Signposts to Afghanistan

Signposts to Afghanistan

A former Afghanistan intelligence analyst looks back at his service years, and at dreams gone by.

The day is December 31, 2006, and on this morning in Los Angeles, the last day of the year, I am enjoying a good cup of coffee while reading the Los Angeles Times. I read the articles on Iraq and Afghanistan with concern for the military men and women serving there, and for what they all must experience and endure. One article in particular catches my attention. It describes in some detail the Ring Road, a road shaped like a circle within the borders of Afghanistan connecting the major towns and cities. I read the article with some interest; there was a time when the country of Afghanistan played a major role in my daily life. I was a young man in uniform then, many years ago, serving in turbulent times as an unpopular war polarized the country. However, today is, after all, the day for the remembrance of things past, so I sit back and relax and let my thoughts drift back in time.
 
In late 1968, the military draft was an unpleasant reality, and I appeared to be an imminent target. The Vietnam Tet Offensive was in the not-to-distant past, and almost every night there was regular TV news footage of Marine or Army troops engaged in heavy combat. The Navy and Air Force wanted a four-year enlistment to reach the relative safety of their duty stations, and this seemed a long commitment to someone who had just endured four years of high school. The Army offered an alternative to the draft and to a four-year enlistment: this was a three-year tour of duty allowing me to choose my military occupational specialty, or MOS. I talked with veterans about their experiences, and with the Army recruiters, I discussed the option of becoming an Intelligence Analyst. Aside from Marines not drafting me into their infantry, there seemed to be three big plusses to this option: the opportunity for assignment to exotic duty stations, the chance to make rank faster, and the fact you traditionally worked with some of the better-educated enlisted personnel. The only caveat to this approach was this: if you had any disciplinary problems, or other personal issues, all bets were off; you were in the Army for three years and they could do with you as they pleased.
 
In December, the Marines drafted two of my friends from Manchester High School. A phone call to me from a Marine recruiter soon followed, and I was borderline frantic. I had seen enough TV footage on the battles at Khe Sanh and Hue during the Tet offensive to know fighting with the Marines in I Corps was not where I wanted to be. After weighing my options, I enlisted in the Army for a three-year commitment. I was what General William Westmoreland called an induced enlistee, my fear of the draft and of ending up as a grunt in a combat unit, had induced me to join the Army to avoid the infantry.
 
In January 1969, I left my home in Connecticut and reported to Fort Dix in New Jersey for Basic Training. After completing Basic, the Army remained good to its part of the deal and in March of 1969, I reported to Fort Holabird, Maryland, where I would attend an Intelligence Analyst training course over the next two months. At graduation, I was an official 96B20, a Military Intelligence Order of Battle Analyst. We waited anxiously for our orders. Out of a class of 50 soldiers, two or three went to Greenland, 2 to Alaska, 2 to Belgium, and the rest were destined for the Republic of South Vietnam.
 
Less than six months after enlisting at the age of nineteen, I found myself on the way to Vietnam in June of 1969. The four benefits of enlisting in the Army mentioned above turned out to be partially true. Although I quickly found myself stationed in Vietnam, I did not go to a combat unit. I never received an exotic or coveted duty station, but I did participate in some interesting intelligence assignments. I received two Army Commendation Medals, and I rose to the rank of Specialist E-5 quickly. I also met and served with some great people. I learned the Army was not for me, however, and early on, I realized I just had to endure my time, keep my nose clean, and submit myself to the regimen of Army life until the magic day came and I could get out. And unless you have been there, and know what that daily grind is like, it is easier said than done.  
 
I spent the majority of my time in Vietnam in a state of trepidation mixed with personal flux, I was changing and growing and so was the world around me. The year I spent in a foreign war zone was a year that saw poignant and memorable events occur back in the States. There was the moon landing which we all listened to on radio. Three days of peace and music at the Woodstock Music Festival was followed by the Rolling Stones and the tragic free concert at Altamont Raceway in December of 1969. In April of 1970 came the bombing of Cambodia; this was quickly followed by the shootings at Kent State and the deaths of 4 students at the hands of the Ohio National Guard. Other widespread political demonstrations followed. The shooting was a polarizing event for the soldiers I served with; some officers and older NCOs said it was about time the government made a stand, and they seemed gratified and elated over the shooting. This created a line between the older and younger troops I never saw crossed. A month later, I was coming back to the States.
   
