I WONDERED IF I SIMPLY wasn’t cut out to be a DSO. I still wonder, sometimes. There wouldn’t be any shame in this, or at least, not much. It’s a difficult job. Flying, just the act of sitting in a cold seat inside a poorly insulated cargo plane that is so loud and so vibratory that it’s all but impossible to tell which of these two nuisances is more responsible for your newfound tinnitus (allegedly, it’s basically an even split of both), is hard. It’s also hard to listen to people talking in another language, while also listening to the men on your plane talking, while also listening to the ground forces talking, while also listening to the sometimes five or six other aircraft in the stack talking, all while continuously deciding whether what you heard in that other language is important enough to translate into English, that is, real English, English that someone else can understand and use, not the weird hybrid of Pashto and English that now exists in your head and can honestly be a little confusing, such that if you’re not careful you’re going to tell the Nav or the JTAC that “the Taliban weapons have,” or “for the attack ready they are,” or some other weird adolescent Yoda shit that will, in the best-case scenario, where it’s just a casual update that you think someone might find interesting, only get you laughed at, and in the worst-case scenario, where the three seconds it takes you to repeat yourself in normal fucking English are all the time it takes for the Taliban to shoot, or set off their IED, or finish coordinating their ambush, will get someone hurt, or killed.
It’s also really fucking hard to learn how to fly on different aircraft, how to communicate on those aircraft, how to properly wear your seatbelt on those aircraft so that when you’re doing an airdrop on a plane you’ve never been on before and the pilot suddenly drops the tail down forty-five degrees to send the pallet of water and food flying out the back and down to the Marines in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, and it turns out the mechanism that locks your seat into place is broken, such that said seat flies backward until it mercifully hits the back of its track and you find yourself sitting with one ass cheek more or less on said seat and the other ass cheek completely off, looking over your shoulder at the ground three hundred feet below you, suddenly acutely aware of the fact that you’re not wearing a parachute ’cause like, why would you, there’s a seatbelt, except you couldn’t figure out how to get the seatbelt around your bulletproof vest, and your survival vest, and your equipment, and they said the bulletproof vest was a lot more important on this plane, ’cause the seat you’re sitting in doesn’t have any armor around it like the pilots’ seats do, and so you listened to them and kept your vest on, thinking, eh, fuck the seatbelt, and besides, you’re so used to flying on gunships and Whiskeys that like, why the fuck would you need to wear a seatbelt, what’s the worst that could happen, some turbulence? Oh, no, okay, this is definitely the worst that could happen, dying during a fucking daytime airdrop because you’re a dumb, fat fuck who should’ve asked someone to help you with your goddamn seatbelt.
Seatbelt situations notwithstanding, I was a good DSO. I was a great linguist. Never the best, but I was up there in terms of pure language capability. And I was good enough at the rest—the technical skills we learned, the situational awareness, the in-flight communication.
I was not a good airman. I wasn’t good with authority or discipline or respect. Generally, being a DSO and being an airman were kept separate, so this worked out in my favor. The men I flew with, because they weren’t in charge of supervising me or making sure I was adhering to Air Force standards, only cared if I was doing my job well. Those who were in charge of supervising me and making sure I adhered to standards only cared that I did my job at all. Because of this disconnect my worst habits and tendencies were allowed to run rampant. I didn’t bother shaving more than once a week, my uniform usually violated four different regulations, and at some point I got so cocky, so sure of my invulnerability (or so uncaring about consequences) that I used the fabled “With all due respect, sir, go fuck yourself” on one of the Whiskey majors. (He did need to go fuck himself, but it wasn’t really my place to inform him of this.)
By the end of my second deployment, all this bad airmanship had begun to affect my DSOing. I couldn’t see the point of it all anymore. The war, deploying, flying, our missions, any of it. It took every ounce of willpower I had to bother listening to anything the Taliban was saying. What did it matter? They’d kill some of us; we’d kill a bunch of them. My presence had so very little to do with this, and I no longer believed that my changing those numbers one way or the other was meaningful, or at least meaningful in the way I was being told it was. Even if we did have a fire mission, all I wanted to write when we landed was “nothing significant to report” or NSTR, because what the fuck was significant about us dropping a few 105s on some random Afghans? I was hard pressed to imagine anything less significant.
