Neil Shea
Neil is a contributing writer for National Geographic magazine.
Work Archive
Failure to Communicate
Could the U.S. mission in Afghanistan fall apart simply because of bad translation?
At one point in Restrepo, a new documentary film about U.S. soldiers at a small combat outpost in eastern Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, Captain Dan Kearney, the officer in command, is sitting in a shura with the Korengal elders he is trying to win over. A frail-looking man sits before the bullish captain and complains about the arrest of a local man. Kearney at first does not know who the elder is talking about. Then Kearney turns to his Afghan interpreter, or “terp,” and in answer to the elder says: “You’re not understanding that I don’t fucking care.”
The F-bomb is called that for a reason: It has power to explode a conversation and obliterate important points. But my main question after watching this scene, so similar to many I’ve witnessed while reporting on America’s wars abroad, was: How is an interpreter, even a very good one, supposed to haul that statement into his own language?
Letter from Afghanistan
So This Is Paktya
Sometime after midnight, from an observation post at a small base in Paktya Province, American soldiers watched the battle begin. Tracer rounds streamed into the January sky, followed by the fire trails of rocket-propelled grenades. It was days before the new moon, and no light fell in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan but what leaked down from the stars. Holed up in the valley below, the Afghan police fired wildly, desperately, as though trying to fight back the darkness itself.
The Americans radioed the police. The police didn’t answer. An artillery crew fired illumination rounds, flares attached to parachutes, trying to locate enemy positions. None was revealed. Finally, the Americans sent a convoy of soldiers speeding into the valley to support or save their allies or at least secure the dead. When the soldiers arrived, the policemen were hanging out.
“What’s up, dudes?” the police said.
The Talking Season
Winter brings a brief calm to eastern Afghanistan—and reveals the deepest challenges of the war
The soldiers at the gate are not pleased that I have invited a Taliban commander for tea.
“What the fuck?” they say, laughing but sort of not laughing. “You mean we gotta search that motherfucker? Man, shit. I mean, if he’s, like, wearing a belt.”
By belt they mean bomb. Suicide vest. Like the one a Jordanian double agent detonated a few days ago on an American base named Chapman in the province next door, killing several employees of the CIA. It is on the soldiers’ minds while they stand cold and bored beside the only road through this winter valley, searching each local laborer who enters their base to lay stones in the mud or slather cement onto the rocket-resistant buildings. They know that by the time they would notice a bomb, ruffling their hands through folds of Afghan clothing, the future would already be decided.
Omo River
Africa's Last Frontier
Dunga Nakuwa cups his face in his hands and remembers his mother’s voice. She has been dead nearly two years, but for Dunga’s tribe the dead are never very far away. In the villages they are buried just below the huts of the living, separated from hearths and sleeping skins by only a few feet of dry, depleted soil. They remain near in the mind too. This is why Dunga still hears his mother: When will you take revenge on your brother’s killer?
Bar Kanday, Afghanistan — “Yeah, but what about the flushers?”
Lt. Mark Zambarda was annoyed. He expected small hoses to come with the toilets that had been ordered for the newly remodeled school. But the Afghan laborers simply smiled and made vague gestures with their cement-caked trowels.
“I’m not paying you until I get some flushers,” Zambarda said.