Fixing Hell (6 page)

“Larry, you got flight lead. You’re the tip of the bayonet for the juveniles.”
Those words from Major General Miller rang in my head over and over. “Flight lead” meant that I was responsible for putting together a team to handle the three juvenile enemy combatants who would arrive in February 2003 at Guantanamo Bay, and the building of a specially designed facility for them to live in.

How am I supposed to work with teenagers in this place?

There was not a computer lit search I could do, nor were there any other PhD colleagues I could consult with on how to manage teenage terrorists. There was no one in the country with any experience on this.

You’re it. You gotta figure out something.

I didn’t have the time it would take to develop the usual PhD planning committee. There was no time. The plane was leaving for Afghanistan in a matter of three weeks and the general demanded a plan by yesterday.

Don’t panic, Larry. You spent a few years growing up in a New Orleans housing project where you became good friends with some hardcore teenage sociopaths. Surely that’s got to be some help here.

Plus, I decided to draw upon my experience working with male juvenile patients I had encountered earlier in my career. Some of these boys were genuine in their desire to hurt others—they liked it and felt no remorse. From these experiences I would build the components of the rehabilitative plan. I realized early in my thinking that I would need a child psychologist to provide the needed psychotherapy, and a pediatrician to serve as the medical director.

With every passing day I ramped up my involvement in planning for the arrival of the three juveniles. My recommendation was to house these teenagers separately from the adult prison population. Major General Miller agreed. Next, I coordinated with a reservist who in civilian life was the warden of an Indiana state prison. Command Sergeant Johnson was the senior-ranking enlisted adviser for the military police brigade in Gitmo. He brought with him nearly thirty years of experience in the prison field. His task was the physical reconstruction and rehabilitation of a house separate and away from the main prison facility, much like a halfway house, and I was charged with building a team for the academic, medical, psychological, and intelligence collection efforts for the juveniles. My guidance to everyone was that we could never house these teenagers in the general adult prison population—not for a minute and no matter how inconvenient it was to keep them separate. We busied ourselves with the plan to retrofit an already existing house that was isolated from the rest of the camp. We named it Camp Iguana, after the two- to three-foot-long lizards that are as common in Gitmo as squirrels are back home, to differentiate it from the rest of the prison known as Camp Delta.

We needed to devise a plan for the correctional custody, medical care, and psychological treatment of these young people, and we had to determine just how one can safely and morally interrogate teenage terrorists. And they were indeed terrorists, according to the intel we had on them. Their age didn’t make them any less so. Fortunately, there was a Navy child psychologist assigned to the hospital, Dr. Tim Dugan, who was an old friend of mine. I valued his judgment and trusted him, so he would be ideal for this task. Tim’s skills would be especially useful because our intel indicated that two of the three boys had been brutally raped, were clinically depressed, and suffered from severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These prisoners were in bad shape.

Soon I boarded a small military C-12 prop plane out of GTMO and headed to a classified military location on the East Coast of the United States. The next morning we loaded up a huge C-17 with a medical team, military police, and a team of Air Force Special Forces shooters. These guys were a special reserve unit with two purposes in life: 1. Kill anyone who messes with our plane, and 2. Kill anyone who messes with the runway while the plane is on it. Those guys were focused.

The Army MPs were on board for the custody and control of the prisoners. They had more damn guns and weapons than any SWAT team I had ever seen in any city in America. We took off and were in the air for twenty hours, which required us to refuel in midair two or three times. In the darkness, an Air Force KC-135 refueling tanker showed up out of the clouds for the rendezvous with our C-17. From the cockpit I watched the steady hands of the pilots and crew connect these two huge aircraft and complete this dangerous task. We landed at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and remained on the runway for a short while, with the Special Forces shooters on high alert, watching for any sign of trouble. Then the back ramp in the tail of the plane was lowered and a truck approached with prisoners, both adults and the teens I was there for. We separated the teenagers out from the other prisoners. I immediately felt sympathy for the young prisoners, though I knew they were far from innocent. They looked not only terrified but also disheveled and lost. The adult detainees looked and smelled repulsive. They smelled like shit or a foul stench of body odor—it was hard to tell the difference. Their hair was uncut, raggedy and long, with long, unkempt beards. The tailgate was closed and we headed back to Cuba.

