ON A WINTER NIGHT in the northern part of Afghanistan, where the average elevation is somewhere above seven thousand feet and the average temperature somewhere below freezing, the following discussion took place:
“Go place the IED down there, at the bend; they won’t see it.”
“It can wait till morning.”
“No, it can’t. They could come early, and we need it down there to kill as many as we can.”
“I think I’ll wait.”
“No, you won’t! Go place it.”
“Do I have to?”
“Yes! Go do it!”
“I don’t want to.”
“Brother, why not? We must jihad!”
“Brother… It’s too cold to jihad.”
He wasn’t wrong. Even in our planes, with our fleeces and hand warmers, it really was too damn cold for war.
Sadly, I didn’t hear this particular conversation live. It was a recording that was heard by every Pashto DSO and told to anyone who would listen to the English version of it. I did hear other jokes, though, because it turned out that the Taliban are fucking funny.
“Najibullah… Najibuuullllaaah… Najibullah, are you there, brother? Najibullah! Najibullah! Najibullah!”
“Yes! What is it, brother?”
“Are the things ready?”
“Yes, brother, the things are ready.”
“Is the big thing ready? I hear monsters above.”
“The big thing is waiting for Baryalai to come back.”
“Baryalai is bringing the large vegetables with him? Hahahahahahahaha your vegetable is too small to fight the monsters, Najibullah. You always have to wait for Baryalai’s big vegetable. Hahahahahahahaha.”
“Stay prepared, brother. God willing many demons will die today.”
“Najibullah! Najibullah! Najibullah! I am just joking. We will be prepared.”
Najibullah didn’t laugh, which seemed a bit unfair, as it was a pretty good dick joke, demons or no.
DSOs all traded with each other the stories of what we heard, in part because they were so funny, in part because we could pass off the stories as our own to other crews. Often, the stories were much the same—chatter is chatter no matter what plane you’re on—but because they only flew at night, the gunships could offer up prime shenanigans.
Taylor had deployed after me, and he’d gotten qualified on different planes and been sent up to Bagram. But even Afghanistan couldn’t keep us apart, because not long after he got there, a plane he was flying on had a bad enough mechanical failure that they had to make an emergency landing down in Kandahar. While the rest of his crew was enjoying all the amenities of the south, it was decided that the best use of his time would be to fly with Ed to go ahead and get qualified on the Whiskey. No rest for the wicked and all.
But he did have a little free time, and when we hung out, we traded stories from our missions so far. Maybe because it was from him, or maybe because it’s simply one of the best physical comedy stories I’ve ever heard, one of Taylor’s stories quickly became DSO legend.
There he was, overhead an op on an H-model, doing his job, listening for anyone talking about doing some bad shit to the Americans on the ground or up above. (It’s worth mentioning here that one of the hardest parts of being a DSO is listening to multiple conversations in different languages. Sometimes, when shit was going real sideways, we would only listen to the Taliban, and then relay what we’d heard to someone else, but we also had to be able to listen to all their static-filled radios while simultaneously paying attention to what the other members of our crew, the ground team, and potentially other aircraft were all saying.) Taylor’s not hearing much of interest from the Taliban, but he realizes the crew is getting pretty excited, because the sensor operator is tracking a guy moving between buildings.
People who weren’t even in the country at the time wound up telling this story as if they were there. Which like, I don’t begrudge them, ’cause who wouldn’t want to be a part of the mission where a gunship watched a guy shit on his neighbor’s roof?
This, of course, necessitates the story of the best Whiskey mission. It was supposed to have been a pretty generic flight, just doing escort support of some group of mixed Afghan military and coalition forces. But then some Talib on the radio kept asking if any of his comrades were at “the school.” This was concerning, as it could have been him checking in on the preparations for an ambush, so “the school” had to be found. While one of the CSOs kept his camera on the convoy, the other scanned the area near the route, and lo and behold, he came across a village with (1) a relatively new building that looked like a lot of the other schools around the country and (2) a shitload of Talibs around said building.
Well-armed Talibs. All around them were Hi-Luxes (Toyota pickup trucks that are seemingly indestructible and therefore the preferred mode of transportation of insurgents worldwide), machine guns, RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades)—you name it, these guys had it.
They also had something no one had ever seen the Taliban with before.
A volleyball net.
There they were, a bunch of Talibs in their man-jammies, surrounded by a metric fuck-ton of serious weapons.
Playing volleyball.
