Afghanistan Flashback: My Dandelion Mission

 

By Jeremy D. Baker

Jeremy D. Baker is a former Army counterintelligence agent, combat veteran and novelist. As part of the 202nd Military Intelligence Battalion, he went to Afghanistan 2002 in the first wave of U.S. troops tasked with finding Osama Bin Laden, destroying Al-Qaeda, and ousting the Taliban. In this essay, Jeremy describes a mission that left him with PTSD and how writing healed him.

A dandelion mission, nice and fluffy. Blow in, do the thing, blow out. A local chapter of the Afghan National Army (ANA) was dismantling an old Taliban weapons cache they’d discovered on their compound. We roll out, press the flesh, take a few photos, gather local atmospherics, and back in time for dinner. So simple—the route known, our ANA partners a solid unit with a good reporting history—only four of us went, in two trucks. A quick in and out, easy as you please.

I was a young U.S. Army counterintelligence (CI) agent, part of a small team that was assigned to a Special Forces (SF), along with a civil affairs group and a psychological operations detachment. Some bright boy or girl up at Bagram airfield was going to get promoted ahead of schedule for the idea: the CI guys cultivate sources and bag actionable intel, the SF guys scout and hit the target, the civil affairs guys follow up at the target location and dig a well or build a clinic, and the psyops guys drift around behind, winning hearts and minds on the back of the public works project. See how easy it is? You tell us where al-Qaeda and the Taliban are, we’ll come get them, then bring you fresh water and medical care.

And it worked. In the months I’d been in Kandahar, the team had taken a lot of tangos off the board, blown a lot of weapons caches, dug a lot of wells.

Today was no different. Along with my SF partner Paul and two other guys, we were going to see if the ANA could offer any insight on the weapons cache they’d found in their compound, see if they had any local color to report, and go from there. Follow the leads where they led, through the tangle of information fog and centuries of tribal and family entanglements and vendettas, hopefully to another nest of al-Qaeda where we could take action. Like I said, a quick in and out. Easy as you please.

The only problem with a dandelion mission is the bad guys get a say too.

Not so Easy

The compound was halfway between our bed-down and Spin Buldak at the Pakistan border. If we got done early enough, we’d probably nip all the way out, maybe cross the frontier and hit the market on the outskirts of Chaman, see if we could find any flats of Diet Pepsi to feed our team leader’s four can-a-day habit. The base was small, essentially a couple acres square bordered by mud brick walls, with a central building and some outbuildings nestled into the walls along the corner. The sign outside, written in Pashto, said it was the home of the ANA Airborne Brigade. I asked Paul about it and he said it was an honorific dating back to Soviet times. These fellas were not doing air drops, but they held the moniker with good intent.

They welcomed us with open arms, the Dagarman (local commander) showing us right to the cache, a buried shipping container stuffed with 107mm Chinese rockets, Soviet anti-tank mines, rusty AKs, and crates of ammo. The ANA guys had formed a human chain and were casually handing rockets and mines to each other and stacking them against the walls. I snapped a few photos for the intel report, hoping no one would drop something explosive.

Then it was time for tea with the Dagarman and his lieutenants, and the latest gossip. They’d found the cache when they were digging a trench to lay pipe for a new latrine, but they didn’t know how long it had been there—they’d only moved into the base three months before, when the Taliban decamped. There was perhaps an al-Qaeda cell operating out of the green space southwest of Adozi. The Haqqani Network was getting active in Spin B, moving a little hash, a little opium across into Chaman and then down to Qila Abdullah for distro into Balochistan. The usual.

Paul glanced at his watch, noticed we were due for a check-in, and asked me to grab his handheld from the truck. After the comparatively cool air of the Dagarman’s tearoom, the baking Afghan sun settled like a lead blanket over my shoulders. As I came around the corner of the building toward our trucks, I stepped into the full bright of day. The sun was a molten coin searing my eyes. I fumbled with my sunglasses as I walked, and just as I reached where we’d parked the trucks, I got them settled.

There was a guy by the trucks. An ANA guy. I remember noticing that he was in olive drab pants but also wearing the top half of a perahan tunban (a traditional garment worn by Afghan men). There was a spray of tempered diamonds in the dust from where he’d broken the truck’s window. The brutal sunlight caught the bits of shattered glass, light dancing across his neck and the underside of his jaw like reflections from a disco ball at the world’s lamest party.

The ANA guy was holding Paul’s M4.

My mind stutter-stepped, trying to catch up with reality.

