Taking stock of shock

What happens to the mind – individual and collective – when attacked? How does the human psyche react to surprise, violent assault? What’s happened in our heads in the 54 weeks since 9/11/01?

Like all questions about mind, these require a measure of “dissociation,” of standing outside one’s own normal awareness. Air travel can help. I’m up here now, five miles high bound from Spain to Maine via Washington, D.C. The fuselage is full of strangers, likewise in limbo and lodged cheek-by-jowl in knee-cramping indignity.

Flying sits us close together, but it sets our minds apart. Nothing’s normal. Everything, despite Delta Airlines’ best efforts, is inherently transient and (since 9-11) insecure. Duly frisked and scanned, we endure the dissociated hours. Today’s choice of distraction is between the usual jet engine white noise, a movie called “Spiderman” about an arachnid-enhanced adolescent, and (my choice) “Honky-Tonkin’ with the Ladies” on one of the in-flight soundtrack channels.

These women can flat-out sing! There’s Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette (with whom I once sang “Johnnie B. Goode” onstage in Culpepper, Va., while awaiting the return to sobriety of then-hubby George Jones) … and a newcomer named (more trendy than country) Grey De Lisle. Her big song, “Homewrecker,” seems oddly domestic in this transatlantic limbo between homes. It reminds me, however, of another moment of dissociation (and shock) when, on March 23, 2001, I was wrecked – robbed, car-jacked, and pistol-whipped – by the Taliban.

What happened to my mind that day? What parallels could there be for post-9-11 America?

Violence struck, as on 9-11, when least expected. I was working with displaced Afghans for one of America’s foremost NGOs (non-governmental organizations). My title: consulting anthropologist. But what’s interesting about that day is more psychological than anthropological, more about mind than culture.

Our white Toyota Land Cruiser contained two Afghans (driver and senior adviser), the NGO’s country director (a Wisconsin Scandinavian known here as Sven), and myself (sitting shotgun without a gun). We’d set forth from Peshawar, Pakistan, that morning and zigzagged up the Khyber Pass in the now infamous Tribal Areas, current home of al-Qaida renegades and maybe Osama bin Laden. We’d crossed the border post at Torkham and entered Afghanistan with our Taliban visas stamped by a bored, black turbaned, heavily armed 17- year-old. We’d stopped for tea at the NGO outpost in Jalalabad. The midday sun lulled me half-asleep as we continued, at Taliban invitation, on the road to Kabul. Our mission: To conclude agreements whereby the NGO would continue saving lives – no matter what the regime – in Afghanistan.

Seat belts are scorned in Afghanistan and the libertarian part of me relishes that old-fashioned freedom. Even so, I’d fastened my buckle to keep from getting jounced by the potholes. And, stupidly, I’d laid my travel pouch with passport and money on the seat beside me. I’d closed my eyes and gone groggy from all the bouncing around in low gear. And I heard the other car before I saw it.

More country than trendy, the Taliban favored four door pick-up trucks whose cargo beds were usually crammed with zealous yahoos. This red Datsun had only three occupants, but all were bearded and turbaned and armed. It pulled alongside, swerved in front, and forced us to stop. “Good,” I remember thinking drowsily, “an escort, a Taliban honor guard.”

Guess again. My worst ever wake-up call consisted of screamed threats and curses whose message, in GP rated language, was “Get out or else.” One man yanked my door open, hauled on my arm, and yelled in my face. “Take it easy,” I said, to no effect, while fumbling with the seatbelt. While I fumbled, he started to hammer – with his pistol against my upper arm, shoulder and neck. As I turned to fend him off, he stopped hammering, screamed louder than ever, cocked the pistol and put it to my head.

My mind shifted into a sort of detached slow motion. Fingers worked of their own accord, and the seat belt opened. Legs got me from car to roadside where my NGO companions were already huddled. We stood there, paralyzed, while the car-jackers spun both vehicles around and disappeared back towards Jalalabad. Dust settled, and silence spread. I’ve never felt more vacant: neither afraid nor relieved, but simply empty. Sven, our leader, broke the spell. “All OK?” he said.

Oddly, I did feel OK in physical terms. The pistol blows hadn’t hurt when inflicted and never would, despite blue marks that lasted ten days. But my mind seemed blank and far away. If anywhere, it was on the front seat of our stolen Land Cruiser with that travel pouch full of $2,500 and (much worse) my passport. I told Sven who grinned. “Think you’ve got problems?” he said. “My heart pills are in the back seat. I have to take one every 12 hours. If we don’t get back to Peshawar this evening, I’m a goner. Let’s go.”

We hitched a ride back to Jalalabad, commandeered another NGO Land Cruiser, and surged between potholes towards the Pakistan border. By now Sven was in total charge, and I trusted him. I had no choice: My passport and money were gone – vanished like the WTC six months later – and my mind, by now completely detached, could only sit back and observe. Somebody mentioned my passport again. “Don’t worry,” said Sven. “We’ll get him across. We’ve got to. I have a plan. Trust me.”

Moment of Truth came at dusk. The enormous, dark green, sheet metal gate at the border was chained and padlocked – with the lock on the Pakistani side. Sven took the two Afghans and headed for the barbed wire, all three passports held aloft. “It may take a while,” Sven said before leaving, “but you stay here in the car. We’ll find someone to open the gate. We’ll get you across. Trust me.”

I looked at the senior Afghan, a man of singular gravitas. “Trust in God,” he said.

It took my friends (or perhaps God) 45 minutes, but I was gotten safely across. And a six-man detachment of the Khyber Rifles took us – a real escort this time – back down the pass to Peshawar. My mind clicked back into place. I went to bed and read myself asleep with Victorian poetry. There’ve been no noticeable after-effects. Perhaps I’m too country for the trendiness of “post-traumatic stress syndrome.”

But there’s no doubt that my mind went blank at the moment of attack. And that, for the next few hours, I felt dissociated, more observer than participant. And – most uncharacteristic of all – that I passively accepted Sven’s decisions, never once questioning them, how suspending completely the process of critical. Sven’s decisions were good ones; they got us back. But if they hadn’t been good – here’s what scares me – I still would have gone along uncritically.

Now Delta No. 95 is about to land in New York. So much for transatlantic limbo. It’s time for tarmac realities, and three weeks from now I’ll be in Bangor. What sort of American national mind will exist along the way?

A year ago our country suffered its own worst ever wake-up call. As with me on the road to Kabul, Americans rallied round their leader and supported him without question. We were in shock. Critical thinking was, for a time, suspended.

Are we still in shock as a nation? Given the extreme, reckless, unilateralist policies on which our leadership has embarked, are we going to continue following with blank minds? Are we going to trust rather than question?

Or have our minds clicked back into place? Are we critical thinkers again? Never in our national experience has critical thinking been more important.

Dr. Whitney Azoy, a cultural anthropologist and former U.S. diplomat in Kabul, has worked for 30 years with Afghanistan and the Muslim world. He was last in Afghanistan in May on a U.S. government contract.