I DON’T KNOW THAT ANYONE told us that everyone else in the class would be Dari or Farsi linguists. I think when Taylor and I heard “experienced linguists” we sort of assumed this, as how else were they supposed to learn Pashto in six months? Yes, once you’ve learned one language, it becomes easier to learn a second, as you’ve already figured out how you best learn and study. But it helps if the language you’re going back for is at least a little related to the one you already know. This was, in our minds, the justification for such an intense and short course; if you already know Dari, then you know around 30 percent of Pashto, as the languages share an inordinate amount of vocabulary.
Two weeks later, this assumption directly informed my decision to look like a racist on our first day back at DLI. We had returned to speaking a lot of Dari since Major Richardson had told us we were headed back (by we I mean I, with Taylor mostly accepting my nerdery, not always speaking Dari back, but responding in English, which meant he had at least listened to my Dari). Even when we were speaking English, the old habit of throwing in Afghan insults had come back, which, coupled with Taylor’s habit of being an ass having never gone away, resulted in my saying “you fucking koon” as we were crossing the threshold into our new classroom.
In Dari, koon means ass. Khar does too (the kh sounds a little like when you’re clearing your throat), but khar means ass as in donkey, not ass as in ass, so I generally went with koon (see above re: originality/offensiveness vs. usage). The problem is, this k sound is indistinguishable from the sound the letter “c” makes when pronouncing the word coon in English. So, to the two black army sergeants who were already sitting in the classroom, one flight suit–wearing white boy had just used a rather strong racial epithet on the other flight suit–wearing white boy.
It isn’t really possible for me to turn white as a sheet, or have the color drop out of my face, or some other metaphorical substitution for the sudden appearance of pallidity, as I’m already incredibly pale. That said, I think my freckles might have lost some melanin in that moment.
I was raised to be at the very least a racist, if not to be a “full-blown” racist. My mother is the daughter of missionaries and was born in Mali. As she tells it, she was also raised there, though she spent most of each year in Côte d’Ivoire, at a boarding school for the kids of missionaries (read: other whites). I don’t know that she ever understood that this meant that her relationship with black people was necessarily built on the foundation of imperialistic great white saviors coming in to free the natives from their backward, heathen ways. I, however, did have this understanding, and never more so than on the day she attempted to teach me that “there are black people, and there are niggers.”
Consequently, when I saw these two people looking at me with disgust on the first of the 180 days I was going to be spending with them, I was deeply worried that they would think I was a racist. Really, I was more worried about their perception of me than I was about the damage my word could have done. My panicked logic was that I hadn’t said what they thought I’d said—I was no racist—and once I explained that it was a simple misunderstanding, any harm would disappear in a puff of linguistic levity. The problem was my explanation:
“No, wait, we speak Dari. Don’t you speak Dari?”
“No.”
“Shit. Okay. Well, koon in Dari means ass! Really! Not… you know… that.”
Taylor wasn’t helping, as he was too busy laughing at the absurdity of the situation, which only became more farcical when our new teacher walked in and I attempted to hastily explain to him that I had accidentally used a Dari curse word that sounded a lot like a very bad English insult. If he would confirm that koon does in fact mean ass, then this whole mess could be cleared up and everything would be great. Except, the instructors aren’t supposed to teach us swear words. The man sitting in front of me, our new head professor, Rahimi, definitely wouldn’t teach us swear words. But he didn’t contradict my story, and I think the combination of my fear and fervor convinced the two sergeants, S. and V., that, while I wasn’t necessarily not a racist, I was telling the truth about my word choice.
