Yale University’s Emma Sky, director of the Maurice R. Greenberg World Fellows Program and a senior fellow at the Jackson Institute, interviewed Miska, whom she first met when they were both in Iraq in 2007. She is also among the people who encouraged him to chronicle his experience helping interpreters come to the United States as refugees in a book.

“Why should Americans care about the fate of those who interpreted for U.S. troops?” asked Sky.

“We serve by an ethos of leave nobody behind, and we tend to think of that as those of us in uniform,” answered Miska of the U.S. military. However, he pointed out, interpreters “are men and women who go on patrol with us every day,” and do so under the threat of death, of kidnappings for ransom, and of harm coming to their families. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. enemies have used violence against interpreters “to send a message to anyone who would think about working alongside us,” said Miska. “We don’t want to violate this ethos that the military inculcated in us.”

Who are these interpreters, Sky asked Miska, and why do they put themselves and their families at risk to help the U.S.?

They have a variety of motives, and those motives have changed and evolved over the past 20 years, said Miska. In the early days, he speculated, “hope was a real driving factor.” For example, a man Miska calls Ronnie, whose story is detailed in Baghdad Underground Railroad, became an interpreter as a teenager just out of high school looking to help renew Iraq post-Saddam Hussein. As the job got increasingly risky, though, he stayed on in order to survive. “Once you’ve committed,” said Miska, “it’s hard to get away from that and to hide that from the nefarious actors who are out there.”

In 2007, Ronnie got approved for a Special Immigrant Visa; at the time, there were only 500 such Visas available for Afghan and Iraqi interpreters annually, so Miska explained, it “felt like winning the lottery.” Over the past two decades, thanks to Special Immigrant Visas, 18,000 interpreters have arrived in the U.S. with 45,000 family members; more than 18,000 applicants and 70,000 family members remain in Afghanistan waiting to come.

Their situation is extremely precarious. “These are people the Taliban are mercilessly hunting,” said Miska.

The post-9/11 wars have taken an enormous toll on the military, said Sky, pointing to the 7,036 American service members who have been killed to date, but also that “we’ve been fighting without winning for 20 years,” with goalposts that kept moving. The costs to Afghanistan and Iraq have been even higher. Are Miska and his partners in helping interpreters driven “by guilt, by a type of penance… because this is something we could actually do and do right?” she asked.

Miska said there are many reasons to protect interpreters, including assisting U.S. troops and counterterrorism investigators around the world, who need local allies that will trust them. “There might be some guilt in there; that’s absolutely true,” he added. “But it’s guilt because we’re being precluded from trying to honor something that we really believe in,” he said, returning to his point about the military’s “no one left behind” ethos.

Turning to Sky, who is British, Miska said that there’s a long, global history of protecting allies; after the American Revolution, for example, the British evacuated between 60,000 and 70,000 Loyalists to Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and London.

What would the equivalent of that action be right now, asked Sky: What is Miska asking from President Biden and his administration?

Miska said that the interpreters and their families in Afghanistan who have applied for Special Immigrant Visas need to be evacuated to Guam, or some other safe third territory—preferably under U.S. jurisdiction—as quickly as possible, before U.S. troops fully withdraw. Government resettlement agencies—which have worked at a similar scale after wars in Vietnam and Kosovo, for instance—need more support to do so. “It won’t be easy,” he said.

The difficulties don’t end when interpreters are able to ultimately arrive in the U.S. Challenges range from enrolling children in school to adjusting to a culture of paper plates. (Miska’s mother, who sponsored a family, would find dinner plates and silverware in the trash due to a misunderstanding about which place settings were indeed disposable.)

Miska called on veterans and civilians alike to do whatever they can to help refugee interpreters, from becoming sponsors to getting involved with organizations like Miry’s List in Los Angeles, No One Left Behind, and the International Refugee Assistance Project. For veterans, specifically, he advised that they check in with their interpreters, and contact their representatives in Congress for help because unlike most issues that have become politically polarizing, assisting interpreters is one of the precious few issues that both parties agree on.

