Staff Sgt. Allen Callender served three tours as a combat engineer in Afghanistan.
I went with him in 2004.
I remember a conversation in the barracks. I was expressing naive, ill-informed attitudes about Afghanistan, ideas about which I am now deeply ashamed. Callender responded, “Don’t you think it’s smart to know your enemy?”
“I don’t wanna know anything about any of them,” I said. I’ve never been so wrong about anything in my life. My deployment taught me that Afghanistan is a great country with wonderful people.
Callender soon realized his idea of learning about the country to better understand the enemy was flawed by an assumption that a significant portion of the Afghan people was our enemy. He would learn a lot more about Afghanistan during his deployments in 2004, 2007, and 2010.
“In 2004, I was with the civil affairs team supervising the local nationals building our Forward Operating Base. Because of this, I got to spend a lot of time getting to know the people and culture of Afghanistan,” Callender explained. “And just with these words, you can see how military-speak discreetly dehumanizes the people. ‘Local nationals.’ We don’t even call them Afghans, let alone people.”
On that deployment, he often talked with an Afghan guard who was also a mullah. This man would often open his Quran and discuss some of the interesting points of the religion that is so important in Afghanistan.
Callender was also introduced to the Pashtunwali, a code of conduct he found amazing. He visited an Afghan home. “I asked my interpreter if I could smoke. He didn’t ask the owner if I could. He just told me that I could. I trusted my interpreter, so I lit a cigarette.”
Later Callender needed an ashtray. “My interpreter told me to just ash on the floor. I was confused. Afterward, he explained to me that asking for an ashtray shamed them because it suggested they weren’t hospitable enough to get me an ashtray when they saw me smoking.”
He returned to Afghanistan in 2007. “I was embedded with the Afghan National Army,” he said. “Boy, howdy, did I get to know the culture.”
Of the corruption in the Afghan government and police, he said the Afghan police “are small town, growing up where they’re serving as cops. So yeah, they know that little Ahmed has been running around with the Taliban, but he’s Mohammad’s kid.”
Callender assumed the voice of his Afghan comrades. “I’ve known Ahmed since he was a baby. He’s a good kid, just running with a bad crowd. Let’s not let the U.S. Army kill him. I’ll just talk to Mohammad.”
More than ever before, Callender understood and sympathized with the pride Afghan soldiers and police have in their country.
His 2010 deployment may have presented his greatest challenge. Instead of getting assigned to civil affairs for the reconstruction effort or working to assist the Afghan National Army, he was deployed as a regular warfighter, attached to a unit that was “there to kill bad guys.”
“These guys thought they saw the enemy everywhere. They treated Afghans like idiots.”
As a platoon leader, Callender encouraged his men to take a different approach, to get to know their Afghan allies and treat them with respect.
“I have had multiple soldiers say that the reason they lived was because I taught them Afghan culture and encouraged them to get to know the Afghan soldiers,” he explained. Word of his platoon’s respect for Afghans reached the people and helped foster relative peace. “We drove the same roads as the other Americans. Everyone else got shot up. We didn’t.”
Serving in a radically different place like Afghanistan with the Taliban threat looming, it’s hard to open oneself to the Afghan people. But doing so can be essential to survival and mission success. Callender, more than most, learned the wisdom of getting to know our allies.
Trent Reedy served as a combat engineer in the Iowa National Guard from 1999 to 2005, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan.
