Redefined is hosted by me, Zainab Salbi, and brought to you by FindCenter, a search engine for your soul. Part library, part temple, FindCenter presents a world of wisdom, organized. Check it out today at www.findcenter.com, and please subscribe to Redefined for free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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What’s most important about life? What is the essence of life? Is it what we do? How much we earn? How many social media followers we have? Or is it, do we live our lives in kindness to ourselves and to others? Do we live our lives in love to ourselves and to others? In nearly losing my life, I was confronted with these questions and it led me to the conversations that make up Redefined, about how we draw our inner maps and the pursuit of meaningful personal change.

Today’s episode is personal, very personal. As I talk to Damien Mander, the Australian anti-poaching activist and the founder of the International Anti-Poaching Foundation. But before becoming an activist, conservationist, and even a feminist working as a last line of defense for nature, Damien was as sniper in the Australian military, and eventually a private security contractor who worked in my own home country, Iraq, during a turbulent, deadly and controversial period in history starting in 2005.

This is one of the most heart-wrenching conversations that I have ever had, not only on Redefined, but in my life. It could only happen in truth. And that Damien gave. He showed up fully and spoke honestly without holding back, about a painful passage of history that changed my life and his. Since reaching this level of truth is so rare, and since the details of Damien’s transformative moments are so many, we’ve split this episode into two parts. The first will run this week, and the second will run next week. It is my hope that conversations like this can serve as an example of healing and reconciliation. And it is the best way I know how to honor the legacy of the late Archbishop Bishop Desmond Tutu and all of his teachings about forgiveness. Join me.

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This conversation is not like other conversations. This is personal, this is different, this is curious, and this is about ultimately healing—for me, and I hope for you too. I trust for you, too. And I want to start it with the letter you sent me, Damien, a few years back. Just to set up the context for our listeners, you and I were invited to give a presentation in Kenya, and just before we were heading off to the presentation—our travels—I live in New York and I was getting ready to go to travel about a month before the presentation actually—I get an email from a friend saying, there’s another speaker who wants connect with you before you go to Kenya. And I’m like, “Yeah, sure. I’ll connect.” Actually, to be honest, I wasn’t researching who else is going to be there. It was really early on for me to do any preparation.

So she’s connecting me with you. And suddenly, first thing, I get this following email from you: “Zainab, I was a part of the system that tried to destroy your country. So I am not sure how to proceed with the conversation. It is my place in a dark history, which I cannot take back or change. Just know that when we do meet in Kenya, I will speak with an open heart and the best of intentions on how we are trying to use some really shitty experiences and skills to make the world a better place for animals and those who protect them. Beyond that, I am open to learning how we can continue to evolve in all that we do. Regards, Damien.”

So it makes me emotional, Damien, just reading that.

Yeah, me too. Yeah. It’s like quite, yeah. Yeah. It’s a lot of stuff that comes flooding back after that email and before it.

And that’s where I want to go, because to set the context, I am from Iraq. It’s painful to see my country and everything in my memory destroyed. The house I grew up in became an execution center right after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 for a year and a half. Then a brothel, and then a military base. Then it nearly got destroyed, and now I don’t recognize it at all.

But honestly, more than the house and all that my family once had, it’s the destruction of the country. You know, just to drive in different parts of the country and to see it. All the memories to see destroyed—towns, villages, churches, mosques, schools, everything—everything is destroyed, and so it’s very painful. I mean, I’m sorry I cry, but it’s a very painful experience to witness such memories destroyed. And I had to reconcile with that.

I mean, the pain doesn’t go. But the reconciliation with myself, the fact that I live in America, a country that really led to that destruction. The fact that I’m in this country and in a world that has contributed to that destruction, right? And in a country that, in my own native country, Iraq, that has also contributed to that destruction. As my aunt says, she said, “America caused half of it,” or the international community caused half of it. “And we caused the other half, and we are all in that process together.”

But the letter from you. First, tell me, why did you write it? What is the context? Who were you in that war?

