“You know you won a free round-trip ticket to Afghanistan?” a perpetually busy chief master sergeant asked me one warm winter evening. We were at the gym at Robins Air Force Base in Houston County, Ga., after a day spent serving on a panel of public affairs chiefs.
“You’re kidding,” I said. Weights clanked behind us. “I saw my name on a deployment list, but there was a question mark beside it.” All afternoon, my hopes had hung on that question mark.
“No question sir. You made the list. You’re going to ISAF headquarters in Kabul,” he said, referring to the United States-led international force in Afghanistan. He beamed like he was handing me a winning lotto ticket. It was January 2013. I was scheduled to deploy in 15 months.
To him, deployment amounted to the opportunity of a lifetime. At that moment, it seemed to me like some surreal theft. I’d miss another New England summer, every birthday in my immediate family and my 33rd wedding anniversary. As a 30-year Air Force Reserve veteran, I’d spent months away from home, but never deployed to a war zone. So I was a decade overdue. But while the Air Force Reserve asks for volunteers to go overseas, I had assumed they don’t involuntarily deploy 53-year-old grandfathers.
They do.
When I called my wife, Debby, that evening to tell her the news, she said, “Aren’t you a little old for that?”
I felt old. I took a walk around the gorgeous Georgia base, grateful to be away from the frigid New England winter, feeling alternately numb and angry to be “non-vol’d.” The crepe myrtles bloomed and the sun warmed my arms as the notion crept up my spine: I’m going to Afghanistan.
In the evening, after opening the Gideon Bible to the 23rd Psalm and glancing at the familiar words – “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want …” – I slept in fits until about 3 a.m., then not at all. In the dark, short, violent movies kept looping in my head. Somebody would burn another Quran and 40,000 protesters – 1 percent of Kabul’s population – would storm the gate. An Afghan would come to work and start shooting, like what happened when a colleague was killed at Kabul International Airport. Looping, like bad songs that won’t stop.
The next day, I asked the Reserve Command director, a thoughtful colonel, “What are my options?”
“Realistically, Jim, you can retire or you can take the deployment.”
“I wouldn’t have volunteered,” I surprised myself by saying. “But I’ll go.”
So I started a year of intense training holding two opposing notions in balance: “I can’t believe they’re sending me to Afghanistan,” and, “What a great opportunity.” During one week of training, I learned how to greet someone in Dari, how to kill an enemy using a chokehold and how to save a shooting victim’s life with quick-clot bandages. Ironically, the Dari greeting, “salaam alaykum,” means “peace be with you.” I read thousands of pages of material on the nuances of Afghan culture, how to spot a roadside bomb, how to evade enemy capture. There were also facts I hoped not to need: Grasshoppers, ants and worms are edible; hairy or brightly colored insects are not. I learned that Afghanistan is a “nation of minorities,” with Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks accounting for about 87 percent of the population, but none representing a majority.
Two weeks before flying overseas I attended combat training at Fort Dix, N.J. It was the hardest training I’d done, physically and mentally, since officer training school in 1984. On the first day, with Army and Marine trainers yelling above simulated explosions, we learned that the Hollywood notion of low-crawling on your elbows actually is high-crawling. In a real low-crawl, you drag your head or helmet along the ground. I can’t low-crawl for more than a few feet without stopping to gasp for air, I discovered, while hauling 70 pounds of body armor and equipment.
Our instructor warned us that on the day we conducted urban assault exercises, we would get shot with metal-capped plastic bullets.
“Only the first shot hurts,” he said.
I didn’t believe him. The night before our turn at urban assault, I stuffed my uniform pockets with padding – a spare notebook, a pair of combat gloves. But our “aggressors,” all expert marksmen, took great delight in shooting us in the few square inches they knew we couldn’t pad. At one point mid-exercise, my M-4 jammed and I stopped moving to “slap and snap” my weapon. In those two seconds, I got shot on the inside thigh, just below the protective groin cup. It stung hard, and would eventually swell up to baseball size. But my instructor was right: I got shot twice more that day and never felt either bullet.
