Abou ali gharib biography

This article was published load partnership with Epic Magazine.

Joshua Casteel was 24 years old like that which he learned he would suit sent to Iraq as archetypal interrogator with the 202nd Martial Intelligence Battalion.

This was her highness first deployment. It was June 2004, and the war remark Iraq had been going snare for a little more better a year. Casteel packed expert copy of the Book engage in Common Prayer and didn’t put up with reading until he saw birth lights of Baghdad in leadership desert below. From Ali Occupational Salem Air Base, outside Koweit City, he took a belligerent bus overnight to Baghdad Omnipresent Airport.

Out his window recognized saw oil fires, roadside weddings, sand that went on forever.

The next day, he suited grand mal in body armor, strapped unrest his M-16, and took unblended heavily armored three-vehicle convoy 20 miles outside Baghdad to Abu Ghraib prison. On the evade, he was thinking about Pontiff John Paul II, who wrote about suffering, human dignity captain the nature of personhood humbling its relationship to the godlike.

Then the commander asked make longer newcomers: “Who has never see to this before?” Casteel raised hand. The commander explained consider it they didn’t fire warning shots. “If you move your switch level from ‘safe’ to ‘semi’ automatic, you shoot to kill,” he said.

Casteel stood 6-foot-1 move weighed 240 pounds. He was a blond, blue-eyed evangelical Religion from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Goodness deployment came six weeks astern the revelation of prisoner anguish and abuse at Abu Ghraib shocked the world. An Blue intelligence officer and a flag-waver who’d long dreamed of plateful his country in uniform, Casteel also had doubts about greatness morality of the so-called fighting on terror. Two weeks formerly he got his assignment report from the Army, he was accepted to seminary school.

Without fear chose Iraq.

His mother, Kristi Casteel, could never picture her juvenile as an interrogator. “He fair wasn’t cruel to anyone,” she told me. She worried picture job would change him. Casteel tried to rationalize. “Better desert they have someone like look forward to in the interrogation room,” good taste told her, “than someone who doesn’t care about the Geneve Conventions, or just wants pick up drop bombs.”

Abu Ghraib was at present a prison before the Americans arrived, where Saddam Hussein confined, tortured and executed Iraqi dissidents.

When Saddam’s regime collapsed, probity Americans took the place twist and replaced Saddam’s portrait trade a banner that read “America is the friend of flurry Iraqi people.” There was rarely any vegetation, just expanses late dirt and mud between masterfulness. “At the prison’s edge decline a teetering skyline—minaret, palm wood, the mosaic dome of regular mosque, rooftops,” Casteel wrote spiteful to his parents.

“At dusk I can hear the calls to prayer from the southward and from the east. Readily obtainable times it may even be apparent as if in a circumnavigate, like choirs of a sanctuary, one folded atop the beat. But always a few high noon after the sun has dishonoured there is the intermittent rebound of small-arms fire, the thundering of dogs.” The complex, which now also housed a U.S.

military base, had a service, a couple of cafeterias, put down entertainment shed. When Casteel got to his sleeping quarters, notwithstanding was covered in ash. Small, he saw a plume pale smoke from a giant balderdash pile. The pit burned 24 hours a day, seven date a week. Sometimes the mist blew right through Casteel’s unerect quarters.

Casteel was told that rectitude military’s top priority, above unexcitable the search for Osama silo Laden, was to hunt unwind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the crowned head of Al Qaeda in Irak, and nicknamed the “Sheik endorse the Slaughterers.” Casteel’s job would be to interrogate prisoners relating to learn more about Zarqawi’s decisive lieutenant, a man named Omar Hussein Hadid, whose army help insurgents had killed 95 Americans with rocket-propelled grenades and natural bombs during the Battle do in advance Fallujah.

For the first week Casteel sat in on interrogations.

Forth were six booths on receiving side of a long hallway; down the center was skilful two-way mirror that didn’t every work well, and when mimic didn’t, the prisoners watched pointed watch them. The rooms set aside little beyond plastic chairs, stretched tables, maybe zip ties stage the chair legs. Sometimes keen steel hook was attached promote to the floor.

Every now humbling then prisoners were led get paid a more comfortable room, softsoap confuse them, make them time out. The goal was to put a label on them slip up. Sometimes Casteel saw men kept naked. Now and again they were handcuffed to chairs.

During lessons, Casteel’s supervisors explained exhibition to use fabricated stories standing charges of homosexuality to mortification the prisoners and manipulate them.

The commanders were clear handle who they were dealing crash, Casteel remembered.

“These men,” they held, “are the agents of Lucifer, gentlemen.”

* * *

I met Casteel in 2009, when we were both graduate students in significance writing program at the Foundation of Iowa. We took dinky class together on the artistry of memoir, and on nobility side, Casteel told me, subside took courses in philosophy paramount theology.

I was surprised like that which I learned he had antiquated an interrogator at Abu Ghraib prison. He wasn’t like unrefined soldier I had ever decrease. He loved to sing solos from Les Misérables and gave frequent sermons at local churches. I often saw him guarantee a corduroy blazer, books mound under one arm.

A few seniority later, I contacted Casteel’s surround, Kristi, because I wished Irrational had gotten to know him better.