Yeah. So I mean, I knew our lives were on a collision course to meet. And some things you can say at the time. Other things you just need to get down on paper or in writing, just to take your time to think about it and measure. Because if I’d come to you the first time we turned up there and I said what I wanted to say, I probably wouldn’t have got to say half of what I needed to say even though it’s not a long letter. So that when we did meet you knew my position, that I was open, the shields of armor had come down and I was exposed to learning and being able to understand what a mistake is, and to learn from it, and to turn it into something good. And know that you’re part of that journey. So, yeah.

Well, I mean, I really appreciate you sending that letter because, again, I didn’t know. Right? And I really do appreciate . . . For you to reach out in advance and all the reasons that you just mention. And I also appreciate that it was a courageous letter to write.

But I’m curious. So let’s start, if we may. Let’s deconstruct the process. First of all, what role did you play in that war? Why were you in Iraq, in what capacity?

So I served, I started in the Australian military. I was a clearance diver in the Australian Navy. So that’s Australia’s version, or as close as we have to the SEALs. After September 11 attacks in New York on America, the Australian government formed black roles, a very small niche, special operations unit called Tactical Assault Group East. And I served with the TAG, a unit of three platoons. I was in sniper platoon there, and I served my time there.

And then Iraq was really ramping. The insurgency was really rising the beginning of 2005. And Australia’s a very well paid military by the way, but not as well paid as being a private contractor, a mercenary, in Iraq. And with the CV or resume I had from the units I’d served in, the most elite in our military and some of the most elite units in the world, I could command a very high salary or paycheck in Iraq as a private contractor. And so that’s why I went there.

I went over there initially working, doing close protection for Australian diplomats. And then I got in involved with a group, an organization called BLP, and they were tasked by the Iraq Ministry of Interior and the US government under the CPATT, Civilian Police Assistance Training Team, to recruit, train, equipment, and deploy battalion-size groups of initially national police to replace . . . But aside from going to Iraq in the first place is what I would say is the biggest mistake of the Iraq war, disbanding the Iraqi army and Iraqi police overnight was an absolute disaster.

But before we go any further, Damien, I want to like step back and go into what made you decide to even join the Australian army, right? Like let’s just go back to that beginning.

So you probably won’t believe this, Zainab, but growing up I was a naughty little shit. And so we discovered one day that the fishermen down at the wharf . . . I was about thirteen at this time . . . The fishermen down at the wharf, they’re losing their fishing lures. And these were the calamari or squid fishermen. So they lose their fishing lures. They get stuck on something on the bottom while they’re fishing overnight. And these things are expensive, twenty, thirty bucks. So if we go to either the hardware store or the fishing store and steal fishing lures, we can go down and sell them to the fisherman. And so I dived in, trying to look around, and every one of these things we’re getting, we’re selling back for five dollars. Some days we get thirty or forty of these lures. So that’s how it started. I left school. I was voted the most likely to end up in prison after school.

Wow. What does that mean? I mean, like how bad, what you did?

Yeah. Look, there was a time there where my friends were either dead, going into witness protection programs, or in prison. And I made it out. I made it out. You know, drugs were a big issue in my life growing up, for the people around me and eventually myself, and I just got lucky. I really did. I just got out by a hair, and joined the Navy. I went through, what do you guys call BUD/S? Hell Week with your SEAL team selection? So we call it, CDAT—Clearance Diver Acceptance Test—twelve days of getting . . . At the time, it was between one or two hours’ sleep a day. And just literally stripped bare as a human, as an individual, in terms of suffering, to face who you are and what you want to do. And most people don’t pass that course.

Wow. How old were you?

I was nineteen. Yeah, twenty. Twenty.

Twenty.

Nineteen when I joined the Navy, twenty when I did the selection program.

Was there anything that pushed you to that? Not to the joining the Navy. Pushed you to being voted as the most likely person to go to prison in high school?

I think it was like I was six or seven when my parents separated for the first time. My mum moved away and we went to a new school and I got beaten up every day. Every single day. Used to come home with no buttons on my shirt. Cuts and bruises. And I just turned into this person. I said, “No, I’m never going to let this happen again.” So I just became this animal. And it just stayed with me and I was always . . . And then it grew into a persona that I felt I had to continuously fulfill.

