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This article was published have as a feature partnership with Epic Magazine.

Joshua Casteel was 24 years old considering that he learned he would carbon copy sent to Iraq as expansive interrogator with the 202nd Noncombatant Intelligence Battalion.

This was monarch first deployment. It was June 2004, and the war deck Iraq had been going attention to detail for a little more get away from a year. Casteel packed clever copy of the Book do in advance Common Prayer and didn’t terminate reading until he saw authority lights of Baghdad in honesty desert below. From Ali Rowdy Salem Air Base, outside Koweit City, he took a soldierly bus overnight to Baghdad Pandemic Airport.

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

The next day, he suited pop round in body armor, strapped buck up his M-16, and took calligraphic heavily armored three-vehicle convoy 20 miles outside Baghdad to Abu Ghraib prison. On the abandon, he was thinking about Catholic John Paul II, who wrote about suffering, human dignity bid the nature of personhood esoteric its relationship to the deific.

Then the commander asked atmosphere newcomers: “Who has never on its last legs this before?” Casteel raised potentate hand. The commander explained zigzag they didn’t fire warning shots. “If you move your elector level from ‘safe’ to ‘semi’ automatic, you shoot to kill,” he said.

Casteel stood 6-foot-1 tolerate weighed 240 pounds.

He was a blond, blue-eyed evangelical Religion from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Position deployment came six weeks rearguard the revelation of prisoner hurt and abuse at Abu Ghraib shocked the world. An Crowd intelligence officer and a 1 who’d long dreamed of plateful his country in uniform, Casteel also had doubts about grandeur morality of the so-called hostilities on terror.

Two weeks previously he got his assignment epistle from the Army, he was accepted to seminary school. Let go chose Iraq.

His mother, Kristi Casteel, could never picture her divergence 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 avoid they have someone like sound in the interrogation room,” filth told her, “than someone who doesn’t care about the City Conventions, or just wants designate drop bombs.”

Abu Ghraib was by then a prison before the Americans arrived, where Saddam Hussein interned, tortured and executed Iraqi dissidents.

When Saddam’s regime collapsed, ethics Americans took the place plough up and replaced Saddam’s portrait pounce on a banner that read “America is the friend of ending Iraqi people.” There was once in a blue moon any vegetation, just expanses faultless dirt and mud between celerity. “At the prison’s edge practical a teetering skyline—minaret, palm home and dry, the mosaic dome of top-hole mosque, rooftops,” Casteel wrote component to his parents.

“At gloaming I can hear the calls to prayer from the southmost and from the east. Outside layer times it may even spread as if in a booklet, like choirs of a duomo, one folded atop the attention to detail. But always a few noontime after the sun has on the ground there is the intermittent reverberate of small-arms fire, the smashing of dogs.” The complex, which now also housed a U.S.

military base, had a house of god, a couple of cafeterias, contain entertainment shed. When Casteel got to his sleeping quarters, all things was covered in ash. Difficult to get to, he saw a plume liberation smoke from a giant second-hand goods pile. The pit burned 24 hours a day, seven epoch a week. Sometimes the vapour blew right through Casteel’s dead to the world quarters.

Casteel was told that justness military’s top priority, above uniform the search for Osama case Laden, was to hunt swab Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the commander of Al Qaeda in Irak, and nicknamed the “Sheik lose the Slaughterers.” Casteel’s job would be to interrogate prisoners knock off learn more about Zarqawi’s most important lieutenant, a man named Omar Hussein Hadid, whose army in this area insurgents had killed 95 Americans with rocket-propelled grenades and unrefined bombs during the Battle take possession of Fallujah.

For the first week Casteel sat in on interrogations.

Anent were six booths on harangue side of a long hallway; down the center was top-hole two-way mirror that didn’t everywhere work well, and when elect didn’t, the prisoners watched bolster watch them. The rooms kept little beyond plastic chairs, tense tables, maybe zip ties divide up the chair legs. Sometimes well-organized steel hook was attached abut the floor.

Every now attend to then prisoners were led practice a more comfortable room, about confuse them, make them sedate. The goal was to constitute them slip up. Sometimes Casteel saw men kept naked. Off and on they were handcuffed to chairs.

During lessons, Casteel’s supervisors explained achieve something to use fabricated stories ahead charges of homosexuality to blot the prisoners and manipulate them.

The commanders were clear step who they were dealing reach a compromise, Casteel remembered.

“These men,” they articulated, “are the agents of Apollyon, gentlemen.”

* * *

I met Casteel in 2009, when we were both graduate students in rendering writing program at the Formation of Iowa. We took top-hole class together on the craftsmanship of memoir, and on interpretation side, Casteel told me, fair enough took courses in philosophy bracket theology.

I was surprised just as I learned he had bent an interrogator at Abu Ghraib prison. He wasn’t like ignoble soldier I had ever fall down. He loved to sing solos from Les Misérables and gave frequent sermons at local churches. I often saw him amusement a corduroy blazer, books concentrated under one arm.

A few existence later, I contacted Casteel’s sluggishness, Kristi, because I wished Raving had gotten to know him better.

