IF I THINK OF MYSELF now, with my desire to experience things and understand my experience of those things, with the strange penchant for nostalgia that showed up sometime around my thirty-first birthday, I can envision myself taking one last walk around a gunship before I got out. Going out to the flight line, walking around inside the plane, taking stock of this wondrous machine. But I didn’t do that. Not for the gunship, not for the Whiskeys. Since November 29, 2011, I haven’t set foot in a C-130. For a long time, I simply didn’t have it in me. And then, after that time had passed, I no longer belonged in them. I spent many years unthinking about them, not trying to forget, but not trying to remember either. So when I began writing this, I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to visualize them anymore. I thought I would need to watch videos, or look at blueprints, something to remind me of what it was like inside them. But I didn’t. I can see the insides of these planes as vividly as I can see the double-wide trailer I grew up in.
On the U-boats, I can instantly see the 105 in all its splendor, the gunners standing all around it, worshipping. The ammo, so organized, so exactingly stacked, ready to be used as quickly and efficiently as possible. The 40, and the 25, all scrunched up next to each other. Here’s the booth, my seat and my equipment, the EWO’s seat with all of his weird-ass sensors. Here’s the FCO and Nav, the TV and IR. Here are the stairs to the cockpit, narrow and steep, almost like moving up some sort of crevasse, the distance of those steps always feeling so much greater than the three feet they actually traversed. And here’s the cockpit, which somehow always surprised me with how small and cramped it was, and how much of the world it let me see.
The Whiskeys aren’t all that different in size, though the lack of a booth makes the layout so much more open. With that openness came the glorious urinals, no piddle-packs on a Whiskey, they’ll always have that over the U-boats (and with the urinals the memory of the time I almost passed out in one, thinking that I’d be fine walking the thirty feet over to take a leak without using any supplemental oxygen when we were flying unpressurized at around twenty thousand feet, which, of course, I wasn’t. Thankfully it wasn’t a long piss, or I definitely would have wound up flat on my back covered in my own urine). I can feel the cargo ramp below me, cool and vibratory, as I catnapped during transit, the loadmasters watching, waiting till I was unconscious so they could hog my hat (read: draw a dick on the inside lining). I can see my strange middle seat, so much closer to the action of the sensors than on a U-boat. I can feel how close to me the two CSOs were, one at each hand, but off in their universe of sight, so far from mine of sound. And there’s the new 30mm, almost sparkling in its newness, so modern, somehow so different from the U-boat guns.
This seems like an incredible amount of detail, given that, on the high end, I spent maybe a thousand hours split between the Whiskeys and the gunships (there’s time spent onboard an aircraft pre- and post-mission that doesn’t count as flight hours, and during my training in Florida I spent a good amount of time just walking around the U-boats, getting familiarized with them). Generously, I spent a total of 41.666667 days in these planes, or .3 percent of my life to date.
I thought about making that the title, or at least subtitle of this book: 42 days, or 1,000 hours, or .3 percent, or something like that. They’re interesting numbers; 42 with its fun Adamsonian coincidence, 1,000 with its sense of nice, even largeness, .003 with its feeling of rarity or specialness. They’re hooky and intriguing, these numbers, which is useful for me, an author, wanting to grab the attention (and money) of you, the reader.
But, you’ll have noticed, none of those are the title, because it felt wrong to try and summarize my life with something so clichéd, so Gladwellian (this is no insult to Gladwell, I’m just not him). Those numbers, or even just one of them, let’s say 1,000 hours, it being the hookiest and most aesthetically pleasing, have defined, continue to define, and near as I can tell, 87,660 hours (or 10 years) later, will always define my life. They defined my dreams, motivating me to go to medical school so that I could one day help people without having to kill others in order to carry out that helping. They defined my nightmares, forcing me to go on the antidepressants that I still take, and will continue to take, as I now know that no matter how healthy I become, if I go off them the desire to cease existing always returns and overwhelms the fortifications that I thought I’d made. Those numbers, along with the other one, 123, the number of people I have allegedly killed, or helped kill or been in the vicinity of when they were killed, made me, and make me, who I am.
I tried to make myself into someone else.
After I quit flying, and once I got the appropriate help, I became a (slightly) better airman. Taking certain antidepressants automatically disqualifies you from flying (or did then anyway) for an extended period of time, and eventually my “story,” aka my mental health, was reviewed, and it was decided that it wasn’t in the best interest of the Air Force to have me flying again. But I had also signed a contract and had a duty to fulfill for a couple more years. So I helped teach future DSOs, in the ways that I could, ways that didn’t involve listening to Pashto. I was put to work in our tactics office, helped develop some of the training material for Dari linguists, and volunteered to become a certified crew resource management instructor; if nothing else, I could help others learn more about communication. And I thought a lot about what I could do to fix myself and my place in the world.
