Afghanistan, You Are Not Alone.

Part One: The problem with having moderate politics is you’re discontent with everything and everyone in the political circuit. No matter who wins an election or what “side” has power or majority, you’re disgruntled and critical and in no way represented. There is no representation for me, my values, or my ethos. It truly must be nice to be able to participate in the political cycle of who’s your favorite team captain and feel like you’re winning in swinging cycles at least every eight years for a short period of time. It must be nice to worship someone sitting in presidency of our great nation, or feel like “your guy” is in office. I’ve never had the luxury of feeling that way. I’ve never gotten to sit and watch a news cycle or watch a politician’s rally and shout “Hell yeah!” at my TV. Instead, I watch in critical bewilderment and judgment: always. It doesn’t matter if the democrats or the republicans are having their time in the sun, or if Trump or Biden or Bush or Barack are in office. I get to sit and watch in critique, in judgement, in desperation, and in what feels like isolation. I don’t agree fully with a god damned one of them.

Enjoy your place on the extremes if that’s where you’re at, because if you’re in the middle, everyone fucking hates you. You’re too liberal for some and too conservative for others. Your DMs will be filled with people from both sides sending you their extremist memes and “take that’s” because they think you also live on an extreme and MUST align with everything if you’ve supported even a singular ounce of legislation that their arch political nemesis has put into play. In actuality, I’m just so god damned disappointed in the fact that good people I care and love on both sides of this spectrum find themselves isolated, divided, and an active participant in tearing this country up like a cancer from the inside out just to have a “side” to play on.

But wait, “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” Right? Fuck no. It’s called being an adult, and seeing a perspective and an experience other than your own. It’s called knowing that compromise and tolerance and inclusion are not things to be feared at all costs. Knowing that you aren’t some fucking hero for drawing lines in the sand and yelling a rally cry over it. Sit in your camps, and cheer your captains. I’m just so sick of sitting as spectator to this bullshit. America is better united. Divided we will fall. Divided, we will be the far-away chaos and turmoil on someone else’s TV. It is a matter of time if you keep this shit up. Gut check time.

Part Two: So here we are with Afghanistan. I can’t even think about it without feeling a veil of overwhelming helplessness. This is a fucking disaster, one put into play and fumbled so many times by so many masters of war, written into our history at the tip of so many R and D’s ballpoint pens. With each pass of a pen stroke, with every political “victory” they have written safely behind a desk, with protected details, this fuckery has been written into a monster of a tragedy. A horror to so many, on so many sides, in so many perspectives, I can’t even begin to list those affected by this. The Afghan civilians, their entire nationality, our service members, our Afghan allies, our international allies, the American people, republicans, democrats, Muslims, Christians, atheists, children, elderly, all the living, and the legacies of the dead: this is a tragedy for all. I’m reeling at the humanitarian crisis, the turmoil, the desperation, the destruction, and the betrayal I’m seeing play out before my eyes. I’ve seen this before, watched it in every corner of the world, even had some front row seats to things of this nature before. But never have I felt as solely responsible as an American as I do currently.

We fucked this up. Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, all the profiteers of war, all the power brokers, arms dealers, traffickers, masters of borders, the religiously elite and extreme, the corrupt, and the “just”: this is yours to own. It’s abundantly clear this is your world, and we just live, and often fucking die in it, as a means to your ends.

Part Three: “You are not alone.”

Those four words, and their impact have fundamentally changed my life.

Those four words are always at the end of a recurring dream I’ve had for almost a decade. I would call it a nightmare, because parts of it are just that. However, it always ends the same way, and because of that, I have a hard time calling it a nightmare. It’s a dream, and it’s a piece of my history: factual, painful, traumatic, and foundational.

