What the Taliban Told Me, page 7
Over the next few months, I spent hours a day talking with our professors. There was Asila, nearly as young and impetuous as I, decidedly younger and more impetuous than my classmates. Najibullah, whose pompadour tried to rival Fawad’s but, despite having roughly three times as much hair in it, couldn’t hold a candle to The Tornado’s coiffure. And there was Dr. Death—whose real name I’m not sure I ever knew—an old crusty Pashtun whose English was very good, but who wouldn’t use it to help you out no matter how hard you were struggling. As the course drew on Rahimi had us talk to the good doctor nearly every day, which we were less than happy about, as he spoke slowly and with a constant emphysematous wheeze, his voice almost whistling as a result, making it painful to listen to him. But then we took the DLPT and discovered that a substantial portion of the audio passages were narrated by the mysterious doctor, who was difficult to understand even when you’d been listening to his voice for weeks, let alone for the first time. Rahimi knew what he was doing, of course, and just laughed his raspy, Muttley-esque laugh when we accused him of preparing us for the test.
We did all this talking in part to prepare for the final test, but mostly because speaking a language that you’re learning is by far the hardest thing to do with it; it’s much easier to recognize words than it is to pull them whole cloth from your memory. Speaking, putting those words and ideas into (hopefully) the same order as native speakers do, is by far the best way to strengthen your language skills. Taylor and I were both “good” at Pashto, but we had a problem; we couldn’t help but speak Dari.
We figured, given the no/minimal English rules, we should just use Dari whenever we didn’t know a Pashto word. The result was strange sentences that would be 60 to 70 percent Dari nouns and adjectives, with Pashto pronouns and verbs. Or, instead of asking “to drink څنګه وایئ” (“how do you say” in Pashto plus “to drink” in English) like our classmates, we would inevitably say say “څنګه وایئ نوشیدن” (“how do you say” in Pashto and “to drink” in Dari). The first time we did this with Rahimi he just paused, looked at us both, and said “I understand what you’re doing. But I hate this.” Us being us, this of course then meant that we kept doing it.
In part because it was fun, his faux exasperation a nice game we could play together, but mostly because we didn’t really understand how he could dislike this so much, we kept mixing and matching the two languages. We figured it was super-cool, ’cause like, how many other students could do that? We also figured that while Rahimi’s English was great, wasn’t his Dari better? Pashtun he may have been, but as far as we knew he was equally fluent in both. But when we finally got around to asking him about it, it turned out that it was harder for him to convert the Dari to Pashto, or vice versa, because he never thought that way. He was perfectly fluent in Dari—the man had been an interpreter all over Afghanistan—but it wasn’t one of the two languages he primarily thought in these days, nor did he ever combine it with Pashto. Mixing Pashto and English was common for him; that’s what he did all day at work. But if he thought in Pashto, Pashto it was. And if he thought in Dari, same. What we were doing was some weird bastardization of the two that did not sit well with him.
So in addition to whatever was happening in the background of our brains as we were learning, we were actively figuring out how to think in Pashto, which is to say, to think like our professors, as this was how we could talk like them. But we soon realized that we weren’t ever going to think quite like Afghans, for more than just the cultural reasons. We would always and forever mix the two languages together, because that was how we could be the most fluent, or at least how we could use the least English. Taylor put more effort into limiting his Dari use when speaking in class, but I didn’t want anything to do with such a restraint, no matter how annoyed my classmates got. The goal was to use our language skills, and I was going to do just that.
As the course went on and my Pashto got better, I did, eventually, use only small amounts of Dari. Some of this was a simple increase in vocabulary, some of it my learning to be less of a jerk, and some of it because a number of our professors didn’t speak Dari. In hindsight, these were probably the best professors I had (other than Rahimi, that patient saint) because with each hour spent with them, sure I learned more Pashto, but I also learned more about Pashtuns.