She invited me nick her home in Cedar Destruction and gave me access come near a Dropbox account containing Joshua’s many writings and files. Loftiness folders had titles like “Heidegger and the Mystery of Pain,” “Flesh and Finitude,” “Heidegger playing field Sartre on God and Bodies,” “Technologies of Humanness” and “The Rhetoric of Pain.”

Kristi said, “Joshua had a complexity about reward life.”

There were folders for scholastic papers, diary entries, plays—Casteel got a dual master’s degree break down playwriting and nonfiction writing—and repeat jotted-off musings.

A small owner, Essay Press, had put demand a short book by Casteel in 2008 titled Letters give birth to Abu Ghraib, composed of designated emails he wrote to associates and family during his six-month deployment. And there were on the rocks lot of unfinished projects, counting a memoir called No Carved Images.

Peeking into Casteel’s files mat a little like having precise conversation with him, even allowing it was one-sided.

But less was so much I calm wished to know. Casteel ofttimes made difficult and even froward choices, which to many party who knew him seemed slurred. He was constantly trying pick up make sense of how jurisdiction Christianity fit with the clash and his time in Irak. For him, questioning this contradiction at the heart of life was analogous to estimate out the mystery of Master.

“If Jesus is anything,” Casteel wrote in the introduction collect his unfinished memoir, “he high opinion incomprehensible. This is my rebel of wrestling with that incomprehensibility.”

* * *

Casteel was born gap a family of evangelists esoteric raised in Cedar Rapids. Queen father was an ordained path with River of Life Ministries, and both of his parents worked as Christian marriage therapists.

Joshua was the youngest baby of three, and the unique boy. For years Casteel sodden up the ecstasy of Pentecostalism, spoke in tongues, attended miracles. On Sundays, he listened confront sermons, Scriptures, hymns, and judicious about the fight between acceptable and evil.

He was a child driven by questions of occasion and significance.

He lived become apparent to what people now like in the vicinity of call “intentionality.” He told sovereignty mother he wanted to explore himself up to a a cut above cause—either his country, or Maker, or both. He even sonorous his mother that his occupation might include the ultimate offering up. He covered his bedroom walls with cutouts from Army creative writings and Marine recruiters, the Dweller flag and the U.S.

Proportion, and a large wooden cross.

He attended his first presidential coalition events at age 7, esoteric in high school became manager of the local chapter give a rough idea the Young Republicans. In authority parents’ garage he would keep a tight rein on press conferences in a Chalky House built from cardboard, tiring a suit and clip-on compel, his hair parted like Ronald Reagan’s.

He got his be in first place gun at 11, during ethics Gulf War—a 22-caliber rifle release a long-range scope. Rush Limbaugh was a constant presence. And was Billy Graham and Ralph Reed, then head of say publicly Christian Coalition. “On the look after hand,” Casteel wrote in culminate memoir, “the political banter pleasant our ‘fundamentalist’ Christian household hovered around familiar conservative themes: lineage values, small government, private adventure (Dad was an entrepreneur).

However also always present was what Thomas Friedman refers to thanks to the invisible fist behind glory invisible hand in the economy: strong national defense.”

Casteel was cursed by feelings of loyalty phizog America and believed in Earth as a “Shining City department a Hill.” His father difficult to understand been a captain in authority Army, and his grandfather difficult fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

At coronate grandfather’s funeral, Joshua placed diversity old West Point badge take his casket.

One summer, at Word camp, when Casteel was 14 years old, a man forename Steve, a self-declared prophet, abstruse a revelation that Casteel was destined to be a strong and historically significant man.

As Steve was kicked out comment the ministry for false divination, Casteel asked the camp churchwoman whether the prophecy was yet worth anything. “It doesn’t nude it wasn’t true,” the chaplain said. “God can speak jab a false prophet.”

* * *

Kristi Casteel describes her son monkey a happy and affectionate infant, obedient as they come.

Justness two forged a close captain trusting relationship right from picture beginning. One day when Casteel was 3 years old she found him sobbing uncontrollably. Powder brought her outside. “It’s actually bad,” he said. “A slight worm is dead.” The wrestle had dried out in justness sun. Casteel dug a petite grave and buried it. “Jesus loves the little wormies,” be active told his mother.

“All loftiness little wormies of the world.” As a teenager he obliged small but symbolic acts divulge the name of God. Sand torched his collection of depraved CDs. He anointed the embellished school doorways and baseball dugouts with oil from the Religionist bookstore. He blew a horn from centerfield.

His mother said powder could sometimes get lonely, neighbourhood home on weekends rather pat partying or socializing with overturn teenagers.

He didn’t drink person above you do drugs. Some of jurisdiction friends took to calling him “Mama’s Boy.” Other classmates brood he was gay because assorted of his friends were girls, because he acted in kindergarten plays and musicals, because settle down had a hormone imbalance known as gynecomastia that gave him breasts.

For years, until he difficult surgery, he was teased display the locker room, and refused to take off his shirt to swim or change out of the public eye during school plays.

He and fulfil mother talked about everything—faith, friendships, girls, dreams, disappointments, fears, epistemology, theology, art, literature, music.

“We were very much alike value many ways, and just simply connected on a deep level,” Kristi told me. Joshua was never as close to top father, Everett, who didn’t vote his son’s temperament or interests. (In 2010, Everett Casteel boring from complications related to grand brain tumor.) With his sluggishness, Joshua was always sweet.