I genuinely don’t remember when or how, but at some point in that thinking I decided that becoming a physician would Solve All My Problems. I went to the community college near my base to take some pre-reqs, transferred to a university soon thereafter, got my degree, and applied to medical school. This is what I wrote in my application:
There was a time when I could see everything. I could hear almost everything too; that’s the whole point of being an Airborne Linguist. The desert was miles below me, but I could hear the insurgents tracking an American convoy, and could tell the Special Forces captain on the ground to adjust his team’s route. Being 10,000 feet above the Earth allowed me to do this. I always enjoyed the altitude—with it came perspective, and with the perspective came clarity. But sometimes, the sky fills with clouds, and suddenly all the world’s a blur.
Blurriness wasn’t something I wanted when I was the only translator working on Special Forces missions in Afghanistan. I couldn’t be hazy when I was translating Taliban communications in real time. So I had to be careful. I had to look, listen, and think. Eventually, I could see and hear everything through the clouds. Now though, my senses were better honed, and I began to notice more details.
Many of these details were associated with my job, but some of them were about myself and what I wanted out of life. I had already come so far, from a childhood where even the most basic things like food and shelter weren’t always assured. I’d left behind the poverty that kept me from pursuing higher education, and joined the Air Force so I could learn languages and see the world. I excelled at this, and became fluent in two new languages in less than a year. Based on my test scores, I was selected to join Special Operations, where I learned from and worked beside some of the most exceptional individuals I have ever known.
Most importantly, I was doing something that was meaningful—I was protecting human lives. Though this was my primary role, sometimes protecting certain people meant harming others, and that detail wasn’t something I could reconcile, or find a solution to. All of the clarity that I’d worked so hard to achieve started to blur around the edges.
Toward the end of my first deployment, and throughout my second one, I searched for an answer to this apparent contradiction. I knew I wanted to serve, help, and protect other people, but not at the expense of others. This reflection culminated in a fascination with medicine. When I made the decision to pursue becoming a physician, I still had over a year left in the Air Force. Telling my coworkers about my newfound goal was ill-advised; after all I hadn’t even been to college, let alone taken the demanding courses required to attend medical school. But with the support and advice I received from friends and mentors, I was fortunate enough to end up attending Columbia University. Just as I had enjoyed the intense challenge of language school and special operations training, I relished the academic rigor I encountered at Columbia.
At the same time, I sought out new volunteer opportunities that allowed me to give back to communities that were similar to the ones I grew up in. I shadowed physicians and saw that many of the skills I gained in the military were applicable to medicine. I saw the same teamwork, honesty, and work ethic that I loved in the military being used in new and exciting ways. I even learned that aspects of aviation like checklists and Crew Resource Management are now being incorporated into many parts of the medical field.
Eventually, I became a Research Assistant at the Veteran’s Affairs hospitals in Manhattan and Brooklyn, where I enrolled patients in a nationwide genetic study, and conducted research on mental health populations. Although I was nervous about communicating in the medical profession, I quickly realized that my old skills were just as applicable in this new environment. The professionalism and calmness I used on the radio naturally extended to patient interactions. I found that because my former career was a solitary position with no one around to offer backup, I was prepared for almost any situation. I didn’t always have the right answer to difficult questions—no one ever does—but I was eager to tackle any new challenge with the support of the people around me.
Sometimes I miss the physical clarity that being 10,000 feet in the air offered, but the intellectual and moral clarity that medicine offers more than make up for that. It also offers me a career that feels familiar. My experience with stressful situations and accelerated learning will give me the strength to excel during the rigors of medical training. I know how to think quickly and calmly, and how to remain focused under pressure, and I believe that the communication, leadership, and teamwork skills I have will allow me to become a good physician. And everything I’ve done so far in pursuit of this goal has only reinforced my original reasons for starting along this path. No longer is there any contradiction, or concern that I should be doing anything else. And that’s not blurry at all.
There are some, let’s say, extensions of the facts in there. Some technicalities. I passed the final exam for Dari at the six-month mark of my yearlong course, and because my Pashto course was just shy of six months long, I can honestly say that “I became fluent in two new languages in less than a year.” I was just careful not to note the chronicity of that year. I received good feedback on this essay, and I was told by a few schools that it played a large part in my being offered an interview.
I wrote something similar when I applied to residency. It had some more details that were specific to the career field I applied to, anesthesiology, but was otherwise largely the same. I received similar feedback on this essay; multiple interviewers told me how upon reading it they knew “they had to interview me.” I am proud of my education, of the fact that I graduated from medical school, that even if I didn’t go to residency I will always be a physician. But I’m not sharing any of this to show off or prove my accomplishments. I worked hard for them, but they’re also in large part due to luck and the graciousness of others.
