Opinion: Our interpreter saved my life in Afghanistan. Now we need to save his, says Capt. Steven Erickson.
Your Turn
In 2008 at the height of the war in Afghanistan, I was the executive officer of a team of 12 U.S. soldiers training local police in a remote district of Zabul province.
One of the most vital members of my team was not American. My Afghan interpreter joined us shortly after he finished working a stint with the Marines in Helmand Province. We nicknamed him Rocky, because he looked like a young Sylvester Stallone — and also because we had trouble pronouncing his actual name, which I’m concealing for reasons that I’ll make clear later.
Rocky was just a year or two younger than me, and yet he’d seen more combat than almost any of us. He served as a crucial bridge between us and the Afghan National Police our team was charged with training to a point of “selfsustainability” so that America could finally leave Zabul Province and the rest of Afghanistan. Rocky had been fighting our “enemies of freedom” since before I arrived, and he stayed on the team long after I left.
During multiple firefights with the Taliban, I’d talk on my radio to the jets — telling them where to drop bombs or which targets to attack — while Rocky shouted orders to the police fighting alongside us into his little plastic I-com radio. He’d relay to them my instructions on where to go, where to shoot, or where to bring their wounded. Without his ability to direct those police units, we could have easily been overrun in at least two ambushes.
But it wasn’t just his role in the firefights that made him so indispensable. On a near nightly basis, Rocky would eat dinner and drink chai with us and the Afghan police commander and his deputies. Since Rocky lived on our side of the base and was about my age, he understood our culture better than anyone. And he helped me understand theirs. How to relate to them. How to connect with them so we could better complete our mission. How to try to believe in them.
The police didn’t like him too much, though. They used to steal money from villagers as they traveled through our district, stopping them like bandits on the highway and collecting illegal tolls. Rocky caught them on camera a couple of times and gave us the pictures, so we could address the situation — which we were never able to do successfully.
Now, Rocky and his people are being taken over again by the Taliban. The war has been lost, and every interpreter we relied on over there is at risk. The U.S. government does not track casualties among visa applicants, but volunteer groups such as No One Left Behind estimate that hundreds of interpreters have already been killed in recent years while waiting to leave Afghanistan and Iraq.
Across the country, female Afghans who’ve spent the past several years fighting for women’s rights are being slaughtered and men like Rocky are getting murdered. And it’s all happening as the police and the army hand over the bases we built for them, the Humvees we gave them, and the honor we foolishly thought we were leaving them with.
President Joe Biden is right to abandon this place and the misguided ideals we sought to impose. If the people of Afghanistan believe that women should be allowed to get an education, mothers shouldn’t be forced to cover their bodies in head-to-toe burqas, and freedom actually means anything, then it ought to be their responsibility to make the necessary sacrifices. They ought to care.
We tried to make them care for 20 years and look what’s happened.
As I write these words, tens of thousands of Special Immigrant Visa applications (SIVs) are stalled, waiting for government contractors such as Mission Essential to write letters verifying employment. The U.S. Refugee Admission Program also requires a government official who worked with an interpreter to fill out a multipage form with photocopies of identifying documents, and the special visa applications require HR letters from American companies with no incentive to provide them in time.
We must streamline the process, immediately approve all pending visa applications, and clear the way for these families to experience the liberty and freedom of America. They’ve earned the right as much as any of us.
Whether you support the pullout or not, taking care of the men and women who took care of us should not be a partisan issue. It’s a human one. We owe it to the 20,000 “Rockys” who fought, bled, and died for two decades alongside America’s troops to create a better exit plan.
Last month, around midnight, Rocky had his home broken into by men with guns searching for him while he hid on a rooftop. He is in more danger of dying now than he ever was when he served with us in the heart of the fight. We can abandon our failed mission without abandoning him.
Capt. Steven Erickson served 15 months in Afghanistan as the executive officer and later commander of a police mentor team. He lives in Madison and is working on a novel loosely based on his experiences during the war.