When I was working in Afghanistan I met a decent number of interpreters and Afghani leaders that were former forced fighters. I even guarded one while he was be

When I was working in Afghanistan I met a decent number of interpreters and Afghani leaders that were former forced fighters. I even guarded one while he was being interviewed and jailed, he was the first of a few that I'd end up meeting. The story that sticks with me is the last one and I think will sit with me for the rest of my life. I was back at my units "home" base where they spent most of a year. Recently US and, I believe, Georgian EOD troops were engaged in heavy fire outside of town and an IED exploded as they tried to defuse it. You hear a lot of these stories day to day so like the author I was pretty desensitized to hearing about people dying trying to do their jobs. Not a day later I was reassigned to the small jail that we had and I met a man who didn't speak English, had a gut but wasn't overweight, and who lacked any education beyond religion and farming. I kept him fed, kept him safe, made sure he had rec time, time in the bathroom etc... I could do basic communication with him through a combination of hand signals. Mostly though I had no way of having any real conversation with him. HumInt came to visit and interview him. They had gathered his side of the story and were going back out to gather information based on what he told them. He was captured after detonating the IED that had killed the EOD troops just days before by connecting a battery to a buried cable. It became clear to me early on that this man did not have the know-how to create a projectile cone, the REX for the explosive material, or the electrical knowledge to determine the battery and wire gauge necessary to carry out this attack. I read through his jacket and understood he had lived mostly a farming life, he was devout in his religion (as most were in that area), and he had a family. The Taliban had approached him to carry out this attack, his gut was a combination of disease and malnutrition most likely which is why they targeted him. They offered him the chance to do this act in exchange for his family being taken care of. A day or so later HumInt came back. They asked me a lot about how he was acting and I told them mostly normal, he'd been sleeping most of the day, he prayed as usual, and had asked for some religious items. They informed me that they had gone to his house with representatives from one of the units on our base and had found that his family had been killed. They had been debating on whether to tell him because he was surely going to the jail in Kabul where he would likely be hanged. They told him during the interview and I remember from that time until he left he was just mute. This will be how I forever remember the Taliban and sister groups like Al Queda. > And yet. > It is hard to express what it means, if you have lived under an authoritarian regime, to experience freedom. Those who have grown up with the privilege of liberty are lucky not to understand it—and the heavy price you are willing to pay for it if you have lived without it. This sentence punches far above it's weight class.