AFTER I COMPLETED MY TOUR with XVIII Airborne Corps, I was assigned as the Army attaché at the embassy. So I packed up my stuff and moved to Kabul. There, living with a scrap of privacy—solo in a converted shipping container rather than in a tent shared with seven others—and the freedom to get off the compound to eat at a restaurant once in a while, I started to feel more alive, more human. I began to think I was approaching All Right. So I found myself missing a day or two of medication accidentally, then letting it go for a week, until one day I was sitting in a café watching my hand shake violently enough to scatter corn flakes from my spoon; I was shaking and rocking with a head full of anger and fear and embarrassment. I skulked out of the café and back to my trailer to gulp down a green and white.
I emailed the good doctor, who replied from Colorado or Oregon or some place back home, already finished with his tour and back in private practice, with the instructions to get back on the medication and the cautionary advice not to visit his replacement who, he said, was not as helpful to officers with high level security clearances.
I did as instructed. But, I started to wonder if I was being robbed of something. I was working at a pretty high level while I was at the airbase in Bagram, between episodes anyway. My mind, as dysfunctional as it was, was an unruly garden of creativity. That garden had now been mowed and tamed by Prozac. Although the clever drug diffused the explosions of ugliness in my head, I felt like it cut my creativity in half. I wondered if the relief from fear and anxiety, and having steady hands was worth losing my insight over. I no longer felt that I was out of control, but I felt diminished, and my creativity endangered.
My work at the embassy was interesting; attaché tours almost always are. We had a small shop of three. My boss was an Air Force colonel who had been recalled from retirement to come out to Kabul for a year. He had flown everything from the O-2A Skymaster as a forward air controller in Vietnam to B-52s and KC-10s. He’d completed his career flying C-12s as an attaché in India and South Africa. He had been in place for six or eight months already when I arrived, so he was well integrated into both the diplomatic and attaché corps. We also had an operations manager, a Vietnam veteran and retired Special Forces master sergeant.
Just down the hall, an Army major general was charged with the security cooperation mission—basically building and training the Afghan National Army. So our tasks were limited to representation and reporting. Representation meant that the colonel and I made the rounds of official events, sometimes tasked to show up in a uniform simply as decoration, but sometimes with an actual substantive mission. The reporting mission was pretty standard stuff: write back to Washington about what we saw and could figure out about the political-military situation in Kabul and beyond. I had the freedom to get off the embassy grounds when I needed to, and an assigned vehicle that belonged to the office, so I did.
Kabul is an old city. It grew up around the banks of the Kabul River around two-thousand years ago, and parts of it look like they’ve survived since then. The old market is still down by the river and possibly just as much a warren of alleys as it was five hundred years ago. It was a great place to go to take the temperature of the city—to walk around and get a feel for how safe things felt or what people were talking about. I went down one afternoon with a female colleague from the embassy. She was wearing a top that didn’t fully cover her shoulders and upper back, and as we walked along, men threw pebbles at her. We turned and went quickly back to the truck. The old ways remained strong.
Maps of the city were hard to find when I was there, and I ended up just learning my way around the town by rote. The streets had names but there weren’t lots of street signs, so you just did your best. Most of the street names were pretty simple and colorful. My favorite rug merchant was on Chicken Street. The Gandamack Lodge was on Passport Road.
There was an explosion of ethnic restaurants in the spring of 2003. At least two Chinese restaurants and a Thai place opened within weeks of each other. At the Thai restaurant you could go sit under the trees with lanterns lighting the grounds and eat pretty terrific food. It seemed very far from the restrictions of the airfield at Bagram and even farther from a firebase on the Pakistan border where some of my former soldiers were working. It was, in fact, pretty civilized.
Of course, Afghanistan was an Islamic republic, so alcohol was officially banned. This made it slightly more difficult to find alcohol, but only slightly. Any foreigner, more or less, could get access to it in some form. There were “official” outlets like the NATO commissary out at the airport where all forms of alcohol were available at all hours. And embassy events almost always featured booze unless the guest of honor was an Afghan. There were also bars, again both official and clandestine.
One of the quasi-official bars was in a hotel downtown. Security guards at the door made sure no one without an international passport got in. The hotel wasn’t particularly nice, but no one seemed to mind. The elevator held maybe three people at a time, so there was always a line to go up or down. When doors opened at the top, the walls of the place were covered with frosted mirrors, and a disco ball spun from the ceiling. It was ghastly. I think I went once, maybe twice. It simply wasn’t a place I needed to be.