S. and V. didn’t speak Dari, and it turned out neither did anyone else. The course wasn’t a turbo course, it was just abbreviated, a way to teach some army sergeants the fundamentals of Pashto before sending them back to their posts to keep learning the rest of the language. For Taylor and me, this meant that after the first two months we were leaps and bounds beyond four of our classmates. But there was a fifth who was a brilliant linguist. Ty too had thought this would be a turbo class, and even though it wasn’t, he was still expected to pass the Pashto DLPT by the end of the course. (The Defense Language Proficiency Test is the standardized exam used by the Department of Defense to assess an individual’s competency in a language. At the time, roughly 50 percent of people who took the full yearlong Pashto course failed it.) Ty took a monastic approach to language learning and after class would spend two hours reading one news article, looking up every single word. With this effort, while he wasn’t quite at our level—we had that whole 30 percent of the vocabulary and an extra year of experience with the vagaries of Afghan language thing going for us—he too was ahead of the rest of our classmates.
Taylor, Ty, and I became fast friends. Ty introduced me to Radiohead (meh), Jonathan Franzen (great), and cappuccinos (life-changing). We talked for hours about Dari and Pashto, Spanish, and English, reveling in our love of languages. One morning, we were bullshitting before class started, and Ty said, “Man, my daughter asked me what terrorism means last night.”
“What’d you tell her?”
“Some nonsense. She’s five. How do I explain terrorism to a five-year-old? I said something about terrorists being bad men, but that’s not good enough.”
“I mean, I don’t have kids, but I like the Dari word a lot better: دهشت افگن.”
“Fritz, that doesn’t help. I don’t speak Dari.” (Ty routinely had to remind me of this fact.)
“I was getting there! It means fear-thrower. Someone who throws fear. It makes more sense to me.”
This was true then and it’s truer now: دهشت افگن (dahesht aafgan) (not afghan, mind you; different letter, different sound, different meaning) makes far more sense to me than the word terrorist. Terrorist, terrorism, terror—all these words have become such a part of our everyday language (if you don’t agree, I refer you to the five-year-old asking about one of them) that they’ve lost whatever meaning they once had. Yes, we all know a terrorist is “a person who uses unlawful violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” This, like so many of our definitions of war and violence, is so sterile, so clinical, so detached, and so good at discriminating between the actions of an individual as opposed to a state. If we applied this definition to a government, say, the American government during the war in Iraq, then maybe we’d have to stop negotiating with ourselves (outside of Congress, I mean). This definition seeks to define the terrorist from the perspective of the terrorized, thereby making the terrorist automatically successful. It also makes the terrorist sound organized, cool, and calculating, planning that if Bomb X kills Y people then law Z will get passed.
دهشت افگن, on the other hand, fear-thrower, for me illustrates the limitations of the English word. A terrorist uses unlawful violence, which would imply that he has considered the law. A fear-thrower doesn’t give the laws of man a second thought. A terrorist might try to kill primarily civilians to accomplish his goal. A fear-thrower doesn’t target anyone. He just kills. And while a fear-thrower (he is, of course, still a terrorist) does have political aims of some sort, in my conceptualization of this word, those are simply an added benefit. The goal of a fear-thrower isn’t political, not really. It’s to spread the thing that gives him power as wide and as far as he possibly can, pitching it in every direction, until the fear of fear gives him absolute dominion over his world. I understand that power is often political, but I also think that this is a fundamentally Western view. Sometimes, power is just power. And fear is a heavy thing. If you’ve trained enough to throw it, you must be pretty strong. Pretty powerful.
I don’t know that Ty told his daughter my theories on fear-throwing vs. terrorism, but he was nice enough to let me ramble on. I was spitballing, as I hadn’t fully fleshed out these thoughts back then, I just felt that the Dari word made more sense. As the course progressed, this kept happening. I think, in large part, this was due to the shared words between the languages; instead of having to spend hour upon hour learning new words, I was afforded the luxury of really trying to understand how Pashto worked, and often, it was easier to do that in relation to Dari (when English is their third or fourth language, sometimes it’s easier to use Dari to ask your professor if the attempt at past progressive you just made in Pashto was correct). Because of this learning of Pashto through both English and Dari, I wasn’t only finding the hidden meanings in Dari or Pashto words anymore, I was replacing entire concepts with them. It seemed that Sapir, or Whorf, or both, had been on to something. How I was thinking was changing.