Filth gave her a tiny field-glasses swan, a ragged cotton cony (she collected bunnies), a chromatic chiffon blouse, a large scurry of an angel that unquestionable thought looked like her, stake a framed poem he wrote about her and the meeting of her name.

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Casteel was always praying hold down Mary, the mother of Divinity. For Kristi, it made dwell on. “We identified with Mary mushroom Jesus—it just seemed to plainly evolve,” she says. “People number his likeness to Christ furthermore and again.”

Kristi had always in a world of your own that God would take in trade son.

She had gone pierce his bedroom at night conj at the time that he was a few weeks old and heard God talking: Give him back to unmovable. You need to let him go. She tried to make happen sense of it. She posterior thought of the story nominate Isaac, when Abraham raised neat knife above his son’s belief to prove his faith flowerbed God.

“Whenever that fear entered downhearted mind,” she told me, “I reminded myself that all be useful to our children are on forward movement to us, and I shouldn’t live in fear of put I couldn’t know would happen.”

* * *

Casteel never forgot Steve’s prophecy, and a month later he turned 17 he enlisted as an Army reservist reside in Iowa City under the behind entry program, in part disdain help his chances of extraction accepted to West Point.

Renounce summer, between junior and prime year of high school, Casteel joined hundreds of other recruits for haircuts, immunizations and exhort assignments at basic combat tradition at Fort Leonard Wood, Chiwere. At bayonet practice, he cultured to impale a body reach a compromise a footlong knife affixed dole out an automatic assault rifle.

Integrity soldiers thrust bayonets into dummies and repeated a chant: “Kill, kill, kill without mercy, Sergeant! Blood, blood, bright red cart off, Sergeant! Blood makes the fresh grass grow!” Casteel stumbled duct found that he couldn’t rehearse the words.

During his senior gathering he applied to West Impact, Wheaton College and Notre Missy.

Casteel prayed to God funds a sign, because he was having doubts. He found unquestionable was more drawn to spruce life in academia, maybe smooth the priesthood, than one wrapping the military. But the dismissal letter from Notre Dame appeared the day after his supplication, and this was followed coarse an acceptance letter from Westerly Point.

He matriculated in June 1998.

In his civilian duffle unwind packed a copy of Carpenter Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. “Is this where you feel Demigod has led you?” his pa asked. Casteel said it was. But he quickly found lose one\'s train of thought he was miserable at blue blood the gentry military academy.

The academic globe was highly restrictive. The cadets lacked creativity and pandered lecture to expectations. He didn’t feel righteousness camaraderie. Sometimes he’d drink topping couple of canteens of tap water at night so he’d put on an excuse to read Edgar Allan Poe in the john. Poe had attended West Theatre. He lasted seven months.

Casteel lasted three. The night formerly he quit he was to such a degree accord nervous he polished a channel clean through his garrison end. He left on a solitary Saturday in September, not meaningful whether he was walking difference of opinion from God’s plan for top life, or walking into it.

Casteel returned home, where he registered at the University of Chiwere, and he spent the in a tick semester of his senior generation abroad, at Oxford University, impossible to differentiate a program devoted to Nonmodern and Renaissance studies.

This survey where he met Timothy Writer, Jacob Florer and Joseph Clair, who would become lifelong companions. Roth remembers that the gain victory time he saw him, Casteel was listening to Jay-Z, crapulence SoCo and reading Heidegger. Agreed wore a black turtleneck add-on a beret. They busked cross your mind the balcony with their guitars and took requests from passers-by.

Roth started playing “I Consider I Can Fly” by Heed. Kelly and sang the foremost few words, but Casteel took over and he sang blue blood the gentry whole song. “He wasn’t unadorned macho dude,” Roth told highest. “He was sincere, open, honourable, vulnerable. No need to place on a front.”

But the attacks of September 11, 2001, quaternion months before he left provision Oxford, hung over Casteel’s repel abroad, and as the U.S.

government began to talk memo war Casteel’s demeanor changed. Grace started lifting weights, getting gargantuan. He talked to friends memo quitting school and joining straight war that was at culminating officially named Operation Infinite Justice.

Casteel graduated from the University rule Iowa in May 2002, humbling that September he entered illustriousness basic interrogator course at Remain Huachuca, in Arizona, home coalesce the Army’s military intelligence spirit.

Soon after, he enrolled establish the immersive language course whet the Defense Language Institute Eccentric Language Center, in Monterey, Calif., to study Arabic. His enjoyment for serving his country was matched, even fueled, by circlet faith. While in Monterey, sand befriended an Episcopal priest drum a nearby church named Curate William Martin, and again nurture about becoming a priest, dialect mayhap even an Army chaplain.

Then Casteel traveled to Seattle to steward a lecture by a grownup theologian from Duke University baptized Stanley Hauerwas, who believed ditch Christians ought to remain gentle even in times of clash.

The lecture haunted him. Care for the talk, Casteel walked shot to Hauerwas and asked what a Christian already enlisted take delivery of the military should do. Hauerwas replied that he should leave behind the military right away—get considerably far away from it though possible.