Taylor and I had learned about the different ethnic groups in Afghanistan in our Dari course. A major part of the language training at DLI is learning about the history of a given country or area, its people, and its culture. For our class, this ranged from preparing presentations on the government of Afghanistan since 1950, to making traditional Afghan food alongside our professors, to crafting kites for a kite battle (an infamous day, wherein one of the young professors absolutely destroyed one of the older professors’ kites, resulting in the older professor yelling the soon to be oft-repeated line “That was not a manly action”). So we already knew that the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and Pashtuns were the major ethnic groups of Afghanistan, and we’d heard a little of some of the smaller ones, like the Baloch and the Pashayi. Some of our Dari teachers had even been trilingual, having grown up speaking both Dari and Pashto before learning English, and had told us about that strange southern tribe and their even stranger language. But they didn’t tend to refer to themselves as Pashtuns, just as Afghans.
Our Pashto professors, on the other hand, were Pashtuns before anything else. It’s not as if any of them followed the traditional code of honor of the Pashtun people—پښتونوالي (Pashtunwali)—but they tended to be more conservative, more religious, more accepting of the role that violence plays in the world than our Dari professors had been. Which isn’t to say that they were on the side of the Taliban. No, in fact, they were very much on our side, which I came to best understand during a speaking lesson about the merits of nuclear proliferation.
The professor I was talking to was new to me, having subbed in for one of our normal professors who had to leave early that day. We’d seen each other before, nods in the hallways between classrooms and so on, and he had always seemed nice. Very self-assured. I guess he just carried himself well, like you probably shouldn’t fuck with him ’cause maybe he’d seen some shit back in the day.
I never learned the specifics, but I did come to wholeheartedly believe that he had seen something(s) or someone(s) pretty awful, because after about twenty minutes of conversation, he told me, in a rather offhanded manner, that he thought we should just nuke Afghanistan.
“Uh, what?”
I thought maybe I’d misunderstood him.
“Oh yeah, absolutely. We should just blow up the whole country.”
Nope. Pretty clear, that. I wondered if this was some sort of test. Like, a way to trap me into admitting that I was a racist/bigot and thought we should just kill any and every Afghan. I couldn’t really get in trouble for that; I’m sure there were at least a dozen Marines who had said that shit out loud already, but I couldn’t figure out a better reason for him to have made such a proclamation, so I asked him if he was serious, and if so, why.
He said something to the effect of, well, there’s nothing good there. The people aren’t good, the land isn’t good, and they’re just always going to fight. So we may as well just drop a bunch of nukes, kill everyone there, and get rid of the problem forever. In response to my question of whether he had family there who would be killed by all these bombs, he just said, eh, extended family. That’s just how it goes.
Whether it was a good use of my time to be talking about nuking the country I was supposed to go fight a war in is up for debate. I knew, or at least had been told, that this level of understanding would be superfluous, as (1) my job was going to be to listen to the Taliban, who didn’t tend to debate much beyond the merits of which weapon to aim at which American or where to place an IED, and (2) I wasn’t the talking kind of linguist, just the listening kind. But we were supposed to become as fluent as possible, and because I wanted to succeed (and because it was fun), I kept talking. When I graduated from our Pashto course, I was coined by the commandant of DLI for my performance on the DLPT. This is an informal award tradition in the military wherein a high-ranking person gives you a custom-made coin (think silver dollar, not quarter) that represents an accomplishment. I had gotten higher scores than most graduates of the yearlong Pashto course, in half the time and, I was told, was a credit to the Air Force and to DLI.
But when I left DLI, this didn’t really matter, because Pashto changed, and I had to change with it. Pashto was now the language of the enemy. Obviously, I was told, not everyone who speaks Pashto is a Talib, but every Talib does speak Pashto, so if you hear it, expect bad shit, because Afghanistan is a far safer place if you operate from the viewpoint that everyone is out to get you.
BULLSHIT, OR YOU’LL ONLY DIE TIRED
IN THE BEGINNING, there were the words, and the words were with the Taliban, and the words were the Taliban. This then, meant that the words were evil. Because they were coming from the Taliban, who are unequivocally, unrelentingly, and unrepentantly evil.
Oh, and boring. Evil and boring.
This was not a lesson in Arendt; I was not told that the Taliban were Eichmann’s heirs. They were banal. And they were evil. But their evil was not banal.