But to take it back to my upbringing, I was raised as the son of a publican. We grew up in hotels with drugs, all-night parties, organized crime, bare-knuckle bar fights. Then that’s what I grew up in for the first almost ten years of my life. That was what I was surrounded with. Mum left Dad when I was seven, got back a year later, and then just before I turned ten, everything was lost. We ended up almost overnight moving to Melbourne, a thousand kilometers away. In a way, into hiding, away from the organized crime side of things that had become a fairly dark shadow over our lives. It was actually refreshing for me as a kid, just to be able to grow up with kids then, and not just be growing up in a pub, in a hotel. It was just like a constant nightclub.

Then once you’re in the military, in these units, you’re surrounded by a bunch of people who have a similar mindset. You’re surrounded by a bunch of silverback gorillas. They’re a bunch of alphas.

I know you have lots of tattoos, Damien.

Yeah.

Some are very intriguing ones.

Yeah.

If I remember . . . And ladies and gentlemen, I only know because at dinner at the retreat that we were all speaking at one point, we were all laughing and talking and all of that, and Damien told us about his tattoos and showed it to us. And it was, wow. I remember skeletons. I may be wrong, but I remember . . . What is in front of your chest? You tattooed something in front of your chest, and I’m curious about that tattoo, and I’m curious about when did you have it and why did you have it?

Yeah, I thought . . . It says, “Seek and destroy.” You can have a look if you want.

Seek and destroy.

And destroy. And that’s . . .

That’s intense.

Yeah, it is. Yeah. It’s hugely intense. And it took me a decade to grow into it after getting it. I got it when I think I was just twenty. I’d just passed the acceptance test to go and train to be a Navy diver. So this was just this shield of machoism that I’m just building up around myself, this masculinity that I thought you can create by adding tattoos and stuff. I think in a lot of ways, when people get tattoos, they sort of have to live out their own story of the ink they’ve got carved into themselves. And I was definitely like . . . I mean, it’s hard to get this tattooed, “Seek and destroy,” and not be that person for at least the next decade until you’re old enough to understand what life’s about.

It really fueled the persona that I wanted to create to protect myself initially, and then wanted to create to keep fulfilling the prophecy. I got that, I hadn’t really achieved anything in the military at that stage, other than passing selection. And then you’re going onto these courses with hard men, hard men that had experienced combat and a lot more life than what I had at that time. They see this young kid with “seek and destroy” on his chest and you attract a lot of attention. So I drew the crabs, as we say. Lot of extra attention during these courses that I was going through. And these are tough courses. And then you got all these tough instructors now looking over your shoulder, through the Navy and then in special operations. If anything, I made things a whole lot harder for myself, but in making it harder for myself also made myself harder by being able to live up to that and deal with all that shit.

And now I’m sort of in this position. I mean, you know me now. I’ve actually come as close to 180 degrees of what a person could probably come, which I’m happy about, I’m proud about, because I can speak to a different audience. I can speak to the person I used to be: the hunter, the sniper, the hothead teenager, the bar fighter, the angry kid, and speak to them as a conservationist, as a vegan, as a feminist, and as someone who my whole life is trying to do something constructive. And it’s not as a form of redemption. It’s just because I’ve actually realized what the right thing to do is.

I got to tell you, Damien, it’s the sniper that scares me, right?

Yeah.

I mean, I grew up fearing soldiers, right? I grew up in war. I know people who did not grow up in war don’t have an encounter with soldiers except for parades perhaps, or whatever. I live in America and a lot of Americans, that’s what I understand—the heroes—but it’s far away and it’s an image that is far away. I grew up in war, and so soldiers were right there in front of you. And I also grew up in a time where I grew up in a dictatorship, and I remember hours and hours and hours of my childhood TV, the government would show us images of dead Iranian soldiers killed by Iraqi soldiers. Right? And that was our national TV, the only station we had. So there’s no other choice. And if you want to turn on the TV, and to turn it off is you are seen unpatriotic.