A few days after Scott asked me if I was afraid, on November 29, 2011, I flew my 100th combat mission (or maybe 101st; I have a couple flights, the seatbelt flight is one, funnily enough, that are missing from my records). The flight was as boring as they came, a true NSTR mission. Utterly uneventful. I didn’t hear anything bad, the sensors didn’t see anyone bad, and we didn’t fire a single round. It was short too. All of 4.7 hours. So I don’t really remember it in any great detail. Looking back, this strikes me as strange. Not because I knew November 29, 2011, was my 100th combat mission, but because I knew it was my last mission, combat or otherwise. I knew that I would never fly as a DSO again.
Of course, I didn’t actually know this. What I did know, like I have known very few other things in life, was that if I kept doing what I was doing, kept flying, someone, be it me, another crewmember, a good guy on the ground, a neutral guy on the ground, a potentially bad but not for sure bad guy on the ground—it didn’t matter who, but someone was going to get hurt because of me. It was most likely going to be me, as the times, or maybe the time—I’m not sure how many moments plural have to blend together to create an epoch singular—where I no longer wanted to live had begun at some point during that second deployment.
I don’t remember exactly how, or when, or why I first found myself in my freight container with my 9mm in my mouth. I have a feeling of the idea of the event as a memory, but I couldn’t tell you anything specific about what pushed me to go ahead and French kiss a pistol. I do remember the fourth time, and the fifth, and all the times after until I left Kandahar. I remember that I was always standing directly next to the door of my room, as I felt that I had to have this gun in my mouth the second I was somewhere no one else could see me, or, conversely, I needed to act out this frustration before I could leave my room. I remember knowing that there was warm, healing sunlight mere inches away, but that I didn’t want anything to do with it. I remember how the gun was always empty, and therefore its insertion was probably not much more than some sort of symbolic cry for help, except since no one was around when I did it, I was the only one who could hear my sobs. So who exactly was I supposed to be symbolizing for? And I can’t help but remember how I became quieter each time, less histrionic, more genuine, my despair muffling my voice just as well as it had smothered my will.
I don’t remember ever having a plan, as the idea of putting a bullet into my own head while in Afghanistan was too pitiful, too clichéd, too giving the Taliban what they wanted. But the haze of depression and morbid ideation that had come to envelop my life was making it harder and harder to think of much else, so while I wasn’t sure I could, or would, kill myself, I most certainly wished I were dead. When I did actively contemplate this completion, I always experienced it as just a moment (or moments) of what felt like pure instinct. I say “what felt like” because I’m not able to make out whether this description is wholly accurate, given that the most primal instinct is supposed to be the urge to stay alive. But I don’t know a better word for this impulse that didn’t feel thought, or unthought, because it didn’t seem to come from my mind. The problem was, or is, that I don’t believe in souls, even as literary metaphor, and so where was it coming from?
It could have been from others. I’d always been impressionable, in early life because of the suspension of disbelief that the religion I was raised in required, in later life because of the reaction formation against that religion that forced me to be open-minded to everything (except Christianity, of course). This suggestibility was almost pathological in nature, so much so that years later, when I told my friends that I was planning on going to medical school, a number of them asked how I could possibly be a doctor when I would have to ask everyone around me for an opinion on what I was supposed to do. And no matter the stage of my life, there was always my unassuageable desire to be liked, which often forced me to defer to others, my conceptualization of power dynamics and human interaction being that submission prevents anger and a lack of anger is often as close as you can get to love, or even just like, so you’ll take it.
So if Ed hadn’t told me about the possibility of putting one’s gun in one’s mouth, maybe I wouldn’t have found out what a Beretta tastes like six months later. Or maybe if I’d spent more time with the disciples and their gospel, I wouldn’t have developed doubts about what we were doing. And if I hadn’t started doubting, and Kasady and Conor and Trevor and Charlie and all the other apostates hadn’t been around to spread their heresy to tell me of the futility of their missions, of the power of their nightmares, maybe I wouldn’t have felt like such a failure. Maybe, if I’d just lived in the little bubble of jingoistic self-aggrandizing heroism that the few Pashto DSOs who’d managed to maintain their sanity existed in, I would have kept flying, would have gone on four or five or six more deployments like the Air Force had intended, would have given them however much of me they wanted (“three pounds of flesh” is the amount our new squadron commander explicitly said he would take out of Trevor).
But if I had done that, then my fear would have become reality. Because if I had kept flying, without one day finding myself in my freight container with all that cold metal in my mouth again, but this time not having bothered to take the ammo out, and as the steel was warmed by my tongue and breath and therefore began to feel less foreign, and more like a part of me, such that it would only be natural to grip the gun tighter, to feel more of it by resting my finger on the trigger, to test the tension that was somehow a perfect metaphor for so much of my mind, and then, because of fatigue, or love, or fear, or just an accidental slip (no one other than me would ever know, and would I have enough time to know for sure?) to put a bullet through the back of my skull and coat the wall behind me with bone, brain, and blood, if that—which I didn’t fear so much as welcome—didn’t happen, then as far as I could see, it would mean that, like Dr. Strangelove, I had learned to stop worrying and love the bombs.
Which would mean that it had, in fact, been my destiny to have the anger and fear that I had felt before return, and because there would no longer be a way to escape them, I would embrace these simple, wondrous emotions wholeheartedly (though whether these are in fact separate emotions is unclear, as I have come to believe that most anger stems from a place of fear). This would make me into a monster, an evil thing spreading its corruption throughout the world. In my mind, this was a fate worse than death.
This is what I was afraid of.
Unfortunately, I didn’t know this at the time. I didn’t realize that this was the root of my fear until I was in medical school. Alongside all the medicine, medical schools try to teach their students how to talk to people (sort of; patients belong to a separate category of human that isn’t quite people). They do this by making use of “standardized patients,” actors, professional or otherwise, who play the roles of different patients presenting with all sorts of problems. Sometimes the goal is straightforward: a simple collection of history and the patient helpfully supplies all the information. Other times the goal is the same, but the story is more complicated, and you are supposed to learn how to deal with the patient being purposefully obfuscatory. Other times, the topic at hand is meant to be uncomfortable, or somehow difficult to talk about, like when a young woman goes to a clinic because she’s having vaginal discharge after some recent unprotected sex.
A thing you get taught to do in these sessions is to mirror the energy of the patients, so that you’re on the same emotional level. This advice can have unintended consequences, like when a classmate of mine was dealing with an irate, screaming patient, and, taking this instruction to heart, leapt out of his chair and began yelling right back at the now confused but still screaming patient (they’re good actors). Or, if you’re me, and the young woman in front of you is providing simple, straightforward answers to your initial questions, you decide that you should ask similarly direct, straightforward questions about the nature of her discharge, its onset, consistency, color, smell, all of the things that you are taught to inquire about to determine what the causative organism is, and you get to the bottom of it, and politely inform her that it’s a simple STI and that a few days of antibiotics should clear it right up, and you go back to your seat and think to yourself, Well that wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable as they wanted it to be, well done, me.
And at the end of the session, after the instructor debriefs with the standardized patient and it’s time for feedback, and the instructor says they want to talk specifically to you and one other student, you think nothing of it because you’re good at this, if there’s one thing you can do well it’s listen to people. But then the instructor says that the standardized patient felt intimidated, indeed, felt afraid of you and your direct questions, and you are taken aback, you are fucking shook, because you are not intimidating, why would you try and scare someone in such a setting, that’s ridiculous, she misread the situation, and this is the problem with so much of the world, they don’t understand that speaking directly is not the same as speaking harshly. That’s definitely been the problem since you got out, or maybe since you stopped flying, but that’s on them, not me, it was never my intention to intimidate anyone. “I don’t want to be threatening, just feared enough to never have to make a fist,” though now I’m pretty inclined to show you intimidating, ’cause like, fuck you, you fucking mouse, if that makes you afraid I feel sorry for you and the life of cowering you must live and… stop. This isn’t helpful.
I spent the rest of that day confused and angry, and angry that I was angry, unable to figure out why I was so torn up by this feedback. I had otherwise received glowing remarks in all of my standardized patient sessions. In far more sensitive scenarios, I had put the patient at ease, earned their trust, and given them the space to speak openly about the things they were struggling with. Clearly this was just a classic case of miscommunication, and not at all representative of me as a person or future physician.
This is what I tried to tell myself, with varying levels of success. I had, finally, by that time in my life, learned to ask others for help, and so I texted one of my best friends, Jerry, and explained the situation, angrily. It wasn’t until I had ranted and raved, sent many messages comprised almost entirely of invective, and just generally whined a lot, that, with Jerry’s help, I realized why I was so bothered. Feeling better, and not quite proud, but a little impressed by my newfound emotional maturity, I related this story to the person I was dating at the time. As I got to what I felt was the big reveal, that my being upset was actually disguised worry about being some sort of monster and that this was necessarily tied back to my time in Afghanistan, I expected her to compliment me on my profound insight into my emotions. Instead, she just said something to the effect of “Well, yeah.”
To her, it was immediately obvious that I should be worried about being monstrous. Which, I supposed, meant that it was immediately obvious that I wasn’t all that far off from being a monster. When I got out, when I had decided that I would no longer be afraid, I did what so many people do, and tried to out-scare the fear. I hadn’t considered what this might make of me, what it would require of me and my presentation to the world.
I know that this worry is childish and reductive. I know men and women who continued to kill people, or Talibs, without undergoing any sort of transmogrification. I do think that they probably lost some “good” part of themselves, but that doesn’t mean that they then became moral vacuums. And I know that monsters aren’t real, but if they were, Jerry had pointed out the obvious, that “monsters aren’t interested in repenting. They aren’t interested in atonement or forgiveness or anything else. They’re monsters.” So, by virtue of questioning being part of that category, I excluded myself from it.
But back then, back in Afghanistan, I didn’t know how to ask for help. Even if I had, I could only hold so much cognitive dissonance in mind, and I was already overextended from having considered the Taliban’s side of things and the ethical grayness of our role in Afghanistan. This, coupled with my willingness to believe the worst of myself, meant that I was committed to this binary conceptualization of myself as good or evil, which meant that by having done anything remotely monstrous, I had necessarily become a monster.
I said that it’s unfortunate that I didn’t know any of this at the time, because this lack of self-awareness resulted in months of my anguish being compounded by a very real fear of prosecution. I’m not blameless in this, as I made a lot of mistakes when I stopped flying. I told anyone who would listen, and lots of people who wouldn’t, that I was done. I skipped about four levels of the chain of command and in a strangely offhand but very matter-of-fact way told our commander that I wouldn’t be deploying anymore. To his credit, he let me do this and just walked away, perhaps if only because he was more confused than angry in the moment. My biggest mistake was how often I seemed happy about it, a big smile on my face when I told even complete strangers that I wasn’t going back. My second biggest mistake was trusting that the Air Force would give two shits about my emotional instability.
In AFSOC, after any deployment, you get up to four allegedly off-the-books sessions with a mental health professional (psychiatrist, licensed clinical social worker, psychologist). These sessions are supposed to allow you to decompress, to at least get off your chest (if not out of your head) whatever things are bothering you, without having to commit to (or be committed to) ongoing therapy or treatment. Given the size of AFSOC, these sessions are not at all off-the-books, as there’s a good chance you have to walk into the appointment wearing a uniform with your name on it, and if you manage to get the appointment scheduled in your off time, as soon as you tell someone your job, or something as simple as the plane(s) you fly on, they know exactly what squadron on base owns the people who do that job or fly on that plane, so it would take all of two phone calls for them to know exactly who you are.
The major contribution to the façade of anonymity is the appearance of no records of the conversations one has with whichever shrink (they’re all shrinks, doesn’t matter what degree they have) one gets assigned to for these four sessions. They inform you that they don’t take notes, and that unless you violate the sacrosanct by telling them that you intend to hurt yourself or others, nothing you say will leave the room. (I understand this disclaimer, it’s a rule of medicine and mental health, but it’s sort of laughable when your job involves killing people. If you don’t intend to hurt others, it gets a little hard to fight a war.) Maybe this promise holds true if you see someone other than the person I saw, or maybe it’s true if you really do only need the four sessions. But if you actually need help, then four 30- to 45-minute sessions aren’t likely to accomplish much, particularly if that time is spent with someone who (a) doesn’t understand what a linguist is and therefore (b) needs a primer on what exactly a DSO does but (c) doesn’t have the requisite clearance to be legally told what exactly it is that said DSO does, such that (d) you spend too much time trying to talk around what you did instead of just telling them why you’re there. So when my four free sessions were up, and this patient person in a Navy uniform with an officer’s rank insignia on it told me that they thought I should continue with real, on-the-books care, and that there was a waiver that would allow them to share their notes with my commander, and that signing said waiver would be for the best, just to make sure everyone’s on the same page, I said “Sure, Doc, I can do that.”
What this person didn’t tell me was that (1) they weren’t in the military, but part of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps (PHSCC), and so entitled to wear their fancy Navy-looking uniform with their shiny laden lapels, (2) members of the PHSCC are legally noncombatants, and so even if this person had deployed, there was fuck-all they could possibly understand about my job, and (3) they were a slimy piece of shit for suggesting, let alone encouraging, and then, after my hesitation, eventually cajoling me into, sharing my mental health records with my squadron. I have tried to extend grace to this person, to assume that they had good intentions. I know, on some cognitive level, that they didn’t have it in for me specifically, no matter how annoying or confrontational I was. But I also know, on an emotional level, that they did have it out for me, generally. Me as an idea.
I know this because not long after my sessions became official, my supervisor called me and told me that this person had recommended to my commander that I be charged with malingering and cowardice, for both of which I could (and in their mind should) be court-martialed. When I first wrote that sentence, the one you just read, I included this person’s name, gender, and rank, because of the amount of anger I feel every time I think of them. The indignation is such that I have hopes that publishing all of this information about them will somehow damage them and their career, and make them feel as violated as I did when I heard what they thought of me and what they wanted to do to me. But I went back and took out their rank and name. I switched the language to gender-nonspecific pronouns. An enterprising individual might be able to figure out who they are based on their “branch” of service and the timeline I’ve established, but that would take some serious effort, and I find it hard to imagine that anyone else would bother to do this much work.
This person didn’t decide that I should be charged with these heinous crimes without, in their mind, serious evidence that I was faking mental illness to get out of doing my job because I was too afraid to do my job. At the beginning of every session, I was given a depression inventory that I was told to fill out completely honestly. The answers I provided created a picture of an individual who should show signs of serious depression and extreme mental anguish. When I then met and spoke with this person, I appeared sarcastic, blithe, and perhaps even chipper at the prospect of no longer DSOing. My understanding is that this contradiction between my answers and my affect led this person to believe that I was malingering, and that I was a coward.
I can only manage the requisite level of objectivity for a few minutes at a time before my rage returns, but in that short time I can force myself to imagine what this person was seeing: a young, brash, obnoxious man-child who was so sure of himself as to be wholly confident that he could up and quit whenever he wanted, despite his having signed a six-year contract committing him to as many deployments as the Air Force saw fit, and that this young man-child had a smile on his face every time he asserted—as if it were a foregone conclusion, as if it were a fact—that he was never going back out. When I carry out this thought experiment, I can see how one might think that this young man is smart enough to know that high scores on the inventory can earn him a diagnosis of depression, which at the very least will get him out of his next deployment, if not all of them, and I can then see the logic behind leveling the above charges.
What I can’t see is how someone who had been practicing for as long as this person had wouldn’t bother to ask the stupid young man why his affect was so inconsistent with his inventories. Why he got that dumbass grin on his face whenever he proclaimed his status as a non-deployer. Why he seemed so happy to be talking to Mental Health, an act that, at that time, was associated with weakness, with faggotry, with being a pussy-ass little bitch.
Because this person didn’t ask these questions, I didn’t tell them that yes, I appeared happy, and, yes, I was afraid. And if we assess cowardice as simple fear, then I suppose it’s possible that I was, in fact, a coward. But if we understand that cowardice is a fear of doing dangerous or difficult things, then I was no coward, as I wasn’t afraid of doing such things. I was afraid of wanting to do them. And so the sarcasm, and the blitheness, and the general holier-than-thou, smug-as-fuck looks on my face weren’t because I was malingering. They were because for perhaps the first time in my life, I was standing up for something I actually believed in, and because I was sure that by doing so I was saving myself, and that this decision did, in fact, make me quite righteous—likely more righteous than anyone who was willing to become the monster—I was, paradoxically, pleased with my decision. I wasn’t happy, but I was also unwilling to break down and show this person my fear, my sadness, and my pain. This bravado is what accounted for the discrepancy between paper and person and was cited as the main evidence against me.
When I found out what this person had told my commander, I refused to see them again. But by now I was in the awkward spot of being forced to go to Mental Health, so I had to see someone. Because of the limited number of appointments available with the handful of other providers, I was told I would be seeing the officer who was in charge of Mental Health. This sounded like a threat and continued to feel like one when I met the Mental Health Clinic chief, who was, let’s say, suspicious of me and my intentions.
The Air Force kindly gave me a copy of my mental health records, in all of their unfiltered glory, when I got out. I was not liked by most of the providers I saw. I both remember this—one of them called me an asshole to my face during a session (he later got a DUI, so it seems his judgment is questionable)—and have the documentation to show it.
Reading their notes, I am presented with the image of a person who is claiming to be suicidal on paper, but then denies intent in person, a person who claims that they are mentally unstable, but refuses to accept medication or therapy to treat this instability, and a person who is committed to no longer doing their sworn duty, no matter the cost.
Which was all true. Saying out loud that I wanted to die, or no longer exist, was shameful. I was too proud to tell them about how often I locked myself in my room at home, because I knew that the kitchen had the knives that would get the job done, and as long as I kept drinking, eventually I would pass out, and while I’d feel pretty shitty the next morning, I would have survived. I was also too afraid of being committed, certain that any sort of inpatient treatment was akin to imprisonment (being from Florida and being raised in a family rife with mental illness, I was all too familiar with the power of the Baker Act). I was, moreover, being threatened with prosecution for having even broached the idea that I might be afraid, and then chastised, and threatened with more punishment, for not talking about my feelings, aka the possibility that I might be afraid.
I was similarly suspicious of therapy, or at least my conceptualization of it, and convinced that it was a cure worse than the disease. I couldn’t bear to think about my missions, or being a DSO, or even Pashto, without breaking out into a cold sweat and becoming nauseated, so how the fuck was I supposed to talk about all the shit that had gotten me to that point? Couldn’t they just give me what I wanted and let me never hear any of it again? Seemed like an equally effective “treatment” to me. Between all the side-effect horror stories I’d heard and my certainty that I was unfixable, I wasn’t willing to consider taking the meds they were proposing, because I just knew that I too would wind up initially being prescribed two antidepressants to keep the suicidal ideations at bay, and then when those (and the fear of nightmares) kept me up at night, I’d be given some low-dose benzodiazepines to take the edge off, and then when those, combined with my preexisting and severe alcohol consumption, led me to be groggy to the point of falling asleep at work, they’d add on some methylphenidate so that I wouldn’t be a completely useless zombie. Just a mostly useless one. This isn’t a hypothetical regimen; it’s exactly what Kasady was prescribed.
As for doing my job, I was fine with that, as long as my job didn’t require killing people. I was then reminded, repeatedly, as if I’d somehow forgotten, that I had in fact joined the military of my own volition, and that the military tends to go about killing people, and therefore this is what I signed up to do. Never mind that at the age of eighteen I enlisted to perform a different job on a different plane, assured that the closest I’d be to combat was, literally, thirty thousand feet above any potential battlefield. Never mind that if I’d asked my recruiter, or my instructor at basic training, or an instructor at language school, or an instructor at intelligence school, or an instructor at survival school, or a linguist who worked aboard RC-135s, if I had asked fucking anyone if I’d be responsible for killing people as a linguist, I would have been called an idiot and laughed out of the room.
So while Captain B., said Mental Health Clinic chief, had a reputation for being a ballbuster (if she hadn’t been a she, and hadn’t been blond and attractive, she most likely would have just been seen as serious, or straightforward, but, y’know, sexism), I can’t help but think that her demeanor at the outset of our meeting was in large part due to having been warned about me. Thankfully, she was still professional, if not exceedingly direct. She outlined for me all of the above problems with my story, and while she didn’t call me a liar, she made it very clear that it wasn’t hard for others to think of me as one.
“Do you want help?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then you have to see the psychiatrist, you have to do therapy, and you have to cooperate with both.”
“I… Okay. I will.”
I think she expected me to argue with her, like she’d been told I had with everyone else, because her face sort of dropped for a second when I said this. She reset it, but her posture and presence softened. More gently, she said, “Good. Why the change of heart?”
“I can’t keep feeling like this.”
“Like what?”
“Like I want to die.”
“Do you want to hurt yourself?”
“Fuck! Sorry. No, that isn’t it. I just don’t want to be alive.”
“Do I need to send you to the hospital?”
“No. I’m not going to kill myself. I don’t want to. No, like. I don’t want to want to.”
“Okay. If that changes, do you have someone to call?”
“Yes. I have friends. My roommate helps, too.”
“All right. You’re going to do therapy with one of our social workers, and you’ll see Dr. S. next week about medications.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I would like to think that I would have come to this decision eventually, regardless of who was recommending, or even dictating it, but I suspect that this might not have been the case. I’m hopeful that someone else would have understood that not having a plan to commit suicide doesn’t mean you’re not suicidal, just that you’re impulsive, but no one else had up until that point, so I’m not sure. Whether in prison, or dead, or just mired in my miasma of melancholy, I don’t know that I’d be here without Captain B. So, thanks, ma’am.
While the person who recommended the charges didn’t have it in for me personally, they did for me as an idea. I was not the first DSO threatened with prosecution for malingering and cowardice, and I wouldn’t be the last. None of us wound up being charged with these heinous crimes, because the crimes were nonexistent. The only heinous thing lying about was the accusation that any of us, who had seen more combat and killed more people than any of those trying to accuse us, were cowards. We were just tired and angry. Maybe tired of being angry. Those in charge, however, were well-rested, and they were fucking furious.
By the time they were considering levying these charges against me, I was the seventh DSO who’d been to Afghanistan to quit for mental health reasons (there were others who left through more official channels, and so it’s unclear what, if any, issues they were dealing with). We came from varying socioeconomic classes, separate parts of the country, different religions, politics, upbringings, marital statuses, age groups. The only common thread between us (other than the usual maleness and whiteness) was our experiences in Afghanistan. It seemed pretty self-fucking-evident that we were not the problem, the mission was.
But at almost every level, our concerns were ignored. When Kasady talked to our leadership about the suffering he was seeing, about the fellow DSO who had told him “I got a dog just to make sure I have a reason to come home,” they did nothing. Well, that’s not true. In what appeared to be some misguided attempt to bolster his career, our leadership sent the most bumbling dumbfuck captain they could to Afghanistan, where he attempted to swing his nonexistent dick around (the man tried to write formal letters of reprimand for other grown men refusing to go to bed when he told them to), only to be laughed at as others outside of our leadership quickly realized how much of a fucking moron he was.
Upon being told that most of the DSOs in Afghanistan were operating at around a 30 percent capacity, that they had only received enough training to be capable of understanding 30 percent of what they were hearing, the commander of the 1st Special Operations Wing, a man who is now a three-star general and the head of all of AFSOC, responded with “I’d rather have 30 percent of a DSO than no DSO.”
The context here is important, in that these weren’t individual asshats carrying out some vendetta against us or the people of Afghanistan. All of these poor decisions—sending out undertrained people, sending them out with a less than 1:1 dwell time (despite the fact that this requires the signed approval of the secretary of defense, which our squadron leaders most certainly did not have), threatening people who were claiming mental health problems with punishment unless they went back to the place and job that they were claiming was the root cause of their mental health problems—were symptoms of the greater disease that was the “war” in Afghanistan.
Those quotes are there because despite what you may have heard, what we did in Afghanistan wasn’t a war. Not according to a senior NATO commander in 2009, who upon being asked about the type of fighting that was going on, replied with “We checked with the legal team and they agree it’s not a war.” Not according to General Stanley McChrystal, the (oh so very supreme) commander of Afghan operations, who wrote in an official report that what we were doing was “not a war in the conventional sense.” Not according to U.S. law, as we hadn’t declared war against anyone, and even if we’d bothered with this ludicrous formality, that really seems like such a waste of time when the only people affected aren’t the ones doing the declaring, and who would it have been against? The Taliban? They gave up way back in 2002. Afghanistan? (Dear reader, please read that italicized word with as much snark and contempt as you can muster. For the world’s last superpower to think about declaring war against a “country” that only exists because of arbitrary colonial lines drawn one hundred years ago after the British finally admitted defeat is laughable in the extreme. But then, I guess, Grenada happened. And bananas. So maybe not.) No, we were at war with an idea.
Not terrorism, by the by. We knew that was unkillable. (In 2011, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Michael G. Vickers, said about the idea of al Qaeda, “You’re never going to eradicate that.”) We were at war with the idea that we weren’t all-powerful, untouchable, and fully willing to do whatever it takes to show the world just how true these things were. This mindset had metastasized to every part of the military, including my leadership. They weren’t mad at us for the act of quitting. They were mad at us for why we were quitting: because we knew that what we were doing was pointless.
When you deal with people who are infatuated with the idea of something but have never had a tangible interaction with it, there’s always going to be major conflict. Some of our leadership had, at some point, killed some folk. So, for them, we were doing what they had done, or at least what they told themselves they had done: killing evil men. This is one of the easiest things anyone can do, as it requires no justification, no second thoughts. Killing evil men is righteous, both ethically and morally. But we knew that these evil men weren’t evil all of the time, or maybe any of the time. Either way, this meant that sometimes we were just killing men. This was not something they were familiar with.
Even the other DSOs, the non-Pashto, non-Arab ones, took it for granted that we should have felt all the same things they did—pride, excitement, joy, even. But then, I guess that’s just a natural consequence of people who have to imagine an experience they’ve never had.
There were members of our squadron who tried to do their best by us. Regardless of their feelings for us personally, they knew that we weren’t being treated fairly. Even Ed, in all of his Big Blueness, had to admit that the squadron had not taken good care of its people. One of the senior Arab DSOs supported us as best he could, albeit while still serving the needs of the Air Force. Another Arab, not a DSO, but an incredibly gifted linguist, understood what it meant to do things that in the moment you knew were necessary, like shooting and killing the armed teenagers driving a jeep at full speed directly toward you somewhere in the sands of North Africa, but that later, when you were home again, playing with your own children, might fuck you up pretty good. But there was only so much they could do, and it wouldn’t make sense for them to jeopardize their careers when the outcome would be the same.
They knew that there was no arguing with the idea that was this “war.” Because it was a war against an idea, I think that for so many people, the killing too was just an idea. They bragged about how they “hear dead people” and “kill people and break their shit” and all the other euphemisms for war, but because they hadn’t done, well, any of that, any dead people that they associated themselves with weren’t actual persons. They were monsters. But then, monsters aren’t real. So they were ideas, effigies. And while it might be satisfying, the burning of effigies only accomplishes two things: the propagation of violence, and the preservation of the idea you’re supposed to be destroying.
This might be why the only name I find appropriate for what we did in Afghanistan is “The Forever War.” The point wasn’t to rid the world, or even Afghanistan, of al Qaeda, or the Taliban. The point was to make sure that we could always, for fucking ever, be trying to rid the world of al Qaeda or the Taliban. If that meant we made new versions of each of these groups, well that was no problem, as we would just get more enemies. More effigies. More ideas. More war.