By Rick Van Arnam
Returning to Afghanistan
Leaders have a responsibility to think deeply on matters that shape character and chiefly, but not solely, include beliefs, values, and motivators. While this post may at first seem off the topic of leadership and character, it does reflect a single leader’s thinking on these important matters while deployed. The views and opinions are mine and mine alone and should not be interpreted as shared by others with whom I serve or the U. S. Army.
The bloated toes of the foot were curled unnaturally into a tight cringe that made me at first think that I was looking at something you would pay to see at a County Fair. The foot appeared almost unrecognizable to my forty-seven year old eyes that are trained naturally to recognize a normal foot. Attached to the foot was a long, white sinewy cord that was sort of like a well-worn telephone cord that had lost its original shape, but was still functional attaching the handset to the phone – except this cord was detached from the rest of the body and no longer with function.
I’m not medically inclined or trained, but I guessed that the white cord was a tendon that stayed attached to the foot when the suicide bomber self-detonated. The rest of the remains, body pieces and equipment, were scattered on a screen to be photographed and studied as part of an investigation following the 19 May 2010 complex attack on Bagram Airfield.
At some point, though, this dead body – body parts is a more accurate description – had not been an insurgent. He had been born a human being, a son, to a mother. As I looked at the remains of this attacker, somewhere my mind drifted back imagining with certainty that this dead body had once been a young boy – innocent and naïve like any young boy – playing games made up as he ran alongside other boys. I know that moment took place because I have been deployed or lived overseas a few times now and have seen dirt-poor, half-dressed kids play and frolic with smiles worn on their faces.
His mother had been present for some period of his life – I know this to be as close to fact as possible because Afghanistan has one of the world’s highest child mortality rates and kids who reach adulthood can only do so with the help of their mothers, close family or just pure luck (or all of the above). As I studied a picture of a piece from a torn satchel I wondered what her dreams were for her son on the day that she gave birth. I doubt, but could be wrong, that she gazed down her tummy to a crying newborn and smiled knowing that he would some day blow himself to smithereens. I don’t think that thought crossed her mind at that time, but I could be wrong – it is just not a natural thought no matter a person’s beliefs or ideology. I think, but could be wrong, that her heart would break on this day knowing the violent death her son had inflicted on himself. Underneath my military crust, which believes with a cool heart that this is the desired end state of any body committed to killing others who intend to do good, I was near sad-hearted thinking of the loss of human opportunity now scattered to be photographed.
Then I became mad – on two levels.
First, I was mad that in the press this futile attack would quickly pass overshadowed by multiple insurgent attacks on coalition forces in the days and weeks to come. On this day, insurgents tried to inflict mass casualties on Bagram Airfield and failed – miserably. One United States citizen, a young man from North Carolina working as a contractor, was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe, in honor, he was the reason more casualties were avoided. When the attackers killed him sitting in the driver’s seat of his vehicle, tower guards were easily alerted and quickly eliminated some of the attackers. The insurgents sent more than twenty attackers to Bagram on that day. Several wore identical suicide vests and most died either by self-detonating or killed by coalition forces. A few more suspected attackers were captured and I estimate that only a few were fortunate to retreat escaping death or capture.
But I was also mad at another level. I was mad that the suicide attackers had been recruited and seduced to believe that their horrific, self-inflicted death was either better than the opportunity of life itself or justified in the name of extreme religious ideology. My reaction to this anger was a desire to photograph the remains, including the bloated foot with the sinewy white tendon attached, and drop millions of these photos on the areas in which suicide bombers are recruited and trained. On the way to believing lies cast as vision, every recruited suicide bomber should have the right to see just how his body will end up.
We do not do that, though, because it is not humane. How ironic is that? That we would not publish, in pictures, the most inhumane way to die because to do so would be inhumane? I suppose we don’t do this out of respect for human life – which includes the respect and compassion for the life of the broken-hearted mother who lost her son to a lie.
In America, there is a common saying that there are only two certainties in life – death and taxes. But having been deployed, I can say that throughout the world only one thing is really certain and that is death. Very few of us will ever have an opportunity to manage a graceful end to our life, this I believe. But no one should be led to embrace a lie cast as vision over which a mother’s heart would break at the site of a body contorted beyond recognition. It is just not right.
RVA
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