“HEARTS AND MINDS: Interactions with Afghans and Iraqis”

Chapter commentary: A surprisingly large number of the submissions sent in to the National Endowment for the Arts were about the local civilians that our servicemen and women encountered in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many of the pieces focus on the humanity of the Iraqis and Afghans and the genuinely strong bonds that developed between them and U.S. soldiers, airmen, sailors, and Marines. And some of the submissions describe encounters that reveal a world that, for most of us back in the States, is truly foreign.

LUNCH WITH PIRATES
(Personal Narrative)
Staff Sergeant Clint Douglas

Commentary: Before embarking overseas, many U.S. troops receive cultural sensitivity briefings so that they do not inadvertently offend the civilians and allied military personnel they meet in Afghanistan and Iraq. No matter how much preparation servicemen and women are given, however, they will inevitably find themselves in situ­ations for which there is simply no training manual or reference guide. In March 2003, thirty-four-year-old U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Clint Douglas, a former Peace Corps volunteer, was deployed to Afghanistan with the 20th Special Forces Group (Airborne), Illinois National Guard, for more than six months. Douglas quickly discovered that beneath the patina of social niceties and expressions of mutual regard, some associations and alliances with local leaders were considerably more complicated than they initially appeared. Douglas’s “Lunch with Pirates” is quite simply a masterpiece, and the following excerpt is just a small sliver from the much larger and more compelling story in “Operation Homecoming” that is humorous, surreal, and at times terrifying.

Overall we worked well with the provincial officials appointed by Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Like Karzai himself, they owed their positions and their continuing survival to the strength of our arms. Without us they were all dead men. But the most peculiar, if not spectacularly bizarre, of all of our relationships was that with Zia Audin, the local warlord in Gardez. It was one of distrust, conspiracy, and mutual antipathy. We endured a dysfunctional marriage of convenience, but divorce was difficult and we couldn’t just get rid of him. The few men that he still controlled were en­camped at several different bases around the city, but his real power em­anated from the Bala Hissar, or Castle Greyskull as we called it, a massive fortification built by the British in the nineteenth century in the middle of Gardez. It dwarfed all of the other structures in town and dominated the en­tire mountain plain that surrounded the city.

Zia Audin, sorry, General Zia Audin, was responsible for many of the rocket attacks on our firebase and at least some of the IEDs that exploded around our patrols. All of the American and Afghan agencies around the re­gion knew this, and most interestingly Zia Audin knew that we knew. But he didn’t try to kill us out of a sense of either hatred or malice in his heart; he did it out of jealousy and pride, for Zia Audin was heartbroken. He suffered from an unrequited love of America, and this was awkward for all parties. So Zia Audin, in a fit of adolescent pique, did what came naturally -- he tried to kill us….

Lunching with Zia Audin was a ritualistic courtesy, demanded by custom and protocol. The first time that I’d heard of such an absurdity was during a conversation with one of our predecessors at the Gardez firebase.

“You’ve actually had lunch with him?” I asked, shocked.

“Oh, yeah, sure. I’ve been up there a couple of times,” he shrugged.

“Have I been reading the wrong intelligence reports or something? Did I miss a meeting? Are we talking about the same Zia Audin, the Zia Audin? The jackass who attacks our convoys, mortars our firebase, and who might be working with the Taliban?” I demanded, as I counted off his sins.

“That would be the one. It’s just expected. You go up to Castle Greyskull occasionally and have lunch with him. You still have to talk to him, and any­way he puts on a nice spread of chow. If you get a chance to go up there, take it. You won’t be disappointed,” he said, obviously relishing the irony of the sit­uation.

Now, I had never in my pitiful life knowingly exchanged pleasantries over lunch, or any other meal for that matter, with a man who was regularly trying to kill me. But when Bill invited me to escort him to the castle for his first meeting with Audin, I jumped at the opportunity. The idea seemed so ele­gant, like the medieval Spaniards and Moors retiring to each other’s tents to play chess and exchange bons mots after a bloody day of battle and slaughter. Perhaps the metaphor was unnecessary; we would, after all, be departing from our own high-walled mud fortress to visit another, albeit grander one. We were literally making a kind of feudal social call. This situation, however, was less straightforward; Zia Audin was technically on our side. And anyway, I really wanted to see the inside of that castle….

© “OPERATION HOMECOMING: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families” (Random House, 2006), edited by Andrew Carroll. Reprinted by permission.

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JAG IN THE SANDBOX
(Personal Narrative)
Lieutenant Colonel Terry F. Moorer

Commentary: A staff judge ad­vocate with the 226th Area Support Group, Alabama National Guard, forty-two-year-old U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Terry F. Moorer ques­tioned well over a hundred detainees and enemy prisoners of war while he was stationed in Iraq. Moorer wrote a fascinating account of what it was like to enounter these individuals, but one of my favorite parts of his overall “Jag in the Sandbox” narrative comes at the end, when he describes the House of Cards and its infamous prisoners.

…The next morning, I went into the House of Cards, where I met Tariq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister of Iraq, and other high-ranking mem­bers of the Hussein regime. Before the war, the U.S. military handed out decks of playing cards to the troops that had the faces of these “most wanted” Iraqis, which is why the facility that keeps them is called the House of Cards. Out of respect for their privacy and the regulations of Camp Cropper, our conversations with the “face cards” consisted of no more than a “Good morn­ing” or a nod. Most of the prisoners wanted to talk and spoke fluent English with a British or American accent acquired from having lived in either or both countries. It was not appropriate to engage in substantive conversation or to gawk.

After the tour, I spoke with a guard who had worked in the Face Card sec­tion from its inception. The guard’s impressions of the prisoners were that they were all extremely intelligent and well-educated individuals who had studied at the finer Western universities in the United States and Britain. The guard noted that there was a pecking order within the deck of face cards and that some of the prisoners were genuinely upset that their likeness did not rate a higher card than other inmates’.

© “OPERATION HOMECOMING: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families” (Random House, 2006), edited by Andrew Carroll. Reprinted by permission.

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NEXT WEEK: Excerpts from Chapter Three of OPERATION HOMECOMING -- “Stuck in This Sandbox: Gripes, Humor, Boredom, and the Daily Grind”