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The crab boy of Kabul

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Leaving so I could arrive elsewhere, with a few illuminating details

In 2011, I left the United States for perhaps the 200th time in my life on a plane. I’ve come and gone and come and gone so many times I’ve lost count. This time, I was headed for Kabul. The capital city of war-torn Afghanistan. A place where (so they tell me) the dust in the air is 15% animal and human feces. Fun pseudo-fact. You are quite welcome to look it up and challenge my second-hand information.

Grammar is important in some places. Kabul, generally speaking, is not one of those places. I plan to write extensively about my time there (due to the ghosts that haunt my dreams). This story is about the crab boy of Kabul.

We, being NATO contractors paid ungodly amounts of money to pretend that we were making better officers out of Afghanistan’s national police force, lived in a “first-class hotel.” That, in and of itself, is another story. I intend to tell it too.

The camp was strategically positioned only 25 or so kilometers from our daily post at the Afghanistan National Police Training General Command, or ANPTGC for short. The place known as ANPTGC is, of and in itself, worth several of my fascinating anecdotes. Let’s set the scene for those of you who have not have the privilege of visiting or living in the city of Kabul:

Kabul smells like a mixture of burning things and offal

It is a maelstrom of chaotic activity. Situated at a relatively high elevation in a semi-arid climate and populated by about 3.5 million souls (give or take a few thousand a day), Kabul is 3,500 years old. And no smell has ever blown away from the city since it became one. Imagine a mixture of burning things, dead things, sweating things and shitting things. That will, perhaps, give you a 10% idea of the amount of nose crinkling I did during my time as a resident.

The streets are paved, sometimes. The motorcycles winding their way recklessly past donkeys, running children, roaming packs of mangy dogs, caravans of paranoid, egotistic, armed elites, and all other manners of roaming life careening wildly through what passes for avenues of transport are a cacophony of suicidal carelessness. The streets are not paved, sometimes. In less than two years I saw more than two dozen human traffic fatalities, an uncountable number of dead dogs, and one horse that dropped dead in the middle of what passes for a road in that particular place.

I’m coming around to the crab boy. Bear with me.

There are no traffic lights in Kabul. Only roundabouts. Some routes are two lanes. Some are twelve. The veins and arteries converge without warning. When there is a traffic jam on one side, drivers immediately begin to use the opposing lanes in a fashion that, if employed in the West, would result in dozens of fatalities per mile of road (do you like how I switched units of measurement?). That doesn’t happen in Kabul.

There are accidents, to be sure. But the beggars that sit in between lanes, combined with the other flotsam and jetsam everywhere, conspire to keep maximum speeds well below a catastrophic situation. Traffic in Kabul is tense. Especially inside an armored Chevy 2500+. But it isn’t suicidal. Not for us contractors, in any case. It’s just asshole tightening. Sweat inducing. Shoulder knotting intensity.

Which brings me to the crab boy of Kabul

As the armed driver of an armored pickup truck in Kabul, commuting up to 60km a day round trip six days a week, I saw many notable things. One of the most memorable, and spotted on more than one occasion, was the crab boy. The city of Kabul is full of dysfunction, disease, pestilence, and poverty. And it’s the capital. He was one of its many lesser citizens.

No armed convoy to convey him to important meetings with egotistical officials wanting bribes. No donkey to take him to market to sell vegetables honestly farmed. Not even a stolen bicycle to get him to the bread vendor so his stomach would not feel empty.

What I remember most is his smile. The kid with the twisted spine who couldn’t stand up. He had to scuttle along like a crab, begging. But his smile. It was like the sun in his brown face. He made me feel things I don’t know how to describe. He was the sun, the life giver. That smile was so genuine.

There I was, inside an armored steel and glass mechanism that probably cost ten times the money that boy will ever touch. Sweating, bitching and arguing with my fellow contractors about banalities that mattered so very little.

The crab boy was happier than I. I made more than 10,000 dollars a month. Tax-free.

He scuttled around with his bent spine, unable to stand up, seeing the world from the dust clouds kicked up by that bustling, insane place. I don’t know how much his begging earned, but I gave him one hundred dollars every time I got the chance. I hope it made something better. For him. For his mother. For whoever his caregiver was.

Every time I unlocked the door of my armored bubble, I was breaking a rule. Every time I broke a rule, his smile was worth any punishment that could have been inflicted on me. Some rules aren’t worth following.

Some smiles are worth handing out whatever hope I have to give.