None of what I wrote in my personal statements, either for medical school or residency, was untrue. But neither of them featured the whole truth. I originally wrote an essay with that truth in it, and my advisor told me that if I used it, I likely wouldn’t get accepted to medical school. Here is some of it:
“Because I’m tired of killing people.” When I first decided I want to be a doctor and people asked me why, that was my answer. It was and is the truth, but this didn’t mean that people were any more comfortable with it. It’s surprising, and not a little unsettling, but the truth is the truth and I saw no reason not to speak it. Today, if you were to ask me the same question, my response would be a lot less bothersome, but also a good bit cliché. “I just want to help people.” Which is also the truth, albeit a different version thereof. I do JUST want to help people. It’s all I can imagine doing with my life. But, as a lot of people have pointed out, there are easier ways to help people. There are even better, more impactful ways. I could be a teacher, and help young people learn, and love to learn, and maybe even decide what they want to be. I could do cancer research and maybe help develop a treatment option that will help tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people. Hell, I could be a nurse and help people in a clinical setting in three years instead of eight.
And I’ve actually thought about all of those options. I love teaching, have experience doing it both in the military and as a civilian, and I’m not half bad at it. Cancer and many other diseases are fascinating, and though I’ve only had a small taste of it, I find research interesting, and despite the occasional tedium, ultimately rewarding. Nursing would become a reality much sooner, and is largely about directly helping people, which is what I crave. But when I think about these or anything else as my future, there’s this feeling of emptiness. It’s not fear of missing out, or the thought of twenty years down the road wondering if I could have made it as a doctor. It isn’t the status, or the compensation that comes with being a physician, though those are nice.
It’s that to this day, the most important thing in my life is the lives I took in Afghanistan. Those lives define my life, almost every part of it. They dictated my education, where I live, who I interact with and how. What I believe, my political leanings, what I’m willing to accept as true, all of this and more is governed by 123 people that no longer exist.
“But they weren’t people.” That’s the argument countless fellow airmen and civilians alike gave me. They were militants, or Taliban, or terrorists, or otherwise enemies. These too are a truth. But they aren’t the truth. The truth is that they were people, no matter what terrible things they’d done, no matter what their motivations were, no matter how many of us they had killed. And while there are those who can kill others, I am not one of those people.
Now, I firmly believe it is my duty to heal people, or at least that I should do everything in my power to make it my duty. I need to do it as a doctor, because I need to make those decisions again. But they can’t be life or death. They can only be life. I know that I won’t be able to cure every patient, or even treat some of them. I know that many will die, despite the best efforts of me and my future “crews.” That won’t necessarily be okay, as I hope I’m never perfectly at ease when someone dies under my watch. At least I’ll have tried though. At least I’ll have attempted to give life, or ease pain and suffering. At least, at the very least, I won’t be tired of killing people.
As you can see, I dutifully changed it. Took out the rawness and the defensiveness. Added some nice, palatable, cinematic visuals. Obviously, we’ll never know if I would have been accepted to any schools if I had used that essay, but I suspect my advisor was right and that I wouldn’t have received any interviews, let alone acceptances. There’s a part of me that finds this irksome, the idea that others would prevent me from pursuing my goals because they believe they know what are and aren’t the “right” reasons to become a physician. As long as it isn’t because they want the power to harm others, I don’t think it matters why anyone wants to be a physician.
The other part of me, the one who, in the end, decided not to go to residency, not to practice medicine, knows that they’re right. Being a physician was never going to unkill those 123 men. Nothing will.
There is no atonement, because I did nothing wrong; I am no sinner.
And there is no absolution, because I did nothing right; I am the worst sinner.
While writing this book I spent a lot of time thinking about the people I used to work with. Some of this was selfish, wondering who would be most interesting to include, then weighing those thoughts against whether they would want to be included and wanting to verify that some of the things I remembered weren’t completely wrong. Some people I just sort of stalked on Facebook, unsure if they would want to hear from me, unsure if I actually wanted to talk to them. Some I found, and sent vaguely platitudinous messages to, getting varying levels of well-worn responses. Some I couldn’t find, and I suspect didn’t want to be found.
There were those I still knew and routinely saw: Dex, Trevor, Taylor. And while we hadn’t kept in close contact, I still counted Kasady and Chris as friends, guys I could readily call up and talk to about these things. But as I thought about other people I’d worked with, I wondered if any of them would want to hear from me. None of us were going to be lifelong friends the way Taylor and I are (how many of those do you get?) or even just good buddies like I am with Dex and Trevor, who text on birthdays or other big life events and make plans to see each other if we happen to be in the same city. I figured that things like age, faith (in God and/or country), or just personalities made it so that once we no longer worked together there would be no reason for us to communicate. It wasn’t that I didn’t consider these people my friends, or, despite my cynicism, because of any suspicion of hatred or even just dislike on their end. (I don’t believe that most humans can have enemies, as very few people think about you as much as you think they do. And even if they do in fact give you that much consideration, who are you to be so important that said person is going to be actively opposed or hostile to you, seeking to injure or harm you all of the time?) I just thought that when you don’t talk to someone for two, or five, or ten years, why would you? What would there be to say?