Attacks on helicopters, attacks on planes, attacks on convoys, suicide bombers, vehicle-born IEDs, donkey-borne IEDs (really), roadside bombs, ambushes, mortaring of bases, RPGing of men, attacks on school, acid thrown in young girls’ faces, honor killings, subjugation of women, sexual enslavement of boys—these were the evils the Taliban practiced, and these are not things “so lacking in originality as to be obvious and boring.”
They, on the other hand, were boring. The Taliban whinged and whined, pissed and moaned, griped and groused. And bullshit (bullshat?). God did they bullshit.
Pashto and Dari naturally lend themselves to puns and insults—there is a lot of rhyming inherent to the languages, and many words share double meanings. A not small part of the Taliban’s bullshitting stems from a penchant for repetition. Afghans will repeat a name or statement, or anything really, dozens of times to make a point. But this repetition intensifies when talking over radios. The story of Kalima taught me this. None of us know who Kalima was, though it’s generally accepted that he wasn’t anyone important. But every Pashto linguist at Hurby knew of Kalima because there was an audio recording of someone—we don’t know who—who really wanted to talk to him. So he called his name.
“Kalima! Kaliiiiiiima. Kalimaaaaaaa. Kalima Kalima Kalima Kalima Kalima.”
He called his name again and again, at least fifty times, in every possible combination of syllabic emphasis. Kalima never responded. Maybe his radio was off. Maybe he just didn’t want to talk to this guy. Maybe he was asleep. All that bullshitting can be tiring.
Bullshitting and evil. Evil bullshitting.
The other DSOs who told me about all this bullshit back at Hurby had listened to the Taliban during the most intense years of the war, 2009 and 2010. The latter was the deadliest year of the war for American forces. This, because of “The Push,” Afghanistan’s version of Fallujah. The Push was supposed to be this incredible show of force, a way to definitively prove to ourselves and to the Taliban that we meant business and that we could root them out of their traditional stronghold in the city of Marjah in Helmand province. Technically, it worked, in that by blowing up a lot of shit and killing a lot of Afghans we took over the area. But this battle that some were concerned could last “up to a month” would be called a “bleeding ulcer” by General Stanley McChrystal ninety days in. It wouldn’t be declared over until the end of the year, just shy of the ten-month mark.
Of course, I didn’t pay attention to any of those DSOs. I figured that they were, perhaps, a bit tired, a bit inundated with bullshit, both Pashto and otherwise. Reasonably so, as they had all had to do five-month deployments up at Bagram, freezing their asses off in flight and camp alike. But everyone was still flying, and while maybe there were some grumbles, things were looking up.
Much of my excitement to deploy was admittedly based in a combination of pride, willful naïveté, and religious fervor. I still didn’t necessarily think I was the second coming of Christ (unlike a certain someone), but it was hard not to be proud of our accomplishments; we really were the only two DSOs—hell, as far as we knew the only two linguists in the entire Air Force—who had been fully trained in both Dari and Pashto. I was also still a True Believer in the “DSO as Deity” myth and was willing to accept our leadership’s claims that they had worked out a number of the kinks in deploying and being deployed. I wouldn’t have to do a five-month deployment, just three, and I wouldn’t have to deploy as often as the older DSOs had (even though I told our commander that I wanted to go for longer, and as often as possible, so that I could finally kill some Talibs, prove my worth, and so the poor bastards who came before me could finally get some well-deserved rest).
There was also serious pressure on Taylor and me to deploy. Some of this was the general push to get more DSOs into Afghanistan, but some of it was specific to us. The fact that we were now able to listen to and understand virtually any Afghan, anywhere in the country, came with great expectations. We were constantly reminded of how long we had already been in, how much money had been spent on training us, how lucky we were to be first-term airmen doing the DSO mission, and just how much we owed the Air Force and our squadron.