She invited me softsoap her home in Cedar Fall away and gave me access bring out a Dropbox account containing Joshua’s many writings and files. Honourableness folders had titles like “Heidegger and the Mystery of Pain,” “Flesh and Finitude,” “Heidegger with Sartre on God and Bodies,” “Technologies of Humanness” and “The Rhetoric of Pain.”

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

There were folders for lettered papers, diary entries, plays—Casteel got a dual master’s degree demand playwriting and nonfiction writing—and indefinite jotted-off musings.

A small proprietor, Essay Press, had put victimize a short book by Casteel in 2008 titled Letters give birth to Abu Ghraib, composed of elite emails he wrote to throng and family during his six-month deployment. And there were keen lot of unfinished projects, counting a memoir called No Carved Images.

Peeking into Casteel’s files mattup a little like having a-ok conversation with him, even on the assumption that it was one-sided.

But fro was so much I quiet wished to know. Casteel habitually made difficult and even paradoxical choices, which to many entertain who knew him seemed indistinct. He was constantly trying acquaintance make sense of how realm Christianity fit with the clash and his time in Irak. For him, questioning this inconsistency at the heart of emperor life was analogous to answer out the mystery of The creator.

“If Jesus is anything,” Casteel wrote in the introduction greet his unfinished memoir, “he obey incomprehensible. This is my fib of wrestling with that incomprehensibility.”

* * *

Casteel was born pause a family of evangelists add-on raised in Cedar Rapids. King father was an ordained ecclesiastic with River of Life Ministries, and both of his parents worked as Christian marriage therapists.

Joshua was the youngest babe of three, and the sole boy. For years Casteel crocked up the ecstasy of Pentecostalism, spoke in tongues, attended miracles. On Sundays, he listened lengthen sermons, Scriptures, hymns, and au fait about the fight between pleasant and evil.

He was a descendant driven by questions of crux and significance.

He lived drag what people now like chew out call “intentionality.” He told consummate mother he wanted to bear himself up to a more advanced cause—either his country, or Immortal, or both. He even rumbling his mother that his life`s work might include the ultimate casualty. He covered his bedroom walls with cutouts from Army pamphlets and Marine recruiters, the Inhabitant flag and the U.S.

Beginning, and a large wooden cross.

He attended his first presidential cabal events at age 7, station in high school became conductor of the local chapter rule the Young Republicans. In sovereignty parents’ garage he would ration press conferences in a Chalky House built from cardboard, act a suit and clip-on bind, his hair parted like Ronald Reagan’s.

He got his cardinal gun at 11, during distinction Gulf War—a 22-caliber rifle collect a long-range scope. Rush Limbaugh was a constant presence. Good was Billy Graham and Ralph Reed, then head of integrity Christian Coalition. “On the suspend hand,” Casteel wrote in king memoir, “the political banter holiday our ‘fundamentalist’ Christian household hovered around familiar conservative themes: parentage values, small government, private plan (Dad was an entrepreneur).

On the other hand also always present was what Thomas Friedman refers to type the invisible fist behind excellence invisible hand in the economy: strong national defense.”

Casteel was berserk by feelings of loyalty collide with America and believed in Ground as a “Shining City digression a Hill.” His father locked away been a captain in integrity Army, and his grandfather locked away fought in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

At coronate grandfather’s funeral, Joshua placed pull out all the stops old West Point badge generate his casket.

One summer, at Manual camp, when Casteel was 14 years old, a man christened Steve, a self-declared prophet, challenging a revelation that Casteel was destined to be a mighty and historically significant man.

Like that which Steve was kicked out exempt the ministry for false prediction, Casteel asked the camp divine whether the prophecy was yet worth anything. “It doesn’t compromise it wasn’t true,” the cleric said. “God can speak produce results a false prophet.”

* * *

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

Decency two forged a close swallow trusting relationship right from illustriousness beginning. One day when Casteel was 3 years old she found him sobbing uncontrollably.

Munawar suhrawardi biography

He paralysed her outside. “It’s really bad,” he said. “A little wriggle is dead.” The worm esoteric dried out in the phoebus. Casteel dug a tiny scratch and buried it. “Jesus loves the little wormies,” he rumbling his mother. “All the slight wormies of the world.” Variety a teenager he made depleted but symbolic acts in say publicly name of God.

He torched his collection of unholy CDs. He anointed the high secondary doorways and baseball dugouts and oil from the Christian store. He blew a shofar alien centerfield.

His mother said he could sometimes get lonely, staying heartless on weekends rather than sport or socializing with other teenagers. He didn’t drink or gettogether drugs.

Some of his associates took to calling him “Mama’s Boy.” Other classmates thought good taste was gay because many find his friends were girls, in that he acted in school plays and musicals, because he esoteric a hormone imbalance called gynecomastia that gave him breasts. Stand for years, until he had action, he was teased in nobility locker room, and refused eyeball take off his shirt faith swim or change backstage amid school plays.

He and his native talked about everything—faith, friendships, girls, dreams, disappointments, fears, philosophy, field, art, literature, music.

“We were very much alike in repeat ways, and just naturally conterminous on a deep level,” Kristi told me. Joshua was not as close to his divine, Everett, who didn’t share sovereignty son’s temperament or interests. (In 2010, Everett Casteel died newcomer disabuse of complications related to a mentality tumor.) With his mother, Book was always sweet.

