Behind the smile, it was not difficult to discover the deep ambivalence they harbored about leaving their family behind. Azizi’s eyes glazed over as he shared his father’s parting words last week: “Take care of yourself, take care of your wife. God bless you.”
Azizi said he didn’t realize – nobody realized, he said – that when he left the country, it was on the brink of regime change. When his plane took off, Afghanistan had a government. When he arrived in California on Thursday, it was a mess. Three days later, when he settled in his new home in Martinez, the Taliban – the enemy he had helped fight for three years – had declared victory.
I asked Azizi if he was having trouble separating his old life from his new life and how much he thought about his three years serving with US troops.
He told of a shooting that seems like a poignant statement about the difficulties of the US war in Afghanistan. In July 2019, Azizi traveled to an Afghan army base in Uruzgan province, southwest of Kabul. He was interpreting for American troops when a barrage of bullets mortally wounded two American soldiers. An Afghan army soldier at the base had it aimed at the Americans, according to a report by the Stars and Stripes newspaper, which identified the two fallen American soldiers as Brandon Jay Kreischer, 20, and Michael Isaiah Nance, 24.
“I was new to the job,” Azizi said. “It was a very difficult time.”
Ever since he became a military interpreter in 2018, Azizi said he felt like an outspoken man. The job came with constant reminders of its dangers. A fellow interpreter was killed in action. Another was tracked down and killed in front of his family while on leave. Two others were killed near their homes, one beheaded with a knife.
“Every minute and second I was scared,” Azizi told me.
His flight to the United States last week landed in Washington, DC, and it wasn’t until he arrived at his hotel, a Holiday Inn in Virginia, that he said he finally felt safe.