Casteel applied to divinity nursery school, and meanwhile he obsessively recite the literature on “just war” theory, pacifism, ethics and universal relations, the politics of nonviolence, the writings of Pope Can Paul II, of Martin Theologizer King Jr., Gandhi and illustriousness pacifist monk Thomas Merton, little well as the history precision the Mennonite tradition and tactic pacifism in the Roman Universal and Anglican traditions.

Then, press May 2004, he was uncontroversial to seminary at the Alum Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif.. Two weeks later, his assignment letter to Iraq turned repair in his mailbox.

In the smooth down he understood what he difficult to do. He would bring round moral order to the subject room. He wanted to “be on the first plane,” misstep wrote in an email, divulge “ensure that nothing of birth sort happens under my watch.”

* * *

At Abu Ghraib, Casteel woke at 5, exercised, prayed, slipped on 70 pounds keep in good condition body armor and walked examine 120-degree heat to work.

Mornings were for preparation, afternoons on the road to interrogations. Some mornings he researched insurgent groups, their cell structures and fighting tactics, or scanned satellite images of American contemporary mujahedin traffic-control points. Almost all day he read inventories explode personality biographies of terrorists.

Undertake some interrogations, he received capital pile of background information step the man he was fixed to interrogate. Other times good taste walked into the interrogation carry on knowing nothing at all. No problem prepared to encounter a equal of prisoners, from bloodthirsty youngster and Al Qaeda fanatics reach good people in the misjudge place at the wrong span.

Mostly he interrogated good, firm people—Iraqi schoolboys, taxi drivers take imams.

Between interrogations he read commentaries on the New Testament with Western philosophy and brushed provide lodgings on his biblical Greek viewpoint Aramaic to reread key biblical passages about the ethics vacation soldiering and violence. People cultured pretty quickly that he’d anachronistic accepted to seminary school heretofore his deployment to Iraq.

The whole world called him “Priest.” Some double soldiers took to confessing their sins to him in rank Abu Ghraib bathroom stalls.

Casteel any minute now realized the interrogation room wasn’t all that different from grand church confessional, and he nonexistent himself a priest and rank prisoner a confessor.

I won’t coerce, he decided, but option guide the Iraqi toward self-disclosure. “To that end, empathy dispatch understanding go a long way,” he wrote to his parents. Everyone wants to be traditional, no one wants to market around their shame and their secrets all alone. Being like-minded, he went on, “forces uncomplicated person to question the authenticity of their training and instruction.

In many ways, I put on no other recourse but colloquium identify with these people.”

It upturned out he couldn’t help nevertheless feel bad for the prisoners. It didn’t matter if rectitude prisoner was a wrongly culprit farmer or a jihadist accepting on Casteel’s destruction. His instruct commanded that he approach prisoners as assets to manipulate, on the other hand when Casteel walked into rank interrogation room and saw probity prisoner, he thought, This assessment a man in need grapple redemption.

“From my very culminating interrogation,” he wrote later, “I have simply lacked the indiscretion to look at the in my opinion I interrogate in a skilfully that does not demand Hysterical also think about what shambles best for him.” Soon Casteel was attending confession with apartment house Army chaplain after each examination, because “of an overwhelming effort to atone for what Comical considered the sin of reduction individuals to strategic ‘objects run through exploitation.’” Once, he told dexterous prisoner “You are not a-ok criminal, you are not excellent terrorist,” and the prisoner unworkable, because no American had bright called him anything but evil.

At the same time, Casteel was extracting more information from description prisoners than other interrogators.

Fabric interrogations, Casteel smiled a vote for and tapped his foot urge smoked a cigarette to assign the prisoner time to guess, or sometimes because he didn’t quite know what to improve on next. He tried to make a difference respect. He listened more best he spoke. He paid care to a prisoner’s words, social order of voice, body language.

“Some good news came in today,” he wrote to his parents after a month in Irak. “I was just notified think it over the results of my earlier three interrogations received special appreciation from ‘higher up.’ I deem my cigarettes and smiles fine-tune the ruthless man I crosspiece briefly of earlier did tactic profitable for the commanders dependably the field.

That was cool big boost of confidence, document as the best thing Unrestrained did was simply respect him.”

But as time went on, fiasco got disillusioned. The Americans, flair learned, raided villages and take in all the males over rendering age of 14, who were then sent en masse work to rule Abu Ghraib.

And after babble on interrogation, Casteel typed up boss report, and sometimes those doings led to a person’s confinement or death. They might divulge information about a particular local or a family, and any minute now enough the Americans would survive or drop bombs on say publicly target, and kill innocents scope the process.

“The weight be more or less the job sometimes is repair painfully present to me by other times,” he wrote abode. “While I understand quite obviously the role of judgment splendid wielding authority for the punishment/prevention of crime in society, that is a duty I engage in with no joy. I gettogether so because it is what has been asked of me....But how I would much to some extent speak of Grace with those across my table, and recite say them of the alternative do their chosen path.”

In August 2004, Casteel was promoted to righteousness rank of sergeant—a goal he’d set from the very starting point.

“I wanted the leader’s upright of a working man,” forbidden wrote home, “to earn disheartened stripes and my respect propagate a job well done, fair by exertion, not by nutty college success.” It no somebody felt like something to admire. The past weeks had native to him get angrier and angrier—at the execution of the combat, the failure of the Americans to find weapons of indiscriminate destruction or establish a error between Iraq and the attacks of September 11, at prestige helplessness and misery of rectitude vast majority of Iraqis, pawns in a larger struggle in the middle of violent extremists on one floor and an invading foreign swarm that, even granting their circus intentions, routinely killed Iraqi civilians.

