I spent a few days at Landstuhl recently, one of a group of writers from the Writers Guild Initiative, part of the Writers Guild of America, East Foundation (Full disclosure and just to add to the confusion: I’m president of the Writers Guild, East, the union with which the foundation’s affiliated).

For the last four years, the foundation has been conducting writing workshops. The project began with professional writers from stage, TV and movies mentoring veterans from the Iraq and Afghan wars, working with them on writing exercises and projects ranging from memoirs and blogs to children’s books, screenplays and sci-fi novels. Recently, in collaboration with the Wounded Warrior Project, the foundation started similar workshops with caregivers, the loved ones of veterans helping them through the aftermath of catastrophic injuries.

Now, Wounded Warrior had asked some of us to come to Landstuhl to meet with the medical staff there. Some 3,000 strong, military and civilian, they work ceaselessly in what has become one of the busiest trauma centers in the world, helping between 20,000 and 30,000 patients a year (not just from the battlefield, but also military and their dependents from all over Europe, Africa and much of Asia).

Landstuhl is where the victims of the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marines Corps barracks in Beirut were brought; Bosnian refugees from the Sarajevo marketplace bombing in 1994, too, wounded from the American embassy bombing in Kenya in 1998 and the 2000 attack on USS Cole. During the first Gulf War, more than 4,000 service members were treated at Landstuhl, as have been men and women fighting in the Balkans and Somalia. Since 9/11, the hospital has treated coalition troops from 44 different countries.

They compare this hospital to the center of an hourglass; it’s the midpoint between a combat injury and treatment in the field and then subsequent care back in the States or other home country. Or it’s where a service member is treated and then sent back into battle.

The staff at Landstuhl sees the wounded at their worst. Many who arrive suffer from multiple injuries – “polytrauma” so extensive that several teams of surgeons with different specialties – neurological, thoracic, ear and eye, facial reconstruction and orthopedic, among others — may work on an individual patient, often simultaneously. Bodies are blown apart or crushed by IEDs, grenades and suicide bombs, but so skillful are the medical teams there, so advanced the techniques and technology, Landstuhl’s survival rate runs as high as 99.5 percent. (The survival rate among American wounded in World War II was 70 percent.)

But all that success takes a toll. One of the little discussed but potent side effects of war is what’s called combat and occupational stress Rreaction or secondary traumatic stress disorder. Compassion fatigue.

After all the years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of the doctors, nurses and other staff at Landstuhl are exhausted or worse. Given what they’ve seen — the horrific wounds and amputations, the infection, agony and grief – some walk around “like zombies,” one therapist said. Feelings of empathy and kindness yield to loneliness, despair and burnout.

Many of the compassion fatigue symptoms are similar to post-traumatic stress disorder  – physical effects like headaches, gastrointestinal problems, reproductive troubles, as well as mental  — nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety, emotional distance, isolation and more.

Working with physically damaged men and women who are so deeply traumatized rubs off. The emotional rawness is contagious. A hospital handout on PTSD understatedly reads, “When life-changing events occur, perceptions about the world may change. For example, before soldiers experience combat trauma, they may think the world is safe. Following combat, a soldier’s perceptions may change — a majority of the world may now seem unsafe.”

That’s why returning vets may reflexively search alongside a U.S. interstate highway for roadside bombs, only shop at Walmart at 3 in the morning, or worry to excess that their children’s school will be attacked by terrorists. And it’s why after hearing the stories of their patients, reliving the horrors of war, watching them endure pain and sometimes countless operations, medical practitioners can suffer from the same fears — whether it’s the surgeon who heals the wounds, the psychiatrist who probes the mind for the source of anguish or even the clean-up staff decontaminating and removing the blood from surgical tools.

Combine that with homesickness, the high operational tempo of Landstuhl, the low tolerance for mistakes, the downtime when the mind takes over and remembers every awful experience. It’s a dangerous, often unhealthy mix.

And so, on a Saturday morning, we writers sat down with a bunch of men and women who work at Landstuhl and other nearby medical facilities. There were 14 of us and t32 or so of them. We broke into small groups – two writers working with a group of two to four hospital staff.

My colleague Susanna and I mentored four – a male Army nurse and a female Navy nurse, a physical therapist and a developmental pediatric psychiatrist. We weren’t there to interview or pry; they would tell us what they wanted us to know when they wished, their stories slowly emerging from conversation and the brief writing exercises we gave them.

The male nurse had been in Special Ops, the Navy, Marines and Army; he was reluctant to talk of what he had experienced but wanted to examine themes of good and evil in an epic novel. The physical therapist told us she wanted to explore the mind-body connection, perhaps with a blog; the Navy nurse spoke of her feelings for the soldiers she took care of from the Republic of Georgia, the former Soviet state, now independent. (By the end of the year, Georgia, aiming at membership in NATO, will have some 1,500 troops in Afghanistan.) She had learned how to bake for them the Georgian national dish, khachapuri, a cheese-filled bread; now she wants to write a cookbook.

For two days, we talked and they wrote, we recommended books and movies, they told us about the ones they loved. Tears were shed as stories and memories came to the surface, many too private to relate here. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll stay in touch via email and meet again; trying to be of assistance as they write to express their thoughts and feelings, to tell their stories.