I hope that he’s still smiling, and I hope his belly is full tonight. I dream of him sometimes and wish the world was different. If I see him again, and I can, I’ll give him another hundred dollars. Or a million.

I wish I could let him see the world from a higher vantage point. I try to switch places with him. Sometimes. When I’m dreaming.

I know I can’t.

Thank you for reading this. If you have a hundred dollars, give it to someone who needs it. If you can spare it.

Before and after PTSD

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I’m a sufferer. But not really. Depends on the day. Depends on the triggers. Depends on a whole lot of baggage that is stored somewhere in my head.

I’m not whining. Let’s stop that line of thought before it starts. Rather, I’m telling you a part of my story. Which connects to other stories. Because, human. It’s a part of the deal.

I volunteered after watching something unfortunate. Never, ever Google ‘beheading videos.’ If you have a soul and want to retain it in some semblance of wholeness. Don’t type that in. Shit. I’m dumb sometimes. And drunk sometimes. Plus, my genetics require me to be inquisitive. So I watched. Men holding him down. Men sawing his head off.

I almost passed out from rage. How can people do that to other people?

A few months later. I’m in uniform. For the second time. A few months after that, I’m in Baghdad. And it’s still rippling outward for me. And inward. Because, dreams, scars, and echoes.

I’m diagnosed with PTSD. By the Veteran’s Administration. I’m not ashamed of it. Lots of people had much worse experiences than I did. And most of them weren’t stupid enough to sign up for a contractor job in another war zone a few years after using up more than one human lifetime’s ration of luck. So yeah, I compounded my issues by showing up in Afghanistan later. Different day, different part of the story.

Caring about the human condition sucks sometimes. But I can’t stop. So I cry more than I used to. And maybe sometimes I drink too much. Put me in front of a well-done war drama and watch me shudder and shake while the tears fall. That’s mostly the extent of my post-traumatic stress disorder. With an occasional night terror thrown in. Sometimes those come in waves.Except when I have to run out of a room because I can’t control the exits and I’m not in charge of how long the meeting is going to go and I think whatever is being discussed is absolutely banal.

I’m normal. Except when I have to run out of a room because I can’t control the exits, and I’m not in charge of how long the meeting is going to go, and I think whatever is being discussed is absolutely banal, and I want to scream, “Are you fucking crazy? Focus your life’s energy on something that is worth a shit!You fuckity fuck idiot!”

I know. I overdid the exclamations a bit. You can forgive me. If you’d like. If not, I won’t hold it against you.

I want to crawl back inside the time when I could ride off into the sunset and know that I wouldn’t dream of being trapped forever in the living hell that was Baghdad in 2006. I’d like to stop having flashbacks, big and small, into moments when I was certain the next rocket or mortar would be the one with my name on it. I wish I had faith like some of them. The ones I went with, came back with, couldn’t be like.

God, I can’t hear you. All I see when I close my eyes is the horror we inflict on each other in the name of things I don’t understand.

And just like in 2005, I feel a visceral need to do something when I see savages masquerading as human beings. Unfortunately, the more I know about how many disguises we wear in this life, the less certain I am who is to blame for all this inhumanity.

The struggle

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In other words, the science itself makes clear that hormones, enzymes, and growth factors regulate our fat tissue, just as they do everything else in the human body, and that we do not get fat because we overeat; we get fat because the carbohydrates in our diet make us fat. The science tells us that obesity is ultimately the result of a hormonal imbalance, not a caloric one—specifically, the stimulation of insulin secretion caused by eating easily digestible, carbohydrate-rich foods: refined carbohydrates, including flour and cereal grains, starchy vegetables such as potatoes, and sugars, like sucrose (table sugar) and high-fructose corn syrup. These carbohydrates literally make us fat, and by driving us to accumulate fat, they make us hungrier and they make us sedentary.
This is the fundamental reality of why we fatten, and if we’re to get lean and stay lean we’ll have to understand and accept it, and, perhaps more important, our doctors are going to have to understand and acknowledge it, too.
― Gary Taubes, Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It

It’s working. This thing we’re doing is working. I can see it in the numbers. They are falling. I have never struggled with my weight. My dysfunctions are otherwise. The demons I wrestle with run a different course. But she struggles. With a monster made of heavy.

Fat. It’s a small word that does so much damage in this shallow ocean we inhabit. I’ve never been fat. But I care about someone who struggles, has struggled, will struggle with the three heaviest letters in the English language.

