Of Alexander, gods and bathrooms: Why the Afghans can't 'get their shit together'

By Doyle Quiggle

Best Defense department of classical
studies

A few minutes before the beginning of a Greek mythology
class at FOB Fenty, Jalalabad, for which I'd prepared to lecture on Alexander
the Great's swift invasion but treacherous occupation of Afghanistan, my best
student stomped into the classroom, slammed his M4 down on the table, and
announced, "I can't take their shit anymore!"

After his classmates and I had calmed him down,
he explained that the walls, stall door, and floor of the toilet he'd just used
were smeared with feces. They were always
smeared with feces, he complained. He was furious about being forced daily to
use facilities that were, as he put it, "Inhumanely, barbarically unhygienic
and filthy." He and his unit shared their toilet with the ANA, as they had been
ordered to do by their commanding officers-"hearts and minds." And it was the
custom of the ANA to wipe themselves with their hands, smear their excrement on
the walls of the toilette, and rinse their hands in the sink, which left the
sinks reeking, a reek made especially acrid and pungent by the Afghans' high
intake of goat meat and goat milk. While brushing his teeth, my student often
had to struggle to keep down his gorge.

The outraged student, who, despite TSIRT, knew dangerously little about the
cultural habits of any of the many Afghan tribes, had begun to take the ANA's
toilette habits personally. I wanted to get my student to explore the source of
his outrage. But I did not want to relativize or dismiss his outrage because I
have learned that outrage always points toward a perception of injustice. It,
therefore, also implies a healthy and intact sense of justice, which is
something I encourage in students. So, I suggested to him that he was being
faced (in the toilet customs of the ANA) with what Alexander's Macedonian
Greeks would have called "borborygmus," a word that Plato and Aristophanes and
Homer used to describe the filthy, excremental sewage of the underworld of
Hades. For was he not in a kind of underworld (Hades or hell) on deployment in
an Afghanistan he barely understood? Borborygmus not only means "shit." It also
connotes "shit fearing." Borborophoba was known as the Goddess of the realm of
death. She had the power to keep shit from flowing, but she also possessed the
power to make it flow in the face of mortal fear and threat of death. Every
combat soldier has been struck by her bowel- and bladder-releasing powers at
least once in his life.

We then recalled what we'd read of David Grossman in On Killing, "the physiology of the fight: the body's role in combat
and the skill to kill," where he explains in the modern language of physiology
what the Greeks described in the metaphorical language of myth:

"Homeostasis is the balance struck between SNS and PNS during normal
routine behavior, and can be thrown completely out of synchronicity when confrontation
occurs, with PNS systems largely shutting down. One result of this can be the
body 'blowing the ballast', that is the dumping of unnecessary bodily
substances which are of no benefit in combat - urine and feces, a rather
unseemly but wholly natural bodily response to confrontation. This loosening of
muscles which would be potentially drawing energy without contributing to the
immediate task of survival is associated with the recession of PNS systems as
the SNS is in the ascendancy."

Now, the smeared feces that my student had been dealing with daily in his
ANA-USA shared toilet was not the result of a loss of homeostasis due to
threat, but it did point to the realm of Borborophoba, and it pointed most
directly to the underlying cultural void between soldiers like my student and
the Afghan Army. As every anthropologist or mythographer knows, shit is the
great leveler. It marks a psychic and cultural border. How a culture treats
excrement, waste (all of that which it discards) speaks volumes about that
culture. And when we are confronted with another culture's treatment of
excrement, we are often pushed to the threshold and outer border of our own
most deeply held, highly cherished values.

On the day of my student's enraged expression of borborophoba, I asked him and
his classmates to link his I-can't-take-their-shit-anymore outrage to that of
Alexander and his men when they arrived in Bactra where they discovered dogs
roaming the otherwise highly civilized city, dogs feeding upon human bodies. According
to the religious practices of the Bactrians, they threw not only their dead to
the dogs but also their sick, lame, and invalid elderly-anyone considered
social excrement or waste. Alexander and his men observed that the normal,
healthy citizens of Bactria went about their daily business even as dogs
devoured human bodies in the streets. An upstanding Bactrian merchant might
walk past a pack of dogs feasting on a corpse as nonchalantly as a Greek
merchant would walk past a fish stand.

Although Alexander and his men had been exceptionally tolerant of the strange
cultural and religious practices of the many tribes they'd conquered since
defeating Darius at the Battle of Granicus, the use of devouring dogs was one
cultural bridge too far for the Macedonian Greeks. They simply could not
imagine disposing of the dead in any form other than a tomb or a funeral pyre.
Their invention of a Goddess like Borborophoba itself speaks to how ornately
and vividly they'd imagined the world after life. Alexander and his men could
not imagine anything more barbaric than encouraging dogs to devour the dead.
Contrariwise, the Bactrians could not imagine anyone being barbaric enough not
to do so with their dead.

The devouring dogs brought Alexander to a classic cultural impasse. And here
Alexander drew a strict line. He would no longer tolerate what he viewed as a
barbaric practice. He'd arrived at an I-can't-take-their-shit-anymore point of
outrage, and he banned the use of devouring dogs from Bactria. At this historic
moment, Alexander's real epic struggle began, the struggle to civilize
Afghanistan. And by civilize we mean simply that he enacted policies that
sought to force Afghanistan's tribes out of the bronze age and into the iron
age.

We spent the rest of the class drawing analogies from Alexander's occupation of
Bactra to the current ISAF mission in Afghanistan. That discussion involved our
detailing as many incompatible differences between the primary cultural habits
of US soldiers and those of the ANA, as well as the cultural habits of Afghans
that US soldiers had observed on off-base patrols. We discussed everything from
the treatment of excrement to the treatment of women. Many of my female
soldier-students could not see any difference between the two as far as Afghan
men were concerned. In order for our anthropological discussion to make any
difference whatsoever to my students, we had to "keep it real," as they would
say. To bite into the marrow, our discussion had to begin with harsh
differences, like the handling of shit in latrines, that had evoked an acute
emotional response from the soldiers. Only thereafter could we move on to the
academic observations made of Afghanis by such notable authors as Thomas
Barfield or Maratine van Bijlert or Antonio Giustozzi.

In other words, the professor treated his own students as if they were an alien
culture, working from within their value system and emotional matrix,
oscillating between their perceptions of an alien culture (Afghans) and that
culture's perceptions of them. I'd assiduously gathered the latter perceptions
from many chai-tea conservations with my tent mates, who were Afghan
interpreters, Pashtun, Nuristanis, and Pashais.

My pedagogical aim for my students was to encourage cultural intelligence
toward Afghans without encouraging any kind of soft-minded, limp-wristed
relativism of values (cultural relativity) in which their own commitment to
classical military core values such as loyalty, courage, selfless service,
integrity, moderation, and justice might be diluted or weakened. On the
contrary, my goal was to help them strengthen their commitment to those core
values by showing them that they can withstand the outside challenge of culture
to which they are wholly alien; they can, so to speak, "take their shit."

Doyle Quiggle taught oratory, rhetoric, and the
classics to U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines in two different war
zones, at Camp Lemonnier (Djibouti, Africa) and at Forward Operating Base Fenty
(Jalalabad, Afghanistan). The honor of contributing to the education of war fighters on the battlefield was granted to Quiggle by the U.S. Army through a
contract with the University of Maryland, University College. Quiggle received
his PhD from Washington University.