KRAKOW, POLAND — The Daily Caller sat down with one of the forces responsible for evacuating Fox News correspondent Benjamin Hall out of Ukraine, Save Our Allies, to learn more about the rescue operation.
After receiving the call that Hall was injured, “in about 90 minutes our guys were out the door and on their way,” Sean Lee, the operations officer of Save Our Allies, told the Daily Caller near their base of operations in Krakow, Poland.
Hall was injured on March 14 by artillery shelling launched by Russian forces while reporting on the Russia-Ukraine war outside of Kyiv, Ukraine. Fox News cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and Ukrainian journalist Oleksandra Kuvshynova were with Hall and died in the attack.
“We were in for a long night, but we deployed our team as part of a plan that we already had to get to where Ben was,” Lee continued, saying that they already knew Hall’s approximate location, but had to change small details.
“Very easy to form, as far as the planning was concerned,” he said.
Once they got to Hall, the team had Dr. Richard Jadick with them who “literally wrote the book on combat surgery and combat trauma for the United States Marine Corps,” Lee said.
Jadick made “a call on whether Ben was able to move to a higher level of care” and the team kept the medical team waiting for him in Poland up to date, he continued.
“We were really really fortunate to have the right people in the right place at the right time,” Lee concluded. (RELATED: Fox News Gives Update On Injured Correspondent Benjamin Hall)
Save Our Allies is a team of veterans evacuating those who can’t get out of Ukraine by themselves, like children, elderly and disabled people, according to Lee.
“Our Mission is to rescue American Citizens, Permanent Residents, SIV Holders, and other special populations from conflict zones and contested areas,” according to the website.
The organization was formed in August of 2021 amid the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and helped 12,000 people evacuate the country with the aid of planes from the United Arab Emirates.