Marking nine years of “unemployment”
April 8, 2013 marked the final day of my two year, seven month career as a civilian intelligence analyst. I usually celebrate the accumulation of my subsequent years of unemployment with a beer, a wry lamentation about losing a nice, bimonthly government paycheck, and a reaffirmation that I got the better end of the bargain when I exchanged the high-stress job I loved and excelled at to be a housewife, writer, and mother.
This year, though, anticipation of this day dug its claws into me, and dragged me back into the past.
By the time my now husband proposed in 2012, it was clear that the U.S. desire to continue fighting in Afghanistan was waning. Leaders had lost the will to understand the Taliban, preferring instead to create some imaginary version of our enemy that might be a good-faith partner in peace negotiations already underway. I believed that, absent an all-out military victory over the Taliban, the group would return to “governing,” and terrorizing, Afghanistan.
I had entered my career with hope that I might help bring the war in Afghanistan to a stable conclusion. No matter how many high-level personalities I briefed, or wrote briefings for, and no matter how many awards and medals I received, it was clear that I would never change the opinions that mattered. Up until the day I left the SCIF for the last time, I fought to impart my beliefs.
In the weeks that passed as I got married and moved to a new state with my new husband, I tried to leave Afghanistan behind. I couldn’t stop thinking about the country that had been part of my life since 2008. When I heard in June that the Taliban had raised their flag at their office in Doha, I raged around my house in red-hot, impotent anger, enraged that the U.S. had legitimized its foe while leaving behind our partners in the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.
Unable to change the present, I returned to the past.
I started to write a series of novels about a war-obsessed Congressional staffer who falls in love with the Marine officer-in-training she meets at the beginning of the 2010 surge in Washington, D.C. In the research phase of my writing, I began interviewing veterans of various conflicts. They did far more than inform my book writing. The candor, love, devotion, and struggle in their stories led me to work on a series of longform essays that I hoped would provide solace for other veterans, and convey the multifaceted meaning of military service to civilian readers.
In the years that followed, I became a mother, twice. Editing my novel, which required intense periods of focus, became nearly impossible. An editor at the Detroit News suggested I submit an editorial, which ultimately sparked my freelance opinion writing “career” in 2018. In the years that followed, the war in Afghanistan, and our nation’s service members and veterans, were a common facet in my work, which I crammed into naptimes, early mornings, and post-bedtime hours.
In the lead-up to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, I covered several stories of interpreters struggling with the special immigrant visa process that turned out to be portentous.
For more than a decade, I had known in my gut that the war in Afghanistan had no chance of ending well. I never believed it would end as badly as it did. August 2021 hit like a sledgehammer. The new war in Afghanistan was destroying the lives of women and children, allies and activists, members of non-Pashtun ethnic groups, and diaspora Afghans spread across the globe. It would also destroy any semblance of work-life balance I had maintained prior to the withdrawal.
I now spend most waking moments checking social media and communications channels for updates on specific cases I’ve become involved with, or communicating with some of the hundreds of Afghans who have graciously told me about their lives under the Taliban. I work in the car, while homeschooling my child, while cooking meals or folding laundry. If I’m not writing, I’m formulating pitches for future articles, trying to make sure that Afghanistan stays in the news.
This looming anniversary of my unemployment has had me reorienting the way I think of the past nine years. Though I may not have collected a reasonable paycheck, I have been constantly at work, learning to tell stories and translate my feelings to my readers. Each experience has been shaping me to lend a hand at this moment in time — a true crisis point for Afghans, and a moral reckoning for Americans who allowed the Taliban to overtake and hold hostage an entire nation.
Today, too many Afghans are losing their lives in the war that began the day America’s war in Afghanistan ended. Too many U.S. veterans are losing their lives because they continue to face internal battles, no matter their distance from conflicts the world considers ended.
Being here to tell their stories is a heavy burden, and the privilege of a lifetime. Today, I celebrate those nine years of preparations, and I say a hearty thank you to everyone who entrusted me with their stories, or who issued words of encouragement.
Most of all, I want to tell my fellow humans who are still in the painstaking cultivation phase to keep up the good fight. Hard years produce unstoppable individuals.