The vibe was really weird, too. It was almost always filled with contract security guys—overly-testosteroned and probably steroided-up guys who were contracted by firms to provide security at a site or as part of a personal security detail. In the very early days of the war, people like Afghan President Karzai had close protection details provided by the U.S. military. Initially, Karzai’s was a group of SEALs. One of the SEAL officers almost had to take a bullet for Karzai, and the team got him out of a couple of pretty serious attacks. But as the war went on, and at about the same time I was moving up to Kabul from Bagram, the security details were being turned over to contractors: some good, some less good, all dangerous.
Many of these contractors were former U.S. or NATO special operators who had chosen not to make the military a career. They were provided with lots of weapons and vehicles, and allowed to run amok in the streets of Kabul. The upshot of this was a sort of arms race amongst Afghan and international officials. If Karzai’s protective detail had a truck with a .50 cal at the front and one with a Mark 19 automatic 40mm grenade launcher at the rear, then by God, the Minister of Defense’s detail had to have the same thing, and the Minister of the Interior, and the Ambassador from Uzbekistan, and so on, whoever could afford it, ad infinitum.
Their gunned-up Humvees and up-armored Suburbans would careen through the streets as fast as possible, over-running sidewalks and barreling through stop lights with .50 cals swiveling threateningly side to side. As if the traffic in Kabul wasn’t already bad enough, these convoys made everything worse.
And the contractors didn’t seem to be particularly well screened or controlled either, at least in the early days of the war. Up in that hotel bar one night, two guys were arguing over the affections of an international woman—who wasn’t interested in either of them—and a gunfight erupted in the bathroom. It was like the Old West, only with automatic weapons and steroids.
Across town, there was a dive on the station compound called The Talibar. Once you got past the contractor muscle out front and made your way onto the compound proper, the bar was inside, hidden away downstairs. It wasn’t lovely. But what it lacked in charm it made up for with raw noise and the utter absence of creature comforts. The walls were covered with weapons collected and, one assumed, rendered harmless, then bolted to the walls. At least the beer was cold. The inarguable high point of a visit to The Talibar was a young, dark-haired American woman who worked behind the bar once in a while. She probably made a fortune in tips. In a place where most women were covered in the burkha, she served beers wearing skin-tight jeans and a wife-beater t-shirt with no bra.
One thing about working in different war zones is that you often see the same people—the usual suspects. I met several former colleagues in The Talibar, a list that included someone who had trained me as a Case Officer a dozen years earlier, to embassy and station colleagues I had known from Africa and Kosovo.
One friend from Kosovo, Carlotta Gall, (who for the record I did not meet in The Talibar) was reporting for The New York Times from Kabul. Carlotta’s father, Sandy Gall, was a news reporter who had long experience in Afghanistan, and Carlotta herself had snuck across the border disguised as a man during the Soviet occupation. Her house was just around the corner from the embassy, and I used to drop in regularly for dinner or drinks with her and other reporters.
Another journalist, cameraman Peter Jouvenal, established a guesthouse with a restaurant and clandestine bar he called the Gandamack Lodge. In the evenings, you could go there and enjoy a cool drink while sitting on carpets Peter was said to have nicked from one of Saddam’s palaces during the invasion of Iraq. Peter told me one night that the lodge occupied a house that formerly belonged to one of Osama bin Laden’s wives. Who knows?
I guess the point is that life in Kabul was active and interesting, and very much unlike that of the troops fighting on combat outposts in the provinces or out on the Pakistan border. We were regularly reminded of the war when 120mm rockets hit nearby, or when a busload of German soldiers driving to the airport for the flight home, their tour complete, was blown up by a suicide bomber. But it was a good transition for me back in the direction of the Foreign Service.
I left Afghanistan in September 2003 and was released from active duty in the Army. After I got home, I went back to my civilian job at State. When I signed back in, I was warned that if I didn’t have an assignment quickly, I would be sent to Iraq.
I landed in a dreary office job moving paper through the bureaucracy of the European bureau, on the desk that covered France. My first task was to draft a note from the Secretary of State to the American ambassador in Paris declining an invitation to an event. It took about three tries to get something through the system. My first attempt was too breezy, my second too dour. Each time, the message came back with a snippy little note attached from the seventh floor staff, earning me looks of disdain from my colleagues. Sadly, that was more or less the high point of the job.
I clearly wasn’t cut out for the tedium of a Washington assignment. “I’m a field officer,” I said. But just back from the war and, with no real transition, I was stuck in a desk job feeling like Goldilocks just trying to draft an RSVP for the Secretary of State—it’s too hot, now it’s too cold; enough already. So when a friend who worked in the Middle East bureau stopped in to offer the opportunity for a State Department assignment dealing with terrorists in Iraq, I jumped at the chance.
Just under six months after I’d left Afghanistan, I landed in Iraq.