In June of 1970, I left Vietnam and transferred to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. My duty assignment was the 14th Military Intelligence (MI) Battalion. For the next year and a half, I served as an Intelligence Analyst in the Department of Intelligence Production (commonly called the DIP). The DIP was in a large building, which looked more like a truck distribution center or warehouse than the main intelligence center for the sprawling post. This facility was far removed from being a spy center; we kept track of no cold war enemy states nor practiced counter intelligence. Rather we studied the armed services of countries around the globe, the personalities of their leaders, and the infrastructure of the country. My assigned countries were Afghanistan and India. Afghanistan definitely provided me the most stimulation and interest. Every workday after morning formation, I reported to the library within the DIP to read the New York Times, the Washington papers, and other topical periodicals. When I came across an article referencing someone or something in my area of responsibility I made a copy of the text, noted the date and source on the copy, and put the copy in the day’s action folder. This copy could include news concerning the promotions or deaths of members of the country’s armed services, political events, new road construction or bridges, articles on storm damage or communication networks, harvests or food shortages; in short, it could be about anything at all.
 
At the end of the day, the action folder passed over to data processing personnel who parsed the data and entered it on long preprinted key type forms; an operator then typed these forms into keypunch cards. A computer operator then loaded these cards into a hopper. This hopper fed the cards into a computer where a software program transferred the information form the keypunch cards into a binary format for storage on databases used by other analysts in the intelligence community. At times, a diplomat or attaché would transfer out of one of these countries; when this occurred we would gather as a group and come up with a list of questions relevant to the current events we gathered every day. We would record these questions on to a tape made with a small cassette recorder. This tape was sent by courier's pouch through military channels to an unknown destination. Five or six weeks later a return pouch would turn up at the DIP carrying another cassette tape, this one with replies to the questions we had sent earlier. This was all very low tech and uninspiring, not the stuff of Ludlum or le Carre. We transcribed the questions and answers from the tape and deposited them in the action folder for the data entry personnel to type them into forms and cards, later they would feed the information into the computer. And so it went, day after day and week after week, for the remainder of my tour.
 
The Afghanistan I researched and read about daily was a wild and mystical place steeped in history. Tigers roamed in the wild north, the strange mountain region, the Hindu Kush, slipped like a high narrow band of the unknown up between China and Pakistan. Over the ages, the ancient caravans of the Silk Road made their way through the country. The great armies of the Mongol horde laid waste to Afghanistan and ruled the country for several centuries. In the east, the Khyber Pass connects Afghanistan to Pakistan. Alexander the Great led a foray into the country and led his troops through the pass, just as Mongol, Persian, Grecian, and Tartar generals did with their armies over the years. Islam made its way to India through the Khyber. The pass is a place of mystical hatred and bloodshed, and over the centuries, the smugglers and the armies of destruction came through the Khyber. The British would fight three Afghan Wars traveling through this pass.

Kipling’s quote about the horror of the place came to mind:
 
“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
and the women come out to cut up what remains,
jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
and go to your gawd like a soldier.”
 
During this period when I worked at the DIP, I read with great interest the stories of people who walked and hitchhiked around the world, an adventure that seemed to take about two years. I yearned for the experience of travel and the freedom of being out of the Army. I read enviously stories of those who traveled to London and then made their way to the Continent. A feeling was in the air that, for the young, the world held no boundaries or prohibitions. The winds of freedom and change that came out of the 1960s were still swirling. In Amsterdam, shops sold cannabis openly and the oldest profession showed its wares in storefront windows right on the street. Friends of mine who had been to Amsterdam told me the city was hipper than hip. Young people from diverse backgrounds and countries came together and traveled the hostel circuit as they backpacked through Europe. The scent of free love was in the air and every summer seemed the summer of love. Some wandered through darkened bazaars in North Africa or the Middle East and wrote about the exotic smells and languages of things distant and unknown. A land route existed that some called the “Hippy Trail”, the trail traveled up through Iran and then east through Afghanistan; after traversing the Khyber Pass the route went on to India and the Pacific Ocean beyond. I saw a picture of a group of smiling young travelers having magic mushroom omelets on the beach at dawn in Bali. This seemed to be the epitome of all things exotic and mystical, the freedom to traverse the world and enjoy the delights one found along the way.  
 
