July 13, 2006

Redneck Philosopher

By Joshua Kors

Talk with James Downen for a good 15 minutes, and it's unclear whether the man should be writing Kenny Rogers' lyrics or George Bush's foreign policy. Downen apologizes for delaying his interview, but lately, he says, he's been as busy as “a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.” Anyway, he says, describing his years of service as a military photographer is easy: “I'm just a doofus with a camera” living in a “rinky-dink redneck town.”

But as Downen's comments slide from the personal to the political, it becomes increasingly difficult to dismiss him so easily. If the Sergeant First Class insists on being labeled a “redneck,” he is then the greatest redneck philosopher this side of the Mississippi, and his views on poverty, religious extremism and the geopolitics of oil prove remarkably nuanced, a worldview clearly devised on his own and fed by years of first-hand experience in Central America, Europe and the Middle East.

The 37-year-old sergeant began gathering that experience as a child, a military brat who followed his father to northern Europe for his service in Belgium. (“My father's a wicked man,” says Downen. “God, I love him.”) Later Downen himself served in Germany and Saudi Arabia, trained with the 82nd Airborne in Panama, and did duty with the army reserves in Bosnia and Kosovo, where he worked as a combat photographer.

“When you've been to so many countries, it broadens your view of the world. You experience what people are like.” And you see, he says, the poverty, the desperation and the grip of religious fundamentalism. It's that fundamentalist component, says Downen, that is the key to the War on Terror. And there's a tinge of frustration in his voice as he adds that in his opinion, America has yet to realize this.

Echoing the wisdom of Robert McNamara, whose hard-earned lessons were laid out in “The Fog of War,” Downen notes that the key to winning any war is to correctly identify the enemy. And the enemy here, he says, is the not the rebels of Afghanistan or the insurgents of Iraq but fundamentalist Islam. “We need to look at the education system in the countries we're fighting and funding. If their textbooks teach that we are the enemy, if the families are telling their children that we're game, how do we ever expect to live peacefully with them?”

The sergeant pauses for a moment. And that folksy charm slips back into his voice, as he reflects upon his experiences on the ground in Jalalabad and Saudi Arabia and how the attitudes there are so absurdly misrepresented on TV's yak shows. “People are saying, ‘Oh, the world hates us now.' Well, the world has always hated us. We're Americans. We're infidels.”

Downen's discussion of this hatred that's fueling the insurgency plays with such honesty because it's clear from the passion in his voice just how much he loves America, how without hesitation he's willing to give his life to reverse Islam's opinion. It is why, after serving honorably in central Europe and the Middle East, and with just a few years to go before his 40th birthday, Downen leapt at the chance to serve once again with the Army's 321st Civil Affairs Brigade in the Nangarhar province of Afghanistan.

“On 9/11 I was in Greensboro, North Carolina, going to photography school and working at the Greensboro Airport. When my sister Rachel called and told me about the attacks, the first thing I did was call up my reserve unit and say, ‘Okay, when are we going?'” Downen lets out a soft chuckle as he remembers his unit administrator's reaction. “He said, ‘Stand down. We haven't been called up for anything yet.'”

That changed, of course, in due time. By Summer 2003, Downen and his brigade were off to the Hindu Kush mountains of eastern Afghanistan, part of a coordinated effort to provide its dirt-poor communities with drinkable water and basic medical treatment.

The Medic

Downen shifts for a moment to the topic of bin Laden and the shock and anger voiced by military critics who can't understand why the al-Qaeda leader has not yet been caught. Those comments, he says, come from people who've never been to Afghanistan, never seen the Hindu Kush mountains, its rugged terrain, massive cliffs and complex network of caves.

“The mountains are incredible, and as soon as you see them,” says Downen, “it makes perfect sense.” If the Hindu Kush offers anything, it's isolation. If bin Laden's still there, he says, it's going to take a determined effort and time to root the terrorist out.

Such isolation may be good for bin Laden, but it's been a disaster for Nangarhar's people, cutting them off from the public eye and leaving them to make do in make-shift communities that, in Downen's words, are “straight out of the Stone Age.” “The people live in huts made out of mud. There's no running water, the roads are all dirt, and the toilet facilities are outside.” The sergeant adds that it's not just the isolation that has kept these Afghan villages in the dark. It's also war, which has been raging there in one form or another, between a variety of combatants, since 1973. The villages caught in the crossfire have had little opportunity to develop their infrastructure or absorb modern notions about germs and disease.

“Their sense of sanitation, oh, it's nothing like America. But in civil affairs, you have to get out amongst them. You have to eat their food.” The main dish in Nangarhar is Qabili palau, “which is basically an oily rice” sometimes topped with sugared almonds and yellow raisins. “You eat with your hands. Or, well, one hand. The left hand is used for … bathroom purposes.”

Downen says he knew he'd get sick. That's why he and other soldiers took regular doses of the antibiotic Cipro.