I’m in my second year as an emergency room nurse, in a small town in Montana, and it’s the middle of the night. The memories, sounds, events, and people are flooding over me in rapid fire. The scene is one so familiar at this point as it’s kept me so much company over the years. I’m performing CPR on a 16-year-old boy, a young man I guess, who shot himself with his gopher gun in his family’s upstairs bathtub. I’m looking into his distorted face, morphed by the bullet’s trajectory: my mind notes his healthy skin and unbroken physique, the sinew of his youth, and then a shift to the brain matter covering his chest. To the image of him spitting it out of his mouth when he was still semi-conscious. Then it becomes a flood, a mess, a scramble of images not playing out in the correct order. It’s the vision of one of the most hardened paramedics I’ve ever known sitting in the corner with his head in his hands covered in blood and brain matter from when he scooped the boy out of the bathtub and ran down the stairs to the ambulance with him in his arms. It’s the sound of the young man’s four-year-old sister yelling so loudly from the lobby I could hear it at the nurses’ station on a repeat of hysteria. “I want my Allie!” over and over and over again. It’s the look of pain and recognition on the face of the 20-year veteran ER nurse when she realized the boy she just spent 40 minutes with was so disfigured she hadn’t recognized him as a classmate and friend to her own child for the past 10 years: the vision of her crumpling against the wall as that reality derails her. It’s the look on his mother’s face when we finally brought her to his lifeless body: the emptiness in a mother that is so horrifically haunting and that you will only ever truly know if you’ve seen it firsthand. An image of a police officer extracting vitreous humor from his eye hours after his death, and trying to draw blood from his femoral artery.  Overwhelmingly, it is a feeling of my own utter helplessness and the despair it cloaks me in is a weight I can’t move against. I’m paralyzed. All these visions play out, in a loop, a repeat, a hellish cycle I can’t break for what feels like eternity. Until, suddenly, and without fail, the one image I chose to carry with me, even during my conscious hours, breaks through.

I see the doctor I’m working with. He’s a starred general in the U.S. Army, a mass of experience in emergency and battlefield medicine. He’s unfaltering, and he’s standing directly to the right of me at the head of the bed while I continue to perform CPR on the boy. He’s already asked us if we all would like to try anything else. We’ve all shaken our heads no. It’s been too long, and we know we don’t have a life to save anymore. This is when time slows down just as it did that night, the only time I’ve ever experienced time slow in my entire life. I see the doctor deglove both of his hands. His left hand goes on top of both of mine in the center of the boy’s chest, and I stop pushing. His right hand, slides through the boy’s hair, starting behind his ear, through blood, and brain matter until it’s resting at the crown of the boy’s head. And I see a mountain of a man, lean down and say so steadily and assuredly, “You are not alone,” into the young man’s ear. He stays there for only a brief second before he looks towards the wall and begins again… “Time of death…” and that is where I always awake.

“You are not alone.”

I have said that phrase in my tenure as an emergency room nurse to every near-deathly critical patient, to every dying and broken being at some point in my time with them since that night in Montana. I’ve made a point to. I’ve said it to a man’s limp lifeless body I found sitting on a toilet surrounded by his own blood. I’ve said it to an eight-month-old infant who had been dead for hours after being left in a car at a local car dealership right before I had to close the door of the morgue and leave her there, in black, and seemingly alone. I’ve said it rubbing the hand of a crying four-year-old whose father had broken his femur in an act of child abuse. I’ve said it while holding a man’s hand as he smiled and said “I’m so excited to see my wife again,” before he took his last breath and we were allowed to let him die in peace.

I’ve also said it to Syrian refugees, suicidal veterans, the recently divorced, the addicted, my best friends, and complete strangers. I say it with no expectation that it means anything or that they will even register it. Merely a statement: it has become the only thing I can say when faced with events, problems, struggles, and tragedies I have no effect over or are on such a magnitude I can’t even comprehend. It has become the only line of solace I even try to offer or articulate in the light of the most debilitating and crippling events we are faced with in our humanity. It is the only thing to say, so I’ll say it now.

You are not alone.

Afghanistan, you are not alone.

Iraq/Afghanistan Veterans, you are not alone.

Our Afghan allies, you are not alone.

To the abandoned, and the workhorses there now trying to rescue you, you are not alone.

Americans, you are not alone.

Refugees and asylum seekers, you are not alone.

And most of all, to my mother, you are not alone.

Any. All. Every. One: “You are not alone.”