So much of what they tell us is wrong. The do-gooders operate around the perimeter. Feeding little lies and big ones that shape our daily decisions in manifold ways. So much of the stuff we learn is just made up. Miracles are only things we have not yet been able to explain.

Fat. I think I’ve begun to understand it. Because of this book. Because of a man named Gary Taubes. We followed his advice. My partner and I. We’re following a ketogenic diet. Sounds complicated. Not so much.

The basic premise is to eat lots of fat, moderate amounts of protein and minimal carbohydrates. Cut out the grains and eat as much bacon and dairy as you can handle. It’s working. We’re kicking that heavy three letter word in the ass.

Ten pounds this month. That’s significant. We aren’t starving ourselves. Lean muscle mass is staying consistent but the fat is melting off. Consistently. This flies in the face of what the government of my adopted nation tells me about what to eat.

If the people in charge can’t even figure out what we should be eating, what else are they getting wrong? It boggles the mind. I don’t need a fancy executive summary to know that the official recommendations weren’t working for her.

Life is an experiment. We’ve found something that works for us in this partnership. Whatever currents brought you to this place, if you struggle with “fat” I hope you’ll pick up the book and read. Thank you, Gary Taubes.

Sunflower man

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It wrecked me. Watching him.

He knew his purpose. I thought I knew mine.

Time has proven me wrong. Time has latched onto my brain and caused me to think about him. What was done to sunflower man. It’s wrong.

I had the might of an empire protecting me. How brittle that turned out to be.

He had his faith. Or many faiths. He watered every day. That was the thing he believed in most. His beneficiaries thrived because of the tender care he gave them.

Dust storms came. Bombs shook everything. The world turned orange. It turned loud. Nothing was certain during that year I spent in hell.

Except that he would find water and pour it out on those golden yellow survivors he created. They were never orange. Even during the hellish dust storms, if you got close enough, they remained bright yellow around the perimeter, with a dark brown center made of seeds. How beautiful.

Because. Sunflower man tended and gardened. In circumstances that would make most of us crumble into pieces.

I don’t know how he came up with the seeds, or the clay pots, or the soil. He just did. That earned my respect. And caused me to think of him. Almost a decade later, I remember his haunted face. Serene and dignified.

Imagine. Invaders coming to your metropolis. Or your rural farm. That part matters not. What matters is how you react when the reality you’ve known your whole life is taken away. Sunflower man. He knew what to do.

Give something life in the midst of hell. Pour the water out. Keep the pot tended carefully. Provide a stick to hold up the fragile nature of existence. I sometimes wonder where he is. Deep in dreams, I tremble and shake.

Shamed. By his bravery and my cowardice. While he grew life, I was a mouthpiece. While he carried nothing but a watering can and his resolve, I shook and cowered inside the latest technology. Body armor and a gun can never defeat a sunflower man.

I’ve learned my lessons the hard way. I hope you’ll hear his voice passed on through mine.

Perhaps I’ll recover a picture of sunflower man one day. If so, I hope to share it with you. He’s my idol. Far braver than most. Far more determined. Far less lucky.

All my respect is his.

 

Breaking your own leg

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Some people avoid the hard stuff. At any cost. I’m too dumb or too smart to do that. Depending how you look at it.

He’s a big black guy. Mid 30’s. Out of shape. From somewhere in deep Georgia. Thick drawl and a belly that’s soft and round from too much fried food. This guy is scared. He tells me so. We’re on the line practicing rushing. It’s this game of life and death where you simulate attacking an enemy position under machine gun and RPG fire. There are observer controllers throwing little sticks of dynamite at you. Firing on you with real machine guns loaded with blanks. Screaming at you. You get the idea.

Under a hot sun in the middle of a place far from everything you’re comfortable with you prepare yourself mentally and physically for war. And this guy wasn’t having any of it. I don’t remember his name. But I remember how scared he was. He didn’t want to go over there. He wasn’t going to die over there. I imagine him humping a pack through the desert. And dropping from a heart attack. He’s carrying a lot of extra weight already. Without the body armor. Without the combat load. He’d be struggling to run these simulated assaults even if he was butt naked.

We’re on the line. Reset. Do it again. Charge. Assault the bunkers. Get screamed at. Hear how pathetic we are. How part-timers like us are going to die. Because we’re out of shape. We don’t take it seriously. We can’t hack it. For some of us it’s the truth. We’re a bunch of middle-aged weekend warriors from all over. Called up to supplement the serious soldiers. The ones who do it full-time. A lot of us are sucking serious wind. This is the National Guard. We aren’t big Army.