Over the next few months, I spent hours a day talking with our professors. There was Asila, nearly as young and impetuous as I, decidedly younger and more impetuous than my classmates. Najibullah, whose pompadour tried to rival Fawad’s but, despite having roughly three times as much hair in it, couldn’t hold a candle to The Tornado’s coiffure. And there was Dr. Death—whose real name I’m not sure I ever knew—an old crusty Pashtun whose English was very good, but who wouldn’t use it to help you out no matter how hard you were struggling. As the course drew on Rahimi had us talk to the good doctor nearly every day, which we were less than happy about, as he spoke slowly and with a constant emphysematous wheeze, his voice almost whistling as a result, making it painful to listen to him. But then we took the DLPT and discovered that a substantial portion of the audio passages were narrated by the mysterious doctor, who was difficult to understand even when you’d been listening to his voice for weeks, let alone for the first time. Rahimi knew what he was doing, of course, and just laughed his raspy, Muttley-esque laugh when we accused him of preparing us for the test.
We did all this talking in part to prepare for the final test, but mostly because speaking a language that you’re learning is by far the hardest thing to do with it; it’s much easier to recognize words than it is to pull them whole cloth from your memory. Speaking, putting those words and ideas into (hopefully) the same order as native speakers do, is by far the best way to strengthen your language skills. Taylor and I were both “good” at Pashto, but we had a problem; we couldn’t help but speak Dari.
We figured, given the no/minimal English rules, we should just use Dari whenever we didn’t know a Pashto word. The result was strange sentences that would be 60 to 70 percent Dari nouns and adjectives, with Pashto pronouns and verbs. Or, instead of asking “to drink څنګه وایئ” (“how do you say” in Pashto plus “to drink” in English) like our classmates, we would inevitably say say “څنګه وایئ نوشیدن” (“how do you say” in Pashto and “to drink” in Dari). The first time we did this with Rahimi he just paused, looked at us both, and said “I understand what you’re doing. But I hate this.” Us being us, this of course then meant that we kept doing it.
In part because it was fun, his faux exasperation a nice game we could play together, but mostly because we didn’t really understand how he could dislike this so much, we kept mixing and matching the two languages. We figured it was super-cool, ’cause like, how many other students could do that? We also figured that while Rahimi’s English was great, wasn’t his Dari better? Pashtun he may have been, but as far as we knew he was equally fluent in both. But when we finally got around to asking him about it, it turned out that it was harder for him to convert the Dari to Pashto, or vice versa, because he never thought that way. He was perfectly fluent in Dari—the man had been an interpreter all over Afghanistan—but it wasn’t one of the two languages he primarily thought in these days, nor did he ever combine it with Pashto. Mixing Pashto and English was common for him; that’s what he did all day at work. But if he thought in Pashto, Pashto it was. And if he thought in Dari, same. What we were doing was some weird bastardization of the two that did not sit well with him.
So in addition to whatever was happening in the background of our brains as we were learning, we were actively figuring out how to think in Pashto, which is to say, to think like our professors, as this was how we could talk like them. But we soon realized that we weren’t ever going to think quite like Afghans, for more than just the cultural reasons. We would always and forever mix the two languages together, because that was how we could be the most fluent, or at least how we could use the least English. Taylor put more effort into limiting his Dari use when speaking in class, but I didn’t want anything to do with such a restraint, no matter how annoyed my classmates got. The goal was to use our language skills, and I was going to do just that.
As the course went on and my Pashto got better, I did, eventually, use only small amounts of Dari. Some of this was a simple increase in vocabulary, some of it my learning to be less of a jerk, and some of it because a number of our professors didn’t speak Dari. In hindsight, these were probably the best professors I had (other than Rahimi, that patient saint) because with each hour spent with them, sure I learned more Pashto, but I also learned more about Pashtuns.
