My Deployment Was Not an ‘Adventure,’ as a Children’s Book Tried to Tell My Daughters
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/magazine/afghanistan-deployment-childrens-book.html Version 0 of 1. One of the hardest parts of parenting is reconciling what I did during the war with who I am now in the eyes of my children. I served as a rifleman in Alpha Company, First Battalion, Sixth Marine Regiment. My time in the corps took me to an especially violent area of Afghanistan and left me emotionally and mentally numb. When I came home, my wife said that I never smiled anymore. When my daughters, Alyssa and Audrey, asked what I did while I was gone, I said, “Daddy helped fight bad guys and slept outside.” The first time I deployed was two days after Alyssa was born. I did not return for seven months. Audrey was born during my second deployment. I didn’t meet her until I got home. The only exposures they have to that time are the photographs from a strange desert land that adorn the walls of our home, and the people they call “uncles” who visit me. Some of these men are covered in tattoos. Others have prosthetic limbs. [Get a weekly roundup of Times coverage of war delivered to your inbox. Sign up here.] This summer I found myself grappling with what I know about war and what my daughters, now 10 and 8, know about it in a way I didn’t expect: via a children’s book called “War in Afghanistan: An Interactive Modern History Adventure,” which they brought home from the local library. The history in this book, which was published in 2014, intersects with my own. My first deployment was to Garmsir in Helmand Province in early 2008, and the second deployment, when I was an infantry squad leader, was in 2010 to the farming town Marjah, where we were a part of Operation Moshtarak, a major offensive for coalition and Afghan forces. Our mission was to seize an agricultural zone that was both a Taliban stronghold and the center of the opium production and trafficking network, and then turn it over to Afghan forces and the government they were supposed to usher in. It didn’t turn out that way. But it did forever change many of us who fought there. The book is part of the You Choose series published by Capstone Press, a popular children’s format in which young readers are asked to make decisions throughout the story that lead them down different paths. The “War in Afghanistan” edition, written for children aged 8 to 11, includes a chapter set in Marjah in 2010, in which the reader is a squad leader with First Battalion, Sixth Marine Regiment — this was my old unit, on a deployment I was on, as part of the offensive operation I fought in. My daughters’ adventure began with a helicopter insert into the fields before sunrise: “You and the three teams that form your squad, along with the Afghan soldiers, climb into the CH-53 Super Stallion helicopters. Their blades whir, drowning out all other sounds. Within minutes you are airborne and speeding through the night.” The next few pages have the reader navigating a perilous battlefield, with decisions and canal crossings culminating in the sighting of two military-age males, the military’s euphemism for people whom troops profile as possible threats. As we went page by page, Alyssa’s first question startled me: “Dad, Captain Sparks ordered you not to fire unless you are fired upon. But what if the men are snipers?” There is no parenting book that explains how to walk your daughter through the standard operating procedures for sniper fire. Should Alyssa wait to see what the men do by turning to page 86, or should she fire on them by turning to page 92? Spoiler alert: If you turn to Page 92, you end up killing two unarmed civilians, which is a war crime. The book says your mission is over, and you will most likely be punished when you get back to base. Alyssa didn’t take that path. “They don’t have any guns, Daddy, so I’m not going to shoot them, because they don’t look like bad guys.” she said. Watching my daughter navigate escalation of force and rules of engagement made me sick. Seeing combat reduced to a common-core multiplication math problem detached from the harsh realities of war left me in a state of shock. As our adventure came to a close, Audrey asked me for personal context: “Did you do that?” My reply was more an effort to change the subject than to answer. “No,” I said. “Let’s see what this other book says about Afghanistan.” I reached for another book about Afghan culture. We would read that instead. I was disgusted by our minutes reliving part of my past. The choose-your-adventure format felt breezy and cavalier, recklessly presenting a bloody contest between the Taliban and the Marines in a manner largely devoid of consequences. I know what the book did not say. My friends and I killed in Marjah, and Marines in my rifle company lost limbs and lives. No notional exercise in choice will erase the fact that both my battalion and the battalion to our north killed many civilians in the opening days of Operation Moshtarak, when American high-explosive rockets struck occupied Afghan homes. Then, in the end, American plans for the area failed. Today Marjah is again under of the control of the Taliban and warlords. Maybe this moment of discomfort in my home was inevitable. My daughters were, quite naturally, trying to figure out a piece of their lives that everyone seemed to know more about than they did. Eventually I will honestly discuss my time in Marjah with them. I will tell them about the time one of their uncles and I commandeered an Afghan National Army truck for a joy ride. I will tell them about the Marines who died, and how much I miss them every day. Finally, I will tell them about the family I escorted to a graveyard. Their baby had died because, fearing the Taliban, they couldn’t get to a hospital. I will tell them about the white blanket that enveloped their child held tightly in the father’s arms as we led them to the burial grounds. I will tell them that I took lives in combat, because they deserve to hear it. I will tell them the truth. I pray that by then the truth won’t tarnish their idea of who I was in the Marine Corps. Until then, I won’t participate in the presentation of the Afghan war as an adventure. Some who were among us never came home. Those who did can’t turn to page 103 and see the conclusion or turn to page 11 and start a new adventure. There are no do-overs in war. |