So I really feared soldiers all my life, and it’s not only the person. And I would see small things. I feared soldiers’ boots. It always would give me the shiver because there’s something rough about the appearance, the clothes, the intimidating. Intimidating. And with all of that . . . I mean, of course I worked in wars, but I worked despite of my fear of soldiers. I got to tell you. I always would like, “Am I going to be raped? Am I going to be killed? Am I going to be tortured?” I had this reaction until I read a book called The Good Soldier by David Finkel that just changed my own understanding of soldiers. And honestly, Damien, I read it before I met you and it helped a lot in our own conversation and what I consider our own healing relationship with each other.

But sniper, for me, is a different level. It’s a “born to kill” kind of . . . Not “born to kill”—“seek and destroy” person. Right? Because it’s scary. So what led you to be a sniper, and what was the worst thing you have done?

Yeah. Look, I can’t go into stuff that would still be unable to speak about, not on a personal level. I’m being quite open here. In Iraq, I wasn’t working as a sniper. I was working as a private contractor. There was conflict from time to time. I wasn’t over there working as a sniper. I was working as a sniper with the Australian military as part of their special operations unit, which did not deploy to Iraq. But the stories of what other people had been doing in Iraq was shitty. Really shitty. You know? I hear stories of people just shooting civilians, just to check if their rifle’s shooting straight. It’s horrendous. It’s horrendous.

Absolutely honest in saying I went there to make money, but in making money, I was also not going to be part of some of the organizations that were over there, like the Blackwaters that were going around. I’ll say this, and I know there’s Blackwater guys sitting there. I don’t give a fuck if they shit on me for it. They’re fucking cowboys on the road. Absolute cowboys. Dickheads. They’re having dickheads driving around and shooting shit up. The world’s seen those news stories. I worked for organizations that were extremely professional, much more so than that. Whatever they want to come and say, say about me, say to me, I don’t care. Because I was there. I saw how they behaved. Cruising around the Green Zone, you got a guy pointing a .50 cal at you when you’ve unloaded your weapons and stuff. Often they’re pointing a .50 cal at your head because you’re driving too close to their convoy once you’re inside the Green Zone. Inside a compound. It’s like, “Dude, chill out.” Yeah. Anyway.

But even in the early days there, when the security industry was really kicking off, you’re having security companies having shootouts with each other. It was the Wild West. So I can honestly, with my hand on my heart, say, “Look, there’s nothing that I did that I wouldn’t do again.” The money I made when I was working over there was a shitload of money. The biggest year I had there was about 240,000 US dollars, tax-free, in the bank. Converted back into Aussie dollars at the exchange rate for the time was a hell of a lot of money towards a property portfolio.

The things I take away from Iraq are lessons. There’s still some people that have not grown out of the mindset of who they were then, and they’re doing the wrong shit. Those people still come into the peripherals from time to time and they’re still that person, and I’m grateful to have people around me in my life that have helped me or encouraged me to be able to take those shitty lessons and turn them into something constructive.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I’m very much interested in the story forward. But before we go there, I do want to ask you a few questions on these moments, because I recently saw The Kingsman, is a movie that is just out. And there’s a line in it, says when you’re in war, and in that shooting in war that happens, when you kill someone in war, something gets lost in you. Something gets killed in you. So I’m curious. Iraq or no Iraq, it doesn’t matter. What was lost in you in that process of being in the army? Again, part of the Australian Army or part of a contractor. Anything got lost in you in that process?

Yeah. Don’t test me on this because I’ve got a bit of a goldfish brain, so my Arabic is pretty sloppy these days. But at twenty-seven I got the job of project manager at the Iraq Special Police Training Academy, because when I went there everyone’s like, “Fucking sand niggers” and this and that. And it was just fucking . . . These are Arabs. And I was like, “Fuck. We’re in their country.” And I made an effort to learn the language. I made an effort to learn the culture. And I sat every night, I sat during the day, and I drank tea. And I sat at night and ate dinner with these staff. I learned their kids’ names. I learned their parents’ names, their wives’ names. There wasn’t one person that I built a friendship with that hadn’t had something significant happen to them. And when I say something significant, like one of their killed on the way to school, or a wife missing a leg from a roadside bomb, or a father that, he’s got to get home from work from a nurse, because he’s got a stray bullet from a fire fight while the father was going to the market.