This guy next to me isn’t having any of it. He’s dripping sweat and muttering to himself. I can see him coming up with a plan.

I focus on my work for a bit. We rush in a line a couple more times. We’re being evaluated. From the privates on up to the company commanders. Under the microscope. This place they sent us is a proving ground to weed out the weak ones. Yesterday a company commander was relieved of duty for screaming at the observer controllers. Those guys love their games. They’d been sneaking up on our tents in the middle of the night and throwing artillery simulators inside. Scaring the shit out of out of shape, exhausted middle-aged men. And perspective makes all the difference. The company commander took offense to having small sticks of dynamite thrown into the middle of his men while they slept. He lost his shit and screamed about it for a while. Now he’s gone. Someone else is in charge.

And this guy next to me. I’m watching him sort through his options. He tells me about his family a little. He’s got kids. Doesn’t want to leave them for 15 months or longer. Doesn’t want to get blown up in the middle of some desert far from home. We rush again. Some of us screaming with all our energy. This guy is using all his energy just to make it up the little hill to the bunkers we’re assaulting. He’s about wiped. He doesn’t scream. He mutters. And plots.

Last rush of the morning. Almost time for lunch. I watch him as we run. I see the moment he pulls the trigger inside his head and wonder what he’s going to do. We’re running across the flat open ground firing our own blanks and avoiding the artillery simulators. Ducking low and honing in on our target. Bunkers at the top of the little manmade rise. I see him dripping sweat to my left. He’s not quite keeping up with me but he’s charging for all he’s worth. We’re running up the rise. He puts on a burst of speed suddenly. Passing me for a second.

I watch him throw his rifle down in front of him and then tangle his right leg up in it. Intentionally. I hear a snapping, popping noise as he breaks his own right leg against the rifle on the side of the hill. He goes down screaming.

Later, in the medical facility, he’s content. I had to help carry him there because I was the guy next to him when he went down. He gets to go back home now. To his people. I’ll end up going in the other direction within two weeks. A long plane ride to the other side of the world. I sometimes wonder what it feels like to break your own leg.

I’ve never been wired that way. I never will be. But I wonder what might be different if I was. A lot of things changed in the sandbox. I still wake up from dreams of snapping my own bones.

Finding god

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I try to stay away from politics and religion because they tend to be divisive. Sometimes I cannot. There are events that affect us all. They sweep across the world like a fire. Think of the crucifixion of the Christ. Or the death of Muhammad by fever in the year 632. These events are still affecting the world stage today. They have been since they happened. I’d like to say that these two historical figures claiming to be agents of a divine being brought peace into the world but events often disagree. There are multiple competing storylines that fade backwards into human history before the invention of writing. Stories wrapped around history. These affect our psyche in manifold ways.

It is the year 632. The prophet, a self-proclaimed agent of the divine, is dead. He has left no heir apparent. His followers have a difference of opinion about who is to lead the faith. Should it be Mohammad’s companion Abu Bakr or Hussein ibn Ali, Muhammad’s closest living relative? The argument resulted in battles that continue to this day. Ali was killed in one of these battles. He was beheaded. We see this happening still in the name of those who claim god as their own. The new religion split into two distinct sects. They have been fighting ever since, with each other and with anyone who disagrees on the finer points of their version of god.

It is the year 2005. I am a man wearing a uniform in a city not that far from where Ali was beheaded. I am an invader following orders. My days and nights consist primarily of producing war propaganda, hearing bombs going off and worrying about bullets, mortars and rockets falling from the sky and ending me. It is a surreal world full of intense psychic stressors. I live in the palace complex of a deposed dictator. He was a Sunni. I am told we are there to bring freedom to all the Shias he oppressed. I am told we are there to bring prosperity and hope. For some of us this idealistic belief is the driving force. For others the impetus is to bring our society’s values to the backwater country we are in. Still others are there simply because they were told to be. They do not believe in a cause and are simply doing a job.