Do the workshops help? Hard to measure, but intuitively it feels as if they do, that in the talking and writing comes self-awareness and some measure of equanimity. And selfishly, for those of us who serve as writer-mentors, the benefits are enormous and fulfilling.

But the statistics are alarming. According to NBC News, “The Pentagon counts more than 6,300 American dead and 33,000 wounded in action in Iraq and Afghanistan. A Rand Corp study estimates that as many as 300,000 post-9/11 veterans suffer from PTSD or major depression, and about 320,000 may have experienced traumatic brain injuries, mainly from bombs.” The number of civilian fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan remains uncertain but a Brown University study last year reported at least 132,000.

Meanwhile, there are still nearly 90,000 American troops in Afghanistan.  More will die and be wounded. President Obama has pledged their complete departure in 2014.

But even after that, the work at Landstuhl will go on. There are still nearly 300,000 American military personnel overseas, plus family members. Landstuhl will take care of many of them. And, says one of the hospital’s surgeons, with a sigh of resignation, “There will always be the Middle East.”

The U.S. expressed regret for the airstrikes and has been quietly pressing Pakistan to reopen the routes over the last two weeks. Washington and NATO stepped up those efforts in recent days by making it clear Islamabad would not be welcome at the two-day summit beginning Sunday in Chicago unless it did so.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen phoned President Asif Ali Zardari on Tuesday afternoon to invite him to the meeting, according to a statement from the Pakistan government and NATO.

“This meeting will underline the strong commitment of the international community to the people of Afghanistan and to its future,” NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu said in Brussels, where the alliance is based. “Pakistan has an important role to play in that future.”

In Islamabad, Zardari’s spokesman Farhatullah Babar said the president would consider the invitation, which he said was not linked to any reopening of the supply lines.

The invite came hours ahead of a meeting in Pakistan of civilian and military leaders to discuss the supply line blockade. A lawmaker said participants would consider reopening the routes. Their recommendations would be sent to the Cabinet, which will meet on Wednesday to formally approve the decision, he said on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.

A NATO diplomat in Brussels, also speaking condition of anonymity for the same reason, said the invitation to Zardari was meant as an inducement to the Pakistani government to reopen the borders.

By maintaining the blockade, Pakistan’s teetering economy risked missing out on millions of dollars in international development and loans, as well military aid. It was also facing the prospect of being left out of discussions on the future of Afghanistan.

The blockade forced NATO to reorient its logistics chain to more expensive routes across Russia and Central Asia. While the war effort has not suffered, the Pakistani routes will be more important in coming months as NATO begins to pull out of Afghanistan, with a 2014 deadline for the withdrawal of all foreign combat troops.

Pakistan sought to use the deadly American air strikes in November to extract new terms from the United States in what has always been a tense and largely transactional relationship. The government has said it wants more money from the U.S. and NATO for hosting the supply routes, something Washington has indicated it could do.

The country’s parliament also demanded an apology from Washington for the border incident, and an end to America’s drone strike campaign against militants in northwestern Pakistan, but neither appears likely, U.S. officials say. Negotiators from both countries have been discussing the drone strikes, which are unpopular in Pakistan, but Washington has said it will not stop them because they are vital to keeping al-Qaida on the defensive.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar said Monday that Islamabad had made the right decision to close the border, but strongly suggested that it was time to reopen it, saying that Pakistan couldn’t afford to alienate the world for much longer.

Pakistan has some bargaining power of its own because its cooperation is seen as important to striking a peace deal with the Taliban and their allies in Afghanistan that would allow foreign troops to withdraw without sending the nation into further chaos.

The weak government risks some backlash from nationalist and Islamist groups, as well as militants, by reopening the supply lines. But the powerful army, which has influence over much of the country’s media and some of its most firebrand politicians and clerics, is likely to tamp down the outrage.

More than 50 heads of state will attend the meeting in Chicago, including President Barack Obama who will be speaking in his hometown.

In Kabul, Afghanistan’s deputy foreign minister Jawed Ludin said there are “some positive signs from Pakistan.”

“It may be resolved today or tomorrow, but as it stands, it’s still unresolved,” Ludin told reporters on Tuesday.

___

Lekic reported from Brussels. Associated Press writers Deb Riechmann in Kabul and Munir Ahmed in Islamabad contributed to this report.

And now, at 90,000 troops, it’s America’s turn.

I have my own history.

A week from now, it’ll be a year since my mother passed. Horrific car accident, traumatic brain injury. It wasn’t the first TBI I’d seen, but I hope it’s the last.

She’s the reason I and my brothers joined the Marines.

The last time I was in a war zone, though, it was Iraq. Anbar. Operation Iraqi Freedom. I was also a journalist — Marine combat correspondent, a Private Joker, like Full Metal Jacket.

“Get rid of that peace pin and get with the winning team, kid,” the Colonel says to Joker.

Yeah that was me, Raptor Man and Joker rolled into one person, hopping around the combat zone with a camera. By the end, I could tell you the type of helicopter approaching just from the sound alone.

