25

Nanawatay

Nanawatay means repentance over past hostility or inimical attitudes and the granting of asylum. Walking down to someone under Nanawatay means having an expression or attitude of submission—a combination of humility, sorrow, and apology—and giving space to the other person to respond with “grace.”

—S. Fida Yunas, Character Traits: Customs/Traditions/Practices of the Pashtuns

Take heed to yourselves. If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him.

—Luke 17:3

The dedication of Camp Blessing provided a formal, celebratory ending to our Pech Valley experience. But for my team, and especially for me personally, there was another, informal ceremony to be performed before we could leave the valley with our minds at ease. We had to compensate the family of the shopkeeper whose life had been ended by a ricochet from my M4. His name, we learned, was Ahmed. Even though the Nangalam elders had ruled that the law of exchange (badal) would not require my blood, Pashtunwali still demanded that Ahmed’s family receive a symbolic “blood payment” partly in money and partly in goods. In this valley, that meant goats and rice.

The money part of this reckoning was settled in a meeting with Ahmed’s brother. This was the man who, on the day of the tragedy, had leaped into the truck with the victim’s body and inflamed the soft spring air with the sounds of his wailing. When he came to the camp again, a couple of days later, he was composed, even respectful. He knew, he told me, that I had not intended harm to his brother and that, as it was Allah’s will that he died, he would honor the elders’ decision not to seek revenge. But he was now the sole guardian of Ahmed’s children—Ahmed’s wife had died some time ago—and he would need monetary help to care properly for these two young ones. This was the first time I heard that I had orphaned two children.

After some debate and consultation with Mashal, the brother and I agreed on a cash payment of $2,500. This was on the high end of the scale for accidental shooting victims, but as the fee was to cover the care of the children, and as I was not in a good position to split hairs, I agreed to the sum. The brother and I parted amiably, our hands resting on our chests in acknowledgment of our shared sadness.

For the noncash part of the compensation payment, I had to go to the home of the man I had killed to make a peace offering to his other relatives and ask for their forgiveness. In Pashtun tradition, I was to learn later, this is known as seeking “asylum” or “doing nanawatay.” I undertook this final obligation the following day.

Accompanied by Scott, Randy, Mashal, and an ASF squad, I walked through Nangalam, past the spot where the shooting had happened, and then continued a few hundred yards up a dirt trail to the hamlet that Ahmed had called home. Behind us we led, on rope leashes, two young goats; in each ASF soldier’s rucksack was a twenty-five-pound bag of rice. It was a short walk on a beautiful day, but I was conscious that it was also a penitential journey, and I hoped that at the end I would find absolution.

In the hamlet—so small that no mapmaker had labeled it—we met a handful of village elders in a humble adobe house. We sat around a rug in a small room, drinking tea and eating candied pecans, while with Mashal’s help I explained again how much I regretted this terrible accident, and how much I felt that the sorrow I had brought here was my sorrow, too. Since no one introduced himself as a member of Ahmed’s family, I thought perhaps that the elders were acting on their behalf—or that, aside from his brother and children, Ahmed had no other survivors. I would have welcomed that information; it would have limited the circle of people my action had harmed.

In any event, like the shura that had pronounced “no blood,” these elders too accepted my penitence, and with one exception they seemed to appreciate the effort we were making to honor their customs.

The exception was a short, white-bearded man who sat darkly off to the side. In appearance he reminded me of the proud, irascible dwarves in Lord of the Rings. Throughout the meeting, he kept to himself, every so often glancing at us—at me, I thought—with unregenerate hostility. He didn’t participate in the conversation, gave no indication of approval, and seemed throughout the encounter a wraith sent to put our cordiality to the test. Even when he wasn’t looking directly at me, I had the sense that he was silently condemning me.

After half an hour, the elders acknowledged the goats and rice and proclaimed that, on behalf of the family, they accepted them, along with the money to the brother, as payment of my obligation. I was puzzled about the whereabouts of the family itself—who they were, and why these elders were their spokesmen—but I let that pass, thankful that the peace offering had been found acceptable. The meeting had gone as well as could be expected.

