Dispatches from Afghanistan

Another phone call from Afghanistan.

Brad got my email about his news item. He had no earthly idea that he had even been photographed, although he seems to have a vague memory of it. He says each day runs together and the only things that set them apart are war‘s oddities or, of course, death.

One of the things I love about Brad is his whacked out sense of humor. He doesn’t care about offending people, he just calls everything as he sees things and how he sees things is unique, unique but painfully astute. Being in Afghanistan is just highlighting that part of him.

He talks often about all the children he meets. In the first few weeks he was there, he was enamored of all these little kids following him and his fellow Marines around while they worked. Then he made several discoveries.

One day as he crossed a corn field, he saw a group of what looked like seven year old boys standing by the road waving to him. He approached them with an open mind, waving and saying hello. As he got closer, he could see they were smiling and apparently talking to him, still waving. When he was close enough to hear, this is what he heard, “As-salamu Fuck You!” Not exactly the traditional greeing “As-salamu alaikum” which means “Peace be upon you.’ Apparently, the presence of so many Americans in the area has colored the speech of the kids.
Brad says he stood there in shock for a minute, unable to figure out what to say. He had been given a mini-course in Pashtu but this bizarre bastardization of Arabic was not something anyone warned him about. He was trying to figure out if this was friendly or not. From the looks on the kids’ faces, it seemed they thought they were conveying something wonderful!

In Brad’s words:

“A wave of sadness washed over me and I couldn’t move or respond for what seemed like minutes but was probably just a few seconds. I felt so sorry for those kids, waving so friendly and nice, probably thinking they had learned some particularly useful phrase in English, all proud of themselves for being able to communicate with this weird-looking enemy. I don’t know. Maybe I’m giving them too much credit, maybe they really were saying ‘Fuck you’ to me. But I don’t think so. I think someone taught that to them, an American I’m sure, just to fuck around with them. That’s just not nice. It makes me so sad. These kids, they’re gonna grow up thinking about the old days when the Marines were walking around their neighborhood and thinking we were so friendly, because we are for the most part. Then they’re gonna realize someone taught them SHIT, that some jackass played a trick on them by teaching them something nasty. It just breaks my heart. It breaks my heart even more than when one of us gets hurt. I dunno. I guess I’m fucked up.”

When he got close enough to really talk to the boys, he realized how dirt poor they were, tattered dirty clothing, skin & hair looking like it hadn’t been washed. He tried to reason that there were a lot of dust storms, even in this relatively populated area, and that everything was so dry and dusty so maybe being dirty was just a daily thing. Still, he wondered about what they did for fun, what they played with. He reached into his rucksack and pulled out a fist full of pens, which they were given just for situations like this. The kids were delighted! They reached out their hands to take as many pens as he could give them. Then a most bizarre thought struck him: did they have any paper to write on? What were they going to do, write on each other?
Within half a minute, that’s exactly what they started to do. The pens were opened and the kids started drawing on themselves and each other. He just shook his head and walked off.

The next day, walking through the same area, Brad encountered the same group of boys, only THIS time they brought more friends. There were about 15 boys of various ages, and at the first sight of Brad they took off after him yelling “PEN!” in Arabic.

Brad’s sense of the absurd kicked in and as he fled as quickly as possible, given all the gear he had on, he couldn’t help but laugh. He laughed after he got in the Humvee, he laughed all the way back to base. The guys in his unit threw stuff at him while they rode in the Humvee, telling him to shut the fuck up, but he couldn’t stop laughing. Finally, when they got back to base, he stripped off layer after sandy layer of 40 pounds of gear. He half-heartedly cleaned his dusty body with a baby wipe, crawled into his sleeping bag, zipped it up around his head and cried.