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Dinner in Kabul

November 6, 2017 by Pen Leave a Comment

I spent some time in Afghanistan working for NATO. There are many places in the world that have a high quotient of misery, and I have lived in a few of them. Where we happen to be born, and also when, largely determines the kind of opportunities that will or will not present themselves during our individual lifetime.

He had no legs below the knees. I do not know how he learned the words of English that he said to me.

“Mister, mister, please help me.”

I had seen him coming. Our whole group had seen him coming. He pulled himself towards us on a piece of wood with wheels bolted to the underside. His ragged jeans were rolled up and pinned where his legs ended abruptly. We were on our way to a dinner hosted by our military bosses. It was inside a heavily fortified area we had no parking clearance for. He picked me, out of our group of more than a dozen.

I was in a bad mood. My back hurt, and we had spent several hours fighting Kabul’s insane traffic, moving across the city from our hotel to this base for a dinner I didn’t really want to be a part of.

“I need medicine. I need doctor.” His outstretched hands grasped up at me. He tried to hold onto my pants. Black eyes pleading for something, anything better than his current existence.

I pushed him away with my own functional legs.

He tried again. “Mister, mister.”

“Yawazi mee pregda! Leave me alone.”

He didn’t leave me alone. He visits me often when I sleep, rolling towards me, saying, “Mister, mister, please help me.”

My quotient of misery, on his rolling board, always pulling on my pant legs. Reminding me to be a little better than I am next time.

I don’t remember what dinner tasted like.

Filed Under: Essays, Personal Tagged With: Afghanistan, autobiographical, kabul, non-fiction, poverty, short story, war

Circle of control

January 10, 2017 by Pen Leave a Comment

“We control our reasoned choice and all acts that depend on that moral will. What’s not under our control are the body and any of its parts, our possessions, parents, siblings, children, or country—anything with which we might associate.” —Epictetus, Discourses

I am in my mid-40s at the time I am writing this. My body is failing. That’s not to say the expiration date is near, but merely that I am hyperaware of the amount of wear and tear I have put on the machine. Military service in two different branches and a mobile lifestyle have taken a toll. I do not control my body’s reaction to this excessive wear and tear, but I do control my mind, and how it responds.

Our mind is the only thing, ultimately, that we do have control over, if we are fortunate enough to have a healthy brain. The lesson for myself, and anyone who chooses to read these words, is this: stop worrying about externality. Make choices that will keep your brain as healthy as possible. Let go of things you have zero influence over. News. Elections. The health of your national currency. What someone else thinks of you. It’s all quite irrelevant.

If you choose to engage with people on social media, remember that you don’t control what they think, and should therefore not become invested in those who have a different opinion than you. Express yourself, move on, and let go.

It was very icy this morning when I left the house, and even though I have all wheel drive, I found myself unable to make turns. Instead, I was sliding in straight lines across sheets of ice. I could easily have wrecked my expensive automobile. I realized that I couldn’t control the ice, or the way my car responded to it. Instead of getting upset, I crept home as slowly and carefully as I could. I made it safely, and for that I am grateful.

If I hadn’t, and had wrecked my car, I would focused on seeing the positives. My automobile has been great in the five years I’ve had it, but I am not attached to it. It’s just a tool that gets me where I want to go. My body is the exact same thing. A tool that gets my mind where I’d like it to go. In the realization of this, I am cognizant that I should try to take care of my car and my body, but that eventually, they will both fail me.

In the mean time, I’m focused on what’s really important – the choices I’m making, the habits I am forming, and the ideas I am exploring. Those are the only things that will matter when my existence is drawing to its close.

My circle of control is what’s happening inside my head. That’s the place that matters most, and what I do there will influence everything else. The same applies to you.

Filed Under: Essays, Personal, Stoicism Tagged With: control, daily stoic, essay, habits, letting go, non-fiction, penfist, stoicism, what's important

The crab boy of Kabul

February 4, 2016 by Pen 1 Comment

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.