“Is that it?” I asked Mashal. “Is the debt now paid?”

“Yes,” he replied. “There is nothing further that you need to do.”

But there was. Something wasn’t right. I felt it bone-deep, like something that went beyond protocol, beyond obligation.

As we got up to make our farewells, as we shook hands with the elders and thanked them for their understanding, I caught the eye again of the man in the corner. He hadn’t budged. He regarded me now with the same baleful pain that had shadowed this hour of détente from the beginning. I felt that if I didn’t confront his darkness before leaving this place, I would never be free of it.

“Who is that man?” I asked Mashal.

The answer hit me hard.

“He is Ahmed’s father. This is his house.”

Instantly the old man’s dark stare became understandable. In looking at me across a small room of his own home, he was seeing not the Red-Bearded Commander, not an American soldier, not the latest of the countless foreigners who had occupied his country. He was seeing only the man who killed his son.

I thought immediately of my own two little boys, safe at home with Becky, and I ached to think what I would feel if a soldier from halfway around the world took one of them away. I thought of what my own father—a seasoned soldier himself—would feel if someone killed me. And I was overwhelmed with pity and shame and sorrow for the agony that I had brought, unwittingly but undeniably, to this black-eyed, smoldering Afghan. And then, in an instant, I knew what I had to do. This was the man I had to beg for asylum.

I walked across the room and stood before him. The anger in his face was unremitting. I dropped to one knee and, as I had witnessed others doing to me, reached up and gently grasped his beard.

For what was probably thirty seconds but seemed like hours, the old man held my gaze, his eyes hard-edged and implacable. I felt for that long moment that if he could have cut me down on the spot, he would have done so. Then suddenly, without transition, he began to cry. The blackness washed away, and his face shivered with tenderness. He reached an arm around my head and pulled me to him in a tight embrace.

I came to my feet and returned the embrace. For a long time—so long that I lost track of where I was, of anything in the room but him and me—we held each other close, silently sobbing.

Rarely have I felt so connected to another human being. For a few extraordinary moments, there was no politics or religion, no East or West, no competition or judgment or even awareness of the things that set the planet’s peoples against each other. It was just two human beings, two fathers, sharing a deep sorrow that had become, in the alchemy of mercy, a somber acceptance.

As we finally parted from each other and nodded good-bye, I could see that everyone who had witnessed what happened had felt it too. In a room full of young soldiers and aging mujahideen, there was an eerie hush as tear-streaked faces turned to each other in wonder and thanksgiving. I had walked down in nanawatay and found forgiveness.

On the way back to camp, I felt almost light-headedly peaceful, and when we arrived there, it was clear that news of what happened had preceded us. It seemed that everybody at Camp Blessing—Afghans, the ODA, the Marines—wanted to shake my hand or give me a hug. They knew something small but spectacular had happened up the trail.

I knew it too. I don’t use the word magic lightly, but there was something magical about that encounter with poor Ahmed’s father. On a very personal level, it stretched me, enriched my faith in humanity, made me searingly aware of how similarly fragile and connected all of us are.

I saw this recognition, too, as a fittingly elevated climax to our sojourn here. The fact that a Special Forces A-Team could share with Afghan villagers such a profoundly emotional experience made me see, with a quiet pride, that our mission in the Pech had been a success in a way that neither the media nor our senior commanders ever fully understood.

They saw that we had made some headway in reducing the influence of insurgents, had improved the valley’s living conditions, and had brought a semblance of stability to a war-weary region. They might have hoped that we had captured one of our two main quarries, Abu Ikhlas or Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, but they were pleased to see that we had made them far less relevant.

I saw something different—something that was even more evanescent than an Al Qaeda ghost, and that the embrace of Ahmed’s father had shown me was real. I saw that for a moment he and I had gone beyond friend, enemy, Afghan, American, Christian, Muslim, villager, soldier. I saw that he was just a man like me. A father like me. I saw that, as we strove to be good guests—guests worthy of hospitality and of respect—we had captured something more precious than a high-value target. Working with the Afghan people, breaching ancient walls of pitiless scorn, we had managed for a time to look into each other’s hearts.