And there was a Sunni general that took over the base in Adhamiyah. He got there and it was a very intense time. Adhamiyah is also very close to Sadr City there, which has got a stronghold in Northern Baghdad. And I was the only person that could speak to him in a broken way, in his own language. He’s like, “I only want to deal with that person.” And I was a kid at the time. And there I was pushed up into the leader of this. I had no qualifications worthy of being in that role other than just the being able to speak to someone on a human level. And that really was all that it took. It was just to be able to speak to someone on equal terms as a human and not as a contractor, or a foreigner, or a white guy, or an Iraqi, or whatever have you, you want to separate it or whatever.

It’s just like, “Who are your kids? What are they doing?” And he’d ask me about my parents and my family back in Australia. And we sit there and we swap pictures and sit down, a general and a kid from Australia, sit there and just talk about the world and not even talking about Iraq, or Baghdad, or the war, or whatever. We’re just talking about the world and the things that mattered to us.

And I suppose in a way I was starting to learn a lot about the world at the same time and just how to treat people and right from wrong in a way, and good from bad. And just seeing it, being surrounded by it, it’s very easy to point a finger at it when it’s happening around you all day in every direction, or when you experience it on a personal level and conversation and sitting around a table and explanation.

Mark Twain summarizes it so well, he says, “Travel is lethal to prejudice,” and it really is. And in a way, there’s colonels and generals that I can’t remember the names of, that showed me the world just by sitting around and drinking tea with them.

People who are listening to us won’t be able to see me, but I am crying [pauses] because the way that war was discussed was not only this war, that war, the Iraqi, it just happens to be my culture, so it’s close to home. But all the wars and that war particularly was engagement of the international community, along with Afghanistan, as opposed to other wars, which the international committee had nothing to do with it.

But there’s a dehumanization of the people, the ways discussed in the media is like “these thugs.” They didn’t say “sand nigger”—

Terrorists.

Terrorists. And it takes away, it steals away, it’s an insult to the soul, because it dehumanizes you. It dehumanizes all “those people.” “They blow themselves up for their cause,” or “They send their kids to die,” or “They hate us. They just inherently hate us.” You just completely take away the humanity of the others.

And as you know and as you just shared, these are people with stories and with hearts and with narratives and with pains. And I constantly, every time the media would hear me on American national news, I would say . . . “Why do they hate us? Why do the Iraqis hate us?” And it’s like, there is no hate, there is pain. There is really pain. Because you did help destroy the country and you did contribute to screwing up the whole entire Middle East. So there’s a lot of pain, but there’s also love and curiosity. And there’s, oh, my God! And we want to know you and we want to get to know you! and all of these things. And they’re both true, but it’s not coming out of just dehumanized “Why you hate?”. It’s coming out of a story.

I remember one time, Damien, I used to work in Iraq as a humanitarian. This is profound—do you understand this is a profound conversation I’m having here? A humanitarian with a private contractor in the Iraq war. And I remember going to visiting some families whose homes were raided by US soldiers in the middle of the night and knock the doors out and destroyed the doors and raided the whole thing and opened the doors of the bedroom and the husband and the wife were sleeping next to each other and they arrested the husband. And they were telling me, and then put the husband in this camp for a few days, and there was no water and there was very shitty food and the whole thing.

And then I’m meeting with the family and this family was, against a dump. And they’re like, “Listen, we understand these soldiers are trying to do their jobs. We understand they’re trying to figure out something and get safety and peace and security in the country. We understand it. We’re not even judging them for raiding our homes. Okay. Fine. This is part of the war. But can you please tell them that there is a line for us. And the line is, if you destroy our door because you’re raiding it in the middle of the night, we don’t have money to fix it. And if you’re going to knock out the door and just open on our private bedroom between our husband and a wife, this is our culture and our religion, our privacy, you can’t do that. We understand you need to raid the house, but can you please tell them there is a limit in here.”