Filed Under: Essays, Freewrite, Personal, Short Stories Tagged With: Afghanistan, contractor, kabol, kabul, NATO, non-fiction, penfist, short story, travel

Breaking your own leg

January 21, 2015 by Pen Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: Essays, Freewrite, Personal Tagged With: fear, freewrite, Iraq, National Guard, non-fiction, self-harm, self-sabotage, war

Polyamory and pain

March 9, 2014 by Pen Leave a Comment

I am an alien. The worlds that I carry around with me are not mine. They belong to the story. I am only a caretaker. My destiny is to give away everything. To you and others.

Rugged mountains covered with shantytowns and the sprawl of human life set the backdrop. I observe this place that is not my home from inside an illusory bubble of safety. My routine is that there is no routine. My companions are aliens too. Unwelcome. Our routes remain the same, but nothing else does. Except the chaos.

All is dust. Every tree looks tired. Animals labor under a sun I thought I knew and didn’t. This is not my world. A maelstrom of activity means that I am always watching. The natives are not friendly. My companions and I watch for magnetic bombs in every hand. Have you ever seen your death in someone else’s eyes? I have.

We study every vehicle and every pile of trash carefully. Things in this world explode, unexpectedly. With great violence. Anyone passing by could have a grenade. And the grenade might be wearing bits of me at any moment. If not today perhaps tomorrow. Sudden, violent endings hide among the throngs of teeming life here. Patiently. Waiting.

I see the girl. For a moment the rest of the details are fuzzy. Then clarity comes. She is perhaps 14. Possibly 15. Maybe 12. She is beautiful. I should not be able to see that. Because her head should be covered. In modesty. It is not. The girl is chained to a tree. The tree is chained to this world that is not mine. I am chained to the memory of the time and space.

She is bleeding from her forehead. She is crying. The rocks hitting her are uncaring. The boys throwing them are cruel. They are laughing. And I have rules to follow. I want to stop my vehicle. I want to get out of my armored sphere of unreality. Unchain the girl from the tree. Save her.

But I don’t. I keep going, saving only her memory. I carry her world inside mine. The rules were yours then. They are mine now. Because I took them away from you for doing this to me.

I woke up one morning not long ago and thought of the girl. I love her. I failed her. I thought of you. I love you too. I thought about how much I hurt you and others. When I give you pain, it is hers and mine and yours.

When I hold you tenderly it is her face that I see sometimes. The girl chained to the tree in that other world. The one I am the caretaker for. Please let me hurt you in a different way. One that is good for you. And let me be a part of your story until it ends. Because I’ll never know what happened to that other girl I love.

I am an alien. Love me. Better than I love you. I need polyamory and pain. Do you understand why? I can never stop loving her. Never stop failing her. Never stop trying to save you in the midst of it all.

Filed Under: Personal, Short Stories Tagged With: Afghanistan, girl, kabul, memory, non-fiction, war

The faceless

October 17, 2013 by Pen 2 Comments

It’s a hot day. Not the kind of hot you know. The kind of hot only Satan could have dreamed up. The air is dry. No breeze. Everything outside is baking. Eight in the morning and the temperature is just creeping over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. We’ll hit 130 in the shade later. If only heat was my biggest problem.

Today, I’m going outside the wire. To the place where all the abuse happened. They call it Abu Ghraib. A prison. A place of hopelessness. The generals want me there to show that we don’t beat and torture people there anymore. That progress is happening. A prisoner release with media coverage. That’s my job today. I’ll take pictures and sing them a happy song made of words. About how great and beneficent we are. I’ll be fascinated by the truth beneath the pastiche and hate my role as the troubador of bullshit.

We will be driving through the most violent place on earth. An occupied city called Baghdad. One of the oldest settled places on the planet, where millions are currently involved in what the leadership of the occupation calls a “low intensity civil war.” I wonder how the thousands dying in that war each month would feel about the description of their murders.