But even with all those weapons, all these obvious Talibs, the Whiskey couldn’t shoot, because alongside all the bad guys were a bunch of women and children. Some thought, and some even said, that this was an obvious “fuck you” to us from the Taliban, who were not shy about using human shields. And this may have been the case, but there was the other option, the less villainous one, wherein even a bunch of Talibs have wives and kids. The war wasn’t going anywhere, so why shouldn’t they sometimes hang out with them, maybe play some games? How many other chances were they gonna have for a nice game of volleyball with the kids?
It wasn’t all roof shits and volleyball, though. The Taliban were an industrious group.
“Amir! Amir. Amir. Amir. Are you there, brother?”
[static]
“Amir, are you there? Amir. Amir. Amir. Amir.”
“Yes, I am here, brother. We are doing the work.”
“Where are you, Amir? There are monsters nearby.”
“We are on the road, brother. Near the house with the trees. We are doing the work.”
“Stay safe, brother, monsters are near.”
“We are ready, brother. God willing, many of our enemies will die.”
The only problem was that their industry, their work, was trying to kill us. In this case, they were setting up an IED at an intersection they knew was heavily traveled. But did that necessarily make them evil?
For most service members in Afghanistan, and certainly for the crews I was flying with, this conceptualization held true, as any interaction they had with the Taliban was wrapped up in fighting. Not only were said Taliban bad most, if not all, of the time, they were depraved and degenerate in their badness; they would do anything to kill us in inventive and terrible ways (remember the fucking donkeys carrying IEDs). I had my share of this, but the nature of DSOing meant that my relationship with the Taliban was becoming less and less violent; even if a given mission resulted in actual combat (all my flights in Afghanistan were technically combat missions, but this was only because the entirety of Afghanistan was perpetually combative in our eyes), there were usually multiple hours surrounding the fighting that were peaceful.
And what I had been told by the DSOs that came before me about the complexity of what I would hear held true; the majority of any elaborate speech was centered around active battles. The rest of the time, which was most of the time, what I kept hearing was the lunch plans, neighborhood gossip, shitty road conditions, and how the weather wasn’t conforming to someone’s exact desires. The name-calling, complaining, and infighting. Yes, it was bullshit, but not all of it was centered around killing us. Turns out you can’t spend all of your time talking about fighting, even in a war zone. Maybe especially in a war zone.
How much of my time in Afghanistan was spent talking about fighting versus literally any other topic? Probably a quarter of the hours of every other mission were spent debating whether one (female) celebrity was hotter than another or fantasizing about what we would do with the latest hundred-million-dollar Powerball or whining about annual training requirements. If the Taliban could have listened to us, they wouldn’t have heard much complexity either.
So as my flight hours kept adding up, they began to beg the question of whether the Taliban were, in fact, evil, or even plain old bad, most (it was certainly no longer all) of the time. Beyond the bullshit, the Talibs also daydreamed about the future, made plans for when (not if) the Americans finally left, and reveled in the idea of retaking their country. These conversations are somewhat paradoxical in that they were ubiquitous and coalesced into a gestalt, such that trying to write out any individual conversation now would be more or less an act of, if not necessarily fabrication, then a sort of creation on my part. There were specifics, though: Guesstimates, or maybe the better description is informed hopes of when the Americans or Brits or whoever would leave this village or that town. Discussion of how glorious or wonderful or great life would be once those devils were gone. The feeling of how great it would be to be back in control (both literally and figuratively). This too was supposed to be evil, their desire to remove us and once again be in charge. And it sounded pretty bad, seeing as how it was entirely predicated on their ability to eradicate the world of infidels (aka us) and return the country to the state it had been in back in the 1990s. The only problem was, it was becoming sort of reasonable.
I began to liken it to the notion of a hypothetically very rich, very not white country, let’s call it Audi Sarabia, invading a hypothetically very proud, relatively dysfunctional, very white country, let’s call it Texasstan. You would have then a country that felt they were morally upright, who, on the premise of rooting out terrorists and extremist ideologues, invaded a formerly independent state with a long and storied history of rejecting invaders and upholding their millennia-old way of life. This formerly independent state would have a working constitution, a (semi-) functioning government, and while maybe not everyone who lived under that government agreed with its policies, well, you can’t please everyone.
Now, on invasion, the Audis would say that the government was corrupt (what government isn’t), draconian (a little hypocritical, that, but okay), and guilty of harboring and supporting international threats (people, they mean people). The rest of the world would say, “Well, okay, yeah, those are all true statements, so I guess you have a point,” and would stand idly by while the Audis went in and subverted an established, legitimate government, in order to stand up a puppet state that would blindly support them in their mission. The Audis would set up shop in the major cities and begin the process of looking for their enemies.