I remember we were all terrified of roadside bombs. Nothing could rip the life out of you as quick as an improvised explosive device. Practically invisible. Pressure plates. Propane tanks. Shaped charges and command det. Incendiary bombs frying the flesh right off your bones, and tank mines turning tons of Humvee steel into an indistinguishable mess, quick as a red-light-running SUV.

Mom’s car was like that, nearly indistinguishable. Her crimson “Marine Mom” plate was bent and hanging from the front. In the backseat, purchased moments before impact, was a mangled case of Rolling Rock, the beer we all loved to drink together when the boys and I were home. When it happened, Mom was getting ready for us to come home again. The green glass from the bottles spread around the demolished Ford at a scarred Pennsylvania crossroad.

She told me once that she had cried every night during my first deployment in 2006. I deployed again in 2008. Long before I even went to bootcamp, though, she had told me she always pictured me living out of a backpack in some foreign country, carrying around a camera and a notepad.

I land in Kabul with a bit more than that. I have a pelican case of camera gear, a backpack, a duffel bag and an old Corps Alice pack. Double of everything; redundancy is key.

The big difference here is that I don’t have the Marine Corps to back me up. I’m alone in my own zone, no Conex box full of extra camera bodies, batteries and lenses. What I have is what I got.

I’m used to freedom. During deployments as a combat correspondent, or “CC,” I had an almost insane amount of freedom. I could be in Baghdad on Sunday, Ramadi on Wednesday, and Mosul by the weekend. I was one of a very select group of “non-rate” entry level Marines who could justifiably look in a colonel’s eye and ask, “Why?”

Also, I had a top-down, bottom-up view of the battlefield. I was included in high-viz command briefs as well as presence patrols.

The only problem was the multilevel public affairs web, a dicey bureaucracy hell-bent on “happy glad” editing and stories that reflect rosily on the command staff. It’s like the scene in “Full Metal Jacket,” written by a former combat correspondent in a short story called “Short Times”:

“So you didn’t see any enemy bodies, no casualties?” says the public affairs officer.

“They must have carried them all away,” says Joker.

“No blood trails?”

“It was raining.”

“Well, throw in one casualty, say, a dead officer; grunts love to read about dead officers,” says the PAO.

“How ’bout a General?”

Yes, I’ll admit, Military Public Affairs was a spin machine I desperately wanted to be free of. Full of “command messages,” clever omissions and helpful little edits.

Criticism at all was out of the question. I guess the idea was that we got enough of that from the civilian side of coverage. But to even call what we did “coverage” would be a bit of a misnomer. It was more like public relations with a journalism arm.

It’s like this. Ribbon cuttings: The General stands there smiling in front of a new clinic, and I take the standard big-scissor picture — snap. He and some Iraqi leader shake hands then — snap snap — and everyone’s happy right? But there are no details about how much we paid and how long it took to finish the project. I can’t even mention that there’s no electricity or acknowledge the smell of shit in the air, wafting from a waterless outhouse just meters from the building.

I saw a little boy come running out of it, smiling, excited the Americans came to visit, and I walk over to take a look inside. A huge pile of human shit intermixed with, strangely enough, pages from prominent American magazines. A smeared Vogue cover; I think I see Esquire, too, and then Johnny Depp peers at me from between turds, flies kissing his face like teenage girls probably do to their posters back home.

It was all so very strange, ignoring details like this, simply because “civilian journalists” don’t want to reflect harshly on command or the military, in general.

Don’t get me wrong, though, I’m not here to pull the rug out from anyone’s feet. I’m not looking for a runaway general, or a hard-hitting expose.

See, I understand that despite what the news media, pundits and commanding generals say, the reality of war is wall-to-wall gray. It may look cut and dry, good and evil, right and wrong, but on the ground, the moral abyss that stretches between weapon sights and targets contextualizes even the most distilled aspect of human struggle: Kill or be killed.

Death, like a black hole, distorts everything around it.

Speaking of death, once I arrive in Kabul city, what I’m wishing for is a little more security. As an independent operator, I’m not as comfortable as I once was rolling around with 50 well-armed 19-year-old Marines.

My travel isn’t so structured. Sit. Stand. Sleep. Get the bags off the truck, Private. Move the bags over here. Now over there. Eat. Form up. Go away. Get together. Load up. Strap in. I said: Strap. In. A C130 from Kuwait, and then you’re in the shit.

Not so now. I land in Kabul a disoriented mess. I’m not with DynCorp or Raytheon. I’m not a former SEAL with Blackwater. There’s no burly white guy waiting at the gate with a sign bearing my name.

I’m a freelance journalist. I have to rely on some tiny, jumpy Afghan who’s looking to make a quick buck to help me get my bags, fill out forms and register with the government. Then my “fixer,” a journalist facilitator, shows up with his driver and car.

Still, they are Afghans, it is not a Humvee and I am not surrounded by armed service members who are eager to dispatch my enemies.

I’ve come a long way from being that aimless college grad living in his mom’s basement. I remember I had recently become a Teach for America reject. She called me upstairs not long after I got the rejection letter. It was the afternoon. I probably still had bed hair, my breath a mixture of cold pizza and coffee.