I am a coward scheduled to ride inside an armored bus they call “the Rhino.” Tons of steel and air conditioning with convenient gun ports for shooting comfortably at any attackers. The ride will be more than an hour, on roads that are swept daily for evidence of bombs. Yet I am afraid. I know from personal experience that no one is immune to the numerous types of bombs that the occupiers are constantly being attacked with. I am an occupier to most of Baghdad. The ones who don’t actively hate me are mostly indifferent to whether I live or die. They have their own survival to worry about, and none of them live inside a protected, fortified perimeter like I do.

No, the average Iraqi lives in a city full of gangs, bandits and murder squads. They are subjected to a dusk to dawn curfew where uniformed gangs roam and terrorize. Some of the gangs are trying to make things better and others are just there for revenge. Sunnis were in charge for 30 plus years. The ethnic minority, they had all the privileges. Now the Shia are in charge, and they want revenge for being oppressed. If the Americans don’t break down the door and take away all the fighting age males in your house it might be one of the other gangs. If you’re Sunni, the Shia might come and take your brother or father away. They’ll tie his hands behind his back and put a power drill up to his skull and start drilling holes in his head. Take whatever information they can and then put a bullet or six in him. Or if you’re Shia, the Sunni might blow up your car while you are on your way to work. It’s a back and forth. Both sides hate each other passionately. Both sides pay lip service to the occupiers and make bombs to attack the foreigners with.

The convoy leaves on schedule. Schedules are important to us. We are sandwiched into our armored box on wheels. In the front and in the back are Humvees with machine guns mounted in the turrets. I would hate to be one of those guys. Bullet magnets.

We drive through the maze that exits our “Green Zone” and enter the world most who were born here have to live in. We call it the Red Zone. They call it hell. Eyes take note of us. Thousands of eyes. Dark eyes. I can feel them boring into the armor and penetrating the thick glass that is designed to stop projectiles. The hate is palpable. It settles onto me like a heavy weight. My chest sinks. My heart beats faster. I wonder if today will be the day. Every day feels like it might the last day here.

These people are fatalistic about death. I am not. I do not want to die. I do not want to be torn apart by a blast. Two days ago I was knocked down by one while in the shower. The concussive force of a car bomb a mile away rattled the trailer I live in so much that it was lifted up and then slammed back down. When I got back up from that, I found myself trembling. The aftermath made it worse. A thick column of black smoke outside attended by the attack helicopters that always swarm like angry bees to watch over the rescue responders on the ground. They told me after that explosion was a targeted attack on policemen waiting to collect their monthly pay. Many of them were ripped to shreds. And I am afraid it is my turn now.

The others on this bus annoy me. Some pray. I do not believe praying will make any difference. Sometimes I do it anyhow but only because it is an old ritual. Some talk to avoid introspection. I avoid them. I do not want to make small talk to pass the time while waiting to die. I sit in the back, with the interpreters. If anyone on this bus is hated more than the occupiers, it is the people who speak for them.

One of the men talks to me. “Where are you from,” he asks? I tell him I am from everywhere. It’s true. I have lived all over the world. I claim no place as my own. He tells me about his family. How his brother, father, uncles and cousins have been killed since the occupation begins. He wants to leave Iraq. That is his only goal. To get a visa to go to Europe or the United States. He wants to get away from his city. He wants to leave his country. I understand. Not everyone here is a fatalist. He doesn’t want to die for nothing. Like all the males in his family have.

I give him my e-mail address and tell him I’ll try to help. We arrive at the prison. Behind rusty barbed wire and chain link fences, hundreds of men are milling. They are quiet, calm and carefully watched. The air crackles with their energy. It stinks of their sweat. I see a man in a wheelchair. He has no legs. I wonder what he possibly could have done to be locked up in this sweltering hell. Hundreds of eyes watch me. Some are guarded, some are cold, but all are interested. They see my camera. Many turn their faces away, to avoid being captured in the lens.

