Page 25 - July Aug 2022 Newsletter Final_Neat

Continued from page 24
meeting.
Key dates are the following:

• The action paper deadline for this meeting is Thursday, September 15.
• The Assembly will be meeting virtually November 5-6, 2022.

Right now we need to get your ideas so that we have time to get a draft Action Paper reviewed and endorsed be-
fore September 15th.

Email any of us Raymond Reyes, MD, Peter Forster, MD, Mel Blaustein, MD, Yelena Zalkina, MD

The Light

Omar Sahak, MD, MPH

Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Fellow

Stanford University School of Medicine

“I did bad things …” the inebriated veteran of Operation Freedom’s Sentinel (OFS) con-
fessed after I asked him for the third time why he was drinking himself sick. OFS was the continuation of the United
States military campaign in Afghanistan that began with Operation Enduring Freedom in 2001. “I hurt people … I
took orders,” he went on to whisper before wailing, “But I’m not a bad person!”

Tears soaked his long blonde beard as he squirmed in his gurney, bloated belly pregnant with pain that hinted at
internal bleeding. But the anesthetic effects of alcohol had made his physical pain secondary to his mental anguish:
the regret, remorse, and fear he felt at the possibility that he had acted as the savage he once thought his enemies
were.
“I did bad things … but I’m not a bad person,” resounded in the back of my mind as I hung over his gurney, cra-
dling him with a warm gaze and soft voice, unraveling the stories he carried. 1 Together, we fought a different kind
of battle, wrestling with emotions he had been denied by mores of masculinity, until finally, he was quiet. Some-
thing had been quenched, and what was left was a healing silence—a potential space.

“Can I share something with you?” I asked.
“Of course,” he replied.

With our hands clasped together, I told him, “I’m from Afghanistan.”
“Really?!” He struggled to rise out of his bed, throwing his right arm around to give me a firm handshake. “That’s
awesome … that’s so awesome.”
In this moment of great vulnerability on both our parts, I could see his boyish innocence and his deep desire to con-
nect in a meaningful way. I smiled as I repeated, “Yes, I’m from Afghanistan,” but in a way I was saying, “I forgive
you. I see that you are someone who wants to do good. And not all Afghans were doomed to die in a bloody field of
war. Some of us went on to become doctors, and one of us was destined to care for you in what might be one of your
darkest hours.”

As a child in the 1980s, I was granted asylum in the United States after Afghanistan was occupied by forces from the
Soviet Union. Over the years, I felt drawn to the American dream, coveting it with my heart and mind, while I wit-
nessed what appeared to be a parallel campaign that was systematically dehumanizing those still trapped in my
country of origin—such that they could be more easily killed, bombed, threatened, and tortured.2,3 After decades of
being depicted as backward savages, devoid of dignity, it was no wonder that my patient was able to carry out

Continued on page 27
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA PSYCHIATRIC SOCIETY Page 25 July/August 2022