The post Leaving No One Behind—Interpreters Included appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’d hoped to avoid ground combat by enlisting in the Navy, but within nine months of joining, I found myself in Vietnam.

During those long 13 months at war, the one good thing was the circle of friends I made, first as a hospital corpsman in an aid station in the jungle, and then onboard the hospital ship Repose.

The first gay man I met was at the aid station located in Dong Ha near the DMZ. His name was Matt, and we laughed when we found we both loved the movie The Group, based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Mary McCarthy. The story of the friendship of a group of Vassar College women who deal together with discrimination, jobs, and men, The Group also had a secret lesbian character who gave us an idea. Matt introduced me to a buddy of his, Joe, and together we bonded like the girls of The Group, and for the same reasons. We added more members who also loved the name—ultimately seven in all—and so we called ourselves “The Group.”

We were noticed, and maybe recognized as gay, but no one bothered us. I know some of our officers knew about us. It didn’t matter. We were in a war zone, and as long as we did our jobs, what the hell?

I had a difficult upbringing. I was born in a field on a farm in California’s Salinas Valley, and my father beat me from the time I was 7 years old. My mother tried to protect me, but one day my father nearly killed me by beating me with a pipe. He left, at my mother’s insistence, abandoning her to raise three children by herself. The last time I saw my father, he said, “I know what you are. I never loved you. I hate you.”

I hated the war, but suddenly because of the Navy, I had a place where I belonged. A family called The Group to share a life with.

Then in mid-December 1969, back stateside and stationed at the Quantico Marine Corp Base, the bottom fell out. I was summoned by the commanding officer of the Marines, who directed me to report to OSI, the Office of Special Investigation. I sat in a small room, where I waited for what seemed like hours. Finally, a man dressed in civilian clothes came in and introduced himself as a special agent of the OSI. He said allegations had been made against me.

I knew immediately what this was about. It was my secret, and it’d been found out.

“What allegations?” I asked anyway.

“You being a faggot,” he said.

I’d been turned in by a man called Anonymous. My military career ended even as I was coming to the very end of my enlistment. My year of service in a war zone counted for nothing. My passion for saving the lives of my fellow servicemen counted for less.

The OSI man said he wanted names and ranks of other homos I knew, and that I was going to have to submit to more detailed questioning by other agents.

“You will report back here to my office at 0900 tomorrow. Do you understand?”

A shipmate in Vietnam, David Monarch, had been arrested for being gay and removed from the ship. A very private man who’d kept to himself, he wasn’t part of The Group. But we all found out that he’d been court-martialed and sentenced to prison. Just months before OSI called me in, I’d gotten word that David had died at Leavenworth Federal Prison. I never learned how and why, but in 1960s America, we gay men deserved to die, according to popular thinking. So, who was going to investigate the fate of a queer Black man behind bars?

I was filled with terror at the prospect of dying like David.

I might as well die now, I thought. On my own terms.

Hours before I was supposed to return to the OSI office, I went to the small laboratory, where I worked as a medical technician. The bottles and beakers looked frightening in the thin 2 a.m. light.

Removing a Bunsen burner from the gas valve, I used the attached tubing to fill up a large plastic bag, which I then taped securely around my neck.

I shut my eyes. Was it the war? Was it the harassment for being gay? I didn’t know. All I knew was that I hated being gay and that I felt like I didn’t deserve to live.

As the gas replaced the oxygen in my system, my head started spinning, and I heard squeaky noises inside my skull. But then I realized I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to give into them. I pulled the plug on the gas pipe, tore off the bag, and sat up.

After I reported my suicide attempt to the psychiatrist in my clinic, that stopped the legal proceedings in their tracks. Even the U.S. Navy wasn’t so cruel as to deny treatment to someone endangering his life.

I was first treated with strong psychotropic drugs and kept in a padded cell to protect the other patients from the “homosexual.” Later, I was released into the general population but kept on drugs with regular interviews and discussions with a military psychologist, all to treat my homosexuality rather than the PTSD I’d suffered because of the war, which remained undiagnosed. I spent nine weeks in the hospital.