And it makes sense for me. Their request was not unreasonable, very reasonable. So I crossed the street and there was a US base and some soldiers and I went and asked them, I was like, “Guys, listen, this is what these Iraqis are just saying. They’re trying to understand you here, but can you have a line in here?” And they’re like, “Sorry, this is what we have been told and we need to do that.” And I’m like, “Did anybody teach you anything about the culture? Do you have any understanding, any crash course on the culture?” And they’re like, “No. We were given Iraqis for Dummies.” That’s the book. Iraqi Culture for Dummies.

So my question for you, Damien, was there, you described your own personal curiosity, was there any awareness, clarity, discussion between you and your other fellow soldiers, contractors or whatever? Whether it’s Australians or Americans about let’s just try to understand what’s going on? Or was there not?

A lot of us from the go we’re just kids here, especially the boys, especially the boys, when we are still boys. You haven’t haven’t evolved yet. You haven’t matured. And you’ve come from a background of being in a military and this indoctrination of mission and this tight unit, and in my case, all male units, this boys club of just, you’re in a program to do that, seek and destroy. And it’s very hard to come up to 30,000 feet and have a look down with perspective when all you’re doing is down with pointy elbows fighting in the weeds.

And I think for a lot of us, that’s what becomes the problem when you do get that maturity and you get that breathing space, and then you don’t have the mission. You don’t have the group around you anymore. The brotherhood and all of that combines into this, what for many people, becomes post-traumatic stress and it’s like, “Fuck. What have I been a part of? What have I done? What was I doing? I’ve got my mission. What’s my purpose?”

And I think that’s the big thing. What’s my actual purpose? I’ve just spent this section of my life doing what I thought was purposeful and now I’m here trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. And I don’t have any support network around me. I’ve got a wife or a girlfriend that doesn’t understand who I was and what I’ve been through, or family that can’t understand who I am now.

I was one of the first humanitarians to have gone to Iraq after the invasion. It was a small plane, six people in it only. The plane was made in 1969, the year I was born. And I was very scared. It was two weeks after the actual fall of Baghdad. And I was very scared to go back into my own home country with a new story.

And I go and the airport is a familiar space for me, because my father was the head of Iraqi Civil Aviation. And I go and I see the airport, all of it, US military planes and ally planes and all of these things. And it’s very intimidating. And there’s a lot of destruction, destroyed planes. It was a very intimidating moment for me and I was shaking. And there was a captain, US captain, processing, making his own procedures to understand who’s entering the country. If you remember, there were no border controls. There was chaos. This guy just did it on his own, had his own sheets to say who’s entered, what day, what’s your affiliation? What’s your passport number? He made up the procedures because there were no instructions.

So he’s asking everyone and writing their names. And he says, “Who is with Women for Women International?” Because the ledger says that. And I’m like, “I am.” But I’m scared. And I can take back the plane and go back to Jordan where I came from. I was so scared. I was so scared if they know, I knew Saddam Hussein. Maybe they will connect me to him, which I had nothing to do with him. But I had all these fears, right?

And the guy, the captain, I’m going to call him because I don’t want to, I don’t have his permission to reveal his name. Pulled his arms from me and shook mine, and says, “Welcome to this country. This country needs you.” He didn’t know I’m from Iraq. He had saw me on The Oprah Winfrey Show, helping women survivors of wars. And he had contributed with his wife, to Women for Women. And when he said, “Welcome. This country needs you.” He was, “We need your help in helping women and rebuilding the lives of people.” So we became friends. We became in dialogue and in conversations, like we are right now. Right?

And the reason I’m mentioning him is because he then—I stayed in touch with him. I, when he came back to the States, I invited him over for dinner, all of that—and he told me a story, Damien, that never left me. He said, “I can tell you things, that we have done some shit in Iraq.” And he talks about, in his brigade, he’s like, “We were one of the first wave to enter Baghdad. And there was a small part of the city, and we were in the tank, and the commander said, ‘Throw cluster bomb on that part of town, or a small neighborhood.’” And he said, “We did.” And the commander said, “Throw it again.” And he said, “We did again.”