I’ll never forget her ultimatum: “Either you go back to school …”

With my habit for whiskey? No. No more school.

“you get your teaching credentials and teach down by your father …”

In South Carolina, nah, I’ll pass. What’s the last one?

“or you enlist in the Marines.”

What? Really?

“I know a recruiter …” — undoubtedly from her days as a high school front desk secretary — “Gunnery Sergeant Fannel. You can call him right now if you want.”

Hmmm … “What’s the number?”

Years later, seeing me as a success, my two brothers would follow suit.

When I do finally meet a service member in Kabul to pick up my media credentials from the local base, he drives out of the entry control point in a lumbering “hard skin” vehicle (one that looks like a regular SUV except it’s armored).

He gets no farther than about 50 feet from the ECP, parks and gets out. He’s totally covered in protective equipment.

I see now how ridiculous we Americans sometimes look to the locals. Obsessed with protection to the point that the protection itself actually makes us slower and more apt to trip, stumble, or get caught up — in a lot of ways more vulnerable.

Also, it acts as a very ostentatious barrier between us and the Afghans.

This is not the first time I get the perspective of the locals. Another big difference this time is that I’ve given myself a week in the mix before I have to meet up for my flight out to Camp Leatherneck and the Marine units with whom I’ll embed.

So I have a week to tool around Afghanistan, free as a bird flapping in the breeze, and my perspective is not solely limited to that of the military. It’s important, I believe, to talk to the people and get to know them. I think the Marines would agree that talking to the people was no small part of their success in Anbar during the “Awakening” in ’07 and ’08. I hope it will be a part of my success as a reporter, this time on the civilian side.

The first time I was in Iraq, I’ll admit that I hated all of them. A deep, scornful hatred, like black syrup pumping thick through my heart. A hawk that eats foreign policy hawks for breakfast, I wanted to glass the whole country.

Second time around, tasked with transition teams, I got to know a lot of Iraqis. Picked up a little Arabic. I began to understand them as a people, their generational struggle to exist beneath the iron arm of Saddam’s royal tyranny.

You can Monday-morning-quarterback the shit out of our operation — whether it was legal or not, how it was handled, etc. But in between the lines of the opinion sections of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, it’s prudent to understand that real people with families, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, dreams and nightmares — actual human beings — are trying to exist and cope with a never-ending cycle of trauma.

The Iraqis used to laugh at the American concept of post-traumatic stress disorder. Actually laugh. They’d say, “PTSD? Look at our children; they’ve grown up with PTSD.”

The Afghans are no different. In fact, they’re worse.

I cruise out west, to Kunduz, to the farms and the bazaars. I talk to farmers, fishermen and kids. Inside the city, I talk to prominent businessmen and city officials. In the park, I talk to regular citizens and even senior citizens as they play chess.

I go up into the mountain slums and give bubblegum to the children. I ask them what they want to be when they grow up, what they learn at school, and who their heroes are.

“John Cena!” Yells one kid, scrunching into a wrestler pose and smiling.

What amazes me is the amount of hope. It’s understandable when a kid in New Jersey tells you he wants to be a firefighter or a doctor. Every kid here either wants to be a doctor or an engineer. It strums a chord of sorrow in me so deep that it takes all I can to ignore it; as I watch a toddler paw through an open sewer, it takes all I have to keep a straight face while I carry on a conversation with children who have lived nothing but war.

The city scene is what we would think of as post-apocalyptic. So is most of the countryside and suburbs, all the bazaars and farms. There is tinge of post-apocalypse everywhere. Not like Iraq, though. In Iraq, in Baghdad, they remembered once that their city was beautiful.

Here it is not so much post-, but also during, maybe even pre-. Even the parents of those children grew up in war. The Russians held ground in the ’80s. The Taliban ran a regime of fire in the ’90s. Now unfinished, unoccupied buildings dot the landscape as proof (alongside the looming U.S. withdrawal deadline) that the crooked fingers of 2008′s economic apocalypse reach even into the darkest depths of war.

And once we go, where does that leave them? Most of them think Pakistan or Iran will take over. The optimists hope Russia or China will gain influence. Either way, the vast majority want the U.S. to stay.

It’s funny, they refer to their country as the football field where armies come to compete for global dominance.

Regardless, I find they are a proud, strong and courteous people. They are also willing to fight for their country, which I find out once I get to Delaram II, a Marine base in Helmand.

After spending a week in Kabul and the surrounding area, I meet up with my military liaison and catch a flight south, to Camp Leatherneck and then down to Delaram II, to embed with a Marine Advisory Team.

I realize things are really different once a Marine — one who would have drastically outranked me –calls me “sir.”

“You don’t have to call me sir, dude. Geoff will do just fine.”

I realize I’ve just called a Gunnery Sergeant “dude.” Yes, as opposed to being a guy in uniform with a camera, now I’m just a guy with a camera. The distance, regardless of my history, is palpable, typified by an intelligence lieutenant who stammers through an interview, unsure exactly of what to divulge.

Finally, for me, it begins to sink in that the phrase, “Once a Marine, always a Marine,” is literally just that: a phrase.