Ultimately, it was decided that I must be discharged. A military medical board promised me a General Discharge under Honorable conditions—but it was qualified. On my Military Separation Paper DD214 were three codes: #265, unsuitability because of a character disorder; #256, admission of being a homosexual, acceptance of discharge in lieu of board action and punishment; and a re-enlistment code of RE4, unsuitable for military service.

This is known as a “bad paper discharge.” Other codes tell stories of drug use/sales, anger/aggression toward others, drunk driving, and any number of crimes or misdeeds. And there are other types of discharges, too, including Dishonorable and Bad Conduct Discharges.

These codes, and your DD214 form, follow you for the rest of your life. Employers can demand to see the form, for government jobs, especially; it indicates your job worthiness. The Veterans Administration will use it to see if you qualify for benefits, such as medical and retirement pay. Some of these General or even Dishonorable designations are the result of PTSD or traumatic brain injury; others are the result of the same mistakes a civilian young person may make, but in the civilian world there’s a chance they’ll forgive and forget these errors of youth. The DD214 is always the same and never changes. The codes give a picture of a person that is as one-dimensional as the ink on the paper.

A bad paper discharge can lead to higher rates of unemployment, homelessness, and suicide. For gay and lesbian people, the discharge has designations showing you as a criminal for many decades.

After getting out, I tried for a job at a city agency in Los Angeles. They refused to hire me after seeing the character flaw designation on my DD214. Later, I applied at Pacific Bell Telephone to become a janitor. They didn’t check my discharge; it wasn’t necessary for someone being hired to clean toilets.

On my discharge day, in February 1970, I went to Arlington National Cemetery to visit the grave of a man I loved. Matt had died a hero in my arms, the last week I was in Vietnam. I remembered how we had decided to create a tribe of our own. The other men, Matt said, had their support system all laid out for them. Surrounded by killing, we gay men needed to protect our minds, and strengthen one another.

As I stood at Matt’s headstone, rivulets of tears ran down my cheeks.

I was never religious. But I looked to the sky and hoped there was a God and that my Matt was with Him. I spoke the words I had said that moment when he died: “I wish we could have been lovers. I love you, man. I love you.”

Over the past 50 years, I have had many battles with the PTSD I suffer because of my war experiences, but I have also fought hard for the rights of Matt and other men and women like me.

It was only after I retired, though, that I began to think about correcting the injustice of my own discharge.

In 2016, I was volunteering at the Los Angeles County Department of Veterans Affairs, where I befriended the chief deputy director. She heard my story and helped me use her office’s resources to start my petition for a change to my discharge. It took four years, the help of a young gay psychologist at the VA Hospital and a high-powered legal team, and it changed my life. On June 3, 2019, my DD214 was administratively reissued to show a full and unqualified Honorable Discharge.

I now belong to veterans’ organizations where Afghanistan and Iraq veterans meet. They have struggles from their wars, and I suspect some have bad paper discharges. I show them that they can have a life—a long life—after service. They are my family now, my Group.

The post The Navy Gave a Gay Man a Home—And a ‘Bad Paper’ Discharge That Haunted Him for Decades appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Why do I still carry so much pain from that war? I have been told over 100 times: “Put it behind you and move on with your life.” But Vietnam hangs onto my innermost thoughts like a newborn to its mother’s warmth.

The friends I left behind wouldn’t want me to be in this bad state of mind. They would want me to cherish life. Sometimes I think: Why didn’t I die with them? They are the lucky ones. They are at peace now. I wonder if I will ever know what it is like to be truly at peace.

The clinical name for what I’m struggling with is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an anxiety disorder where the “fight-or-flight” responses triggered by a terrifying event can’t be turned off.