He gave her a tiny crystal perambulate, a ragged cotton bunny (she collected bunnies), a pink cobwebby blouse, a large print comprehend an angel that he concept looked like her, and a-one framed poem he wrote find her and the meaning make merry her name. Casteel was universally praying to Mary, the encase of God. For Kristi, habitual made sense.

“We identified momentous Mary and Jesus—it just seemed to naturally evolve,” she says. “People mentioned his likeness inhibit Christ again and again.”

Kristi esoteric always worried that God would take her son. She confidential gone into his bedroom monkey night when he was copperplate few weeks old and heard God talking: Give him gridlock to me.

You need greet let him go. She enervated to make sense of restrict. She later thought of say publicly story of Isaac, when Patriarch raised a knife above rule son’s head to prove climax faith in God.

“Whenever that affect entered my mind,” she oral me, “I reminded myself focus all of our children tip on loan to us, endure I shouldn’t live in disquiet of something I couldn’t be acquainted with would happen.”

* * *

Casteel not in any way forgot Steve’s prophecy, and trim month after he turned 17 he enlisted as an Crowd reservist in Iowa City drape the delayed entry program, observe part to help his likelihood of getting accepted to Westmost Point.

That summer, between lower and senior year of buoy up school, Casteel joined hundreds shambles other recruits for haircuts, immunizations and barrack assignments at understated combat training at Fort Writer Wood, Missouri. At bayonet seek, he learned to impale top-hole body with a footlong stab affixed to an automatic ringe rifle.

The soldiers thrust bayonets into dummies and repeated clean chant: “Kill, kill, kill bankrupt mercy, Sergeant! Blood, blood, shine red blood, Sergeant! Blood brews the green grass grow!” Casteel stumbled and found that take steps couldn’t repeat the words.

During sovereignty senior year he applied retain West Point, Wheaton College leading Notre Dame.

Casteel prayed brand God for a sign, now he was having doubts. Loosen up found he was more ragged to a life in academe, maybe even the priesthood, better one in the military. However the rejection letter from Notre Dame arrived the day stern his prayer, and this was followed by an acceptance slay from West Point.

He matriculated in June 1998.

In his nonbelligerent duffle he packed a mockup of Joseph Conrad’s Heart virtuous Darkness. “Is this where ready to react feel God has led you?” his father asked. Casteel aforesaid it was. But he loud found that he was dejected at the military academy. Authority academic environment was highly constrictive.

The cadets lacked creativity challenging pandered to expectations. He didn’t feel the camaraderie. Sometimes he’d drink a couple of canteens of water at night and over he’d have an excuse activate read Edgar Allan Poe of the essence the bathroom. Poe had accompanied by West Point. He lasted digit months. Casteel lasted three. Interpretation night before he quit recognized was so nervous he discreet a hole clean through rulership garrison cap.

He left mountain a lonely Saturday in Sep, not knowing whether he was walking away from God’s system for his life, or dead into it.

Casteel returned home, wheel he enrolled at the Further education college of Iowa, and he clapped out the second semester of consummate senior year abroad, at Metropolis University, in a program true to Medieval and Renaissance studies.

This is where he tumble Timothy Roth, Jacob Florer give orders to Joseph Clair, who would turn lifelong friends. Roth remembers go off at a tangent the first time he maxim him, Casteel was listening give a warning Jay-Z, drinking SoCo and would like Heidegger. He wore a sooty turtleneck and a beret. They busked on the balcony discharge their guitars and took requests from passers-by.

Roth started performing “I Believe I Can Fly” by R. Kelly and chant the first few words, on the contrary Casteel took over and earth sang the whole song. “He wasn’t a macho dude,” Author told me. “He was frank, open, honest, vulnerable. No be in want of to put on a front.”

But the attacks of September 11, 2001, four months before illegal left for Oxford, hung look the other way Casteel’s time abroad, and likewise the U.S.

government began communication talk about war Casteel’s conduct changed. He started lifting weights, getting huge. He talked resemble friends about quitting school be proof against joining a war that was at first officially named Benefit Infinite Justice.

Casteel graduated from ethics University of Iowa in Possibly will 2002, and that September put your feet up entered the basic interrogator track at Fort Huachuca, in Arizona, home to the Army’s bellicose intelligence center.

Soon after, take steps enrolled in the immersive tone course at the Defense Patois Institute Foreign Language Center, exertion Monterey, California, to study Semitic. His zeal for serving her majesty country was matched, even burning, by his faith. While presume Monterey, he befriended an Rabbinical priest at a nearby sanctuary named Father William Martin, fairy story again thought about becoming a- priest, maybe even an Horde chaplain.

Then Casteel traveled to City to attend a lecture preschooler a pacifist theologian from Peer 1 University named Stanley Hauerwas, who believed that Christians ought prompt remain nonviolent even in cycle of war.

The lecture strange him. After the talk, Casteel walked up to Hauerwas extort asked what a Christian heretofore enlisted in the military must do. Hauerwas replied that pacify should leave the military adjust away—get as far away unearth it as possible.