The unit here is “advising” a brigade of the Afghan National Army. My first day there, the Afghan army simultaneously repels an enemy assault and finds some IEDs. They do both to a degree satisfactory to Marine standards, except they bring the IEDs back on the base, sending the Marines into a tizzy.

Marine explosive ordinance disposal appears to take care of the bombs (it turns out, they were inert anyway), and I find myself an interpreter so that I can talk to the Afghan chain of command. I think I’m going to focus on them more than the Marines, who are due to leave in the next two years anyway.

Inside the Afghan command center, I am alone, aside from the interpreter. No Marine Gunny. No PAO.

So there is freedom, and there is also more of a degree of objectivity, but objectivity is a relative concept. I know I have more latitude, but I also have more time. There’s no quota. I can focus on whatever I want (there’s a motorcycle-riding General here whom I’ve pretty much pegged for my next piece).

I guess that just leaves the question: Why? Why did I come back?

I’ve wondered that myself quite often. I remember on that last plane ride out, after my second deployment, there was a soul-deep sigh when the bird finally left the ground. Thank God, I thought, I have all my fingers and all my toes, all my limbs, all my skin, and I’m out. I don’t ever have to come back.

But here I am. Again.

Maybe I want action. Or maybe it’s that writers write what they know. It could even be that I miss the Corps. But that’s not quite right.

I know that I want to offer a voice to voiceless people. I know that I want to see the truth — report the truth — in depth. And I know that, if not for anyone but my little brothers, I want to tell the stories of 19-year-old Marines — Americans who were as old as those Afghan children when the planes took down our towers.

The truth is I don’t really know why. It could be many things.

It could even be my mother, whom I still see in my dreams, and the drive to be the man she dreamed me to be. I wish the nearest Rolling Rock wasn’t 4,000 miles away.

This is one of Afghanistan’s forgotten battlegrounds, a place quietly unraveling as Washington debates the future of the war. Behind the calm facade is a strategically vital part of the country with a fragile security situation that shows every sign of worsening.

Kapisa is barely an hour’s drive north of Kabul, yet two of its seven districts have been in insurgent hands for years, according to local residents, politicians and officials. One is Tagab, where the Taliban stop and search vehicles, run a shadow judicial system and stage regular attacks on foreign and Afghan troops.

“The government does not have control there. I am the representative of the people and I cannot go without employing very heavy security,” said Al Haj Khoja Ghulam Mohammed Zamaray, deputy leader of the provincial council.

Conditions are arguably even more extreme in Alasay. A June 2009 U.S. embassy cable published by WikiLeaks described the militants as having “relative freedom of movement well inside putative secure areas” there. With NATO having since left the district, that has not changed. Elders and members of parliament all insist the Taliban walk openly in the local bazaar.

Similar situations can be found across rural Afghanistan, but history shows events in Kapisa are of particular concern. Guerrillas resisting the Soviet occupation in the 1980s traveled here from safe havens in Pakistan, via the provinces of Kunar and Laghman. It put them within striking distance of the Afghan capital and Bagram air base — then an important Russian facility and now a huge U.S. installation — as well as the main highways connecting Kabul to the north and east of the country.

Speaking to GlobalPost, Abdul Jabar Farhad, a former mujahideen commander serving in the security forces, said “it’s the same story today” and the insurgents are now establishing crucial forward positions in Kapisa in preparation for a wider war.

Attempts to stop them have proved ineffective so far. In September 2010 the government launched the High Peace Council nationwide to help negotiate with rebel groups and persuade their men to lay down arms in exchange for financial aid and vocational training. It finally opened an office in Kapisa earlier this year. The man hired as the local head was Mawlawi Abdul Momin Muslim, who once fought against the Taliban regime. He must now convince his old enemies to accept the constitution.

He admitted people here often have more faith in the rebels than the corrupt government. “The Taliban will sit with them, issue serious orders and solve their problems,” Muslim said.

Initial efforts to win over local residents have also backfired. When NATO delivered leaflets to villages announcing his appointment, insurgents called him to complain that the propaganda was written like a military decree, rather than an offer of reconciliation.

It is a common grievance among Afghans that foreign soldiers have never understood their culture. In a spectacular example, U.S. troops stationed at Bagram in February burned copies of the Quran. Despite a swift apology from NATO, the incident caused nationwide protests and less than a fortnight later the anger in Kapisa was still palpable, neither forgiven nor forgotten.

Haji Mohammed Ibrahim, aged 84 and from Tagab, summed up the mood when he said, “If someone has disrespected your religion, your holy book and your women, they are not your friends anymore.”

In contrast, the Taliban have long possessed the ability to tap into the innate piety of life here. One elder recalled watching an insurgent deliver a sermon at a mosque in Alasay. Members of the audience were so moved by his speech, they cried.

This is not to say the Taliban are supported everywhere in Kapisa. The province is split along faultlines that date from the Soviet era. Tensions between two rival mujahideen parties are contributing to the violence. Fighters linked to Hizb-e-Islami are now swelling the Taliban’s ranks, while members of Jamiat-e-Islami hold key official posts, allying themselves to the government and by extension the occupation.