We’d left out long guns in the trucks as a show of respect for our allies. This guy’d broken the window and was in the process of stealing the carbines, Paul’s radio and whatever else wasn’t nailed down. I’d caught him, witnessed his crime.

The guy looked at me, I looked at him. He held the M4 across his body, but he quickly pivoted, sliding his finger into the trigger well. My hands, my stupid hands, were still up around my eyes from where I’d been fiddling with my shades. I had my sidearm, but it was in a drop-leg holster against my right thigh.  Probably 30 inches away from my hand, but it may as well have been on the moon.

Life ain’t like the movies, except when it is, because. Time. Slowed. Down.

The light from the scattered glass whirled on the guy’s face. Hot wind drove flecks of sand into my cheeks. The thief raised Paul’s M4.  His finger curled around the trigger. There was no expression on his face. The M4 is a mid-caliber rifle, but the barrel looked as big as a train tunnel.  I thought about my mother, dead too young from cancer two years before.

I wondered if I’d see her in whatever came next.

Flashbacks

I sat up, the metal frame of the bed squealing in protest under the thin mattress. The night was cool, all our windows open, but I was bathed in sweat. My pistol was in my hand, pointing every which way. My breath pistoned in my chest, lungs never able to pull in enough air. I stared into the shadows, looking for a little Afghan guy in olive drab pants and perahan tunic, pointing Paul’s rifle at me.

Slowly, I came back to myself. Heard the snores of my teammates. Shadows resolved to a softer black, no threats revealed.

It was three days after the thing at the compound, third night in a row I’d had a flashback to that moment. But it was the first time I’d woken up with my gun in my hand. I ejected the magazine, un-chambered the round in the pipe, and put the mag and bullet in my boots under the bed. Put my unloaded pistol back under my pillow and laid down. I stared at the mud-daubed ceiling and tried to breathe and waited for morning to come.

Next day, I talked to the SF medic.

‘Zat mefloquine shit they have us on for malaria, he said. C’n give you nightmares. Take a break ‘n’ see if it eases up.

The doc was right, or so it seemed. I stopped the anti-malarial and the nightmares faded.  Somewhat. Washed out a bit. But they never fully went away.

I never slept with a pistol under my pillow again.

Back in the World

The deployment ended, like they all ultimately do, one way or another. I thought constantly about how mine nearly ended in…..  We were back in the world.  Settling into the routine of garrison life. I expected—now I was back from over there and had been off the mefloquine for months—that the nightmares would finally go away completely. That I would stop feeling irritable at nothing.  That I’d be able to drive with a seatbelt again, not feeling constricted and choked. That I’d stop seeing the barrel of Paul’s M4, and thinking Am I about to see you, Mom?

Two weeks after we got back, I was doing my laundry in the central shared space of the barracks quad.  It was two in the morning and I hadn’t slept. Another of those nights. The scattered diamonds on the ground. The gritty sand blowing against my cheeks. The ANA guy’s finger on the trigger, his knuckle white. The scrape of Paul’s boot on the gravel behind me as he came to grab a carton of cigarettes from the truck, a gift for the Dagarman.

I closed the dryer door, only it didn’t latch. One of my damp socks was in the way. So stupid.  Stupid sock. Stupid door. Stupid latch. I slammed the door and it bounced back, hit me in the hand. I slammed it again, again, again, again, until I was breathing hard and the door was dented. I sat down, almost fell down, put my head in my hands.

What is wrong with me?

Struggling

Next day, I was at my post-deployment checkup. They found signs of tuberculosis exposure in my lung x-rays, and I was going over the treatment plan with the doc. She asked how I was sleeping, and I told her the truth. Barely and badly. I’d had nightmares in Afghanistan, probably from the mefloquine, I told her, and when I stopped taking it, they’d faded but not stopped. Some nights they were just as strong as they’d been those first three days. I was exhausted, desperate to go to sleep, afraid of going to sleep, and angry.

You should think about talking to someone, she said. And that was it. It was 2002. The Army, at least where I was, hadn’t started ramping up PTSD care. If soldiers were meeting with a head-shrinker, they got a reputation. There were whispers. Maybe you didn’t get promoted, maybe you wouldn’t get to deploy with your battle buddies again. Maybe you were weak. All the usual bullshit that discourages soldiers from taking care of their mental health. And I didn’t know the first thing about PTSD, or what it was doing to me. All I knew was that I was struggling.