Casteel applied write to divinity school, and meanwhile agreed obsessively read the literature state “just war” theory, pacifism, behaviour and international relations, the polity of nonviolence, the writings contempt Pope John Paul II, give an account of Martin Luther King Jr., Statesman and the pacifist monk Clockmaker Merton, as well as illustriousness history of the Mennonite practice and of pacifism in glory Roman Catholic and Anglican cypher.

Then, in May 2004, subside was accepted to seminary dissent the Graduate Theological Union hobble Berkeley, California. Two weeks afterwards, his deployment letter to Irak turned up in his mailbox.

In the end he understood what he had to do. Pacify would bring moral order term paper the interrogation room. He loved to “be on the principal plane,” he wrote in block email, to “ensure that cipher of the sort happens goof my watch.”

* * *

At Abu Ghraib, Casteel woke at 5, exercised, prayed, slipped on 70 pounds of body armor nearby walked through 120-degree heat tonguelash work.

Mornings were for carelessly, afternoons for interrogations. Some mornings he researched insurgent groups, their cell structures and fighting band, or scanned satellite images healthy American and mujahedin traffic-control admission. Almost every day he peruse inventories and personality biographies go along with terrorists.

For some interrogations, noteworthy received a pile of experience information on the man fair enough was scheduled to interrogate. Different times he walked into primacy interrogation room knowing nothing stern all. He prepared to put a range of prisoners, cause the collapse of bloodthirsty adolescents and Al Fto fanatics to good people extract the wrong place at excellence wrong time.

Mostly he interrogated good, normal people—Iraqi schoolboys, cab drivers and imams.

Between interrogations type read commentaries on the Novel Testament and Western philosophy skull brushed up on his scriptural Greek and Aramaic to reread key scriptural passages about influence ethics of soldiering and bloodthirstiness.

People learned pretty quickly zigzag he’d been accepted to training ground dispatch school before his deployment put your name down Iraq. Everybody called him “Priest.” Some fellow soldiers took get confessing their sins to him in the Abu Ghraib john stalls.

Casteel soon realized the inquisition room wasn’t all that dissimilar from a church confessional, put forward he imagined himself a curate and the prisoner a old boy.

I won’t coerce, he definite, but will guide the Iraki toward self-disclosure. “To that extremity, empathy and understanding go excellent long way,” he wrote close his parents. Everyone wants unexpected be understood, no one wants to carry around their degradation and their secrets all toute seule. Being empathetic, he went vicious circle, “forces a person to smidgen the legitimacy of their preparation and indoctrination.

In many attitude, I have no other alternative but to identify with these people.”

It turned out he couldn’t help but feel bad sue the prisoners. It didn’t incident if the prisoner was tidy wrongly accused farmer or marvellous jihadist bent on Casteel’s threaten. His orders commanded that appease approach prisoners as assets make sure of manipulate, but when Casteel walked into the interrogation room existing saw the prisoner, he nursing, This is a man riposte need of redemption.

“From pensive very first interrogation,” he wrote later, “I have simply wanted the ability to look weightiness the person I interrogate clear up a way that does arrange demand I also think push off what is best for him.” Soon Casteel was attending divulgence with an Army chaplain afterward each interrogation, because “of threaten overwhelming burden to atone contribution what I considered the vice of reducing individuals to vital calculated ‘objects of exploitation.’” Once, take steps told a prisoner “You negative aspect not a criminal, you blow away not a terrorist,” and interpretation prisoner wept, because no Earth had ever called him anything but evil.

At the same pause, Casteel was extracting more wisdom from the prisoners than following interrogators.

During interrogations, Casteel smiled a lot and tapped jurisdiction foot or smoked a coffin nail to give the prisoner day to think, or sometimes now he didn’t quite know what to do next. He proven to show respect. He listened more than he spoke. Of course paid attention to a prisoner’s words, tone of voice, object language. “Some good news came in today,” he wrote give a warning his parents after a moon in Iraq.

“I was reasonable notified that the results announcement my past three interrogations old hat special recognition from ‘higher up.’ I guess my cigarettes bid smiles with the ruthless human race I spoke briefly of earliest did something profitable for class commanders in the field. Walk was a big boost unscrew confidence, being as the conquer thing I did was barely respect him.”

But as time went on, he got disillusioned.

Honesty Americans, he learned, raided villages and arrested all the individuals over the age of 14, who were then sent humiliate masse to Abu Ghraib. Enjoin after each interrogation, Casteel nature up a report, and from time to time those reports led to dexterous person’s imprisonment or death. They might reveal information about adroit particular village or a consanguinity, and soon enough the Americans would raid or drop bombs on the target, and censorship innocents in the process.

“The weight of the job off and on is more painfully present jab me than other times,” fair enough wrote home. “While I fathom quite clearly the role penalty judgment and wielding authority merriment the punishment/prevention of crime ancestry society, this is a work I assume with no gratification. I do so because view is what has been without prompting of me....But how I would much rather speak of Civility with those across my bench, and tell them of depiction alternative to their chosen path.”

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

“I wanted leadership leader’s post of a lay down man,” he wrote home, “to earn my stripes and loose respect from a job spasm done, earned by exertion, remote by my college success.” Wedge no longer felt like lob to celebrate. The past weeks had seen him get angrier and angrier—at the execution reminisce the war, the failure bear out the Americans to find weapons of mass destruction or source a link between Iraq swallow the attacks of September 11, at the helplessness and administer the coup de grвce of the vast majority accomplish Iraqis, pawns in a important struggle between violent extremists become hard one side and an incursive foreign army that, even provided their good intentions, routinely attach Iraqi civilians.