Ethnicity also plays a role in the unrest. Pashtuns and some Pashayi make up the bulk of the resistance. Tajik areas remain predominantly safe. The worry is that these divisions will grow when NATO leaves.

A small American military reconstruction team is based locally but the majority of foreign troops here are French. They are due to depart in 2013. The forces that remain may not be enough to prevent conditions from deteriorating.

Kapisa’s governor, Mehrabuddin Safi, said he has only 900 to 1,000 police and roughly 1,200 Afghan soldiers to protect a population of 700,000. Pro-government militias have been set up to boost the numbers. He was confident that with greater manpower, and improved training and equipment, he would be able to maintain security.

“This is our country, this is our province,” he said. “We have to look after it.”

Only time will tell if such optimism is misplaced, but the omens are not good. A combination of afflictions has left people struggling to survive. The foreign troops are increasingly mistrusted and opinion of the local authorities is little better, giving the insurgents free reign at the gates of Kabul.

Mohammed Farouq, a villager from Tagab, suggested what may be the future for Kapisa when he described a commander in the Afghan army verbally abusing women and deliberately firing mortars at civilians.

“If he is captured by us does he hope for mercy? There is no hope for mercy then,” he said. “But if we can’t do anything, then one day, if he is going somewhere, we will inform the Taliban.”

We now live in a world that is wilder than a lot of science fiction from my youth. My phone is 58 times faster than IBM’s fastest mainframe computer in 1964 (calculates my older brother Steve) and more powerful than the computers on the Apollo spaceship we landed on the moon in 1969 (adds my nephew Jason). Though we never got the promised jetpacks and the Martians were a bust, we do live in a time when genetic engineers use jellyfish genes to make mammals glow in the dark and nerds in southern Nevada kill people in Pakistan and Afghanistan with unmanned drones.  Anyone who time-traveled from the sixties would be astonished by our age, for its wonders and its horrors and its profound social changes. But science fiction is about the present more than the future, and we do have a new science fiction trilogy that’s perfect for this very moment.

Sacrificing the Young in the Arenas of Capital

“The Hunger Games,” Suzanne Collins’s bestselling young-adult novel and top-grossing blockbuster movie, is all about this very moment in so many ways. For those of you hiding out deep in the woods, it’s set in a dystopian future North America, a continent divided into downtrodden, fearful districts ruled by a decadent, luxurious oligarchy in the Capitol. Supposedly to punish the districts for an uprising 74 years ago, but really to provide Roman-style blood and circuses to intimidate and distract, the Capitol requires each district to provide two adolescent Tributes, drawn by lottery each year, to compete in the gladiatorial Hunger Games broadcast across the nation.

That these 24 youths battle each other to the death with one lone victor allowed to survive makes it like — and yet not exactly like — high school, that concentration camp for angst and competition into which we force our young. After all, even such real-life situations can be fatal: witness the gay Iowa teen who took his life only a few weeks ago after being outed and taunted by his peers, not to speak of the epidemic of other suicides by queer teens that Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” website, film and books aspire to reduce.

But really, in this moment, the cruelty of teens to teens is far from the most atrocious thing in the land. “The Hunger Games” reminds us of that.  Its Capitol is, of course, the land of the 1 percent, a sort of amalgamation of Fashion Week, Versailles and the KGB/CIA. Collins’s timely trilogy makes it clear that the 1 percent, having created a system of deeply embedded cruelty, should go, something highlighted by the surly defiance of heroine Katniss Everdeen — Annie Oakley, Tank Girl and Robin Hood all rolled into one – who refuses to be disposed of.

Now, in our world, gladiatorial entertainment and the disposability of the young are mostly separate things (except in football, boxing, hockey and other contact sports that regularly result in brain damage and sometimes even in death). But while the Capitol is portrayed as brutal for annually sacrificing 23 teenagers from the Districts, what about our own Capitol in the District of Columbia? It has a war or two on, if you hadn’t noticed.

In Iraq, 4,486 mostly young Americans died.  If you want to count Iraqis (which you should indeed want to do), the deaths of babies, children, grandmothers, young men and others total more than 106,000 by the most conservative count, hundreds of thousands by others. Even the lowest numbers represent enough kill to fill nearly 5,000 years of Hunger Games.

Then, of course, there are thousands more Americans who were so grievously wounded they might have died in previous conflicts, but are now surviving with severe brain damage, multiple missing limbs, or other profound mutilations. And don’t forget the trauma and mental illness that mostly goes unacknowledged and untreated or the far more devastating Iraqi version of the same. And never mind Afghanistan, with its own grim numbers and horrific consequences.

Our wartime carnage has been on a grand scale, but it hasn’t been on television in any meaningful way; it’s generally been semi-hidden by most of the American media and the government, which censored images of returning coffins, corpses, civilian casualties and anything else uncomfortable (though in our science-fiction era when every phone is potentially a video camera, the leakage has still been colossal). Most of us did a good job of being distracted by other things — including reality TV, of course.  The U.S. Ambassador and military commander in Afghanistan were furious not that our soldiers struck jokey poses with severed limbs, but that the Los Angeles Times dared to publish them last month. And those whistleblowers who took the effort to reveal the little men behind the throne are facing severe punishment.  Witness one Hunger-Games-style hero, Bradley Manning, the slight young soldier turned alleged leaker, long held in inhumane conditions and now facing a potential life sentence.

