From Hero to Hateful: Recalling an Afghan Soldier’s Descent

By IAN ALLEN

AUGUST 11, 2014 

The recent green on blue attack that claimed the life ofGen. Harold J. Greene, the deputy commander for the Combined Security Transition Command–Afghanistan, has, for good reason, caused a fury of questions in the media about these attacks and what they meant. Who are the Afghans that carry them out? Why do they seem to suddenly turn on the Americans that have been fighting with them for years and years, struggling to help Afghanistan build something from the ruins of three decades of war. The answers, it seems, are complex, but also nuanced. And the questions reminded me of the worst case of post-traumatic stress syndrome that I’ve ever seen.

He called himself Castro. He was a slight Afghan man with fine features, wide eyes half-hidden behind a chronic furrow, and black hair always swept back for how often he would sit with his head in his hands.

One of his first firefights, in 2003, was an ambush that cost two American lives. It happened in a distant valley in eastern Afghanistan, a chance encounter at dark in a place without the slightest significance to American interests before, and now significant only for the families of men killed there. All of it is a metaphor for how CIA officers often die.

The sole remaining American – we’ll call him John – charged up the mountain, trying to break the ambush at the flank. The Afghans with him tried to keep pace, but much popular mythology to the contrary, not all Afghans have evolved with genes uniquely selected for fighting and climbing steep hills. Between the valley floor and the ridge, they all dropped, from exhaustion or fire. All but one: Castro. He and John reached the top, taking fire from both sides. Shooting at the row of Taliban militants to his front, John could not turn to return fire coming at his back. Castro, close behind, saved his life.

Years later, John did not remember the story quite the same way. But distinguishing the details of one firefight out of one thousand can be hard. What was interesting was that this was the story Castro chose to tell over and over: that he was there when two Americans died, he was there when the third charged up the mountain.

The night of that firefight, Castro had a different name. This nom de guerre, an homage to Fidel, that great thorn in America’s side, he chose later — after his PTSD had become clear and he had been transferred to what amounted to an administrative job and after he was no longer in daily contact with the Americans he had long known and separated even from other Afghan fighters. He was descending into a dark place.

It was during this time, in about 2008, that he would often spend the night at the base rather than return home to his wife and daughter, and whenever possible I would sit with him for tea at the end of the day.

I would find him alone in his room, hunched over his computer, grainy bootleg VHS videos of Indian dance competitions playing on loop, mute on a little TV. We would start with small talk: the superiority of Indian television to the indescribably awful Pakistani soap operas, a few old Mullah Nasruddin jokes. But inevitably the conversation would turn. I would see it coming, watching him wring his hands as his voice grew louder, regurgitating whatever had been the message of the day on shahamat or the Al Qaeda blogs: the suppression of the brothers in Palestine, the apostates armed with American tanks, the American hypocrites that dropped the a nuclear bomb on Japan. And it always ended the same way. I hate Americans, he would say. Then, catching himself, he would add: not you. I don’t mean you or John or Brian or Patrick. You are my brothers. I love you. But I hate Americans.

Ian Allen, a former C.I.A. paramilitary operations officer.Credit Ian Allen

The only Afghan that Castro considered a brother was also a soldier. They had come to the war together, and fought in all the same places, sipping tea and eating dinner with the same Americans for years. We’ll call him Yankee. He loved America – a country he had never seen – and never had a doubt about American intentions or the evil of America’s enemies. He was forever jovial and at ease, an inexplicable mix of Afghan stoicism and American optimism that protected him against the daily — yearly – grind of suicide bombings and firefights, of shattered bodies and of his country’s grinding misery.

At first, Castro and Yankee would spend hours together, talking and listening. But after a year or two, they drifted apart, almost pushing each other away, as if each man defined himself in reaction to the other: Yankee hopeful and resilient, Castro lost and angry.

Still, I would occasionally convince Yankee to come talk with Castro. And at first they would laugh, telling old stories the way soldiers do.

But then the conversation would turn. Castro would say that he almost did it again, something he’d almost done dozens or perhaps hundreds of times. He would describe having his 9-millimeter gun in his hand, seated alone in a room as his daughter and wife watched from the door, his wife silently weeping while his daughter looked on scared and confused. Then, just in time, his daughter would run to him, climbing into his lap, asking why he had the gun. Then the vulnerability would pass and the rage would return. The brothers in Palestine, he would rant, the apostates and the tanks, the unconventional weapons. And then Yankee would storm out, the only times I ever saw him angry.

It seemed clear then that Castro’s rage was the inevitable result of his endless firefights and bombings, his years of fighting alongside the Americans. But in retrospect, I wonder what came first; the PTSD or the radicalization. Regardless, both, I think, would have come. In the beginning, Castro, a man with what we in the west call a “strong sense of justice,” fought with the Americans because he hated Pakistan; the most recent foreign invader striving to keep Afghanistan weak. But as time passed and the war did not end it became impossible for him to believe that the Americans wanted peace. It was all so obvious, he would say during our talks.Everyone wants war in Afghanistan but the Afghans.

Time passed. Castro’s old friends continued to drift away. I moved on to other projects. John had been long gone. Yankee, the Afghan who was more American than the Americans, had been given a visa and was living in California.

It all came apart in August 2008. In trying to cut off a second wave of suicide bombers and vehicle-borne bombs attacking the base, Castro’s friend Patrick was seriously injured and evacuated, never to return to Afghanistan. He had been Castro’s last friend.

Though not physically injured, it was probably Castro who was the most grievously hurt. He was alone. The next day, having not slept, he beat on an office door, demanding to know Patrick’s condition.

A new American, unimpressed with this incoherent Afghan, dismissed him. Insulted, Castro raged back, threatening to kill him if someone did not tell him of Patrick. Within seconds Castro was seized by younger Afghan soldiers. Unceremoniously, they tossed him off the base.

When I heard the story later, I was told Castro had saved much of his salary over the years, and had set himself up in a small business in Khost Province near the Pakistani border. I never looked to see if this was true.

Yankee, in contrast — I know about him. He is an American citizen, one step closer to his dream of a commission in the United States Air Force. I’d like to think that Castro spends his days sitting in a market stall, selling juice boxes and knock-off Indian DVDs, chatting happily with customers and vendors, his daughter at his side.

Only I know that is willfully dishonest. When I remember him with his head in his hands, when I think of him away from his brothers, adrift and without a side, I wonder if it was inevitable. I wonder if it would have mattered how the war ended. I wonder if Castro, like so many others who were lost and angry, so many others with that strong sense of justice, those whose feeling and intensity eventually twisted in and degenerated into something horrible after years and years of desperate helplessness, exploded himself in some crowded market, seeking redemption and an end. Or if Castro, still above the false martyrdom of his first enemy, simply fired a bullet into his head, his daughter watching from the doorway.

Ian Allen was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Marine Corps upon graduation from the University of San Diego in 1998, deploying with the 1st Battalion 6th Marines to Okinawa, the Philippines, Japan, Korea, and Russia. In 2006 he left active duty and joined the C.I.A., working as a paramilitary operations officer in Afghanistan, the Middle East, East Africa and Latin America. He left the CIA in 2012 and is now a writer.