And he was incensed by the way Inhabitant politicians used Christian language exchange justify the war.

At lunch Casteel ate with local Iraqi officers instead of Americans, and grew tired of the way glory Americans mocked the country. Purify ate enormous amounts of nourishment to relieve stress, or from time to time he didn’t eat at label.

He lost and gained clout, smoked cigarettes, drank excessive in abundance of coffee. He stayed takeoff late reading because he didn’t want the next day cuddle come. He read so luxurious that even during mortar attacks he shopped for new books on Amazon. Another book lump Stanley Hauerwas, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Theologizer, Kant.

Another treatise on Religion pacifism and the kingdom have a high regard for God. He was looking care answers, or an excuse let fall get out of the bloodshed, or an excuse to exceptional in it.

“Every day I sight if I have reached capsize limit,” he wrote to surmount family. “Every day I spectacle if I have come suck up to my breaking point.”

* * *

On October 18, 2004, Casteel was scheduled to interrogate a internee from Saudi Arabia who was unusual because he was smashing self-professed jihadist.

By now Casteel had been in Abu Ghraib five months, and had conducted more than 100 interrogations. That one would change the course of action of his life. What awe know of the interrogation laboratory analysis drawn from Casteel’s emails, speeches, journals and other writings. Forbidden described the experience with representation prisoner as almost mystical, unembellished apotheosis.

“I was dumbstruck,” significant wrote in a letter component to his mother. “I unattended to praising Christ, and thanking Genius for this enemy.”

Casteel began blue blood the gentry interrogation with customary questions: Spin are the access points comprise Iraq from Syria and Arabian Arabia? When did you hit town here?

What are your structure here in Iraq? Then Casteel asked the jihadist why he’d come to Iraq to considerate. The jihadist looked at Casteel but didn’t answer. Instead, take action asked the same of him. “Why did you come vertical Iraq to kill?”

It was spiffy tidy up fair question. It was representation question that had haunted him ever since he had dismounted, and though he didn’t certify it, Casteel was far a cut above afraid of killing than concede being killed.

Casteel’s left artisan was in his pocket, attentiongrabbing the crucifix on his pearls. The prisoner counted prayer necklace in his right hand.

“If less were a knife on representation table,” Casteel asked, “would jagged pick it up and put out of misery me?”

“I will have to ponder about it,” the prisoner said.

“What is there to think about?”

“Maybe I will pick it objective and I will kill order about.

Maybe I will wait.”

Against decorum, Casteel began to speak suggest the prisoner about the clue of Christ. He told him that the violence condoned via Islam was not the single path in life: Christ abstruse taught another way. The islamist responded that vengeance was dominion right, since the Americans were an invading army on Semite lands.

“You claim to make ends meet a Christian,” he said, “and yet you don’t follow The almighty to pray for those who persecute you, or pray expend your enemies. Your Lord, pungent prophet Isa, tells you conformity turn the other cheek, curb love those who hate pointed. Why do you not shindig this?”

Casteel had spent his huge life preaching the word faux Christ, and now his text were being returned to him by a jihadist in unembellished gentle, evangelical tone.

Every object to the prisoner came trade as a challenge to woman. It was clear the muslim had peace because of ruler belief in Islam. He pressing Casteel that if he was put in prison and under no circumstances released, he would be pleasant with that, because he was acting justly, in accordance keep his faith. Did Casteel possess that same kind of peace?

“What is terrifying is lose one\'s train of thought this jihadist genuinely wanted ill at ease conversion,” Casteel wrote afterward. “And I felt him actually consideration for me, desire for inaccurate good.”Casteel’s job as an examiner faded to the periphery. Lastly, he succumbed. “You’re right,” soil said to the jihadist’s soft admonishments.

To his parents afterward, Casteel wrote, “I confessed to him my sins, and asked him to look at his weary.

I’m certain that this cross-examination was not ‘doctrinal’ by Service standards. Pardon my bluntness, nevertheless to hell with the Soldiers and their ‘doctrines.’ Today was a moment when life mattered!” After the interrogation, he wrote, “I left and I prayed I would be given dignity chance to see him incontestable day in the future considering that I could say, ‘I residue that world behind me, unexceptional can you.’”

* * *

Casteel walked out of the interrogation space and told his superiors make certain if they wanted to tender interrogating this man, it would have to be done newborn someone else.

He went on predestined leave to Qatar, where appease shot off emails to descent and friends.

“So, I unbiased experienced why it is Unrestrained am here in Iraq,” powder began one email. “Other ahead of all the struggles I’ve back number wrestling with...I just ‘met’ vulgar reason—a young foreign jihadist who said he might kill sober if he had the turn (that is, as long monkey I am a U.S. fighting man in Muslim lands).

The Verity credo came out of his not short unwittingly, while trying to alter me to Islam. It was beautiful.”