The Return of Debt Peonage

In “The Hunger Games,” kids in poor families take out extra chances in their District lottery — that is, extra chances to die — in return for extra food rations; in ours, poor kids enlist in the military to feed their families and maybe escape economic doom. Many are seduced by military recruiters who stalk them in high school with promises as slippery as those the slave trade uses to recruit poor young women for sex work abroad.

And then there’s another form of debt peonage that is far more widespread in our strange and ever-changing land: student loans. The young are constantly told that only a college education can give them a decent future. Then they’re told that, to pay for it, they need to go into debt — usually into five figures, sometimes well into six. And these debts are, in turn, governed by special laws that don’t allow you to declare bankruptcy — no matter what.  In other words, they are guaranteed to follow you all your life.

One of my close friends wept when her husband began to earn enough money to pay off her $45,000 loan, structured so that it looked like she would continue to pay interest on it for the rest of her life; not so dissimilar, that is, from the debts sharecroppers and workers in company towns used to incur.

In other words, we’re creating a new generation of debt peonage. And she’s not the worst case by far. Early in the Occupy Wall Street moment, she told me, someone arrived at Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan with markers and cardboard on which participants were to write their debt.  What shocked her was how many of the occupiers in their early twenties were already carrying huge debt burdens.

According to the website for Occupy Student Debt, 36,000,000 Americans have student debts.  These have increased more than fivefold since 1999, creating a debt load that’s approaching a trillion dollars, with students borrowing $96 billion more every year to pay for their educations. Two-thirds of college students find themselves in this trap nowadays. As commentator Malcolm Harris put it in N + 1 magazine:

Since 1978, the price of tuition at U.S. colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above inflation. To put that number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the U.S. economy, then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But… wages for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished. Unemployment has hit recent graduates especially hard, nearly doubling in the post-2007 recession. The result is that the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs it needs to escape debt.

About a third are already in default. You can only hope that this bubble will burst in a wildcat strike against student debt, and if we’re lucky, a move to force tuition lower and have a debt jubilee.

The rest of us, the 99 percent, need to remember that, when it comes to public education, the crisis has everything to do with slashed tax rates — to the wealthy and corporations in particular — over the last 30 years. We went into bondage so that they might be free. Getting an education to make your way out of poverty and maybe expand your mind is becoming another way of being trapped forever in poverty. For too many, there’s no way out of the hunger labyrinth.

The Labyrinths of Poverty

Which brings us to the hungriest in our 2012 real-life version of the Hunger Games: the poor. The wealthiest and most powerful nation the world has ever seen is full of hungry people. You know it, and you know why. In this vast, bountiful, food-producing, food-wasting nation, it’s a crisis of distribution, also known as economic inequality, described at last with clarity and force by the Occupy movement.

One of the sad and moving spectacles of camps like Occupy Oakland last year was the way they became de facto soup kitchens as the homeless and hungry came out of the shadows for the chance at a decent meal. Some of the camps had really dedicated chefs who cooked superbly.  They also had rudimentary medical clinics where the poor received the healthcare they couldn’t get anywhere else.

We are in a new era of desperation, when lots of people who were getting by these last several decades aren’t anymore. There are no jobs, or the jobs available pay so abysmally that workers can barely survive on them.

Of course, we do have one arena in which meals are guaranteed, and the population there keeps growing. Six million Americans live there, and it often does get gladiatorial inside. It’s called prison, and we have the highest percentage of prisoners per population in the world, higher than in the U.S.SR gulags under Stalin. Half of them are there for drug offenses, 80 percent of those for simple possession.

Which, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, hasn’t stopped the flow of drugs meant to numb the pain we’re so good at creating here.  We should create a measure for Gross National Suffering (GNS) before we even think about the Gross National Happiness they measure in Bhutan.

And once our prisoners get out, they’re a stigmatized caste, uniquely ill-suited to survival in this economy — speaking of hunger, debt, poverty, being branded for life and hopelessness. Like universities, prisons are profitable industries, though not for the human beings who are the raw material they process.  In this age, both systems seem increasingly like so many factories.

In the Shadow of 900 Tornados

But if you want to think about all the ways we’re dooming the young, there’s one that puts the others in the shade, a form of destruction that includes not just American youth, or human youth, but all species everywhere, from coral reefs to caribou. That’s climate change, of course.

Our failure to do anything adequate about it has rocketed us into the science-fiction world Bill McKibben so eloquently warned us about in his 2010 book “Eaarth.” His argument is that we’ve so altered the planet we live on that we might as well have landed on a new one (with an extra “a” in its name), more turbulent and far less hospitable than the beautiful Holocene one we trashed.

There were 160 tornados reported on March 2nd of this year. Remember that, in April of 2011, 900 tornadoes were ripping up interior United States, and this April was similarly volatile.  Remember the unprecedented wildfires, the catastrophic floods, the heat waves, the bizarrely hot North American January and other oddities? That’s science fiction of the scariest sort, and we’re in it. Or on it, on the crazy new planet we’ve made ourselves. Here in the U.S.A sector of Eaarth in the year 2012, 15,000 high-temperature records were broken in March alone, and summer is yet to come. A town in north-central Texas hit 111 degrees — in April! What turbulent planet is this?

