One Soldier's Tale of How War Drove Him Crazy

By Penny Coleman, AlterNet. Posted March 20, 2009.

His next assignment changed his mind. With his dark hair and olive complexion, Jim could pass for a local. He was ordered to grow out his beard, issued a chapan (the vest traditionally worn by Afghan men), a pakol (the traditional Pashto hat), linen pants, leather sandals and a list of phonetically written Pashtun phrases.

So armed, he joined a crew of Afghan trash collectors who worked on the post and listened for talk of insurgency. The crew he was told to infiltrate turned out to be the same one he had been assigned to guard the week before. Of course, the men all recognized him. Instead of treating him with distrust, they bonded over the oxymoronic example of "military intelligence."

"I ended up making really good friends with most of them," Jim said.

And he began to see what it was like for them and their families to be caught up in the war -- the up-close effects of the daily rocket and artillery fire on the villagers, compounded by a foreign occupation force that treats all Afghans as if they were the enemy.

"When I was getting ready to deploy, they were telling us that the Taliban all wore black turbans. But it turned out there wasn't some big gang sign, like the Bloods and the Crips. Other people were wearing black turbans, too. It was messed up. We were supposed to be fighting the Taliban, but we were obliterating Afghanistan."

Jim began taking his frustration and confusion to a Buddhist ascetic who lived in a cave above the Kandahar airfield where Jim was stationed. "

Babah, which means ‘honored grandfather' in Pashto, was just a remarkable person. He had this glow about him. When I met him, he was 96. Most of his teeth were gone, and the rest were brown. He was a small man, frail looking, but he was so strong. I think he might have been stronger than me."

Jim often made the trek up to Babah's cave to sit peacefully and drink tea. Babah had been a traveler in his youth. He spoke six languages, told stories of walking from Afghanistan to Tibet through the Hindu Kush and on into Pakistan and India.

And he taught Jim about Buddhist practices and beliefs. Everything Jim learned resonated with the sorrow he felt about what was being done to the country and the people he was coming to know and love.

"I thought we were just doing too much messed up stuff to civilians. It was wrong, and I didn't worry about what people had on their collar, if I had something to say, I would say it.

"But they didn't like what I was saying, so I think that had a lot to do with why Babah got detained.The last thing he said to me, as my brothers cuffed him, was, 'Without suffering, there would be no bliss. Without death, there would be no life.' Even as they put a black hood over his head, he still had his beautiful smile on his face."

His other closest friend was Nasirjan, a member of the trash detail that served as Jim's ostensible cover. Apart from his duties on the post, Nasirjan also raised goats, opium and marijuana, and he took Jim to cockfights, kept him in hashish, and even stood up to gunmen looking to take the life of an American.

One night, when the trash workers were all gathered around the burn pit having tea, Jim gave Nasirjan a keychain flashlight in return for some hash. Narsirjan "was goofing off with the flashlight, and it was really funny because he was a big man and he was being really childish and awkward. We were all laughing when one of my brothers shot him in the back. Dead. He said Nasirjan was trying to signal a rocket attack."

Jim was the one who had given Nasirjan the flashlight, and he believed that he was responsible for Babah's arrest (whatever the facts behind it may have been). He left Afghanistan a month after Babah was taken away, carrying the guilt and the burden of both losses.

Instead of things getting better when he got home, they got worse.

"I already knew that I didn't know how to act anymore," he said. "I didn't know what I was going to do, and I didn't know how people were going to expect me to be."

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Penny Coleman is the widow of a Vietnam veteran who took his own life after coming home. Her latest book, Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide and the Lessons of War, was released on Memorial Day 2006. Her Web site is Flashback.

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