PART I: What it Felt Like to Come Home
Reflections on Afghanistan and the Year Following My Return
(A writing exercise in several parts, each composed in 60 minutes and posted without edits)
Part I – A little background
Sometimes it seems that rather than living a single life I’ve lived a dozen rushed and truncated lives. As someone who was living a lifestyle of regular displacement and re-adjustment literally from birth, the periodic (every year or two) move was never strange to me. Nor were its attendant explorations and social connections and variations in aspiration and identity. The idea of staying in a home for longer (4, 5, 6!!! years) has always felt strange to me and still does, although less so.
I therefore retrospectively view my life in stages that occupy different lengths of time: 2-6 months at the lower end and 5-6 years at the upper. The stage that probably seems strangest to me (and that is saying something, as anyone who has any familiarity with the course of my life would understand) is the period when I returned home from my National Guard deployment in Afghanistan in early 2009.
The social and policy challenges of integrating and supporting veterans has mostly faded from view. We (veterans) still choose to end our lives at a devastating rate but other and more sensational issues now crowd us out of the headlines: gender dysphoria and smart phone use among teens, or a supposed invisible genocide of respectable and law-abiding black American men at the hands of evil genocidaire police officers (truly invisible, in that it isn’t happening at all). For one I don’t begrudge the new arrivals to our club of society’s pity cases their prominent positions. I suspect that society’s casual focus on the struggles of veterans (seen mostly in unrealistic films and television specials) never actually helped us and I believe that the now-common (mis)understanding of ‘PTSD’ has done real damage, to veterans and others, but that’s a different issue. I suspect that any REAL accounting of the ‘marginalized’ would have to include not only black and indigenous and queer people (many of whom were raised in comfortable surroundings and never experienced any profound personal oppression due to their status) but also physically and psychologically wounded vets and, indeed, many kinds of citizens dealing with chronic physical and mental illness, but I’m glad we seem to be left out of that particular club. When being marginalized leads to personal obstacles and victories it should be a point of immense pride and shared with others (as the individual finds appropriate) but this is always an INDIVIDUAL struggle. Getting status or cachet on the basis of group membership alone seems to have a corrosive effect on many people (status being immensely important to people, whether they ideologically oppose hierarchies or not) and I shudder to think what kind of narcissistic and self-indulgent veterans we might see in the news if we had some special ‘victim status’. Better we suffer in silence than become an avatar in our society’s never-ending victim narratives. All the government funding and ‘awareness’ in the world wouldn’t compensate for the poisonous effects of that kind of focus, and I truly believe that.
In any case my experience is all I can really speak to and I will try to do so honestly, now removed more than a decade from the events and sensations described. In some ways my experience was typical (sleep problems, missing my buddies, struggles with alcohol) and in some ways it was not (jumping right back into civilian life, no family nearby and living alone). I think the suddenness of my transition sharpened some of the feelings that I felt.
You ask any veteran why many of us are opting out and you get an insight into mental health that the profession seems yet to incorporate: life is very much about purpose and identity. Knowing a person’s symptoms and prescribed medications can give you a TINY view into their interior state, but understanding that they feel bereft or miss their community is not just one data point: it’s often the entire story. A soldier goes from being part of a dangerous but comforting social machine, honed and equipped for efficient cooperation to deal lethal violence on the ‘other’ (whoever our policymakers and voters decide they are), to being a guy who has to get up and eat cereal and entertain himself… but he can’t quite remember why.
