2006.12.12: December 12, 2006: Headlines: COS - Afghanistan: Military: Military.com: U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Clint Douglas, a former Peace Corps volunteer, was deployed to Afghanistan with the 20th Special Forces Group (Airborne), Illinois National Guard, for more than six months
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2006.12.12: December 12, 2006: Headlines: COS - Afghanistan: Military: Military.com: U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Clint Douglas, a former Peace Corps volunteer, was deployed to Afghanistan with the 20th Special Forces Group (Airborne), Illinois National Guard, for more than six months
U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Clint Douglas, a former Peace Corps volunteer, was deployed to Afghanistan with the 20th Special Forces Group (Airborne), Illinois National Guard, for more than six months
"Now, I had never in my pitiful life knowingly exchanged pleasantries over lunch, or any other meal for that matter, with a man who was regularly trying to kill me. But when Bill invited me to escort him to the castle for his first meeting with Audin, I jumped at the opportunity. The idea seemed so elegant, like the medieval Spaniards and Moors retiring to each other's tents to play chess and exchange bons mots after a bloody day of battle and slaughter. Perhaps the metaphor was unnecessary; we would, after all, be departing from our own high-walled mud fortress to visit another, albeit grander one. We were literally making a kind of feudal social call. This situation, however, was less straightforward; Zia Audin was technically on our side. And anyway, I really wanted to see the inside of that castle".
U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Clint Douglas, a former Peace Corps volunteer, was deployed to Afghanistan with the 20th Special Forces Group (Airborne), Illinois National Guard, for more than six months
LUNCH WITH PIRATES
(Personal Narrative)
Staff Sergeant Clint Douglas
Commentary: Before embarking overseas, many U.S. troops receive cultural sensitivity briefings so that they do not inadvertently offend the civilians and allied military personnel they meet in Afghanistan and Iraq. No matter how much preparation servicemen and women are given, however, they will inevitably find themselves in situations for which there is simply no training manual or reference guide. In March 2003, thirty-four-year-old U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Clint Douglas, a former Peace Corps volunteer, was deployed to Afghanistan with the 20th Special Forces Group (Airborne), Illinois National Guard, for more than six months. Douglas quickly discovered that beneath the patina of social niceties and expressions of mutual regard, some associations and alliances with local leaders were considerably more complicated than they initially appeared. Douglas"s "Lunch with Pirates" is quite simply a masterpiece, and the following excerpt is just a small sliver from the much larger and more compelling story in "Operation Homecoming" that is humorous, surreal, and at times terrifying.
Overall we worked well with the provincial officials appointed by Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Like Karzai himself, they owed their positions and their continuing survival to the strength of our arms. Without us they were all dead men. But the most peculiar, if not spectacularly bizarre, of all of our relationships was that with Zia Audin, the local warlord in Gardez. It was one of distrust, conspiracy, and mutual antipathy. We endured a dysfunctional marriage of convenience, but divorce was difficult and we couldn"t just get rid of him. The few men that he still controlled were encamped at several different bases around the city, but his real power emanated from the Bala Hissar, or Castle Greyskull as we called it, a massive fortification built by the British in the nineteenth century in the middle of Gardez. It dwarfed all of the other structures in town and dominated the entire mountain plain that surrounded the city.
Zia Audin, sorry, General Zia Audin, was responsible for many of the rocket attacks on our firebase and at least some of the IEDs that exploded around our patrols. All of the American and Afghan agencies around the region knew this, and most interestingly Zia Audin knew that we knew. But he didn"t try to kill us out of a sense of either hatred or malice in his heart; he did it out of jealousy and pride, for Zia Audin was heartbroken. He suffered from an unrequited love of America, and this was awkward for all parties. So Zia Audin, in a fit of adolescent pique, did what came naturally -- he tried to kill us".
Lunching with Zia Audin was a ritualistic courtesy, demanded by custom and protocol. The first time that I"d heard of such an absurdity was during a conversation with one of our predecessors at the Gardez firebase.
"You"ve actually had lunch with him"" I asked, shocked.
"Oh, yeah, sure. I"ve been up there a couple of times," he shrugged.
"Have I been reading the wrong intelligence reports or something" Did I miss a meeting" Are we talking about the same Zia Audin, the Zia Audin" The jackass who attacks our convoys, mortars our firebase, and who might be working with the Taliban"" I demanded, as I counted off his sins.
"That would be the one. It"s just expected. You go up to Castle Greyskull occasionally and have lunch with him. You still have to talk to him, and anyway he puts on a nice spread of chow. If you get a chance to go up there, take it. You won"t be disappointed," he said, obviously relishing the irony of the situation.
"Now, I had never in my pitiful life knowingly exchanged pleasantries over lunch, or any other meal for that matter, with a man who was regularly trying to kill me. But when Bill invited me to escort him to the castle for his first meeting with Audin, I jumped at the opportunity. The idea seemed so elegant, like the medieval Spaniards and Moors retiring to each other"s tents to play chess and exchange bons mots after a bloody day of battle and slaughter. Perhaps the metaphor was unnecessary; we would, after all, be departing from our own high-walled mud fortress to visit another, albeit grander one. We were literally making a kind of feudal social call. This situation, however, was less straightforward; Zia Audin was technically on our side. And anyway, I really wanted to see the inside of that castle".
" "OPERATION HOMECOMING: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families" (Random House, 2006), edited by Andrew Carroll.
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Headlines: December, 2006; Peace Corps Afghanistan; Directory of Afghanistan RPCVs; Messages and Announcements for Afghanistan RPCVs; Military
When this story was posted in March 2007, this was on the front page of PCOL:
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Story Source: Military.com
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