PTSD reminds me of an evil thief who tries to steal everything from you—your life, your family, and your mind. It won’t let you get close to people. It eats you alive from the inside out. PTSD has no mercy and its only goal is to devour your mind, body, and spirit. It’s a beast that never sleeps.

The first 13 years after I returned from the war were tough. My first wife left me after we lost our second child to miscarriage; I think the miscarriages might have been related to my exposure to Agent Orange. I remarried four years later. My second wife and I had two beautiful children together, but she left me when they were 4 and 6. I wanted love and yet, I pushed it away. It was hard for me to show my emotions. My heart couldn’t take losing anymore, so I built a wall around my feelings.

I could go on and on about the things that went wrong after I came back from Vietnam, but that was nothing compared to what happened over Memorial Day in 1983. That is always a hard time for me, and in 1983—after years of just barely holding it together—I snapped. I was back in Vietnam. I could smell gunpowder and blood.

Every day when I wake up, the PTSD monster says, Just stay in bed. Don’t get up. I finally listened to the monster. I could not get out of bed. I became dead to the world. I shut down.
My schedule for nine months was: Wake up at 7:30 a.m. Take a hot shower for my crippling arthritis. Make a bowl of ramen soup and eat it. I was back in bed by 9:00 a.m., and I’d stay there until 7:30 a.m. the following morning, only to repeat the routine once again.

At the end of the ninth month, my brother knocked on my bedroom door. I had just finished my soup, and was back in bed and about to nod off. He insisted on taking me to the Veterans Affairs hospital in West Los Angeles. The next day, I was admitted to the VA hospital for severe PTSD.

Growing up in the Antelope Valley north of L.A., I wanted to be a priest. But at 17, I decided instead to serve my country. I joined the Marine Corps. In December 1968, I went to boot camp at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego. The drill instructors really knew how to make men out of boys! Every day, we did hundreds of brutal squat thrusts, sit-ups, chin-ups, and pull-ups. There was lots of running, going through the obstacle course, and marching in formation.

The drill instructors called us “maggots” “pukes,” “scum bags,” “slimy worms.” And they always put motherf—– in front of everything. The verbal abuse was at full volume, from the time we woke up until we went to sleep.

Next I went through intense combat training at Camp Pendleton, California. That’s where they teach you tactical field maneuvers, weapons training, how to kill, how to survive, and—you guessed it—more running, physical training, marching in formation, and of course, verbal abuse.

They transformed us into “lean, mean fighting machines.” I became part of a polished, synchronized team. Your life depends on what they teach you in the classroom and out in the field. We were trained in a replica Vietnamese “village” with about six or seven palm huts, a fenced animal pen, a water well, an ox cart, and large woven baskets that contained rice and/or weapons. We were made aware of the areas of possible booby-traps and the fact that the enemy lurked on the perimeter of the “village.” They actually had us in Vietnam before we even left the States.

At the end of our training, we were told that we were prepared to enter the battlefield. That some of us might not come back—and that some of us might come back and wish we hadn’t.

When we landed in Vietnam and the stewardess opened the door of the plane, I was blasted with the largest dose of high-humidity heat that I have ever experienced in my life!

Rick Martinez, 18, in Vietnam (1969)

By the time I hit the tarmac, I was drenched in sweat. I smelt a new smell, like nothing I had ever smelled before. It was a combination of campfires, diesel fuel, jet fuel, sweaty Marines, the stewardess’ perfume, a jungle smell, gunpowder, and burning rubber … Rubber? My boots? The concrete tarmac at that hour was about 130 degrees. Enough to literally fry an egg! I thought: This is going to be my home for the next 365 days?

After I had finished my Marine Corp training, I thought I was prepared for the Vietnam War. Looking back on that experience now, nothing could have prepared me for the death and destruction of that insane war. I saw more death than I could have ever imagined.

I saw a young boy, about 12 years old, on a bike toss a grenade into a moving jeep, killing a young officer and his driver. It happened right in front of my truck, but I could not stop. I was transporting ammunition, and the attack could have been an ambush for my cargo.