Guards around the perimeter hassle me. “No cameras,” says one. He has a Mossberg shotgun. I show him my badge authorizing the camera. He grimaces but shuts up and walks off. I walk the fence line trying to shoot through the fences, trying to focus on the eyes of the prisoners. I am frustrated. I climb into a guard tower after making small talk with one of them. He becomes accommodating when I take his picture. There are always some like him. They want to be recognized. They are proud of the freedom they bring to foreign lands. Of the bad guys they stop.

A politician begins speaking. Then some generals. The foreign general goes first. Then the Iraqi general. I don’t know what they are saying but I know it is mostly bullshit. I take a few pictures. That is required. The commanding officer will want at least one photo of these people to make himself look good to them. I can hear him ingratiating himself now, in his deep drawl. He believes Jesus wants him here to help these ignorant people who are too stupid to manage their own country.

The gates of the prison open. The guards tense, ready for any trouble. Men begin to emerge from the pen. They stink. The temperature has risen to near 120 degrees now. I am sweating freely and drinking water non-stop. Running around with my camera. One man is clutching a Quran, his fingers spasmodic, his lips pursed in prayer. The legless man is pushed awkwardly through the double gates by a fellow prisoner. I wonder if they are friends, or if some guard just said, “Hey you, push the legless guy. Now!” I wonder if he had to wave a shotgun around to get taken seriously. I wonder what these guys did to get locked up in a sandy cage where the heat cooks them all day every day. And I remember the pictures. Of the ones my fellow soldiers beat and tortured and made into human pyramids covered in their own excrement. I am sad, but I keep snapping the photos and taking my notes so I can write a story about how great we are now at freeing prisoners who have promised not to rabble rouse anymore.

I see haunted eyes among the faces. Other men have hopeful eyes. A few look desperate to get away from this place. Some are fighting their own urges to run to the waiting buses. I am getting dizzy from the heat. Many of them are wearing towels on their heads but I have to wear a Kevlar helmet. It’s heavy and doesn’t allow any airflow. Eventually, I am finished photographing and taking notes. Four hundred men are distributed onto buses that will take them to different parts of the city where they will meet family members and be reunited. I wonder how many of these men have no family members left. Then my retinue is back inside our armored, air conditioned bus. The recently freed prisoners get to ride in non air-conditioned, unarmored charter buses that look like should have been put in a junkyard 20 years ago. The temperature is nearing 130 degrees. I am spent. I sit in the back of the bus again, and prepare to cross the world’s most violent city back to my bubble of unreality where we can swim in a dictator’s pool and sing karaoke at night while the life flight choppers bring the injured and dying in over our heads from all around.

I am somber. I hear a bomb go off somewhere far away. Gunfire punctuates the moments all around us. These sounds have been my normal for months. I look at Ali, the interpreter. His eyes are sad, haunted. He goes to sleep. I wonder what he will dream about. Maybe his dead uncle, whom he said was very funny. His favorite person in the whole world. Murdered with a gunshot to the back of the head and dropped off in the street in front of his house, a piece of rotting meat.

I drink water.

The bomb goes off unexpectedly, ripping the world to shreds. Dozens die in the 130 degree heat. But today is not my day. And the target is not my convoy. Instead, one of the buses full of prisoners is attacked by a suicide car bomber as it pulls into the depot where waiting family members stand. Men, women and children are blown into pieces. I see the pictures later and wonder if the legless man was on that bus or another one. I’ll never know. I see him in my dreams sometimes. His thick glasses falling down the brim of his brown nose and the scars on the nubs where his legs used to be. I sobbed for him once. And for myself.

Now, years later, all those prisoners are blurring in my mind. They are becoming faceless ghosts who haunt me everywhere I go. I wish I could tell you each of their stories, but I can only tell you mine. Sometimes I wonder if Ali the interpreter made it out alive. He never e-mailed me.

Filed Under: Short Stories Tagged With: Abu Ghraib, dreams, Europe, forgotten people, Green Zone, Iraq, non-fiction, occupied country, pen, prison, Red Zone, revenge, short story, story, suicide, true war, war, war stories

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