But then, who, exactly, are their enemies? Supporters of the old government, that one’s easy. Rebels against the new government, also easy (the Audis prefer rebel to insurgent in this analogy—has to do with that whole submission to Islam thing). Oh, and anyone that members of the new government say is bad, regardless of any proof supporting these claims, and regardless of the fact that it seems strangely convenient that most of the people being named happen to be political opponents, or guys that the members of the new government feel have wronged them (some of them fellow members).
Over the next five to ten years, the Audis continue to build up their presence, continue to raid homes at night, kidnap people, drop bombs indiscriminately, all the while maintaining that these actions are justifiable and for the greater good. Meanwhile, the Texans, who have had their own culture longer than the Audis have had a nation, replete with their own laws and customs, are told that they should be ashamed of this culture, that it’s barbaric and outdated, and that while they don’t necessarily need to convert to the Audis’ religion (this isn’t the Crusades; proselytization is actually illegal under the rules governing the Audis’ military members), they should probably think about joining the rest of the world in modernity.
At some point during all this, a number of Texans find themselves wondering whether the old government—which, admittedly, had its problems—wasn’t preferable. They were violent, yes, but at least they were predictable in their violence. And they didn’t have giant flying bogeymen that went around blowing up weddings or bombing funerals or just generally making violence an everyday part of life. If, then, a number of these Texans begin to feel that they have no choice but to try and fight against the Audis, would that be so unreasonable? And if, once they do start fighting back, their culture and long-standing way of life mean that they fight hard, even fight dirty, wouldn’t this too make some sense?
I spent too many hours and too many words developing this brilliant analogy of mine. It was ham-fisted, overly reductive, and failed to extend the grace that was so readily at hand for the Taliban to the American side of things. If I had tried this shit on a U-boat, I probably would have gotten punched, or at the very least told in no uncertain terms to shut the fuck up. The Whiskeys put up with it, for a time. Eventually, though, they’d all heard my little thought piece, and I had enough self-awareness, or at least enough interest in being liked, to not repeat something that no one else found all that thought-provoking.
It didn’t help that I never bothered to ask anyone else what they thought about what we were doing. I felt that whatever insight they might think they had would automatically be limited by their not having the same knowledge and education that I did, never mind that half the crewmembers I flew with were college graduates, and the other half, while not necessarily diplomates, were also intelligent, thoughtful human beings. But I wasn’t interested in debate. I just wanted to lecture. Which I proceeded to try to do to Ed on the occasion of OBL’s death.
Though I’d only been in the country for a month, missions and days in Kandahar had come to blur together. Because I have my flight records, I know how many missions I flew in that month, and for how many hours. Without them, the only reason I can separate that first month from the next is because Osama bin Laden finally got schwacked at the beginning of May. Mind you, I/we had nothing to do with it. You’ll have to read Mark Owen and Kevin Maurer’s book if you want to know more about the actual schwacking.
I may have been closer to the action than (most of) you, but I was also very much asleep in my freight container when bin Laden got got. I found out when I woke up a few hours after and checked Facebook. Flying life was rarely physically hard. Sure, I was in Afghanistan, but I had just slept eight (mostly) uninterrupted hours and had pretty decent Wi-Fi. Scrolling through my friends’ statuses, I remember thinking, Huh. It was interesting, the idea that almost ten years after 9/11 we had finally killed our country’s biggest bogeyman, and it was very interesting that we had invaded Pakistan to do it. But I wasn’t, like, happy about it.
It was gauche then, and it’s gauche now, to celebrate the deaths of others. It’s gauche when the Taliban does it, it’s gauche when al Qaeda does it, it’s gauche when we do it. It’s supposed to be even more gauche when we do it, what with our greater morality and all. It’s one thing to say that killing this person or that person will ultimately result in less pain and suffering in the world, and that might be something worth getting excited about. But this isn’t what anyone I knew was doing. They were celebrating the death of bin Laden the guy, not bin Laden the idea. As if his murder made up for the murder of all those people lost to the 9/11 attacks he orchestrated.
Maybe I was more tired than I knew, or grumpy, or just acting contrarian in the way that twenty-two-year-olds who feel like they’re having deep-and-novel-thoughts-that-others-in-their-small-mindedness-haven’t-yet-considered are prone to feel, but I was ready to argue with somebody about the merits of these celebrations. Ed wound up being that somebody. Unfortunately.