I lost a friend who died in my arms. We were in a firefight, and I was praying for him to live. But then the flares went off overhead, and I saw blood coming out of his eyes, nose, and ears. I saw where his skull was cracked. I realized if he lived, he would be a vegetable … And I found myself praying for him to die.

Of all the painful things I had to deal with in therapy, watching my friend die is up there at the top of the list. The camaraderie in a combat zone is stronger than even blood ties.

Once, while on a search-and-destroy mission, we had unknowingly set up our camp right on top of a Viet Cong underground tunnel complex. The enemy kept popping up in the middle of the night shooting AK-47 rounds into our camp and bunkers. After meticulously searching the area for two days, we finally found the trap doors that led down into the tunnel complex.

Someone had to go in and take care of business and I was small enough to fit into the two-foot wide trap doors. I became a “tunnel rat,” with a flashlight in my left hand, and a .45 in my right. My goal was to search and destroy, and to clear the tunnel.

Those tunnel complexes were heavily booby-trapped and designed to take out intruders. For every 10 military dogs that got sent into the tunnels, an average of only two survived. It was a low survival rate for soldiers, also.

When I went in, my movements were very slow. My eyes were trying to adjust to the darkness; my ears seemed to be able to hear the sand move under my body. My hearing seemed to stretch out into the darkness. I could hear myself breathing and thought, I’m too loud. As I moved forward, feeling with my hands the sides, the top, and the floor, I thought, Stay calm, careful. Be ready for anything. God, please help me.

There were trip wires and little grass mats covered by sand to conceal bunches of sharp bamboo sticks that had been dipped in poison. But they didn’t get me—I made it out.

I felt hands patting me on the back as we knelt down to examine the treasures I had brought up—some old, worn maps; three Chicom grenades; a M1 carbine rifle. After that day, everyone (including the officers) called me “Snake.”

It was the third tunnel I entered later that would haunt me the most. It had enemy inside. The three Viet Cong decided to escape through another exit and perish at the hands of my fellow Marines instead of confronting me—why they chose to do this is a question I can never answer. I acknowledge it as Divine Intervention.

It is a miracle that I made it out of that insane war.

When I was at the VA hospital in 1984, part of my treatment was exposure therapy where you relive a painful experience to get control over your feelings about the trauma. In “flooding,” you talk about a lot of bad memories at once. It’s called flooding for a reason: the tears.

Therapy triggered so many memories and opened up my mind like a river. The sight of dead Viet Cong soldiers, especially the children and elderly, kept coming back to me. The Viet Cong child soldiers (some as young as 12) and the grandma and grandpa soldiers made it really hard for me to put the Vietnam War behind me. How can you really justify war? It was a no-win war for them and for us. They fought for a cause that they thought was right, and so did we. They fought with courage and tenacity, just like us.

Talking about what happened in Vietnam took me right back there. The adrenaline would kick in, and I’d go into combat mode. I felt locked up with anxiety and all these emotions. Then, instead of sleeping around the clock, I hardly ever slept.

Slowly, I started to talk with other patients, the therapists, and nurses. I was discharged from the hospital after three months of treatment.

But Vietnam remained at the surface. Once I was on the outside again, I was really afraid. Now all my issues weren’t buried and repressed. The flashbacks were just as intense as the experience itself. I was alone in a world that did not seem to care about or understand me as a Vietnam veteran.

I still had a hard time sleeping. I still felt extremely anxious in crowds. I had zero tolerance for listening to people talk—whatever they said seemed so unnecessary and unimportant. I completely shut myself off from my family, my (few) friends, and society. I was out of sync with everyone. Thoughts of suicide began to whirl about in my mind. I had no hope of ever living a productive life again.

On my way back to the States, I saw a jacket—I think it was in a shop at the Da Nang Airport. On the back of the jacket was a map of Vietnam and it said: “When I die, I am surely going to heaven because I served my time in hell.” I bought the jacket.

Vietnam was hell, but it turned out I had to fight in another war. In 1984, I headed into the war within.

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