So we were pushed through our flight training, fast, and I got to Afghanistan four months after The Push ended. It was further exciting, if not a little terrifying, that this coincided with the onset of the fighting season in Afghanistan. In the month prior to my arrival, very little had been going on, as a result of the nonstop rain. Every year, this had the strange effect of giving the Taliban time to rest and regroup, and us time to feel pent-up and anxious. This sort of scheduled war, the knowledge that the spring offensive is coming, that though things are quiet now, soon there will be battles, was a strange unease specific to the war in Afghanistan. For us flyers, it mostly just meant that we could expect to be bored for a couple months out of the year. I can’t imagine what it felt like for the guys on the ground, knowing that after the boredom would come many, many bullets.
The problem was that in the aftermath of The Push, we weren’t sure how many bullets there would be. We’d allegedly taken one of the Taliban’s main bomb-making sites, eliminated, or at least diminished, a large portion of their revenue, and weakened their hold on a strategic area (Marjah is very close to Kandahar, so in theory there were now fewer Taliban breathing down the neck of one of our largest bases). Would there be fewer attacks as a result of this, or more? Would the Taliban be cowed or just pissed off? Would The Push be the decisive moment we had been promised?
The year 2011 wound up being the second deadliest of the war in Afghanistan. One hundred and twelve Americans would be killed in action during the three months I was there (this count includes civilians). The Push would in fact come to be seen as a major turning point in the war.
But it was a turn in the wrong direction. Instead of proving to the Taliban (and the world) that we were an unstoppable force who could accomplish anything if we just threw enough money and soldiers at it, The Push only wound up cementing the idea that Afghanistan was unconquerable and that the Taliban would keep fighting even in the face of thousands more coalition troops.
My first mission and the battle in the Barawala Kalay Valley couldn’t have been better confirmation of this. The Taliban somehow coordinated a massive surprise attack on a FOB (forward operating base), and while it didn’t go well for them, it was pretty strong evidence that they hadn’t been cowed. This battle was also validation of the wickedness I had been told to expect. Our men had just been sitting in their FOB, like so many ducks, and the Taliban had tried to overrun them. Those fuckers shot a fucking medevac. And they were so celebratory, so full of pomp and pride. In the middle of this massive battle, this thing straight out of a war movie, they rejoiced about results to come, consistently encouraging each other, secure in their knowledge that they would kill so many more of us.
“Praise God, they are dying!”
“How many have we killed, brother?”
“Hundreds!”
“Keep fighting, keep fighting! They’re losing!”
“Yes, yes, we’re winning, thank God, we are winning!”
“We’ll kill every devil here, all of them!”
This was total bullshit, as their casualties outnumbered ours at least ten to one. And it really was evil bullshit. All that invoking of God’s will, his greatness, his power, praise be to him who helps us kill the infidels; it was incomprehensible, this use of Allah for their atrocious ambitions.
The natural consequence of this mission and its verification of what I had already been taught was that I thought and talked about future missions just like everyone else.
“Yeah, we schwacked a few guys.”
“Oh man, you should’ve seen it, there was nothing left of those fuckers.”
“Should’ve kept shooting, but these fucking new ROEs [rules of engagement]. Can’t Winchester anymore.”
I would like to tell you that this was self-defense, some psychic protectionism, or just me trying to fit in with the men and women I was working with, but it wasn’t. To some extent I was trying to conform, as my natural temperament—or maybe nurtured temperament, my childhood having been filled (or I guess emptied?) with abandonment—is one of deep-seated longing for a sense of community. But I didn’t have to try all that hard. While I didn’t always agree with the specifics—the bragging about “mercing some towelheads” was uncomfortable, and the (thankfully rare) celebrating of the wiping out of some “sand niggers” was outright revolting—I could now pretty readily get behind the excitement of schwacking a bunch of bad dudes or 105-ing a few Talibs. And I could understand the frustration with the changes to the ROEs, such that we had to be far more careful about whom we shot, and how much we shot at them, to reduce civilian casualties. What’s more, the Taliban knew about these changes, and used them to become more brazen in their attacks, secure in the knowledge that if they were close enough to some off-limits building, or a collection of civilians, we wouldn’t shoot at them, despite the fact that a gunship with a good crew can put a bullet through a basketball hoop from two miles away. We weren’t just not Winchestering—to Winchester is to fire every round available on the plane, meaning you have to return to base to reload the plane’s entire ammo stores—we were (in our eyes) barely shooting.