Humans evolved in medium-sized (50-200) bands of individuals who knew each other as well as themselves. They only understood their identity as members of this group, whose common prupose was understood: feed, rest, copulate, run and fight when necessary… SURVIVE, and help your compatriots do the same with every ounce of strength. Being placed into a social unit that approximates this dynamic (even partially) feels natural and right. Being taken out of it feels wrong and it feels so wrong that the person loses huge parts of their identity and drive and psychological stability. One could describe the recent history of our civilization as the story of a billion people being slowly wrested from a kind of variation on the theme of communal, Dunbar-number sized groups (in small towns and close families and churches, etc.) into a strange life of solitary struggle where online identity and Amazon.com shopping are positioned to take the place of what we’ve lost. To say that these elements doesn’t compensate for the general loss of friends, family, and community is to understate the bleak situation badly. I’m not going to consult Google because I resolved to write this in a single 60-minute period with no distractions or edits but I recall a self-report study in which respondents were asked during the 1970’s how many CLOSE friends/contacts they had in their lives – how many people could they call on for support and tell almost anything? The mode (most commonly given) number was 5. The same question, asked 45 years later revealed that more people had exactly ‘0’ people fitting that description than any other reported number. The men and women who served in uniform and are now in the ground by their own tragic choice have faced some unique challenges (traumatic brain injury is a topic that I recommend reading up on if you have some concern for or curiosity about American veterans) and seen some unusual sights… but mostly they’re just experiencing what everyone else is experiencing. Their experiences are just deeper because they actually HAD a tribe and a kind of simulacrum of our deepest purpose: survive, and help your companions do the same. Nothing feels better than facing such a task every day and nothing feels worse than losing it, even when your consolation prize is all of the comforts and accoutrements of modernity.
I was a National Guardsman during this particular year – kind of a part-time soldier activated for the length of my deployment and therefore free to resume my civilian life shortly upon returning home. During this particular period I was a (less than impressive) architecture student at CCNY (City College of New York, the ‘Harvard of the Proletariat’) with a budding full-time career in corporate security. I was struggling with a growing substance use disorder (which well predated my military experiences), and was chronically and badly sleep deprived as a matter of course. Working 45-50 hours a week guarding marbled midtown lobbies while trying to attend college (as an architecture major, moreover) full time left very little time for sleep or nutrition. That was my default lifestyle that I returned to.
I won’t go into great detail about my combat experiences. I will say just enough to give some insight into my reaction upon returning to New York City. Combat deployments are very rarely exciting or traumatic and mostly boring, like life itself. I spent 2008 in Eastern provinces of Afghanistan (Kunar and Nangarhar) where the Taliban (and other, less-well known adversaries) were quite powerful. Kunar province is the current home base for ISIS in Afghanistan, from what I understand, and that might give you some idea of what kind of place it is.
During this year I probably only spent 20 minutes engaged in actual combat and perhaps a few hours total driving towards some impending fight. We weren’t there as occupiers per se. Nor was the US there to gather resources, as the annoying acolytes of Noam Chomsky like to assume. Afghanistan has some impressive mineral deposits and some natural gas but they’ve never been explored or exploited. Spending 2 trillion dollars on a 20-year war in exchange for 0 dollars worth of oil and gas is not the kind of Machiavellian calculation that our imperial overlords would make, I imagine. The plain fact is that none of our modern wars have been waged for resources in any sense. When we want resources we buy them, combine them with inputs, ship them elsewhere, and collect the profits. It’s the kind of voluntary exchange that makes for bad anti-imperialist propaganda but when its reality is ignored it only betrays the ignorance of the speaker. We (the United States and ISAF – dozens of mostly European allies) were in Afghanistan to prop up the ‘democratically-elected’ government and also to provide enough order and stability for developments projects and humanitarian relief to flow to the countryside. Certainly much of those resources were wasted and stolen but ask ANY Afghan (in private) whether their country was better off during that time or now and they will probably not sing the praises of their current government. Everyone who knew anything about the political situation at the time sounded the same warning: corruption exacerbated by the tides of foreign money flowing in were stunting institutional development and creating resentment and crime. That seems equally true in retrospect, and our reluctance to lean on our ‘regional partners’ or exercise anything approaching accountability seems like a bad bargain but it’s the one we made. The point is we were there as partners and we did nothing operationally or strategically without a larger cohort of Afghans involved at every step. We were usually attached to the Afghan Border Police (ABP) and sometimes the Afghan National Army (ANA).
This is a good time to describe a few of the main players in Eastern Afghanistan: The Taliban, The Haqqani network, the ANA, the ABP, the Soviets, the Europeans who preceded us as stewards of those provinces, and the Americans. How did they behave? What were their objectives (real and public)? How effective were they? Most importantly: how were they regarded by the people? After that I will go into a little more detail about the flow and texture of my life overseas…
James,
Very good,
Keith