Major Joshua Mast, a U.S. Marine Corps officer, gained attention for his efforts to adopt an Afghan war orphan. Mast initiated adoption proceedings for a baby girl found on an Afghan battlefield in 2019. His actions, motivated by a desire to ensure the child's safety, led to a complex legal battle involving the Department of Justice and the State Department. In October 2024, a military board substantiated misconduct allegations against Mast but declined to separate him from service. The board found that while Mast acted in a way “unbecoming an officer”, his actions did not warrant dismissal from the Marine Corps. Mast, now 41 and living in Hampstead, North Carolina with his wife Stephanie, continues to advocate for the child's well-being. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: http://helixsleep.com/srs http://amac.us/srs http://meetfabric.com/srs http://preparewithshawn.com This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Major Joshua Mast and why is he in the news?
Joshua and Stephanie Mast, welcome to the show.
It's good to be here. Yeah, Sean, we really appreciate you having us.
Man, you guys have one hell of a story here and very complicated. Doing the best I can. We're going to cover all of it. It's probably going to be a long show, but... You know, even though nobody knows what we're about to talk about just yet, I just want to say, like, man, you guys are, like, such honorable people doing what you're doing.
And I'm really excited to do this and to get this out into the world. So thank you guys for what you're doing, and thank you for being here. We really appreciate it.
I mean, honestly, we feel blessed to have been a part of this. Like, we're very proud of it. And we'd like to put the spotlight on some people who've made it happen along the way. Regular Americans doing their thing at the ground level, and it's really about them.
Awesome. Awesome. Well, everybody gets an introduction, so... Major Joshua and Stephanie Mast. Major Joshua Mast, you're a United States Marine Judge Advocate General with a law degree from Liberty University and currently assigned as the Assistant Operations Officer, Marine Raider Support Group, Marine Special Forces Operation Command.
You've served as a civil law attorney, trial counsel, and prosecutor. You deployed to Afghanistan in 2019 and worked in the Resolute Support Headquarters Office of the Staff Judge Advocate, where your portfolio responsibilities included targeting, collateral damage estimation, and civilian casualty response.
You are married to Stephanie, who is a graduate of Thomas Edison State University and has master's degrees from Liberty University and the Academy of Art, University of San Francisco, California. Most importantly, you invest your time raising your five children, ages 13, 10, 6, 5, and 4. And I think you guys said downstairs you've been married for 18 years? Years. Congratulations.
And it's because of the love you have for one of your children that you're here with us today. So before we move on, a couple caveats and disclaimers. Before we begin, we need to make some important clarifications. Josh, can I call you Josh or do you prefer Joshua? Sure, it's fine. You're an active duty Marine Corps officer.
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Chapter 2: What led to the adoption attempt of an Afghan war orphan?
I cannot express how much appreciation we have for that. Like, you know, you're raised in America, you're patriotic, you care about service members, like thank you for your service, that type of thing.
But when you read what these guys have done or you hear, like when it gets out from behind, because there's a lot of non-disclosure agreements, there's a lot of stuff that you don't get to talk about, especially with the special mission units. And when you actually dive into that and you get to see some of these experiences they've had, unbelievable, like heroic.
It's humbling to be able to read some of this stuff and talk to these guys.
And so when did you – we got a little sidetracked there. Now I'm angry. But I just – I'll never – I just – Attorneys, man. Sorry, but I just cannot imagine what it's like on the others. How the fuck do they sleep at night? I just don't get it. So at what point did you find out she's going to be in your care?
Okay, so probably fast forward a couple months. She's been under U.S. care at Bagram. Doctors and nurses love her, obviously, trying to make sure she's safe and recovering and all that. We're trying to get more information for decision makers. And then there was a real problem with classification. So we have some NATO folks who don't have a U.S. secret clearance.
And we're working with NGOs and some folks at the embassy that it's not easy to share how much we know. And so at one point I sat through – a meeting where they were going to use our general's influence to make the Afghans take her. Like, end of story. Like, here, your problem. Like, kind of like an operational, like, it's a distraction from operations, Afghan problem.
Let's just make them take her. And so that was going to happen. And I was like, I went to my colonel. I was like, sir. I was like, I don't think I can sleep at night. If we, like, close our eyes and say that she's not going to get, like, best case scenario, she's going to die of neglect. Because you're talking about Kabul, which is like Denver. It's a mile-high city.
It's fall, so it's going to be cold. There's no heat in the orphanages. There's no running water, electricity. There's a few nice presentation facilities in the capital that they showed all the NGOs to get people to donate. But in reality, in most places, there's nothing. You know, there's very little infrastructure. There's no medical care. And, like, this is a kid with a fractured skull.
Like, holy cow. How do we ignore, as Americans, like the big U.S., us, how do we ignore what's actually going to happen? And I have no problem with killing terrorists. Like, her parents died in combat with our guys. No problem with that. But we're about protecting innocence.
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Chapter 3: What legal and ethical challenges has Major Mast faced?
I think the half-truth or the lie was it wasn't part of the Afghan process. Well, that's because they're asking you to do it. They're asking you personally to DNA test this child. And we have an Acme lab at Bagram that does it in three days. And we already have her swab. And they had actually sent one of these people out of the woodwork in Afghanistan to get DNA tested.
So, like, that's what he told them. I've got it in an email downstairs where he's asking the embassy, like, this person that says that there's a surviving sibling, we now want to do the DNA test. And then there's this nondescript response from the embassy, and then they get them in person, and they say, don't talk to the DOD anymore. Are you serious? Yeah.
They get an order from the two-star that no one in US4A will advocate for this child. I've got the order. It's a draft. It wasn't signed. It was a verbal order. He never signed. But it was, you will not advocate for this child. All questions of this will go to the embassy. And so something else happened that's very important for viewers to understand.
When we threatened to sue, there was a hold by the Secretary of Defense on her movement. Like they were going to move her on February 11th, 2020, and they ended up not moving her to the 27th. And so we thought, okay, we've succeeded. They're going to do a DNA test. They're going to vet these people, right, to make sure that this is a safe outcome. And so we thought we succeeded.
We didn't end up filing that lawsuit until we found out they were ignoring it and just going to go forward with it. But that was because the Afghan, quote, government, and I air quote that for a reason, sent two demand letters in perfect English to the embassy and U.S. Forces Afghanistan. And the intent of those letters was to rush the administration's decision-making cycle.
And guess who do you think drafted those emails or those letters? We came through this Afghan that we've now got to the U.S. safely. He's like, oh yeah, the embassy drafted this and sent it to us on WhatsApp so that we could send back to them.
So you've got this embassy drafting letters purportedly in the name of the Afghan government during a discussion about what's the right thing to do here to rush the decision-making cycle of their own government. I've got the drafts. Holy shit. Yeah. And so then they're filing affidavits in court saying, oh, well, the Afghan government demanded this to happen. And it's bogus...
Deep state, ridiculous, I don't know, it makes me angry as an American.
Manipulation. Manipulation. Did the people at the embassy have the after-actions reports from the operation?
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