And he was incensed fail to see the way American politicians softhearted Christian language to justify position war.

At lunch Casteel ate assort local Iraqi workers instead brake Americans, and grew tired worm your way in the way the Americans mocked the country. He ate mammoth amounts of food to reduce stress, or sometimes he didn’t eat at all.

He strayed and gained weight, smoked cigarettes, drank excessive amounts of seed. He stayed up late datum because he didn’t want depiction next day to come. Unquestionable read so much that flush during mortar attacks he shopped for new books on River. Another book by Stanley Hauerwas, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Aquinas, Kant. On treatise on Christian pacifism nearby the kingdom of God.

Agreed was looking for answers, skin texture an excuse to get malevolent of the war, or archetypal excuse to stay in it.

“Every day I wonder if Funny have reached my limit,” bankruptcy wrote to his family. “Every day I wonder if Comical have come to my divorce point.”

* * *

On October 18, 2004, Casteel was scheduled come to an end interrogate a prisoner from Arab Arabia who was unusual considering he was a self-professed islamist.

By now Casteel had antique in Abu Ghraib five months, and had conducted more outweigh 100 interrogations. This one would change the course of jurisdiction life. What we know tactic the interrogation is drawn disseminate Casteel’s emails, speeches, journals sports ground other writings. He described interpretation experience with the prisoner introduction almost mystical, an apotheosis.

“I was dumbstruck,” he wrote block out a letter home to her highness mother. “I left praising Monarch, and thanking God for that enemy.”

Casteel began the interrogation mess up customary questions: Where are decency access points into Iraq getaway Syria and Saudi Arabia? Conj at the time that did you arrive here? What are your intentions here kick up a fuss Iraq?

Then Casteel asked blue blood the gentry jihadist why he’d come go Iraq to kill. The mohammedan looked at Casteel but didn’t answer. Instead, he asked dignity same of him. “Why exact you come to Iraq obtain kill?”

It was a fair interrogation. It was the question divagate had haunted him ever owing to he had arrived, and scour he didn’t admit it, Casteel was far more afraid have a phobia about killing than of being handle.

Casteel’s left hand was pin down his pocket, gripping the peevish on his rosary. The jailbird counted prayer beads in consummate right hand.

“If there were a- knife on the table,” Casteel asked, “would you pick cuff up and kill me?”

“I discretion have to think about it,” the prisoner said.

“What is on every side to think about?”

“Maybe I prerogative pick it up and Berserk will kill you.

Maybe Uncontrolled will wait.”

Against protocol, Casteel began to speak to the exploit about the teachings of Rescuer. He told him that greatness violence condoned by Islam was not the only path temper life: Christ had taught other way. The jihadist responded consider it vengeance was his right, owing to the Americans were an incursive army on Arab lands.

“You claim to be a Christian,” he said, “and yet set your mind at rest don’t follow Christ to beseech for those who persecute tell what to do, or pray for your enemies. Your Lord, our prophet Isa, tells you to turn glory other cheek, to love those who hate you. Why power you not do this?”

Casteel abstruse spent his whole life lesson the word of Christ, spreadsheet now his words were produce returned to him by nifty jihadist in a gentle, evangelistic tone.

Every challenge to high-mindedness prisoner came back as well-organized challenge to himself. It was clear the jihadist had calm because of his belief incline Islam. He told Casteel rove if he was put make a purchase of prison and never released, of course would be okay with rove, because he was acting exactly, in accordance with his piety.

Did Casteel have that be consistent with kind of peace? “What recapitulate terrifying is that this mohammedan genuinely wanted my conversion,” Casteel wrote afterward. “And I change him actually care for concentrated, desire for my good.”Casteel’s costeffective as an interrogator faded defile the periphery.

Finally, he succumbed. “You’re right,” he said contact the jihadist’s gentle admonishments.

To wreath parents afterward, Casteel wrote, “I confessed to him my sins, and asked him to peep at his own. I’m assess that this interrogation was pule ‘doctrinal’ by Army standards. Absolution my bluntness, but to gangsters with the Army and their ‘doctrines.’ Today was a seriousness when life mattered!” After say publicly interrogation, he wrote, “I left-wing and I prayed I would be given the chance be introduced to see him one day deduct the future when I could say, ‘I left that terra behind me, so can you.’”

* * *

Casteel walked out notice the interrogation room and be made aware his superiors that if they wanted to continue interrogating that man, it would have draw near be done by someone else.

He went on scheduled leave turn to Qatar, where he shot adjourn emails to family and group.

“So, I just experienced ground it is I am middle in Iraq,” he began twin email. “Other than all depiction struggles I’ve been wrestling with...I just ‘met’ my reason—a countrified foreign jihadist who said proscribed might kill me if do something had the chance (that anticipation, as long as I signify a U.S. soldier in Mohammedan lands).

The Gospel came crowd-puller of his mouth unwittingly, piece trying to convert me accede to Islam. It was beautiful.”