Twenty or so hours later we landed and I had the teenagers separated according to plan, away from the general adult population. They were in fact never seen by any of the adult prisoners. The command gave me two male interpreters who were fluent in the specific language spoken in the villages where these three boys were raised. The two interpreters had master’s degrees in education, were soft-spoken, and had in fact been teachers in Afghanistan for many years prior to emigrating to the United States. Their age was also an important factor. Both were in their fifties, which would engender some respect. They were kind, well educated, and dedicated to helping these three fragile boys. They were exceptional as surrogate fathers, teachers, and protectors.

Back in Cuba, after we had fully processed the incoming prisoners, I was able to get a really good look at the teenagers. I couldn’t help but ask myself how these pitiful-looking boys could be a threat to any U.S. soldier. Did they just wake up one day and say, “I want to be a terrorist” or “I want to kill soldiers”? I couldn’t connect the dots in my head, so I started to simply ask each of them the questions “how?” and “why?”

The answers that came back through the interpreters were shocking. In the United States we do not use what are known as conscripts. In today’s military, you have to volunteer to fight. And even in the past in our country, we drafted people legally and usually not at gunpoint, at least in modern times. But in Afghanistan, young boys are literally dragged from their homes by the local tribal gang lord in a conscription of sorts. Parents watch helplessly in horror, knowing that to intervene would only end in death for the parent, child, or perhaps both. The young teenage boy would usually be brutally raped on the first night of captivity and afterwards made to perform female domestic chores like cooking, washing dishes, and performing sex favors for the gang lord or visiting male guests. It would not be unusual for a thirteen-year-old boy in Afghanistan, after he was forcibly taken at gunpoint, to wear girls’ clothes and live in a sex harem.

Bizarre, I thought. I thought these guys were all supposed to be religious fanatics. How do they do that to young boys?

All three boys were fragile psychologically, and my job was to ensure that they were never harmed in any way whatsoever. Also, it was a requirement by Major General Miller that in order for any interrogations to be conducted, I had to be present the entire time. We found out that the youngest of the three, who was approximately twelve years of age, had been kidnapped by his province’s Taliban gang lord and forced into sex slavery. He was required to wear Afghani girls’ clothes, to walk and talk like a girl, and to do domestic chores such as cooking and washing dishes as well as bathing male guests and performing sexual duties as required. The next oldest was approximately fourteen and also had been kidnapped by another Taliban gang lord at gunpoint, literally dragged from his home while his parents watched helplessly, and forced to be the houseboy at the home of the gang lord. On the first night of his captivity, he was held down by three members of this Taliban gang and brutally raped all night. He and the youngest boy would have nightmares and other symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder. The homosexual rape seemed incongruous with what I knew of strict Islamic culture, but sadly, our intelligence from Afghanistan indicated that the boys’ experience was not that unusual. It was hard for my mind to process how terrible it must have been. The third teenage terrorist was physically healthy and unharmed sexually, but he was academically the most illiterate of the group.

I asked Hassan, one of the older Afghani translators, to explain more about the prevalence of homosexual rape in the Afghani culture.

“It just doesn’t jibe with what I thought about Muslim culture,” I said. “When does it stop? Can the boys ever stop being sex slaves?”

“Sir, the custom is that once the boy grows a beard he is no longer seen as attractive to his captors,” Hassan told me.

I was being introduced to a new type of enemy we were encountering in this new war, the global war on terrorism. In Afghanistan at least 10 to 20 percent of the soldiers were teenagers. The boys were either forced into the service of a gang lord or were indoctrinated at a younger age at a mosque by radical fundamentalist religious training. Perhaps in a manner similar to the brainwashing of the Ku Klux Klan in our country, radical religious teachers taught these young boys that anyone who was not Muslim was an infidel, and that it was his duty to kill all infidels. Just like the indoctrination of the KKK at the height of its membership in the United States, or the Nazi Party in Germany, the youth members were taught to hate with such ferocity and certainty that it became second nature. For the KKK, all nonwhites and non-Christians were the enemy, and in the group’s interpretation, the ethnic, racial, and religious cleansing was justified by scripture. Similarly, the Muslim fundamentalists believed that all nonbelievers had to be put to death.