After eight days of travel and delays – from Norfolk, Va., to Pease, N.H., to Germany, Kuwait, Qatar, and a staging base in Afghanistan – I arrived at ISAF headquarters in Kabul, wearing my helmet and heavy body armor, dragging more than 300 pounds of gear. I joined the battle rhythm of working seven days a week, 12 hours a day, at the Media Operations Center as chief of future operations. In my first two months in-country, I lost 15 pounds without trying.
At Camp ISAF, beauty and ugliness mingled. Around the perimeter stood a beige, prisonlike concrete blast T-wall, meant to save us from rocket attacks. Razor wire surrounded various compounds within the main camp. Gray dust settled on everything. Across from the ISAF commander’s building was the pristine Destille Garden, with green grass, cozy pavilions and a spacious brick fire pit. At the entrance, a waterfall trickled down a series of bowls. Next door sat three faded porta-potties and seven rusty storage containers.
In my job, the mundane and the noble mingled. For hours each week, I served as a “PowerPoint Ranger,” working into the night to align information in boxes and shade one section of a briefing medium green instead of light green on a slide that might flash on a screen for 10 seconds in a crowded conference room. Other times, I helped plan events that were reported globally.
On June 25, sweating under the Afghan sun, while two Black Hawk helicopters buzzed overhead, I met Afghan Brig. Gen. Jamila Bayaz, Kabul’s first female police chief. She’d been the target of multiple death threats since she started on the Kabul police force 30 years ago, simply because she’s a woman. In her gray uniform and black hijab, she spoke with grace and confidence about bringing more women onto the force for the good of Afghanistan, and afterward I felt like I’d witnessed a brief moment of something noble.
The less-spotlighted people I met here provided another window into courage: One Afghan woman who worked on the ISAF compound to support her family said, “The Taliban would kill me if they knew I worked here.” She was just one of a parade of Afghan soldiers and civilians who have taken the brunt of the violence in this long war.
The beauty and nobility often seem alloyed with something more dangerous. After a news conference, as I was escorting reporters and cameramen to the gate, I asked one reporter if she felt safe living in Kabul. “Not lately, after the bombing,” she said. “We used to throw parties every week, but now we don’t meet together in the evenings, except when we have to attend events for work.” She was referring to an incident on Jan. 17, when a suicide bomber entered the Taverna du Liban, a Lebanese restaurant popular with Western journalists. After the explosion, two gunmen rushed in and fired on diners. Twenty-one people died. In another scare, on July 3, insurgents launched two rockets that exploded at Kabul International Airport, near the ISAF compound. No one was injured, but they caused millions of dollars in damage.
On July 18, 12 of us went from ISAF to a charitable organization in west Kabul to drop off 800 pounds of clothes, school supplies and even some purple lollipops. I was apprehensive. The day before, insurgents had attacked a compound near the airport for nearly five hours. But it ended up being my favorite day in Afghanistan. Then, on Aug. 5, an insider attack at Camp Qargha in Kabul killed Maj. Gen. Harold Greene, the highest ranking American to die in the war, and injured 15 others, including a friend – a tall bodybuilder who seemed indestructible. I can’t help thinking that for all the briefings and PowerPoint slides I prepared, my best contributions were dropping off school supplies and comforting some of the Camp Qargha survivors.
This mingling of high and low seems as old as war. During my going-away party, I quoted Shakespeare’s lines from “Henry V.” When Henry’s army is at its worst, sick and rain-soaked, he tells the French messenger, Mountjoy, “We would not seek a battle, as we are; Nor as we are, we say, we shall not shun it.” I don’t think I’d trust someone who sought out war without questioning why. So I walked around Camp ISAF, looking for the noble amid the gray dust and green gardens, as competing notions – “I can’t believe they sent me here,” and, “What a great opportunity” – staged their own battle.
A lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve, James Gleason Bishop served in Afghanistan as a public affairs officer at headquarters, International Security Assistance Force from April to August 2014. He’s completing a memoir on his time in Afghanistan. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of NATO, the Department of Defense, Department of the Air Force or the United States government.