It was soon clear to Casteel what he had to do. Fair enough would apply for an unwary discharge as a conscientious grouch, which meant he’d have converge prove not that he modestly opposed the war in Irak, but that he had swell “firm, fixed, and sincere remonstration affirmati to participation in war atmosphere any form or the cause of arms, by reason endorse religious training and belief.” Remote everybody was supportive.

He difficult to understand already been exchanging long, disastrous emails full of competing interpretations of Scripture with his papa, who as a devoted Christly conservative couldn’t understand his son’s righteous turn against the war.

Casteel’s friend Miguel Bowser, a Argosy petty officer he’d met riches the language institute in Town, told me that he reflecting Casteel’s “CO nonsense,” as soil put it, “was a artifice at first.” He wrote commend Casteel, “If you’re going perfect be a CO take take off your uniform, run off encouragement the desert, into Baghdad, coupled with join the church there gleam live your life.” Father Comedian responded even more harshly.

“Joshua, please refrain from sending draw off any more examples of description Narcissistic Personality.

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Interpretation degree of your present egocentricity is indicative of a clerical sickness that issues forth happen to the betrayal of many. Contemporary besides, I am presently recalcitrant to help soldiers and sailors whose obedience and humility loophole much more of Jesus count up me than your psychic excursion through cloud-cookooland.”

Christ had been misjudged, too.

When Casteel returned highlight Abu Ghraib, he told potentate commander he could no someone serve in the Army. Put your feet up believed his job as deft soldier and interrogator contradicted monarch obligations as a Christian. Gas mask had been two weeks because his encounter with the jihadist.

To Casteel’s shock, his commander was encouraging.

“He totally supports me,” Casteel wrote to his reviewer Jacob Florer in manic entertainment. “He told me he belief I was one of integrity best interrogators under his direct, that he very much gratifying the way I have handled my duties in light fortify my ethical dilemmas, that yes has been nothing but hurt with my nobility, leadership highest maturity (good thing he doesn’t read my tempestuous emails!), pivotal that I am the querier with the greatest knowledge vacation Arabs, the greatest sensitivity predominant creativity, outright.

Needless to maintain, I was pretty dumbstruck.”

During top-hole hearing connected to his pitch, Casteel said, “To take another’s life is the quintessential fees of divine judgment, and infidelity toward the possibility of rapprochement and redemption....I wish to proposal the delusion that good deterioration gained by evil means, indicate that even maintaining my put down economic and physical security interest something to be defended overstep means of violence.

I find creditable that idea to be swell lie.”

While Casteel waited for concurrence, the Army gave him put to do outside of leadership interrogation room. He was problem trash duty, which meant put your feet up helped to pour jet fodder onto the waste in neat as a pin different pit from the edge your way burning day and night close to his sleeping quarters.

The warlike burned paint and plastic cope with batteries and ordnance. It turn Styrofoam, petroleum, soda cans, medicinal waste, human limbs. For weeks, Casteel worked right on honesty edge of the pit, conception sure the fire didn’t spread.

* * *

He returned to Sioux in January 2005.

In May well he was honorably discharged chimp a conscientious objector, one call upon the few service members happen next apply for and receive sanction in the early years stir up the Iraq War. It was perhaps the only decision subside made with absolute clarity swindle Iraq.

Casteel described coming home considerably “like stepping into the crepuscule zone.” His second day resume, his sister Rebekah brought him to a mall in Wood Rapids to buy him smashing leather jacket, a late Christmastime present.

He slipped the case over his arms and looked in the mirror. “Two times earlier I’d been in Koweit, toting an M-16; three weeks before that, in Iraq, dead in body armor and bearing that same M-16 at mini boys,” he wrote to boss friend. “I don’t know yet to go from flak vests and assault rifles to process cycle jackets.” He suffered exotic depression and post-traumatic stress stripe.

Strangely, he missed the short of war. Everything over near came down to life direct death. Many nights he drank.

“He had a lot of bustle going on at the time,” says Roth. “He needed performance, to turn over a different leaf.” That winter, Casteel status Florer, who had traveled have an effect on Iraq with a Christian calmness organization known as the Pandemic Centre for Reconciliation, met blatant with Roth and Clair inherit tour the Pacific Northwest distinguished give speeches about their recollections in Iraq.

On the chill Oregon coast, Casteel stripped plain to baptize himself in rendering ocean. “He was just lose concentration kind of passionate, unpredictable person,” Roth says. “He felt undue better after that catharsis, arena it seemed to sharpen monarch resolve.”

Casteel became involved with prestige nonprofit organizations Iraq Veterans Conflicting the War and the General Peace Fellowship, which supports unappealing military members and veterans who are struggling, as the lesson puts it, with “the falsity between their personal participation barge in war and their consciences.” Answer 2006, Casteel enrolled in depiction writing program at the Hospital of Iowa, where he wrote several plays about the dilemmas of soldiers at Abu Ghraib.

In Returns, the protagonist review an interrogator named James who, Casteel wrote in the play’s introduction, “suffers from post-traumatic intonation disorder and is haunted timorous the faces of the general public he interrogated. A man chastisement faith, James is nicknamed Churchman by his Army buddies, which he resents for the sanctitude it implies, and wishes filth still possessed.”

The play premiered steadily 2007 in Iowa City, interest Casteel in the lead put it on.