If I remember correctly, in one long-ago edition of “The Whole Earth Catalog”, I found a story of how to get to Afghanistan by driving through Iran. The story included a picture of a signpost seemingly in the middle of nowhere standing by a remote road; the story said it was very important not to miss this turnoff if your destination was Afghanistan. For me, that picture was a signpost to adventure and the unknown. I dreamt about making such a trip myself, of heading up into Iran in a VW bus and turning east to come into (at last) Afghanistan. Once in the country I would slowly make my way across the country. After leaving Kabul, I would exit out the Khyber Pass and work my way to India, perhaps taking in the Himalaya. After experiencing first hand the wisdom of the Hindu sages that the Beatles had earlier encountered and documented, I would head east across the Pacific Ocean. I would then delight and partake in some of the local and exotic delicacies, things I read about in other traveler’s stories, from making love to beautiful women in secluded palm-ringed lagoons to meeting on the coast in Bali at dawn with the other traveling cognoscenti. Then I would arrive back in the States as a well-traveled and mind-expanded philosophical seizer of life like Heinrich Harrer, Paul Bowles, or William Burroughs. I would then write a book about my experiences and get on with the rest of my life.

Well, that dream did not come to fruition, but other magical things came into my life in their own time. I was discharged out of the Army at Fort Bragg in October of 1971 and I longed for new experiences as a way to shed the years of being a soldier. The world was open before me. I was a child of the 1960’s, and though far from being a hippie or a political radical my hair was soon long. I embraced the counter-culture experience. In hindsight I can see how naïve I was, how fast the world was changing around me. Hunter S. Thompson wrote how, with the right kind of eyes, you could actually see where the wave of the 60’s broke and ran back on the desert walls near Vegas. Unaware of such a wave, and in search of my own life and identity, I rode my motorcycle across country to Los Angeles. Four months later, in February of 1972, I rode my bike back to North Carolina over six long, cold, and lonely days to live for a while with a friend near Fort Bragg and to reassess what the next chapter in my life should be.
 
In May of 1972, I took a leisurely trip to the White Mountains of New Hampshire with a friend. We traveled up north in his cherry 1955 Chevy Bel Air, and set up our tent in one of the campgrounds along the eastern side of Kancamaugus Highway. The next day we climbed the highest peak in the northeast, Mt Washington. Two days later, we climbed one of the most scenic peaks in the southern area of the region, Chocorua. I was awe struck by the area: the great ravines, the great areas above tree line, the smell of the trail in the rain, the people we met. On that trip I fell in love with the White Mountains, and I began an eighteen year love affair with them; an affair I remained faithful to until I moved West in 1990.
 
Later, during the summer of ’72, I hitchhiked around the West and backpacked in Colorado, Utah, and Montana. In the autumn, I ended up in college back in the east. A marriage followed in 1974, and eventually a career began to unfold. Afghanistan was relegated to a remote place in my mind where distant memories and dreams were allowed to remain dormant until stirred from the sediment by some external stimuli. And so, along with everything else related to the Army years, this dream of visiting Afghanistan and circling the world began to fade from my mind altogether.
 
As the years went by, my feelings toward Afghanistan became more negative and sinister. The damage and horror inflicted by opium from this narco-state upon the world is inexpressible. In the war between Afghanistan and Russia, we armed the Mujahadeen and learned of the power of Stinger missiles. What a benefit that technology was supposed to be for the West. I can remember one TV news account where a reporter interviewed a group of Mujahadeen fighters. One bearded warrior in the background seemed to sum up the horror that was occurring in this war. He carried an old battle-axe used to execute those Russians captured during the fighting. Sometimes they kept them as prisoners for days before dispatching them. He had beheaded over 100 of the infidels. I thought of the terrible last minutes and hours of the Russian youths as they met their tragic end in such a foreign and inhospitable place, going to their ‘gawd’ on Kipling’s plains with an axe in lieu of a bullet. I wondered how their dreams of the life they would lead after leaving the Army compared with those dreams of mine from the 1970s.
 
