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At 21, I applied for and was accepted into the Särskilda operationsgruppen – the Swedish Special Operations Task Group, or SOG for short. It was the equivalent of the Special Forces in the US military – very much like the Green Berets.
A week after I got my notice, I shipped out to the base at Linköping, a small city two hours away from Stockholm – and the headquarters for the Special Forces division.
I’d done poorly in school as a kid, but it was because I’d been bored and unchallenged. Special Forces piled on new challenges left and right.
I underwent intensive battleground training above and beyond what I’d received as a regular soldier.
I excelled in marksmanship and trained as a sniper.
I learned hand-to-hand combat and became one of the Special Forces’ best unarmed combatants.
I took leadership classes and learned how to command others in combat situations.
And I was required to study two foreign languages. I chose English and Arabic.
I had flunked all of my English classes in school, but I’d grown up watching American movies in English, so I had a grasp of the basics. I picked it up quickly once I applied myself. I chose American English because I wanted to sound like Tom Cruise or Vin Diesel, not Daniel Craig or Jason Statham.
With the ongoing global War on Terror, Arabic seemed like a good bet, so I chose it as my second language.
Within two years, I became fluent in English with very little trace of a Swedish accent. I also became proficient in both reading and speaking Arabic.
At the time, Sweden wasn’t a member of NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), but our military still worked closely with the US and NATO.
That’s how I got sent to Afghanistan.
There were two distinct phases to the war in Afghanistan. One was the initial US invasion after 9/11, with the goal to remove the Taliban from power and eradicate Al-Qaeda. That phase was called Operation Enduring Freedom, and it lasted until December 31, 2014.
Then came Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, which was supposed to train the Afghan army to fight against the Taliban.
I was deployed to Afghanistan during this second phase.
‘Officially,’ it was because I knew Arabic… but only a small percentage of Afghans speak Arabic. The two most common languages are Dari Persian and Pashto.
‘Officially,’ Sweden was there to train the Afghan army.
Unofficially, our Special Forces unit did whatever the Americans and NATO needed us to.
If that meant fighting the Taliban and other terrorists in the region, then we fought.
We ended up fighting a lot.
I spent my entire deployment at Bagram Airfield – the US military’s biggest base, about 25 miles north of the capital, Kabul.
Three incredibly important things happened while I was in Afghanistan.
The first was a near-tragedy…
The second was a tragedy…
And the third was the best thing that had ever happened to me.
But it eventually turned into a tragedy, too.
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The near-tragedy occurred in the first two weeks of my deployment.
It followed a horrific truck bombing by the Taliban in Kabul. Ten people were killed, hundreds were wounded, and the explosion severely damaged over 50 homes and apartment buildings.
