The calls sound the same no matter where they come from. Syria. Haiti. Northern Israel. A vacation that turned into something else entirely.
“I found you online. I called the State Department. I called my congressman. No one will get back to me. I called the embassy a thousand times. What do I do?”
Bryan Stern has a practiced answer, and it starts with small talk. Are you an American citizen? Where are you from? Oh, no kidding. I’m from Florida too. The questions aren’t idle. They buy a few seconds of calm and build a little trust, because by the time someone reaches Grey Bull Rescue, they’ve usually run out of numbers to call.
“If you’re calling us, you’ve called everyone else,” Stern said. “We are the last resort, the last hope.”
Stern is the Founder and Chairman of Grey Bull Rescue, a Tampa-based, veteran-led nonprofit whose teams include U.S. Special Operations and Intelligence Community veterans and civilian volunteers who go rescue Americans and allies when conventional options have failed. Eight hundred eleven missions. 8,761 lives. Every one of them, Stern will tell you, started with a phone call like that one.
The Grey Bull Rescue story starts during the withdrawal from Afghanistan. “We started off wanting to rescue and evacuate our friends from Afghanistan, interpreters, commandos, sources that we handled,” shared Stern. “But we learned there were Americans left behind after the military left. I love my Afghan friends. I’m alive today because of them. But the reality is I’m an American. So, Americans come first. It didn’t occur to us at the time that Americans would get left behind.”
That effort inspired the creation of Grey Bull Rescue. They work in the “grey space,” in places the government can’t get to or won’t go. When red tape delays action, Grey Bull is able take action at “The Speed of Need.”
The work is usually eight time zones away. Sometimes it’s ten minutes down the road. When Hurricane Helene came up the Gulf Coast, Stern and his team staged out of his home in Tampa. With trucks loaded with chainsaws, ropes, and an inflatable boat, they decided to take a slow look around, sticking to the elevated stretch of the Veterans where the water couldn’t reach them.
That’s where they were when they got the call. The storm surge had pushed six or seven feet of salt water up around a home off Spanish Main. The water caught an electric car on fire with the family still inside the home. Tampa Fire tried to reach them and couldn’t get through water that deep. They took shelter with neighbors and made the call to Stern.
Forty-two minutes later, Stern’s four-man team had walked every person out of both houses, along with their dogs. “We got out of there without anyone getting wet,” shared Stern.
It’s the same model Grey Bull uses in Kyiv, Port-au-Prince and countless cities across the world: a call from people who have exhausted official channels, answered by a team close enough, capable enough, agile and brave enough to act. Ask Stern what the community can do to support their efforts, and he doesn’t reach for the dramatic version. He doesn’t need more volunteers on helicopters. He wants a budget he can plan around.
“A nonprofit is like any other business in that we need to forecast,” he said. “With sponsors who give monthly, the team can forecast, staff, and be staged before the call comes so we can act fast. “
And he’s turning people away. Not often, and never easily, but the calls come in faster than the funding does.
“Every day we get calls and we’re having to say no, which is terrible. What I know is that if I had the funding, I could save more lives,” shared Stern.
Which returns him to the closest thing he has to a philosophy: Don’t be a spectator. “Everyone can do something,” he said. “Everyone."