And he’s explaining what a cluster bomb for me, which I don’t understand. Yeah. I didn’t know what it is. It’s just basically a bomb that goes into a million other bombs, basically. And this has a multiple effect. It’s not one location. It has multiple location that it lands on. And you’re going to correct me when I, what is a cluster bomb.

But then he said, “We threw it again.” And the commander said, “Again.” And he said, “We did it again.” Fourth time, “Again.” And he said, “At this point, we turned to the commander. I was, this is a lot. We’re done. We have enough. We threw enough cluster bombs.” And, he said, “Again.” And, by the way, my father was in Iraq during that war. And he was in a shelter, and a bomb fell on them. And, obviously, he’s alive, thank God, but is just shaken because of it.

And the commander said, “Again.” And he said, “The sixth time he commands us to launch cluster bombs on this one neighborhood, one street, that was enough.” And he said, “Zainab,” he looks at me. And he said, “At that point, we committed a massacre. The sixth time, that was a massacre. That was not being in the army.” And he said, “I could never say that in public, because we are told never to tell of the things that we have done, because I will betray my fellow soldiers, and my fellow . . . if I say it. But I am telling it to you.”

So my question, what was the worst you have witnessed in your service? And in Iraq, but in your service? That was a turning point for you?

I remember going through Babel and just . . . Babylon and just seeing it flattened. And just thinking this is part of the cradle of civilization, and I’m part of a very small cog in a big machine that has been a part of just destroying that, and the country, and culture that built it. And all for resources in the ground and the arguments of old men. Where we were just the smallest of pawns in just a big old game, and a game that didn’t take into consideration all the victims. And yeah, I was part of that machine. And, yeah, not something I’m proud of. Not something I even had perspective, or a lens through which to see it properly at the time. That was just drummed into you. I won’t say brainwashed, but it’s, you’re just programmed to do and be a part of this machine.

And, I thought, it’s almost like kids . . . you shouldn’t be able to join the army until a certain age, when you have perspective and life experience, and have matured. And then maybe things would be a whole lot different.

So how did you do that? What was the moment in which you said to yourself, “I’m out. I’m out, I’m done, and I’m leaving”?

It was, we were on a mission in Northern Baghdad. And, I’d done very well, financially, by this stage. And I’d finished doing the training with the Iraqi Special Police Training Academy. And so I was working for a company called Agent on some project matrix, working with the US Army Corps of Engineers. So we’re doing short and long range reconnaissance across the country, looking at major infrastructure that have been destroyed. And we were deploying from Baghdad each time. So whether it was all the way down south, or all the way up past Derbal, we would go by road. And our job was to go in and look at this major infrastructure, hospitals, schools, power plants, go in and talk to the locals, from a security aspect, while the Corps of Engineers would discuss with them on a bricks and mortar aspect, what it would take to rebuild these areas.

Now, these infrastructure had been blown up because they’ve become or suspected to become insurgency strongholds. And so, yeah, we were on a mission. I can’t remember the exact month, but it was on, I think, my second to last rotation. I think I did twelve or thirteen rotations over there.

How long is each rotation?

For the shortest one I did, it was two weeks. The longest was six months. So, any window in between that. And then, we went through a checkpoint. And a convoy was blown up, going through the checkpoint. It killed a couple of Iraqi security guards or police officers that were at the checkpoint, as we’re going through. And as we pushed through, we were surrounded quite quickly by a local army, militia, and mixture of militia and rogue police and military officers. And it’s, I had a Dushka antiaircraft gun held to my head. And it was, “Shit now, this is it. Okay, this is how it ends.”

[closing piano music]

Wow. Okay. That was Damien Mander. And we are leaving him in a tough spot. Please do come back next week to hear how Damien pivoted from this moment of conflict, where his own life was threatened, to becoming a pioneering steward of the earth and an innovative feminist. Damian has used his training as a soldier in service of something much greater, much kinder than war.

Next week, he shares more details of his extraordinary transformation, and helps me heal in the process. For full transcripts of this episode, please visit www.findcenter.com. Do remember to subscribe to this podcast. It is free, and I truly welcome your comments. You can follow us on Instagram @find_center. To learn more about Damien’s work, please visit www.iapf.org. Redefined is produced by me, