ACCORDING TO MY OFFICIAL Air Force records, I do not have, and in fact have never had, PTSD. Formally receiving this diagnosis would have required an official admission that what I did and saw and heard was in fact traumatic and that it wasn’t normal, which would only have served to justify my reasons for not wanting to go back. You can see why the powers that be wouldn’t want to admit this. And while this diagnosis wasn’t true when the Air Force made it, it might be now. Time doesn’t heal all wounds—some simply can’t be treated—but eventually your mind can bring the edges together, and while the scar is ugly and imprecise, the gaping hole has, finally, closed. These days I can listen to Pashto without breaking out in a cold sweat, get on a plane without thinking about the guns that ought to be attached to it, and talk about war without wanting to curl up in a ball and die. This, then, is understood as meaning that my PTSD has been cured (never mind that curing something that was never supposed to have existed creates some mild metaphysical stickiness).
In the time since I wasn’t diagnosed, the military has embraced a different terminology to attempt to describe the turmoil that I and so many others experienced: moral injury. The idea of moral injury has been around since at least the 1980s, though the explicit term was coined by Jonathan Shay in the nineties, when his work with Vietnam veterans led to his writing Achilles in Vietnam. Today, Syracuse University’s Moral Injury Project not only defines moral injury but attempts to explain why and when it happens:
Moral injury is the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one’s own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct.
This is a good definition; it is thorough while simultaneously casting a wide enough net to embrace the myriad reasons any warfighter could suffer such an injury. Being a DSO allowed for perpetration, witnessing, and failure. Certainly, my moral code was violated. But I don’t think moral injury fully encompasses just what happened. It’s not that I, along with almost every other Pashto DSO, wasn’t morally injured. We were. But it’s not entirely accurate to say that there was “damage done to [my] conscience or moral compass.” It’s more like, along with the many men I killed, my consciousness was blown the fuck up.
With the exception of spies mythical and real, most warfighters throughout history have not been tasked with killing people they know. Even in our modern wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the majority of killing is done by complete strangers. There is, I assume, a feeling of knowing associated with killing someone in close combat, even though you may have no knowledge of anything that defines that person as a unique human. But this is different from understanding what makes that person a person, from killing someone you know. With modernity came the ability to have this knowledge.
The most famous of these warriors are drone operators. These men and women face issues that I can’t begin to understand, as the cognitive dissonance that they experience is so strange as to be something out of science fiction. If anything, it seems that their injury is arguably worsened by the moral contradiction of being so far away from the “threat.” These are people who wake up every morning and drive to work like any other commuter. Except, their work is hunting people. They do this work for twelve hours (or more), and at the end of their shift they head home. Just like any other commuter. Maybe their significant other calls them and asks them to stop and pick up some milk on the way, which they obligingly do, maybe grabbing a candy bar or a six-pack at the same time. And then they sit down to dinner with their loved ones, the memory of the missile they fired five hours earlier destroying a man still playing in their head.
Often, the man that was destroyed by that missile was a target that this drone operator had been following for days or weeks. This work is done to establish what is known as a pattern of life (POL), aka the shit someone does on a regular basis. POL is supposed to help determine whether the things someone is doing or the people someone is meeting are happenstance or more purposeful. Did that guy go talk to a known bomb-maker who also happens to be a tailor just once, like someone who was trying out different tailors might do? Or did that guy go see his “tailor” two or three times a week for a month, all while wearing the same ill-fitting clothing? In the course of this work—sometimes as a side effect, sometimes completely on purpose—one begins to develop an idea of who that target is.
In a New York Times article exploring the effects of this work, of the damage done to the men and women who perform this function, an unnamed drone operator says that his injuries resulted from “cognitive combat intimacy,” a term so apt that I wish his name were published, if only so he could get the credit he deserves for such an accurate neologism. The day in, day out watching of targets, learning about their lives, their habits, their likes and dislikes, results in a strong sense of familiarity, and sometimes, even closeness (a friend of mine who did this sort of work once told me that he and his team could always identify one particular target based on the highly specific porn searches said target made on various devices that he used, which while comical, is indeed also quite intimate). And then, after you’ve come to know so much about this person, in fact because you’ve come to know so much about this person, you kill them.
The work I did was not this in-depth, and nowhere near as detailed (I didn’t hear of any porn searches, though I did learn about a few sexual preferences), and so it could be said, in relation to others like these drone operators, that I didn’t know much about the men I was listening to, not really. The sense of closeness I had with the men I listened to was not a cognitive process, but an emotional one (whether and how these two processes are actually different is a matter of debate, but in my usage here I mean to have cognitive equate to an objective, fact-finding affair, and emotional to mean a subjective, desire-discovering activity).
I spent a long time fighting this realization. I had been okay with intellectualizing the Taliban as a movement, analyzing their motivations, trying to understand why they might do all these terrible things. This was okay to do, as knowing your enemy is part of being a good warrior. Loving them, not so much. This might be a me-specific problem. I’m not certain, as articulating it is hard. But I find it impossible to feel another human without simultaneously loving them to some extent.
So when I say that my consciousness was blown up, while I’m being a little melodramatic, for the most part I mean it. If we define consciousness as “the normal state of being awake and able to understand what is happening around you,” then I sure as shit stopped being conscious at some point, somewhere in Afghanistan, sometime around the impact of a missile or a bullet. I couldn’t understand why I felt this love for these men, and I couldn’t understand how I was supposed to kill them once I knew that love existed.
What I now think is that this love hinged on a simple grammatical conceit. That of the collective, proper noun, e.g. the Taliban, vs. that of the singular, common noun. Because the whole of the Taliban did, in the end, tell me of their evil. I have no love for them. Any given talib just told me who they were. I couldn’t help but love them.
When the Taliban told me of their plans to kill the men on the ground I was working for, I hated them, and longed for their death. When a talib told me of these plans, were they any different from me or the people I was working with who were actively plotting that same talib’s death? When the Taliban fantasized about the glorious day when the invaders would be gone, they reeked of despotism and tyranny. When a talib dreamed of that future, were they any different from an American patriot who wouldn’t stand the trespasses of another? When the Taliban lamented their losses, I scoffed at them, and laughed at their pain. When a talib lost his friend, was that any different from the ache I felt when my JTAC got shot?
Wouldn’t I, and virtually everyone I knew, do the same thing if we were in their position? Of course I would defend my country, my homeland, and my way of life. Of course I would readily fight and happily kill those who I felt were threatening the people I loved. Hell, wasn’t that why we were fighting this war? Wasn’t that exactly what I was trained to do?
Because I could hear it all, both sides of this strange and eternal war, the boundary that was supposed to separate them from us no longer existed. Even if I only spent six hundred hours listening to the Taliban, or even just a portion of that, I spent thousands of hours hearing them in my head, building their camaraderie, telling me it was too cold to jihad, or breathing their friend’s last breath.
And so, at some point, were we not all brothers in arms?
This love that I had, or have, was a one-sided affair. They knew I was listening (if not me, specifically, then at least me, conceptually). Whether it was a good or bad thing (from their perspective) that I was hearing them was irrelevant, as there was nothing they, or I, could do to stop me. I was their captive audience, held at gunpoints. Sometime during my second deployment I suddenly appreciated how this explained much of their bullshitting; it’s a good idea to let your enemy hear that not only are you indefatigable, even after ten years of war, but that you’re also excited to continue fighting, day after day. The enemy (aka me) hears this and becomes frustrated, disheartened, and confused, which are more or less the three things you want the target of your psychological warfare to be.
Their knowledge of my presence explained their ridiculous projections, their claims that they had somehow killed hundreds of us, even when their attack had only targeted a few dozen guys out at some FOB. With time, my anger, my desire to confront them with their falsehoods, was replaced by exhaustion (as, I suspect, all anger eventually is). Once I was too tired and too sad to be angry at hearing them repeat these lies, I could hear them differently. I could hear them like a talib heard them. To a talib, these outrageous claims weren’t lies. When they killed a few of us, say in a firefight, where they could be more certain of the deaths, they knew the real count; they had watched three, or four, or ten of us die (as opposed to a random mortar attack, or even an IED, where they couldn’t be sure of the number dead). But it wasn’t how many of us they killed that mattered, it was the fact that they were killing us at all.
U.S. (and many European) fighters are so well equipped, so technologically advanced, so well armored as to be mythical. SEALs, Green Berets, and other special operators are trained to continue moving after they’ve been shot. (I’ve helped them with this training. The rules were that when we, the “bad guys,” got shot, we went down. If they, the “good guys,” got shot, they were supposed to keep advancing until they neutralized us and completed their mission. All of this was done with simulation rounds, but there’s still impact, and the guns we were using were real; they really were getting shot.) The purpose of this training is to impart a psychology of undefeatability. It is singularly terrifying to shoot multiple bullets into what is supposed to be a human and then watch that (alleged) human continue to push forward as if nothing happened to them. Yes, somewhere in the back of your mind you know that they are wearing a bulletproof vest and other pieces of body armor and that these are the things keeping them alive, but that knowledge doesn’t make the six-foot-tall, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound creature coming at you any less intimidating. To kill such a being is to kill a god. I could now see why a Talib might feel entitled to inflate his kill count.
In addition to this sort of allegorical accounting, I wondered if, in a way, they weren’t actually right about how many of us they were successfully killing. At the very least, a lot of us were dying. And I couldn’t help but think, if a warfighter dies because of a war, does it matter if they died on the battlefield? Does it matter if their death is “self-inflicted”? All those men and women who made it out of Afghanistan, only to commit suicide once they were home, are they not casualties of war? Didn’t the Taliban kill them?
Equally disheartening was my newfound understanding of why the Taliban seemed to ignore, somehow discount, our kills. On the missions where I knew we had killed dozens of them, they routinely refused to acknowledge all of the deaths. Some of this was attributable to their haphazard organization; they didn’t exactly have rosters of who was fighting in a given battle, or dog tags to identify unrecognizable corpses. Our jokes about them being immortal had stopped being funny, because now I couldn’t help but wonder if they actually were. They were suffering thousands of casualties per year, which I always heard about, but not once had I been told that the Taliban was growing weaker, getting smaller. It was like we were playing whack-an-Afghan, and every time we managed to hit one, another popped up one wadi over. How many times had we rolled up the same guy, interrogated him, probably tortured him, eventually released him, only to wind up hunting him down again weeks or months or years later? They were constantly replacing themselves, either literally or figuratively, and we had fallen for the trap of thinking of them as interchangeable, thereby placing them beyond the constraints of ordinary humanity, allowing them to become the superhumans they claimed they were. So, while I knew they were dying, I no longer believed they were dead.
You may have noticed, or maybe not, how slippery I have been with the verb to kill:
This is no grammatical slip, an inability to keep track of who did what. These variations are there because there was, and is, an argument to be made about my role in any killing, as that’s not how gunships, or Whiskeys, or DSOs work. No single individual is held responsible for the people that our planes kill. It’s a crew effort. There is no ammunition without a loadmaster to balance the plane; a FCO can’t fire that ammunition without gunners loading the weapons; the gunners won’t ready the weapons till the sensor operators find a bad guy; the sensor operators couldn’t find that bad guy without pilots flying the plane; the pilots couldn’t have flown the plane to the location where the sensors found that bad guy without a navigator guiding them across the country; the navigator couldn’t have safely gotten across that country without an EWO making sure no one hit the plane with a rocket; the EWO couldn’t have used his equipment without a flight engineer making sure everything was in working order.
I didn’t mention the role of DSOs because DSOs, while nice to have around, are not remotely necessary for a C-130 to carry out its mission. And so, if I heard something that proved to be the key piece of information that resulted in us shooting, a piece of information, that, if lacking, would have prevented us from shooting, then didn’t I kill someone on my own? Conversely, if I didn’t hear anything that was related to why we shot, then did I kill anyone at all?
The problem with this argument is that according to my official records I have in fact killed 123 people. The actual wording is “123 insurgents EKIA” (EKIA = enemy killed in action, so not quite people, but definitely killed). These records don’t say that I was part of a crew that killed these people, or that I supported other people who did the killing, just that I killed those 123 humans. I can’t know, and will never know, if all of these kills belong to me. I do know, and will always know, that I belong to all of them.
To have felt these men, and to have consequently loved them, was an exercise in radical empathy, long before I knew that such a concept existed. For a long time, I struggled with how to explain this to people. Some of this was a problem with who I was telling the story to. Americans have been well trained to respect, and even idolize, those who go off to “fight for their freedom.” They have not been taught how to listen to those men and women tell their stories when they contradict the greater narrative, when they conflict with their conception of their nation’s infallible moral excellence. But most of it was a problem with my storytelling; I wasn’t able to describe my thoughts without my emotions confusing the message. So when I told people there were things I wished I hadn’t heard, their natural assumption was that those things were all of the violence, and the killing, and the dying. In response to this, I would get upset that they were missing the point and then fail to explain myself properly. I didn’t know how to say, instead of scream, “No, that’s not it! That’s the job! That’s just what you hear.”
I was talking to a friend about this, probably the best Pashto DSO of any of us, and he too spent years struggling with his telling. Maybe we’ve softened with age, or maybe it’s because now he’s a physicist and thinks about things at scales most of us can’t comprehend, but he finds it easier to explain now. What he told me was that while any given person can be infinitely different from another, you can only be so different within the human experience, because “that infinity is still confined between zero and one”: human or not. What we listened to made this infinity that much smaller. Not the killing, not the dying, but the everything else.
The run-of-the-mill, everyday this is my life and it’s full of just as much petty bullshit as yours, so I’m gonna make a decent number of dick jokes to try and brighten it up a little bit (dick jokes, it would seem, are universal).
Or the well, yeah, I’m trying to kill, I mean, not you in particular, but the men like you, but hey, aren’t you trying to kill me and my brothers too? All’s fair, man. Besides, I never did anything to you. Look what you’ve done to us.
And the I can’t wait till this shit is over and we can get back to our lives.
These are the things I wish I hadn’t heard.
If I hadn’t heard those things, infinity would have remained, well, infinite. I would have been able to tell myself that the Taliban were not men, were not even human, that they were in fact Enemies, whose only purpose was to be Killed in Action. If I hadn’t heard those things, I wouldn’t have loved the men I was listening to. If I hadn’t loved them, killing them would have been easy. If killing them had been easy, my consciousness would have remained intact.
To say that I loved the Taliban is surely anathema to most anyone who reads this. It doesn’t feel good, or right, for me to say it. But I checked, and of the many definitions that exist for the word love, one of them is the following: “strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties.” I most certainly had personal ties to the men I was listening to; they told me shit they wouldn’t tell their best (non-Talib) friends, their wives, their fathers. And at some point, not because they were Talibs, in fact in spite of that, because they were human, I came to have the strong affection for them that I firmly believe it is impossible not to develop for virtually any other person if you can get past your own bullshit and just accept that they’re people too.
Let me be clear about something here: I in no way support the Taliban, their stated goals, their practices, or really anything about them. Nor do I support the individual men who comprise the greater Taliban. Their movement and many of their beliefs are an affront to modernity in all of its complicated, messy, but ultimately better than the shit that actively and gleefully removes myriad human rights from everyone who isn’t a God-fearing man, splendor. They are not the good guys.
None of these things detract from the fact that they’re still human. They’re still people. I have no desire for you to identify with them or wish for their lives to be spared. What I do ask is that you understand that I did identify with them. I had to. My job required it. All that talking with my teachers in language school, so I could figure out how they think? That’s what made me a good linguist. The translation we did isn’t something that can be done by a computer or a robot, it isn’t the simple transformation of the sounds of one language into another. You have to understand the intent, the tone, the playfulness, the fear, the anger, the confusion, all of the nuances that attach themselves to spoken words and drastically change their meanings. It was impossible for me to do this without internalizing the speakers’ logic (it’s possible for others, but I don’t understand that process).
It was also impossible, despite all this knowing and feeling, for me to wish for their lives to have been spared. To have spared their lives would have been to guarantee that many others would have been taken. And if Camus was right, and “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem,” it isn’t as simple as suicide or not. Whether I think my life is worth living is unimportant, or at least less important than the lives of those who know that their existence has merit. And if it’s in my power to not only help them keep living, but ensure that they can, am I not obligated to carry out that duty? If, in this act of protecting life, which, at least in my case, often required the taking of other lives, my life becomes threatened (but only by me), when do I stop? Can I? If I can physically keep flying, keep listening, and by doing so save ten, or twenty, or maybe hundreds of other lives, but with the knowledge that at some point, I will kill myself, which is more moral? Sparing their lives? Or ending mine? This was the only truly serious philosophical problem. Not if I kill myself, but when.
I’ve managed to piece it back together, mostly. Said consciousness. I have an idea of what’s right and wrong in this world, whom I (truly) love and don’t. But like anything else that has been shattered, once I, or at least my I, was rebuilt, there were pieces missing, structures weakened. The part of my mind that could hear Pashto without having a panic attack was gone. The bit of brain that understood that violence isn’t always the answer was strained, at best, bearing a larger load than it had been built for. And, for a long, long time, I couldn’t find the section for empathy. I thought, in that time, that it was gone forever.
Because I couldn’t feel anything for anyone. Not the Taliban, not you, not me. Initially, this felt like your average disdain; anything anyone tried to tell me about DSOing, or the war, or how to feel, I simply dismissed as irrelevant. In the words of Trevor, “No concern that any human has is worse than any mission I’ve been on.” At some point though, this dismissal metastasized. It was too much work to feel that the things people were telling me were irrelevant. It was far easier to just know that the people telling me were.
The way I figured it, if I’d already been forced to kill those I loved, then how was I supposed to attach meaning to anyone else’s life? To do so would have only served to set me up for further trauma. This is a known side effect of combat, described by Shay in Achilles in Vietnam. He felt that it was a survival skill, a thing we naturally did during war just to make it from one day to the next. We stopped feeling bothered when we referred to dead civilians as collateral damage, so as to eliminate their humanity, as this meant we didn’t have to worry about killing civilians. We stopped caring when they extended our deployments or gave us half the people to carry out twice as many missions. We stopped hoping for a day when the war(s) would end. We stopped wanting anything, stopped willing anything.
But for me, apathy wasn’t sufficient. Not caring wasn’t good enough, wasn’t powerful enough. Not caring is only one step removed from yes caring. I needed to be further away from whatever it was that was allowing me to see and understand the Taliban as human. I needed negation. To say that someone’s life was meaningless wasn’t enough; I had to know, and had to let them know, that their life removed meaning from the world, such that, if I could invalidate them, or even just kill them, we would all be better off.
This antipathy, or maybe even dyspathy, is still around in some ways. I’m cold and calloused about death. When I was applying to medical school, I had prepared an answer for a question I was told I might get during interviews: “How do you plan on dealing with death?” The first thing I had to do was learn to stifle my laughter, it being comical that these people would be asking me that question. Then I had to learn how to not respond with “What the fuck do you know about death?” Finally, I learned how to tell them what they wanted to hear. “Well, when people die, it matters. But you still have to fly the next day. Or, I guess, operate, or you know, go to work.” I found the question a little silly, for, as Erich Maria Remarque wrote, “when a man has seen so many dead he cannot understand any longer why there should be so much anguish over a single individual.” Besides, I wasn’t interested in watching people die—been there, done that, pretty over it—I was interested in saving their lives. Everyone has to die some time, what’s that got to do with me?
When I was in medical school, this skill served me well. There was no trauma, or illness, or story that could unsettle me, as I knew that watching people die was easy. All you have to do is sit there. I could absorb pain, heartache, rage, sadness, insanity, despair, this-can’t-be-happening’s, no-God-no’s, that-can’t-be-right’s. I could soak up joy, relief, acceptance, surprise, happiness, thank-God’s, we’ll-fight’s, I’m-gonna-do-this’s. There was no emotion that I couldn’t drink in without a benevolent look on my unreacting face.
Even now, when my partner tells me about the people she sees with cancer or some other terminal illness in the emergency room, my first question is always “How old?” and if the answer is greater than sixty, I scoff and say, “Eh.” Sixty years is about twice as long as the lives of most of the men I killed, so like, shit sucks for sure, but fuck ’em, that’s a good run. I don’t consider the other lives that will be affected by this person’s illness and subsequent death, because they too are irrelevant.
I could do this, can do this, continue to do this, because I am not interested in your suffering. It is gauche and weak and self-absorbed. But most of all, it’s unbearable.
I cannot fucking bear to see, to acknowledge, to speak into reality any of the suffering that exists in this world. If I do, if I feel any of these humans, alive and dead, then I will feel all of them again, and I will cease to exist. Because it turns out that the part of my consciousness responsible for empathy wasn’t gone. It had just gotten so big that I couldn’t see the forest for the stumps.
I won’t presume to speak for anyone else who has, or had, or “doesn’t have” PTSD, as it isn’t some singular, identical bogeyman that haunts everyone the exact same way. I just know that for me, and I believe for many others, the thing that became most disordered was what and how we feel. The boundaries of what can or should be felt were erased, leaving us lost, somewhere in infinity.