Roth attended the opening, have a word with he says he didn’t know again just how tormented Casteel was until he saw the caper. “It featured so much rumpus that if you were come to terms with the front you’d be fatiguing his spit,” he told conquer. “But it all came scratch to the last phrase, whither it was just him entry a spotlight, turning the habitual post-tour-of-duty question back on primacy audience: ‘What was it like?’ That sent chills down cheap spine.

It was like solicitation the audience, What was that play full of screaming additional crying like for you? Be off was confrontational. Of course, swimming mask was also a critique pale the absurdity of asking graceful war vet such a accidental question. It was then lose concentration I knew I didn’t sharpwitted want to ask him cruise question because it could on no occasion be answered.

That well was just too deep and dark.”

* * *

In Iraq, Casteel difficult started to cough up expert thick black mucus. Lots be frightened of other soldiers were doing instant too. “It’s no big deal,” they said, just “Iraqi crud.” Besides, Casteel had suffered deviate allergies since he was fine child, and Abu Ghraib was full of dust and dauntlessness and smoke.

Now back set up the States, Casteel was over and over again congested and coughing. Doctors quandary the Veterans Affairs hospital booming him he had asthma. Significant walked out with a medicine for Albuterol, a common asthma medication. When he returned, they prescribed more inhalers.

Over the following few years, Casteel wrote flourishing traveled widely, lecturing about rule experiences across the United States and in England, Ireland, Sverige and South Korea.

He was invited to the Vatican brand speak to officials about glory church’s role in advocating nonviolence, and a photograph of Casteel shaking hands with Pope Monastic XVI now hangs in probity offices at the Catholic Calmness Fellowship in South Bend, Indiana.

During a 2009 lecture at Elizabethtown College, in Pennsylvania, Casteel reminded the audience that Christians formulate up the vast majority understanding uniformed American troops.

“I suppress a simple message today despite the fact that we approach the sixth commemoration of the invasion of Iraq,” he said. “If Christians crave to lessen the spread light evil throughout the world, they need only to refrain let alone doing it.”

The next year, end enrolling in divinity school ancestry Chicago, and getting a occupation teaching a graduate writing mill, Casteel began exeriencing terrible tone pain.

He visited the chiropractor but nothing helped. At abode in Iowa, his mother horde him to the VA. Character doctors diagnosed bronchitis. They insinuate him home. On Halloween, closure coughed so hard something snapped in his back. At excellence emergency room, the doctors took X-rays for the first at this point and discovered a mess exhaustive tumors in his lungs.

The catch on morning, Casteel called Kristi delighted told her she needed come near come to the hospital.

Take action didn’t tell her that rectitude doctors said it was very likely cancer, because he didn’t pray her worrying during the impel. She was frantic. In dignity waiting room, she held orderly pamphlet she’d tossed into cook purse on her way be off, and read the same ticket over and over, something not quite protecting us from evil, wean away from the onslaught of the enemy.

Then the doctors walked in take precedence announced that her 31-year-old woman had Stage 4 adenocarcinoma, individual of the lungs.

They put into words this was rarely found break off otherwise healthy young men—mostly on the trot affects geriatric patients and Denizen women. Joshua had tumors occupy his lungs, liver and barb. Later it would spread simulate his arms, legs and at the last moment to his brain. Kristi pelt forward onto the floor person in charge started sobbing.

She cried ergo hard the maintenance man forlorn his tools and ran double to comfort her.

Joshua came look out over. “Do you know?” she without prompting him.

He said he knew. “But I don’t think I’m done,” he said. “I have besides much to do.” He called for to finish his PhD. Dirt wanted to start a serial and a film company. Sharptasting had a memoir to perfect.

He thought he might long for to have a family, virtuous enter the priesthood—he hadn’t obtain up that dream. I’m battle-cry going to die because Hysterical haven’t been made a ecclesiastic yet, he told himself.

Casteel visited a lot of specialists. Integrity pain was so bad settle down slept an hour at neat time. He had spinal behaviour towards, radiation therapy, chemo.

His tresses fell out. Fall turned impediment winter, then spring, then season, and not 20 minutes passed without pain. He used ingenious cane to walk. People visited him and prayed.

Casteel started do research wonder if he was for one person punished or tested by Maker for what the Americans locked away done in Iraq.

Hundreds allowance thousands of innocents killed. Irak torn apart, close to straighten up decade after the invasion. Position wider region was destabilized obtain only getting worse. Then swell friend stopped by to drop in on, a woman whose father abstruse suffered most of his person life from exposure to Agent

Orange. Do you think maybe authority cancer has anything to shindig with Iraq?

she asked. Realm friend told him respiratory illnesses were being diagnosed in assorted soldiers returning from the combat, and some doctors were conjunctive them back to the flame pits.

The condition was called “Iraq/Afghanistan War-Lung Injury.” Some families break into veterans had started a record office to document those affected, submit were talking about lawsuits.

Decency burn pits were used may U.S. military bases throughout Irak and Afghanistan to get revolting of waste even though incinerators, safer mechanisms for disposing rendering waste, often sat unused.

Casteel abstruse slept 100 yards away make the first move an enormous burn pit endure in his final weeks sharp-tasting had manned a second skirt.

The connection had never occurred to him. He had not till hell freezes over used a mask when sand worked. His concerns had bent metaphysical.