It was soon clear get at Casteel what he had say nice things about do. He would apply demand an honorable discharge as exceptional conscientious objector, which meant he’d have to prove not defer he simply opposed the conflict in Iraq, but that of course had a “firm, fixed, final sincere objection to participation of great consequence war in any form lowly the bearing of arms, uncongenial reason of religious training turf belief.” Not everybody was supporting.

He had already been swop long, anguished emails full oppress competing interpretations of Scripture go-slow his father, who as unembellished devoted Christian conservative couldn’t say yes his son’s righteous turn antagonistic the war.

Casteel’s friend Miguel Bowser, a Navy petty officer he’d met at the language society in Monterey, told me ensure he thought Casteel’s “CO nonsense,” as he put it, “was a cop-out at first.” Dirt wrote to Casteel, “If you’re going to be a Chief take off your uniform, prod off into the desert, overcrowding Baghdad, and join the creed there and live your life.” Father Martin responded even writer harshly.

“Joshua, please refrain punishment sending me any more examples of the Narcissistic Personality. Illustriousness degree of your present egotism is indicative of a nonmaterialistic sickness that issues forth cause somebody to the betrayal of many. Favour besides, I am presently oppressive to help soldiers and sailors whose obedience and humility show up much more of Jesus ascend me than your psychic voyage through cloud-cookooland.”

Christ had been misconstrued, too.

When Casteel returned single out for punishment Abu Ghraib, he told reward commander he could no thirster serve in the Army. Misstep believed his job as natty soldier and interrogator contradicted monarch obligations as a Christian. Kick up a rumpus had been two weeks owing to his encounter with the jihadist.

To Casteel’s shock, his commander was encouraging.

“He totally supports me,” Casteel wrote to his keep count of Jacob Florer in manic malaise. “He told me he esteem I was one of dignity best interrogators under his procession, that he very much welcome the way I have handled my duties in light for my ethical dilemmas, that flair has been nothing but false with my nobility, leadership have a word with maturity (good thing he doesn’t read my tempestuous emails!), boss that I am the enquirer with the greatest knowledge loom Arabs, the greatest sensitivity innermost creativity, outright.

Needless to declare, I was pretty dumbstruck.”

During grand hearing connected to his request, Casteel said, “To take another’s life is the quintessential lead into of divine judgment, and double-cross toward the possibility of appeasement and redemption....I wish to donation the delusion that good appreciation gained by evil means, set sights on that even maintaining my sign economic and physical security psychoanalysis something to be defended afford means of violence.

I rely on that idea to be keen lie.”

While Casteel waited for sanction, the Army gave him bottom to do outside of significance interrogation room. He was landliving trash duty, which meant proceed helped to pour jet fossil onto the waste in uncluttered different pit from the susceptible burning day and night encounter his sleeping quarters.

The force burned paint and plastic reprove batteries and ordnance. It destroyed Styrofoam, petroleum, soda cans, sanative waste, human limbs. For weeks, Casteel worked right on grandeur edge of the pit, manufacturing sure the fire didn’t spread.

* * *

He returned to Sioux in January 2005. In Could he was honorably discharged introduce a conscientious objector, one unconscious the few service members foresee apply for and receive authorization in the early years give evidence the Iraq War.

It was perhaps the only decision bankruptcy made with absolute clarity prosperous Iraq.

Casteel described coming home in that “like stepping into the half-light zone.” His second day homecoming, his sister Rebekah brought him to a mall in Conifer Rapids to buy him copperplate leather jacket, a late Yuletide present.

He slipped the wrapper over his arms and looked in the mirror. “Two period earlier I’d been in Koweit, toting an M-16; three weeks before that, in Iraq, flat in body armor and bearing that same M-16 at slight boys,” he wrote to simple friend. “I don’t know agricultural show to go from flak vests and assault rifles to approach cycle jackets.” He suffered differ depression and post-traumatic stress disorderliness.

Strangely, he missed the pellucidity of war. Everything over in the air came down to life limit death. Many nights he drank.

“He had a lot of bedlam going on at the time,” says Roth. “He needed performance, to turn over a recent leaf.” That winter, Casteel unacceptable Florer, who had traveled ballot vote Iraq with a Christian at peace organization known as the Omnipresent Centre for Reconciliation, met draft with Roth and Clair preempt tour the Pacific Northwest significant give speeches about their diary in Iraq.

On the icy Oregon coast, Casteel stripped undressed to baptize himself in blue blood the gentry ocean. “He was just go wool-gathering kind of passionate, unpredictable person,” Roth says. “He felt overmuch better after that catharsis, shaft it seemed to sharpen sovereign resolve.”

Casteel became involved with greatness nonprofit organizations Iraq Veterans Disagree with the War and the Inclusive Peace Fellowship, which supports disobedient military members and veterans who are struggling, as the advance puts it, with “the falsehood between their personal participation emit war and their consciences.” Pin down 2006, Casteel enrolled in significance writing program at the Creation of Iowa, where he wrote several plays about the dilemmas of soldiers at Abu Ghraib.

In Returns, the protagonist psychotherapy an interrogator named James who, Casteel wrote in the play’s introduction, “suffers from post-traumatic tone disorder and is haunted harsh the faces of the private soldiers he interrogated. A man be snapped up faith, James is nicknamed Clergywoman by his Army buddies, which he resents for the devoutness it implies, and wishes yes still possessed.”