What developed was a rigid, almost delusional mind-set, so that by the time the boy became a young adult all who believed differently were evil. To complicate the scenario, the rest of the Afghani culture could be cold and brutal. Killing, torture, rape, the opium drug trade, bombmaking, and weapons trafficking were normal for many teenage boys in Afghanistan. After their initial experience with the gangs, these young boys often graduated into trafficking weapons and on to actual war fighting.

One of the boys talked about being raped and seemed to have reframed his experience. He believed that his rape was a “rite of passage” and really had nothing to do with him. The older men had a physical need and he was there to meet that need, he explained. It was no more than that, not sexual, and most certainly not homosexual. The men who raped him were not gay, he said, and they had not committed a homosexual act on him. When the interpreters related the boy’s way of looking at his rape, I couldn’t really understand.

“Hassan, how can he think that? I mean, he’s not homosexual because he was raped by other men, but how can he defend them and say they didn’t commit a homosexual act?”

I could tell that Hassan was struggling to explain a part of his culture that was very difficult for outsiders to understand. Without trying to defend the boys’ attackers, he patiently explained to me that Afghanis and Americans look at the situation from very different perspectives. In a fundamentalist Muslim culture, homosexuality is strictly forbidden and can result in death, he said, but sex with another man or boy was not seen as homosexual if it was done simply to satisfy a physical need and there was no female around to use instead. In the mountains of Afghanistan, particularly with the tribal gangs that often lived in remote locations and were on the run, looking for women or keeping a woman around camp was not practical. The boys served that role instead.

“But if a man has the opportunity to be with a woman and chooses to be with a boy or a man, that is different,” Hassan explained. “That is not the same thing.”

I was reminded of a similar philosophy that can be found in prisons worldwide. Sex with a same-sex cellmate doesn’t necessarily make you gay, many prisoners will tell you; it’s just the only option. It was a lesson in how one’s cultural perspective can shift how different people view the same set of facts. But at the same time, my Afghani friend acknowledged that the boys were also just denying some of the terror they had experienced. Hassan explained to me that in their country, good fortune was rare, and putting firm boundaries or compartmentalizing their bad emotional experiences was a requirement to survive. “Colonel, there are no Oprah talk shows in my country. In the U.S. you got a talk show for everything, and if an American can’t see it on TV you even have people calling in to strangers on radio shows talking about their personal problems. That’s not how it is in my country,” he said. “First, you don’t talk about your problems with strangers in public, and second, why talk about it or think about it at all? It will not make your problems go away. Sir, this is why it seems like these kids have just put this away in the back of their minds.”

Once we learned a little about their pasts, we decided that it was important to get the juveniles healthy before we did anything else. Gathering any intelligence from them would have to wait. Like many children from rural Afghanistan, these three boys could not recall the last time or if ever they had been seen by a doctor. So we had our pediatrician conduct thorough physical examinations and follow them for their medical care.

After getting their health on track, we then had to focus on interrogating them. I realized that talking to these kids was going to be different from the way we talked to most prisoners. How can you interrogate teenagers who can’t read and write and who have little exposure to anyone or anything outside their immediate family and village? Most Americans have never even talked to a person who cannot even spell “cat” or add one plus one, but none of the boys could read or write, not even in a rudimentary way. None of the three had ever ridden an escalator, an elevator, or a plane, and they had never even heard the phrase “video game.” They were the most fragile—psychologically, medically, and academically—children I had ever met. Whatever problems they had when they were picked up in Afghanistan, language and cultural barriers exacerbated the problems. Most schizophrenic teenagers in the United States were in better shape.