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PART IV
16
Lars
Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan
6 Years Ago
My Special Forces unit was standing in a windowless briefing room, surrounded by Special Forces guys from five other countries, when Gunnar whispered to me in Swedish. We often spoke in our native tongue when we wanted to keep it between us.
Anybody who knows Spanish, Italian, or French can get the gist of something said in one of the other languages. And everybody at Bagram understood English.
But Swedish?
It was like our own private code.
“Hej bror, vad fan tror du att det här handlar om?”
Hey, brother – what the fuck do you think this is all about?
“Ingen aning,” I replied.
No idea.
Gunnar was a fellow Special Forces member and the most unusual guy I’d met in the military. At 6’2” and 240 pounds, he was powerfully built – but he had the friendliest, most easy-going personality of anyone I knew. There was always a smile on his bushy-bearded face.
Maybe it was all the weed. He’d smoked out frequently when we were stationed back in Sweden, and he’d continued his habit in Afghanistan.
Despite his love for the herb, Gunnar was brilliant. He’d been a computer hacker as a teenager and had broken into several major corporations’ databases just for fun. I had a hard time wrapping my head around it: a 6’2”, burly computer nerd. But apparently, it was the truth.
When he was 18, he hacked the Swedish equivalent of the Pentagon and got caught. They gave him two choices: a criminal trial and jail time… or he could go to work for the military. He chose the latter.
The thing was, Gunnar was an anti-establishment type through and through. He hated being forced to hack – especially by The Man. When he intentionally failed out of the military’s computer counter-measures training program, they threatened him with placement in the infantry. He called their bluff and immediately got shipped off to boot camp.
Weirdly enough, Gunnar took to being a soldier like a duck to water. After getting into superb physical shape, he eventually tried out for Special Forces and made it in.
He studied Pashto as one of his languages when he joined Special Forces.
I asked him ‘why’ once.
“Cuz it sounds cool,” he told me.
That was reason enough for Gunnar.
Pashto was one of Afghanistan’s most widely used languages, which was the ‘official’ reason why he got sent there. Like me, the unofficial reason was that he was exceptionally good in a firefight.
As soon as we arrived at Bagram, Gunnar started talking to the locals who did the support roles on base: kitchen staff, groundskeepers, janitors. Within a few days, he’d gotten hooked up with a steady supply of what he called bra grajer – Swedish for the ‘good stuff.’
I warned him repeatedly to knock that shit off. Recreational marijuana use was illegal in Sweden and was even more strictly prohibited in the Swedish military.
It was a thousand times worse in Afghanistan. They gave the death penalty to any Afghan caught selling or cultivating weed, so I was pretty sure the government wouldn’t take kindly to foreign nationals possessing it, either.
But Gunnar ignored me.
“A lot of botanists believe Afghanistan is where cannabis originally came from,” he said earnestly, as though that would keep him out of trouble if he got caught.
That was the thing about Gunnar that was both exasperating and admirable: he was going to do whatever he wanted, and nobody would ever be able to talk him out of it. But he’d still be cheerful and friendly to you the entire time, no matter how much he disagreed with you.