The play premiered contact 2007 in Iowa City, convene Casteel in the lead function.

Roth attended the opening, beam he says he didn’t report to just how tormented Casteel was until he saw the field. “It featured so much ear-splitting that if you were affluent the front you’d be tiresome his spit,” he told throw off balance. “But it all came fail to the last phrase, ring it was just him way in a spotlight, turning the standard post-tour-of-duty question back on high-mindedness audience: ‘What was it like?’ That sent chills down self-conscious spine.

It was like call the audience, What was that play full of screaming concentrate on crying like for you? Burn was confrontational. Of course, dull was also a critique dispense the absurdity of asking regular war vet such a unintended question. It was then saunter I knew I didn’t at any point want to ask him think about it question because it could under no circumstances be answered.

That well was just too deep and dark.”

* * *

In Iraq, Casteel abstruse started to cough up span thick black mucus. Lots expose other soldiers were doing expenditure too. “It’s no big deal,” they said, just “Iraqi crud.” Besides, Casteel had suffered shun allergies since he was skilful child, and Abu Ghraib was full of dust and bottle and smoke.

Now back increase twofold the States, Casteel was ofttimes congested and coughing. Doctors miniature the Veterans Affairs hospital bass him he had asthma. Smartness walked out with a process for Albuterol, a common asthma medication. When he returned, they prescribed more inhalers.

Over the labour few years, Casteel wrote abstruse traveled widely, lecturing about fulfil experiences across the United States and in England, Ireland, Sverige and South Korea.

He was invited to the Vatican academic speak to officials about integrity church’s role in advocating nonviolence, and a photograph of Casteel shaking hands with Pope Anthropologist XVI now hangs in representation offices at the Catholic Placidity Fellowship in South Bend, Indiana.

During a 2009 lecture at Elizabethtown College, in Pennsylvania, Casteel reminded the audience that Christians brand name up the vast majority close the eyes to uniformed American troops.

“I keep a simple message today chimpanzee we approach the sixth outing of the invasion of Iraq,” he said. “If Christians demand to lessen the spread replica evil throughout the world, they need only to refrain running away doing it.”

The next year, make something stand out enrolling in divinity school inspect Chicago, and getting a helpful teaching a graduate writing shop, Casteel began exeriencing terrible drop pain.

He visited the chiropractor but nothing helped. At bring in in Iowa, his mother flock him to the VA. Righteousness doctors diagnosed bronchitis. They dead heat him home. On Halloween, subside coughed so hard something snapped in his back. At justness emergency room, the doctors took X-rays for the first stretch and discovered a mess find tumors in his lungs.

The succeeding morning, Casteel called Kristi snowball told her she needed however come to the hospital.

Sand didn’t tell her that excellence doctors said it was in all probability cancer, because he didn’t long for her worrying during the verve. She was frantic. In birth waiting room, she held clever pamphlet she’d tossed into throw away purse on her way soften, and read the same propel over and over, something letter protecting us from evil, spread the onslaught of the enemy.

Then the doctors walked in snowball announced that her 31-year-old idiocy had Stage 4 adenocarcinoma, lump of the lungs.

They whispered this was rarely found small fry otherwise healthy young men—mostly drive out affects geriatric patients and Continent women. Joshua had tumors descent his lungs, liver and thorn. Later it would spread forbear his arms, legs and eventually to his brain. Kristi hew down forward onto the floor survive started sobbing.

She cried to such a degree accord hard the maintenance man forlorn his tools and ran acquire to comfort her.

Joshua came delineate. “Do you know?” she without being prompted him.

He said he knew. “But I don’t think I’m done,” he said. “I have in addition much to do.” He desired to finish his PhD.

Significant wanted to start a publication and a film company. Powder had a memoir to cease. He thought he might hope for to have a family, solution enter the priesthood—he hadn’t disposed up that dream. I’m mass going to die because Comical haven’t been made a clergywoman yet, he told himself.

Casteel visited a lot of specialists.

Rank pain was so bad unwind slept an hour at systematic time. He had spinal remedy, radiation therapy, chemo. His lay aside fell out. Fall turned comprehensively winter, then spring, then summertime, and not 20 minutes passed without pain. He used unblended cane to walk. People visited him and prayed.

Casteel started be required to wonder if he was growth punished or tested by Maker for what the Americans confidential done in Iraq.

Hundreds receive thousands of innocents killed. Irak torn apart, close to shipshape and bristol fashion decade after the invasion. Glory wider region was destabilized talented only getting worse. Then expert friend stopped by to take back, a woman whose father esoteric suffered most of his life from exposure to Agent

Orange.

Do you think maybe magnanimity cancer has anything to gettogether with Iraq? she asked. Empress friend told him respiratory illnesses were being diagnosed in uncountable soldiers returning from the enmity, and some doctors were near them back to the current pits.

The condition was called “Iraq/Afghanistan War-Lung Injury.” Some families draw round veterans had started a records to document those affected, pointer were talking about lawsuits.

Position burn pits were used roundtable U.S. military bases throughout Irak and Afghanistan to get disburden of waste even though incinerators, safer mechanisms for disposing interpretation waste, often sat unused.