But then I got Vince’s phone number and sent him a text asking if he had some time to talk. Vince and I had not exchanged so much as a single hello since 2012. But a couple hours later he said sure, how about Tuesday, after the kids are in bed. The kids, I thought. Plural. Wow. The first few minutes of the call were a little awkward, each of us unsure of the role to be played, how much of our lives we needed to share to be polite, how many questions to ask. But after about six minutes or so, everything clicked back into place. It hadn’t been ten years since we talked, it was just yesterday.
The same thing happened with Paul (kids and all), a former TSO. And Jack, another DSO. And Sue. As I kept talking to people who I thought were more or less gone from, or no longer a part of, my life—even people who I wouldn’t have necessarily felt comfortable saying were ever a part of my life, more just connected to it—the same sequence of events took place:
I was surprised by this, but after the second time it happened, it started to make sense. It didn’t matter that we both knew there was a good chance it might be another ten years before we spoke, if we ever did again. The nature of our work, of having done something so rare, so incredible, meant that we would always be able to talk like we’d just seen each other yesterday; our Super Balls, conservation of energy be damned, are still flying around even now, in orbit somewhere over Afghanistan.
In the course of all these conversations I also found out that, of course, war doesn’t give with both hands. While we might never forget each other, almost none of us speak Pashto anymore, no matter how good we were or weren’t in the first place. Certainly, some of this loss is due to lack of use, but then, I don’t use Dari anymore and can still put together a fair number of sentences in it. I think the thing about Pashto is, or was, or will be, that to think it is to be fighting again. Turns out trauma can make you forget all sorts of things. Even an entire language.
And then I called up another friend, someone who was also a DSO once upon a time, but a non-Pashto one, to ask him about his memories of us. Who knows, I thought, maybe an outside observer would have thought we were all terrible. Jordan and I bullshitted for a little while, updated each other on our lives, wondered about the fates of various other DSOs. He allayed my fears, said that while he remembered some drama, that no, we weren’t terrible. Toward the end of our conversation, he asked me if I wasn’t ultimately thankful for these numbers and all of their associated memories precisely because they made me who I am. I told him no, I am in fact not thankful for all those deaths and that I found this argument a little tautological, or at least circular, like “Yes these things are ultimately good because they made me who I am and who I am is good and therefore they are good.”
After this initial response, because he’s my friend, and because I love him, I actually thought about what he said, instead of just dismissing it like a sarcastic asshole. I had never bothered to think that it was even possible to be thankful for such things. I’d autopopulated his question, or maybe even translated it to the thing I was so used to being asked, “Would you change them?” which I find ridiculous and annoying, because hypotheticals like that are entirely unuseful (I’m fine with considering the impossible, that’s often how amazing things get dreamt up, but engaging in this sort of fairy tale wish fulfillment is just frustrating and pointless, as whether I would change them has little to do with their being).
“I think in order to be thankful for the things that made you who you are, you have to be happy with who you are.”
“Aren’t you?”
“I… Sometimes. But not usually, no.”
“Oh. Why not?”
“Fuck, man, I don’t know.”
It’s not that I’m necessarily unhappy with who I am, though that is sometimes, and sometimes even more than sometimes, the case. I’m not as suggestable, though. I have firmly held beliefs, things that I’ve decided are True. I’ll listen to others’ opinions about these things, but I’m not all that likely to change what I know. I spent so long not knowing what was true, and trying to forget what I eventually did know, that I’m not willing to risk my reality anymore.
So when I said “I don’t know” to my friend, it was the truth. I didn’t have a good answer as to why I’m not happy with who I am, in part, I think, because answering that question would run the risk of expanding my reality. But I suspect that realities are like the universe, constantly expanding, and so I’ve begun to wonder: If I’m right, and that in order to be thankful for certain experiences that made you who you are, you have to be happy with who you are, then it follows that you have to know who you are (I suppose it’s possible to be “happy” without any self-awareness, but I don’t believe that ignorance is in fact bliss). And maybe, more than simple unhappiness, more than the routine malaise, more than even clinical depression, this is my problem. I have these titles I can fall back on, things like physician, and scientist, and writer, and so on and so forth, but I don’t feel that any of these things are definitional. They don’t provide me with form, or substance. They don’t tell me who I am.
Only the Taliban could do that.