Later, almost in slow motion, came the growth of radical Islam and terror around the world; not only did our friend become the foe, the axes and weapons were turned around on us. Then came the rise of the Taliban; with their rise comes a capacity for mindless hate, terror and atrocity all in the name of god. Zealots find it easy to kill themselves and innocent westerners because their religion promises eternal bliss and an unending supply of virgins as a reward for their martyrdom. Just make sure your daughters are not allowed to go to school. From the rise of the Taliban followed September 11. I, along with much of the world, wept. And Afghanistan, what was once the image of all things wild and free, now became for me the image of all things ignorant and hateful. When the president stood with the firefighters in the rubble of the World Trade Center and told us that the people who did this would be hearing from us soon, I felt my righteous indignation rise and I was totally behind the president. But a funny thing happened on the way to retribution, we took a left turn and ended up in Iraq. And because of the war in Iraq, we have let Afghanistan languish in this hellish quasi-existence without striking at the true heart of September 11. The terror of indiscriminate killing and bloodshed directed at the West in the name of Allah found its way to the shores of Bali as well. Now, the Taliban is once again on the rise; I fear that because of Iraq our will and determination to do what is right has been squandered. And perhaps the signpost showing the way to what is right has been misplaced as well.
 
The innocence of a world expanding its consciousness in the 1960s has given way to the scourge of crack cocaine and methamphetamine. Even as we fight in Iran and Afghanistan, Europe’s Islamic population surges and one can’t help but wonder whether Europe will maintain its democratic ideals and connection with its past. I look to the heartland and feel the same unease over the situation here in the States as an evermore-militant evangelical movement attempts to influence the course of American life and politics. All over the world people seem to be shifting into camps and categories, black and white, pro and con; lost is the love and appreciation for nuance and shades of gray, for commonality and consensus. I despaired for the world.
 
Slowly, as I sit here in Los Angeles alone and pensive, this long reverie finally ends, and my thoughts return to the present. I continue to read the article describing the Ring Road in Afghanistan today, and the story goes on to detail the problems and challenges of the road and the land the route traverses, how difficult it is to travel the road's entire length. Bandits, damage, warlords, corrupt officials, terrible events, and religious zealots all play their part in the story. What year is it in Afghanistan anyway: 705, 1410, 2006? From Alexander the Great, to Mongol hordes, to the present day, the more things change the more they remain the same.  
 
I worry about the men and women serving today in Afghanistan, and of their brothers and sisters in Iraq. I think we as a country should be more reticent of what we send our sons and daughters off to see and do. The government points with pride to its all-volunteer force, but in these days of outsourcing and sending high-paying jobs offshore, I know for many young people the armed services are an opportunity of last resort. I wonder about their dreams and desires, and what they yearn for out in the life that awaits them beyond their military years. I look at those eighteen years when I made New Hampshire and the White Mountains the focal point around which the rest of my life revolved. Those were wonderful and meaningful years for me, years of many joys and some sorrows, years I would not change or trade for anything. Those years did not fill the bank accounts or retirement coffers, but they filled the chambers of my heart and breadth of my soul with lasting friendships and experiences, the things that make the human experience so profound. What truly surprises me about this period of my life is New Hampshire was completely unknown to me when I left the Army, and what I would do and experience there was undreamt of. I hope such joy and discovery await these young men and women when the time comes for them to step out into this world on their own terms once again.  
 
Here in Los Angeles today, on the last day of the year, I have enjoyed this look back at some of my own days in the Army, and I remember how I felt when I was finally discharged and was done with it. Spurred on by this story of a road in Afghanistan, I revisited a time when I was young and felt the possibility of all things, and I see those days reflected in the mirror of how the world is now and how much things have changed. As for myself, I look back kindly and warmly, with no rancor or regret, on both the simple dreams of a young man and the small things I decided to make important in my life.
 
I never made the trip of my dreams through Afghanistan and around the world, and in hindsight that is fine with me. But I do bemoan the loss of the freedom and innocence that fostered those dreams, and I bemoan the loss of the wild and mystical places of the earth, places we can no longer enjoy for what they were.

Over the years, I have often thought of distant lands and of faraway signposts adorning remote and deserted crossroads; in my own way I found and followed some of them. Signposts followed, signposts ignored, signposts forgotten. I turn the page.
 
The year is over.