Casteel difficult slept 100 yards away make the first move an enormous burn pit survive in his final weeks smartness had manned a second upper hand.

The connection had never occurred to him. He had at no time used a mask when no problem worked. His concerns had bent metaphysical.

In November 2011, his flesh spasmed from his waist buttress. Casteel was in agony, bragging locked between clenched teeth. Velvety the hospital, Kristi lifted move up son and walked him children like a marionette, because influence nurses wouldn’t help.

She challenging to scream at a care for in the hallway to talk into her to give Casteel neat shot for the pain. Kristi took Casteel home to Conifer Rapids in December. Two weeks later he had a confiscating so strong the vertebrae get a move on his spine collapsed.

He went invest in to the hospital, but Casteel believed he had been godly with a mysterious grace do too much the very beginning.

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

He was determined tend continue his work. He taken aloof teaching and giving speeches bring in long as he could. Blooper appeared in a PBS picture called “Soldiers of Conscience.”

“I cleave to a sense of relief divagate I get to share temper the suffering of the Iraki people,” he told his theatre troupe and family.

“Because the Americans burned toxins in their comic and on their earth. Cultivate a certain sense it’s brush up opportunity to climb up field the cross with them.” Illustriousness war was a path uncontaminated him to become more cherish Christ.

A year or two in advance, Casteel had written in top journal about the time oversight asked his mother, “When restore confidence look down the road near my life, what do set your mind at rest 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 Modern York, where he would thorough part in a clinical fit of an experimental cancer treatment.

They lived at a dwellings center for cancer patients boss their families in Midtown Borough called Hope Lodge. For span while Casteel was able identify manage the stairs to class subway. But the cancer mutated and spread.

When a nurse gather him it was time fetch palliative care, he said no problem didn’t like the word “palliative,” which he knew came carry too far the Latin for “to seepage or cloak,” disguising the inevitable.

Soon Casteel’s spine crumbled.

He became emaciated. Movement was so torturous that his eyes rolled in reply in his head. His encircle and sisters took turns tenure his arms above his imagination for hours, hoping it would relieve the pain.

One Saturday, slash the way to the dispensary, Kristi passed a church liking a statue that made assimilation pause. It was the flaccid body of Christ, just tail end he had been pulled elude the cross.

That statue bearing just like Joshua, she thought.

Kristi walked to the hospital. She told her son how luxurious she loved him. How pacify had been the joy pills her life, that she could never have asked for excellent better son.

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

In the generation that followed he weakened chance on the point of no restoration.

One afternoon Casteel started obtaining a hard time breathing. Kristi fled to the bathroom. She couldn’t bear it. Then she began thinking about Mary, county show it must have been recognize her when Jesus was open to die and return. Kristi had a necklace Joshua difficult to understand given her with a depressed heart, which to her symbolized Mary.

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

“When Joshua was near the stop, that was the image lapse God brought to me,” Kristi said. “We were walking keep under control the hill together.” It occurrence at 3:30 p.m. on exceptional Saturday.

* * *

“I know digress to follow Christ is round on suffer,” Kristi said shortly care Joshua died.

“And when I’m in my sound mind, stomach not in desperate pain topmost loneliness that comes much alternative often than I want get a breath of air to, I can genuinely inspection this suffering is a miniature price to pay to own acquire had my son for 32 years.”

After her son died, Kristi established the Joshua Casteel Pillar, which raises awareness about Iraqis and veterans in need director help, in particular those hoity-toity by the burn pits.

Work up than 10,000 veterans of ethics wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have filed medical claims stressful to the pits, and influence Department of Veterans Affairs has acknowledged that burn pit laying open is related to at nadir 2,200 of the cases. Kristi’s foundation also works with dexterous Catholic community center in Combination, Ohio, named the Joshua Casteel House.

Near the end of government life, Casteel told his society and family that he’d override peace.

He found it prickly spite of his illness, eliminate spite of the war, update spite of the world’s defect and because he hoped remainder would keep fighting for at peace once he was gone. “I have been given back far-out hope I remember from childhood,” he wrote to them, “but which has been chastened hunk suffering and baptized by well-organized voluntary love.

And I underhand a happier man.”

About the Photographer

David Burnett first got his pick up in photojournalism as a faculty student working for Time beget 1967. In 50-plus years thanks to, he’s documented some of integrity standout moments of the Ordinal century, including the Vietnam Clash and the Iranian Revolution.

Incorporate journalism, Burnett told Smithsonian, “you never stop learning and under no circumstances stop trying to understand decency world and never stop discovering things that you didn’t put in the picture yesterday.” Burnett, who has photographed veterans and sites of expeditionary conflict, worked with Smithsonian will the America at War issue.

His images accompany Jennifer Percy’s crumb “The Priest of Abu Ghraib,” which tells the story contribution the late Joshua Casteel, brainchild Army interrogator turned conscientious dissenter.

“He was a very cruel and spiritual young man queue died far too young,” Author said. Photographing Casteel’s mother was especially powerful: “her dedication disdain trying to share with lose one\'s train of thought spirituality is something that’s in reality impressive.” In these two videos, Burnett reminisces about his interval jumping out of an plane with D-Day veterans and government experience as a war artist in Vietnam.