I made my way over to the camp’s main building. We had our own office space in it, separated from the rest of the various crews on our camp due to our usage of Top Secret networks for which most everyone else didn’t have clearance. Passcode-protected door, windowless room that had a feeling of nerdy despair—just a good old-fashioned secure compartmentalized information facility. Ed was already there, which shouldn’t have been surprising. I don’t think he slept all that much on his good days, and those were plenty rare, so by the time I walked in he had already been up for a few hours, reveling in this now Greatest of Days.
“Man! Did you see! We got that fucker!”
Ed was smiling. Ed has a nice smile. Big, toothy grin—he’s got nice teeth, very into his dental hygiene, pretty sure he told me once he’d never had a cavity in all his thirty plus years—that really lights up his face. If you didn’t know any better, when Ed smiles, you’d think he was pretty happy. This might be why he’s, to some degree, usually smiling. But this morning, his smile was brilliant. It was genuine. He really was happy.
“Yeah, I saw it on Facebook.”
The smile faltered, just for a second. Maybe at my lack of exclamation points, maybe at me learning about it on Facebook. I’ll admit this is a strange way to learn about something that happened a few hundred miles away from your war zone, but it’s not as if I control how information spreads in the world.
“What a day! I’ve been trying to find pictures but who knows if we’ll have access.”
“Uh-huh.”
The smile definitely slipped, though this didn’t register in my brain at the time. An unsmiling Ed was a potentially scary Ed. This is the problem with people whose rage is constantly simmering. If they aren’t happy, they’re usually not far from something destructive.
“Dude, we should be celebrating!”
I would like to say that at this point I exercised some self-restraint, some critical thought. But I went with the option of the twenty-two-year-old who feels like they’re having deep-and-novel-thoughts-that-others-in-their-small-mindedness-haven’t-yet-considered. Ten years later, I don’t necessarily disagree with twenty-two-year-old Ian’s thoughts, but I do disagree with sharing them with someone like Ed.
“Why? What will that get you? He was an incredible human. He changed the world.”
No more smile. Some redness though.
“Fritz, shut the fuck up.”
“No, but real—”
“Get out of this room.”
“Wha—”
“Leave!”
I have a pretty strong memory of there being an additional threat of potential harm, not that Ed said he would hit me, but that he had a strong desire to do so. I will, however, not attribute it as a quote, in case I have misremembered. Suffice it to say that even if it wasn’t verbalized, a threat was hanging in the air.
At the risk of sounding like the elitist pricks I so much detested, I didn’t expect this response from Ed. From the gunship crews, sure, or at least some of them. Not to say that they weren’t capable of the highfalutin’ critical thought I was (I told myself) currently engaging in, it was just that they didn’t have the background information we did as linguists. To them, bin Laden was the enemy, full stop. To me and, I thought, the royal us, there was more nuance. Which, of course, there is in such a situation. Having an understanding—even appreciation, even respect—for the machinations of a man that unequivocally crippled the last superpower is a necessary part of engaging with the motivation for why that man was hunted, found, and killed. But if we acknowledge that this nuance exists, we must also acknowledge that it doesn’t do so in a vacuum. It is inextricably linked to other ideas, other happenings of the universe. Indeed, it is highly dependent on them.
The hunting and killing of OBL was part of his plan. He more or less knew that if 9/11 was successful, the United States in all of its hate-filled hubris would stop at nothing to find him, and to destroy him. By doing just that we made him what he was, and still is. The man Osama bin Laden would have died of old age at some point, but OBL the idea will live on through history, at least our history, because we made him such an intricate part of our story. This didn’t have to be the case. Retribution didn’t undo 9/11. And if we only felt “better” because we murdered someone else—and let’s be clear, Osama bin Laden the man was extrajudicially murdered—then we definitely shouldn’t, and probably don’t, feel all that good with him gone.
To me, the almost ten years following 9/11, and the however many more since we acknowledged that Osama bin Laden was actively plotting to change the world, offered enough distance to look at him and his plans through a relatively objective lens (objectivity being, as we know, the ultimate goal of the self-styled students of Socrates—emotions and all the other intricacies of the human condition merely the crutches for the intellectually stunted). But while time is, in and of itself, an arrow, capable only of unidirectional flight, the human experience of time is that of a fucking Super Ball launched by a batting machine, zooming about every which way, reversing, forwarding, re-reversing, spinning, back spinning, upending, down ending, side ending, zigging, zagging, insert rather a few more directional gerunds and you get the idea. For all I know, to Ed, 9/11 may have been yesterday. Hell, maybe it was today, the death of OBL having altered the path of Ed’s Super Ball such that he was watching the Towers fall in real time, but now, this time, Osama bin Laden was inside too, hopefully meeting his end with just as much fear as so many of those other 2,958 people.