All around, outside the walls and sometimes inside, people are dying. Horribly. In the name of god and vengeance. Everyone sees god through his or her personal lens and from the context provided by their own past experiences and present circumstances. At the height of my time there, estimates of the death toll in my host city range from 4,000 to 15,000 casualties per week. The air stinks of reprisals, fear and suffering. I feel the bombs going off inside people’s heads and outside the gates. I see the aftermath of the violence. Prepare stories about how we are liberating prisoners from torture chambers. Write about Sunnis being captured by Shias and having their heads poked full of holes using power drills. The Sunnis respond by blowing up open air markets full of Shias. People die for many reasons. Some die for no reason at all. I am entering middle age and at this time and in this place I find myself those around me are struggling to emerge from the events of the middle ages.

I survive 2005 and 2006. So many around me do not. Those who do must of necessity carry away scars that are both physical and mental. One cannot exist in the midst of violence without carrying the echoes of that violence around. The scars of my past contain the many ideas of god within themselves. What is this word? I refuse to capitalize it intentionally because I want to remind my brothers and sisters of humanity of one thing: you do not own this idea any more than I do. Your god or gods are yours to worship as you see fit up to the point where you are forcing those ideas down my throat as car battery acid or into my head at the tip of a power drill.

It is 2015. There are two brothers. Raised to believe in a version of god I do not understand. This god is easily offended. I suspect this god is also weak. This god never speaks except through angry humans who believe that those who disagree with their version of events must be executed in the name of untouchable and intangible ideas that they have in their head. They have rules that include extreme silliness. My god is so important that you may not draw a picture of him. My god is so important that you may not destroy any of his words. They make the holy into the unholy by waging war in the name of something I don’t understand.

What kind of god would need followers like this? Not the kind I can fathom. This could never be the lens through which I see the world. Where all of existence is merely a game of chess pieces played by a being that demands I slaughter others to honor it following esoteric rules made up thousands of years ago and often stolen from the esoteric rules of other gods worshipped by generations past all the way back into the beginning of written language.

There is no one true god. Because each of us has our own version. And this is why we often fight. Over disagreements about what this unseeable, unknowable thing inside us really is. Yes. You understood me. God is inside each of us. Some of us have more than one god inside ourselves. And whether there is only one or there are many they are all the same thing. Because all the atoms and molecules of the universe are connected. All the energy is connected. All the stars send their light across all the universe. It takes a long time to travel that distance.

Which makes me wonder why such tiny beings as ourselves spend so much time and energy fighting about what god is. Wouldn’t it be easier to spend some of these resources exploring everything we cannot see yet. I’d rather do that than to spend all my time living inside books that claim to be the only true explanation of god. Such books often contain wisdom. And wisdom is not a static thing. Like the universe wisdom is a growing, living thing. It does not stand still. It does not use force to control others. It uses patience, tolerance and understanding.

I am student trying to learn. I am a mote that is self-aware. I am a wound that wants to heal.

Maybe all the aberrations I have experienced are there to teach me what god is and what god is not. For myself only. If others want to follow my example or take a piece of it they can choose to do so in freedom and without expectations on my part. Here are words crafted as fragments of my own journey.

I am finding god. God is not a bomb. God is not a bullet. God is not contained inside a book. These things are only tools used to create or destroy. To build or tear down. God is inside you and all around you. God is the fabric of everything. God belongs to everyone. I am not god’s exclusive messenger and neither are you. If you have been given anything worthwhile in this existence it is the choices you make about what you do with all the information available to you. Choose your paths wisely.

God does not act alone. God does not demand. God is not vengeful. God does not become offended and is never offensive. God does not hate. God cannot be drawn.

God is community. God is reasoned debate. God is exploration of the self and of the universe. God is infinite and in everything. God understands love that seems impossible.

Each of us is nothing more than a possibility. Each of us is only here for a few moments. I hope you are finding god in a peaceful, thoughtful way today. If we could all agree to pursue spirituality from this perspective the world would change drastically for the better. I believe it is possible. In the cosmic scheme of things it shouldn’t take more than a few eye blinks. While I wait for those blinks to transpire, god bless you and keep you. May you be inspired in ways that make your journey rich and full of epiphanies, laughter and pleasure. I hope you find your measure of humility, strength and courage. Unto you be granted the qualities of mercy, wisdom and a thirst for knowledge.

I am made of scars and ideas. I am made of love and weakness. I would rather know you than kill you. I am a man who does not believe in anything but the fluidity of existence and the journey. Ideas are not static. Knowledge grows and spawns new wisdom. I am not standing still and neither are you. We are all spinning through space. Together. I try not to lose sight of that.

It is the year 2015. What will you do with this eye blink?

Signed,

An apostate