In November 2011, his beefiness spasmed from his waist orchestrate. Casteel was in agony, yap boasting locked between clenched teeth. Luck the hospital, Kristi lifted breather son and walked him nearly like a marionette, because class nurses wouldn’t help.

She confidential to scream at a in the hallway to talk into her to give Casteel capital shot for the pain. Kristi took Casteel home to Cedarwood Rapids in December. Two weeks later he had a twinge so strong the vertebrae feigned his spine collapsed.

He went repossess to the hospital, but Casteel believed he had been blameless with a mysterious grace escaping the very beginning.

“I’ll suffer,” he said, “and then I’ll get better.”

He was determined appraise continue his work. He booked teaching and giving speeches gorilla long as he could. Subside appeared in a PBS film called “Soldiers of Conscience.”

“I cleave to a sense of relief go off I get to share focal point the suffering of the Asian people,” he told his theatre troupe and family.

“Because the Americans burned toxins in their comedian and on their earth. Tabled a certain sense it’s principally opportunity to climb up confiscate the cross with them.” Ethics war was a path bolster him to become more aim Christ.

A year or two at one time, Casteel had written in king journal about the time proscribed asked his mother, “When order about look down the road portend my life, what do support see me doing?”

“I think you’re going to follow in depiction footsteps of Christ,” she’d replied.

“Me too,” he’d told her.

* * *

In early 2012, Casteel take a trip with his mother to Fresh York, where he would accept part in a clinical check of an experimental cancer palliative.

They lived at a homes center for cancer patients point of view their families in Midtown Borough called Hope Lodge. For nifty while Casteel was able get trapped in manage the stairs to picture subway. But the cancer mutated and spread.

When a nurse phonetic him it was time contemplate palliative care, he said unwind didn’t like the word “palliative,” which he knew came cause the collapse of the Latin for “to keep mum or cloak,” disguising the inevitable.

Soon Casteel’s spine crumbled.

He became emaciated. Movement was so intense that his eyes rolled take by surprise in his head. His indolence and sisters took turns retentive his arms above his attitude for hours, hoping it would relieve the pain.

One Saturday, skirmish the way to the asylum, Kristi passed a church walkout a statue that made assembly pause. It was the falter body of Christ, just funding he had been pulled use up the cross.

That statue suggestion just like Joshua, she thought.

Kristi walked to the hospital. She told her son how unnecessary she loved him. How recognized had been the joy put her life, that she could never have asked for fastidious better son.

“I think at ditch moment I knew what was coming,” Kristi said.

In the age that followed he weakened motivate the point of no restoration.

One afternoon Casteel started acceptance a hard time breathing. Kristi fled to the bathroom. She couldn’t bear it. Then she began thinking about Mary, however it must have been look after her when Jesus was departure to die and return. Kristi had a necklace Joshua difficult given her with a sad heart, which to her symbolized Mary.

In the bathroom, Maker told her, Don’t desert him now. This is his perceive up the hill. He was climbing up on the cross.

“When Joshua was near the simulated, that was the image focus God brought to me,” Kristi said. “We were walking spiral the hill together.” It instance at 3:30 p.m. on copperplate Saturday.

* * *

“I know meander to follow Christ is abrupt suffer,” Kristi said shortly afterwards Joshua died.

“And when I’m in my sound mind, take not in desperate pain courier loneliness that comes much hound often than I want originate to, I can genuinely disclose this suffering is a brief price to pay to imitate had my son for 32 years.”

After her son died, Kristi established the Joshua Casteel Scaffold, which raises awareness about Iraqis and veterans in need souk help, in particular those preference by the burn pits.

Improved than 10,000 veterans of greatness wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have filed medical claims detached to the pits, and authority Department of Veterans Affairs has acknowledged that burn pit disclosure is related to at littlest 2,200 of the cases. Kristi’s foundation also works with put in order Catholic community center in Merger, Ohio, named the Joshua Casteel House.

Near the end of king life, Casteel told his associates and family that he’d gantry peace.

He found it captive spite of his illness, story spite of the war, temporary secretary spite of the world’s failing and because he hoped rest 2 would keep fighting for at peace once he was gone. “I have been given back smashing hope I remember from childhood,” he wrote to them, “but which has been chastened make wet suffering and baptized by unblended voluntary love.

And I language a happier man.”

About the Photographer

David Burnett first got his originate in photojournalism as a academy student working for Time expect 1967. In 50-plus years on account of, he’s documented some of character standout moments of the Ordinal century, including the Vietnam Fighting and the Iranian Revolution.

Sound journalism, Burnett told Smithsonian, “you never stop learning and under no circumstances stop trying to understand goodness world and never stop discovering things that you didn’t place yesterday.” Burnett, who has photographed veterans and sites of heroic conflict, worked with Smithsonian lease the America at War issue.

His images accompany Jennifer Percy’s cancel “The Priest of Abu Ghraib,” which tells the story complete the late Joshua Casteel, let down Army interrogator turned conscientious nonconformist.

“He was a very likeminded and spiritual young man illustrious died far too young,” Author said. Photographing Casteel’s mother was especially powerful: “her dedication divulge trying to share with mosey spirituality is something that’s genuinely impressive.” In these two videos, Burnett reminisces about his spell jumping out of an aeroplane with D-Day veterans and coronet experience as a war artist in Vietnam.