Treatment for the natives was more rudimentary — and more serious. “We'd try to teach them a little about sanitation, but the people, they were remarkably ignorant about washing their hands,” says Downen. “It was sad because you'd see people with worms, children with wounds that would grow infected. If they'd just clean them that wouldn't happen.” But it did happen, and Downen saw it over and over. When the army medics would come, “the women in burkas would bum rush the staff to get treatment.” It was as if, he says, “the people had gone feral.”

Downen says the medical staff did the best they could to fight those infections and assist the ill and dying. He particularly noticed the service of one medic, Sergeant Rebecca Berndt. A romance in the mountains began to bloom. Downen lays out the details as if it were a country music song.

“I started to speak to this young lady, and I realized she knows a lot about the Civil War. Well, I'm more of a World War II guy, but I know a bit about the War Between the States. We took an interest in each other.” Downen and Berndt swapped information. “She told me where her tent was, and I told her about mine.” Soon the two sergeants were gathering together at nighttime to enjoy Downen's “shoebox entertainment system,” a portable DVD player he took with him to the mountains.

It wasn't just that they were both history buffs, says Downen. “She's also a hunter and gun nut like me. Becky likes to travel. And she has several dogs,” three Labradors and a beagle. “I've always liked animals,” he says.

There was something else too. As Downen sweeps through the finer points of the woman who would become his wife, suddenly his voice becomes flush with excitement when he gets to Michigan, Berndt's home state. “She was just crazy about her state and her life there,” he says. The medic spent nights telling warm stories about her parents and her low-key life out in Dorr, Mich., a town of 6,000 residents about 170 miles west of Detroit. There her parents own a 62-acre estate. She spoke about venturing across its open fields, into its forests to hunt game. “I was intrigued,” says the sergeant.

It didn't take long for him to realize that was the kind of place he wanted to be, the kind of life he wanted to live. So Downen made it simple. “I just sat down” in the tent “and said, ‘You're the most intriguing, wonderful woman I've ever met in my life. I'd really like to marry you.' And she said yes.”

A true Texas gentleman, Downen took the extra step of writing her father from the Afghan mountains, asking him for his 27-year-old daughter's hand. “I told him that if he gave his permission, I would be a respectful son-in-law.” Downen chuckles, remembering Berndt's father's reply. “His letter said, ‘You don't need my permission.' He said that he met his daughter as a naked baby, that he's been proud of her ever since and had full faith in her decision.”

Today Downen is indeed a full member of the family, living upstairs with his wife in the Berdnts' two-story home. Free now to use their ammo for sport, the two sergeants make routine trips to the family forest. “We love to kill stuff out there,” he says. “I hope that doesn't give you a one-sided view of rednecks.”

With Downen, it doesn't. Given specific questions, the sergeant pulls back from the personal to address once again the larger picture, informed commentary on the War on Terror no yokel could possibly provide.

The Big Picture

For a man who never went to college, Downen maintains some rigorous academic standards, refusing to comment on anything he hasn't studied first-hand. He won't speak about Iraq because he never served in Iraq, “and I don't want to talk out of my ass.”

The sergeant does share his views, though, about the bigger picture: the War on Terror and the twisted approach of the left and right. Both political parties, he says, have maintained a “lock-tight orthodox view” of the international community, one that distorts truths that are obvious from the ground.

As Downen phrases it, “You got the liberal view, the conservative view, and then you got reality.”

That misguided orthodoxy, he says, has kept both parties from recognizing “the Islam factor” as the driving force behind the terror attacks. “The left won't acknowledge it because it put their multicultural view in the trash. The right won't acknowledge it because of the oil.”

If there is a long-term solution to the terror wars, he says, it lies there — in terminating our commitment to oil and ceasing to enrich the Middle East's oil-rich nations. “We got to drain the money from them, develop our own resources, find alternative energy.” If we don't, says Downen, we're simply “funding the people who want to kill us.” The sergeant lays out the current wars as he sees them, an absurd cycle in which America spends one dollar on oil, which eventually reaches the insurgents, then a second dollar to fight the dollar in the insurgents' hands.

Shutting down that cycle will no doubt be difficult, but Downen suggest it is possible with a long-term commitment to a revised energy policy.

That said, an unmistakable exhaustion affects Downen's voice. The larger issues are of interest to him, he says, but now that he's thousands of miles from the battles of Afghanistan, quartered comfortably with his new family in western Michigan, it's the little things that are now Downen's focus.

He speaks with enthusiasm about being back behind the lens, working full-time as a military photographer with the Michigan National Guard. Before his first stint as a combat photographer “I didn't even know how to load a camera. Then,” he says, “it became my obsession.”

The sergeant also speaks with pride about his wife's continuing service as a counselor with Michigan's Veteran Affairs, informing soldiers now returning from the war about their military benefits and offering them psychological counseling. Downen rejects the stereotypical image of the soul-scarred veteran returning home unable to function. There are veterans like that out there, he says, but the ones he served with in Afghanistan, though they faced serious threats and witnessed unspeakable horrors, they were also strong dudes, not “emotional jellyfish.”

Still, the sergeant tells every veteran, take advantage of all the VA's benefits, “benefits you've earned with your service,” including the free psychological counseling.

“I had my head checked,” he says, that trademark laugh back once again. “I recommend that all soldiers coming back do the same.”