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

Afghanistan at least 10 to 20 percent of the soldiers were teenagers. The boys were either forced into the service of a gang lord or were indoctrinated at a younger age at a mosque by radical fundamentalist religious training. Perhaps in a manner similar to the brainwashing of the Ku Klux Klan in our country, radical religious teachers taught these young boys that anyone who was not Muslim was an infidel, and that it was his duty to kill all infidels. Just like the indoctrination of the KKK at the height of its membership in the United States, or the Nazi Party in Germany, the youth members were taught to hate with such ferocity and certainty that it became second nature. For the KKK, all nonwhites and non-Christians were the enemy, and in the group’s interpretation, the ethnic, racial, and religious cleansing was justified by scripture. Similarly, the Muslim fundamentalists believed that all nonbelievers had to be put to death.
    What developed was a rigid, almost delusional mind-set, so that by the time the boy became a young adult all who believed differently were evil. To complicate the scenario, the rest of the Afghani culture could be cold and brutal. Killing, torture, rape, the opium drug trade, bombmaking, and weapons trafficking were normal for many teenage boys in Afghanistan. After their initial experience with the gangs, these young boys often graduated into trafficking weapons and on to actual war fighting.
    One of the boys talked about being raped and seemed to have reframed his experience. He believed that his rape was a “rite of passage” and really had nothing to do with him. The older men had a physical need and he was there to meet that need, he explained. It was no more than that, not sexual, and most certainly not homosexual. The men who raped him were not gay, he said, and they had not committed a homosexual act on him. When the interpreters related the boy’s way of looking at his rape, I couldn’t really understand.
    “Hassan, how can he think that? I mean, he’s not homosexual because he was raped by other men, but how can he defend them and say they didn’t commit a homosexual act?”
    I could tell that Hassan was struggling to explain a part of his culture that was very difficult for outsiders to understand. Without trying to defend the boys’ attackers, he patiently explained to me that Afghanis and Americans look at the situation from very different perspectives. In a fundamentalist Muslim culture, homosexuality is strictly forbidden and can result in death, he said, but sex with another man or boy was not seen as homosexual if it was done simply to satisfy a physical need and there was no female around to use instead. In the mountains of Afghanistan, particularly with the tribal gangs that often lived in remote locations and were on the run, looking for women or keeping a woman around camp was not practical. The boys served that role instead.
    “But if a man has the opportunity to be with a woman and chooses to be with a boy or a man, that is different,” Hassan explained. “That is not the same thing.”
    I was reminded of a similar philosophy that can be found in prisons worldwide. Sex with a same-sex cellmate doesn’t necessarily make you gay, many prisoners will tell you; it’s just the only option. It was a lesson in how one’s cultural perspective can shift how different people view the same set of facts. But at the same time, my Afghani friend acknowledged that the boys were also just denying some of the terror they had experienced. Hassan explained to me that in their country, good fortune was rare, and putting firm boundaries or compartmentalizing their bad emotional experiences was a requirement to survive. “Colonel, there are no Oprah talk shows in my country. In the U.S. you got a talk show for everything, and if an American can’t see it on TV you even have people calling in to strangers on radio shows talking about their personal problems. That’s not how it is in