One grain of good news: a lot of us, even in this country, finally seem to be of aware of the strangeness of the planet we’re now on. As the New York Times reported, a new survey “shows that a large majority of Americans believe that this year’s unusually warm winter, last year’s blistering summer, and some other weather disasters were probably made worse by global warming. And by a 2-to-1 margin, the public says the weather has been getting worse, rather than better, in recent years.”

If you want to talk about hunger, talk about the unprecedented flooding that’s turned Pakistan from one of the world’s breadbaskets into a net food-importing nation, with dire consequences for the agricultural poor. Talk about China’s many impending ecological disasters, its degraded soil, contaminated air and water, its many systems ready to collapse. There’s more disruption of food production to come, a lot more, and lots more hunger, too.

Around this point in science fiction books and even history books, a revolution seems necessary. The good news I have for you this May Day is that it’s underway.

Revolution 2012

2011 was the year of strange weather, but it was also the year of global uprisings, and they’re far from over. They erupted in Russia, Israel, Spain, Greece, Britain, much of the Arab-speaking world, parts of Africa and Chile, among other spots in Latin America (some of which got their revolutions underway earlier in the millennium). Uprisings have blossomed even in what the rest of the hungry world sees as the elite Capitol, the United States and much of the English-speaking world, from London to New Zealand.

Remember that revolution doesn’t look much like revolution used to. That might be the most retrograde aspect of the very violent “Hunger Games” trilogy, the way in which the author’s imagination travels along conventional or old-fashioned lines. There, violence is truly the arbitrator of power, along with cunning, whether in the ways the teenagers survive in the gladiatorial arena or the Capitol, or how both sides operate in conflicts between the Districts and the Capitol. In our own world, the state is very good at violence, whether in its wars overseas or in pepper-spraying and clubbing young demonstrators. You’ll notice, however, that neither the Iraqis, nor the Afghanis, nor the Occupiers were subjugated by these means.

Violence is not power, as Jonathan Schell makes strikingly clear in “The Unconquerable World,” it’s what the state uses when we are not otherwise under control. In addition, when we speak of “nonviolence” as an alternative to violence, we can’t help but underestimate our own power.  That word, unfortunately, sounds like it’s describing an absence, a polite refraining from action, when what’s at stake — as demonstrators around the world proved last year — is a force to be reckoned with; so call it “people power” instead.

When we come together as civil society to exercise this power, regimes tremble and history is made. Not instantly and not exactly according to plan, but who ever expected that?

Still, many regimes have been toppled by this power, and the capacity to do so is ours in the present.  As Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan point out in their recent “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict“, since 1900 people-power campaigns have been successful in achieving regime change more than twice as often as violent campaigns.

It’s May Day, a worldwide General Strike has been called, and last week tiny Occupy Norman (Oklahoma) announced that it “had won a major battle”: their city is moving all its money out of Bank of America into a local bank. Last fall’s Move Your Money campaign included city money from the outset and quiet victories like this could begin to reshape our economic landscape. Activism in the streets is so intimidating that next month’s G8 Summit scheduled for Chicago will hole up at Camp David instead.

Meanwhile last week, both the Wells Fargo and General Electric shareholders’ meetings were under siege from Occupy activists.  The Wells Fargo meeting and protests took place in San Francisco, and afterward an arrested friend of mine posted this on Facebook: “I forgot to mention that Max gave me the Hunger Games salute in jail today. It was awesome.”

In this way do fiction and reality meld in misery and triumph as, this very day, janitors in California go out on strike and even Golden Gate Bridge workers will be protesting. May Day actions are planned across the globe.

Still alive and kicking, Occupy is chipping away in a thousand places at the status quo. 350.org, the little organization that defeated the Keystone XL Pipeline (so far), is holding a global Climate Impacts Day on May 5th and plans to take on the petroleum industry in its next round of actions.

Of course, this is only a beginning, and the banking and oil companies, the 1 percent, and the prison and education rackets are more than capable of pushing back.  So we need one more tool in our arsenal, and that’s a picture of what we want, of what a better world looks like. McKibben’s “Eaarth” and “Deep Economy” offer such a picture, as does William Morris’s “News from Nowhere,” even 120-odd years later, but we won’t get that from “The Hunger Games,” which, for all its thrilling, subversive and surly delights, is all dystopia all the way home. We may still get it, however, on our stranger-than-fiction planet.

May Day is a day of liberation — a day to be seized and celebrated, a day to remember who was shot down on it and who fought for it.  It’s a day to join those who fought and fight for liberation, to imagine what its most delicious and profound possibilities might look like.

So skip work, flip a bird at the Capitol, commit your deepest love and solidarity to the young whose lives are being gambled away, feed the hungry, take a long look at how beautiful our planet still is, find your way into solidarity and people power, and dream big about other futures. Resistance is one of your obligations, but it’s also a pleasure and a way of stealing back hope.

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