But then, what would this mean for Ed? He would now have to be celebrating the fall of the Towers. OBL the idea doesn’t exist without the Towers. So you can’t celebrate the death of our greatest bogeyman without implicitly acknowledging the accomplishment that was taking down those two towers. By daring to offer this, that the life of OBL the man deserved some consideration, not too unlike the other 2,958 lives lost years prior, I was not only committing heresy, but I was also actively interrupting Ed’s joy. His celebration. I may as well have kicked him in the balls right before he was about to come.
I sort of sulked, skulked my way out, ambled outside, and dicked around, wandering over to the gunship side of the building to dick around some more. There was little else by way of conversation, and, if nothing else, Ed showed me that I should maybe keep my thoughts on the matter to myself. I didn’t bring it up again, at least not to him, figuring that any attempt at justification would be met with more anger, and so I suspect that Ed ultimately felt I was just being a contrarian prick, an edgelord, ever desirous of attention (wouldn’t be the first time, or the last). But I wasn’t. I wasn’t excited that OBL had been merc’d. I wasn’t sad either. Mostly, I was confused. Was killing OBL going to end our deployments? Was it going to result in fewer deaths? Was it going to make Afghanistan a better place? Was it going to help the grass to grow, the sun to shine? Was the death or killing or murder or revenge or elimination or neutralization or score-evening of this man going to result in any meaningful, substantial change in the world?
Nope.
Then why be so happy?
Some of this was my contrary nature, some of it my desire to look and feel smart. But much of this—both my lecture to the crews and my attempt to talk to Ed—was the only way I knew how to react to the surprising and unsettling realization that the notion of evil was turning out to be unsustainable. The Taliban had, at first, embodied the traits that I felt were consistent with evil: doing terrible things all of the time (or at least a majority of it) and/or committing such singularly awful acts that it felt logical to assume that their core was bereft of any good. But it had turned out that the Taliban weren’t bad all of the time. Which like, okay, had been sort of an unrealistic expectation anyway, but worse than this was the fact that all this boring bullshit I was listening to was serving to humanize those who had before been what.
I never heard another series of “Kaliiiiiiima… Kalimaaaaaaaaa… Kalima Kalima Kalima Kalima” again. And I never heard Kalima answer the radio. Maybe he hadn’t just been tired. Maybe he was dead. It’s possible that I had killed him. But I heard countless other men repeating all their friends’ names and imploring them to be safe.
“Shpoon Jaan, are you there? Shpoon Jaan?”
“Shpoon Jaan, wake up. Shpoon, there are monsters near. Are you safe, brother? Are you prepared?”
“Yes, brother, we are safe and prepared.”
“Stay safe and look for monsters, brother.”
“Aziz, are you there? Aziz?”
“Yes, we are here, brother. Are things well?”
“Yes, brother, but there are monsters near. Stay safe and be prepared.”
“We will, brother. Stay safe.”
“Haji Jaan, are you there? Haji Jaan?”
“Haji Jaan, brother, are you there?”
“Yes, yes, we are here. What is it?”
“Monsters are nearby, Haji Jaan. Stay safe and be prepared.”
“God willing, we will be prepared, brother. Stay safe.”
“Latif Jaan, are you there, Latif?”
“Latif, brother, are you there?”
“Latif Latif Latif Latif Latif? Are you there, brother?”
“YES! We are here, brother, what is it?”
“Monsters are close, brother, be prepared.”
“We are always prepared. Stay safe, brother.”
Kalima, or at least the guy who wanted to talk to him, was emblematic of so much of what I was hearing on mission after mission. These men, these Taliban, these guys sitting in the mountains, were bored and tired, but mostly bored. This is difficult to explain in that, while it’s easy for me to tell you this, it’s difficult for us humans to admit that the malevolent can be filled with the mundane. We want our evil to stay evil, the prosaic to be not just separated from the depraved, but diametrically opposed. But now these two poles were busy converging, and I was feeling less and less sure about my conceptualization of our enemy as somehow less, or at least other, than human.
And then my Mission happened, and none of that mattered anymore.