Taylor and I had learned about the different ethnic groups in Afghanistan in our Dari course. A major part of the language training at DLI is learning about the history of a given country or area, its people, and its culture. For our class, this ranged from preparing presentations on the government of Afghanistan since 1950, to making traditional Afghan food alongside our professors, to crafting kites for a kite battle (an infamous day, wherein one of the young professors absolutely destroyed one of the older professors’ kites, resulting in the older professor yelling the soon to be oft-repeated line “That was not a manly action”). So we already knew that the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and Pashtuns were the major ethnic groups of Afghanistan, and we’d heard a little of some of the smaller ones, like the Baloch and the Pashayi. Some of our Dari teachers had even been trilingual, having grown up speaking both Dari and Pashto before learning English, and had told us about that strange southern tribe and their even stranger language. But they didn’t tend to refer to themselves as Pashtuns, just as Afghans.
Our Pashto professors, on the other hand, were Pashtuns before anything else. It’s not as if any of them followed the traditional code of honor of the Pashtun people—پښتونوالي (Pashtunwali)—but they tended to be more conservative, more religious, more accepting of the role that violence plays in the world than our Dari professors had been. Which isn’t to say that they were on the side of the Taliban. No, in fact, they were very much on our side, which I came to best understand during a speaking lesson about the merits of nuclear proliferation.
The professor I was talking to was new to me, having subbed in for one of our normal professors who had to leave early that day. We’d seen each other before, nods in the hallways between classrooms and so on, and he had always seemed nice. Very self-assured. I guess he just carried himself well, like you probably shouldn’t fuck with him ’cause maybe he’d seen some shit back in the day.
I never learned the specifics, but I did come to wholeheartedly believe that he had seen something(s) or someone(s) pretty awful, because after about twenty minutes of conversation, he told me, in a rather offhanded manner, that he thought we should just nuke Afghanistan.
“Uh, what?”
I thought maybe I’d misunderstood him.
“Oh yeah, absolutely. We should just blow up the whole country.”
Nope. Pretty clear, that. I wondered if this was some sort of test. Like, a way to trap me into admitting that I was a racist/bigot and thought we should just kill any and every Afghan. I couldn’t really get in trouble for that; I’m sure there were at least a dozen Marines who had said that shit out loud already, but I couldn’t figure out a better reason for him to have made such a proclamation, so I asked him if he was serious, and if so, why.
He said something to the effect of, well, there’s nothing good there. The people aren’t good, the land isn’t good, and they’re just always going to fight. So we may as well just drop a bunch of nukes, kill everyone there, and get rid of the problem forever. In response to my question of whether he had family there who would be killed by all these bombs, he just said, eh, extended family. That’s just how it goes.
Whether it was a good use of my time to be talking about nuking the country I was supposed to go fight a war in is up for debate. I knew, or at least had been told, that this level of understanding would be superfluous, as (1) my job was going to be to listen to the Taliban, who didn’t tend to debate much beyond the merits of which weapon to aim at which American or where to place an IED, and (2) I wasn’t the talking kind of linguist, just the listening kind. But we were supposed to become as fluent as possible, and because I wanted to succeed (and because it was fun), I kept talking. When I graduated from our Pashto course, I was coined by the commandant of DLI for my performance on the DLPT. This is an informal award tradition in the military wherein a high-ranking person gives you a custom-made coin (think silver dollar, not quarter) that represents an accomplishment. I had gotten higher scores than most graduates of the yearlong Pashto course, in half the time and, I was told, was a credit to the Air Force and to DLI.
But when I left DLI, this didn’t really matter, because Pashto changed, and I had to change with it. Pashto was now the language of the enemy. Obviously, I was told, not everyone who speaks Pashto is a Talib, but every Talib does speak Pashto, so if you hear it, expect bad shit, because Afghanistan is a far safer place if you operate from the viewpoint that everyone is out to get you.