there. The other one is still in Pakistan and we are working on getting them to, right now we're working on Brazil because they've got a big Christian immigration program there to host. And so we've got about 20,000 raised through a benefactor, a donor out in Arizona through Jess Larson who you know. Jess does a fundraiser down there and so I go out and support that every year. It's a shooting thing. And so one of those guys donated money for it. And so we think we're going to get this other family into the Brazil embassy in Pakistan for visas in early November and then get them down to Brazil, so that's what we're working on with them.
And there's no such thing as one Afghan, it's like their brother and their cousins and their sister. And there's always more and there's always more and there's always more. And we're doing as much as we can for as many as we can, but at some point you have to make a choice with limited resources and what you're going to do. And so we focused on those that are most vulnerable. And with Glenn Beck, Christians in a country ruled by the Taliban are very vulnerable. And that's why it was so important that they try to get as many of them out of there as fast as possible.
Clint Betts
And you said something that caught my ear there, you got to make some decisions based on the resources you have. And to me it's just fascinating that how is this private citizens making these decisions?
Al Buford
Well, governments move at the speed of pond water and civilians and former Special Operations folks—
Clint Betts
They can—
Al Buford
They move at the speed that the mission requires.
Clint Betts
Yeah.
Al Buford
And so that's really the difference and that's what it comes down to. And I got to tell you, the old saying where there's a will, there's a way, it's not a hostage rescue mission to take a person from Afghanistan and get them into Pakistan. It is an immigration and a transportation and a logistics issue. You want to do it legally. You want to have visas because if you just stick somebody in another country because you snuck them across the border, you're not helping them. You're just getting them in legal trouble and you're getting them stuck. So you got to do it all legally. And if you do that, then they get to a place where they have a status and they can work and they can go to school and they can have a life. But if you sneak them into some place, well now they're just illegal and they have to run in this shadow economy and all that.
It's not helpful to just drag them across the border like some folks have done, but the folks who are doing it right, I think are trying to find all the legal pathways to do it. And Osida is really brilliant at figuring all that out.
Clint Betts
And now you've touched on this a bit, but I'd love to revisit it just for a second around this idea of you didn't have to do any of this, everything you've just described for the past 15 minutes, you did not have to do any of it. What motivated you to do it?
Al Buford
It comes down to somebody asking for help. And for me it's just a matter of some phone calls and some texting and connecting of dots and leveraging my network and how can I say no when I'm sitting in the comfort of my home here in Virginia, having worked for many years and been successful in business and I have a network of friends who have all these capabilities, I found a hard time saying no to people who are asking for help, for their lives. And so we were with Asma in helping her buy some clothing in a Target in Northern Virginia and she's in the dressing room and she wanted my wife to stand by the door the whole time she was in the dressing room because she had these fears of being abandoned and all this. And we could just tell the mental trauma.
And so after a couple of days of these kinds of things, my wife said, "I just want to scoop her up and help her." And I said, "I'm just dying for you to say that I didn't want to drag you down a path that you didn't want to go, but God, she needs the help." And we're in a position, it's not going to hurt my kids one bit from a resource perspective to have another person living in our house just in terms of food to eat and heat and water and the things that you need to get through a day. We have plenty of that and it's not going to hurt my kids for somebody else to be joining in. And so—
Clint Betts
I imagine your kids feel blessed by it, even.
Al Buford
Yeah. Well, Asma and Osida, my son had just gone away to college. He's studying cyber security at Randolph-Macon here in Virginia, and he had just gone away to college. And I said, "Look, we could put you in this room, we have in the basement. It's a finished basement, but you'll be down there by yourself. It's kind of a mother-in-law suite kind of thing, but I think you're going to feel better up with the family. And so Matthew's room is empty." And they're like, "No, no, no, no, no, we can't stay in his room because we haven't asked him." I said, "Look, I'll ask him if that's what you want." I got about a third of the way through the sentence and he said, "It's fine, dad, I'm good with it. Go ahead." And so they've stayed in Matthew’s room the whole time until Asma went off to college and now Osida is there by herself.
Clint Betts
You look at the current state of the country and the news is unwatchable because it feels like the world's on fire and we're on the verge of something pretty terrible in terms of the divisions and things. How do you think we get more of the Buford family spirit into this nation?
Al Buford
Man, I think it takes shared hardship to bring people together and not that this is something I would ever want to happen again, but if you look at what happened the week or two or three after 9/11. How many American flags were on the front of houses around this country for the few weeks right after 9/11? And I can remember telling my wife, at the time I was still active duty military teaching ROTC on a college campus. And I said, "You see all this?" And she said, "Yeah." I said, "It's fair weather patriotism and it's not going to last. It'll go on for a couple of months and then people are going to go back to their divisions." And you're also going to see when we send our young people off to war and they come back either in body bags or missing limbs or with traumatic brain injuries, you're going to see political leaders lose their will when that starts happening and the optics and what it does to the perception of their administration and things like that.
And so, I don't know if that answers your question, but some sort of shared goal, some sort of shared objective that people can rally around together, but without some common objective it's kind of hard. And with social media the way it is, the algorithms are set up to inflame, they magnify the negative. And so with that being the primary mode of communication and with news, whatever's the most negative, gets the best ratings. Man, I don't know how you fix all that.
Everybody out there, almost everybody, can see somebody around them that needs a little bit of help. And it doesn't matter what your political leaning is. Nobody likes homelessness. Nobody likes mentally ill people not receiving treatment. Nobody likes to see people laying on the sidewalk loaded up with drugs and malnourished and all that and at risk every day of some sort of assault. And so, almost all of us have somebody around us that we can help. And so I would just say that being a good citizen to those around you, even if you can't agree about politics, we can all help our neighbor. We can all help those around us that need our help.
Clint Betts
Yeah, it does get mocked sometimes when people say, "Start with yourself first. Make your bed in the morning. Start there before you try to solve all the world's problems." And if you just branch that out, even just a little bit, this idea of help your neighbor, help your community, help your city, then it does feel like we get that shared sense of community and responsibility toward each other back. I think that's beautiful. Al, thank you so much for coming on. We've got to have you back on, no question. What you're building with the Patriot Group is unbelievable. What you've done for these Afghanistan girls is unbelievable. You've lived an amazing life, my friend.
Al Buford
Well, thank you so much, Clint. I appreciate the opportunity and I would like my final ask one more time, if you go to GoFundMe and type in Asma, A-S-M-A Paigeer, P-A-I-G-E-E-R, that's the GoFundMe site to help with her college education. Her intent is to study computer science and finance and financial technology. She, after the Taliban eventually leaves and they will, they only last four or five, six years at a time whenever they take over. At some point she wants to put a financial system in place in Afghanistan that is something modern, potentially digitally based because the Hawala, the eighth century Hawala system that is corrupt and supports human trafficking and terrorism and tax evasion, that's sort at the root of the Taliban's power is the ability to have this financial system in place that supports their mechanism and drug trafficking and all that. She wants to put a better system in place there.
And she's got a big vision, something much bigger than herself. And so supporting her education is much bigger than just this 19-year-old girl going to college. She's got a big dream here as it relates to her country and making it better in the future.
Clint Betts
That's unbelievable. We'll make sure to put the link in the description notes and all that type of stuff for the show. Al, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. We'll talk again soon.
Al Buford
Thanks, Clint. My pleasure. Take care.