In retrospect, it’s a good thing I’d been exposed to TB in Afghanistan. The treatment included medication that was hard on the liver, so I was under strict orders to drink no alcohol for the several months I’d be taking it. I’d not been a big drinker before the deployment, but I could see the appeal in knocking a few back before bed. To hold at bay the shadows that sharpened into knives. If I had, I think it would have been a headfirst dive into the black river of alcoholism.

I was looking for alternate solutions, wondering if this was just the way it would be now, and found help in a place I never expected.

No More Nightmares

I was a lifelong reader, even on deployment, tearing through books in a day or two. Came from growing up in my youngest days without a TV in the house and loving the stories my mom and dad would read to me before bed. I remember my dad reading the Narnia books and doing different voices for each character. It came from summer reading contests, always trying to beat Kristen P. for the top page count in school, always coming in second, but still earning a personal pan pizza or five. It came from Scholastic book fairs, buying my very own books with my allowance. It came from living a mile from the Wheaton library, biking there every other day in summer,  trading in my stack of Douglas Hill and Andre Norton for a stack of Ursula Le Guin and Mercedes Lackey, and eventually Dean Koontz and Stephen King. Stories were a part of my life. So I read—voraciously. Anything to distract my mind in the too-quiet times.

My lifeline, what I grabbed on to with all my might, was books.  One of those science fiction collections edited by John Joseph Adams. A book of short stories that transported me into a new world every 15 or 20 pages. Escape and wonder.

My salvation began as a hallucination brought on by a combination of desperation and exhaustion, but I thought to myself: I wonder if I could write something like this.

I fired up my bulky desktop, and under the soundtrack of my roommate’s snores, I wrote my first short story. Two thousand words in an hour: a desperate man, wandering lost and dying in frigid woods, stalking a deer to try to feed his starving tribe. To eke out one more day of life for his people in a frozen world that was trying to kill them. Coming upon a ruined church and its impossibly ancient stained-glass windows, a collection of mummified, desiccated worshipers inside. A remnant of a dead and vanished civilization—ours. It wasn’t really good. But it wasn’t terrible, I didn’t think.

What’s more, when it was done, I slept. True and deep. No nightmares, no waking up sweat-slick and tangled in the sheets.

So. I wrote. Chasing that solace, that dreamless peace. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, but it was always better when I wrote.

Sometimes it was (bad) poetry, sometimes it was (worse) “literary” fiction, mostly it was the type of stuff I’d grown up with, fallen in love with. Science fiction, fantasy, noir, historical. Just for me, just to gain a few measures of peace.

Funny thing happened, though. The more I wrote, the better it worked. I realized, after a year or so (I’m not especially quick) that I was very often taking my characters and imbuing them with my characteristics and, more importantly, my experiences. In doing so, I was able to take some of those thoughts and feelings that I now identify as PTSD and ascribe them to someone else through words on an unblinking screen. At a safe remove, the story stared them down, eye to eye, mano a mano.

I pulled those thoughts and emotions out of myself, wrung them out like a wet washcloth, and gave myself space to breathe.

So. I wrote. I wrote more. Endless words. Mostly short stories, a couple novellas that were short stories that took on a life of their own. Thought about novels as a climbable mountain range instead of something impossible.

And the nightmares, the flashbacks, faded. Eventually stopped. The pointless, inchoate anger receded. I could drive with a seatbelt on and not see an IED behind every trashcan. I didn’t see the barrel of Paul’s rifle pointed at my head every night, the guy’s finger on the trigger and starting to squeeze.

Instead, I saw the stories I wanted to tell next. And slept. And, on waking, thought to myself:  A quick mission. A dandelion. Blow in—tell the story—and get out.

The bad guys get a say, yes. They always do, they always will.

But now, so do I.

Jeremy’s debut novel, The Guilty Sleep, is the fictional story of Afghanistan veteran Dexter Grant who is broke, reeling from PTSD, and on the verge of divorce when he’s approached by his old Army buddies to help rescue their former interpreter, the man who once saved Dex’s life. Lee Childs described The Guilty Sleep as being “shot-thru with hard-won authenticity and deep humanity” and USMC veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan Elliot Ackerman praised it as cutting “sharp and deep.” The Guilty Sleep (Diversion Books) is available online at all major booksellers. To find out more about Jeremy’s work, go to jeremydbaker.com.

View Jeremy talking about his service on our VBC livestream at https://veteransbreakfastclub.org/surviving-afghanistan-with-former-army-counterintelligence-agent-jeremy-d-baker/