Fixing Hell by Larry C. James, Gregory A. Freeman Page A

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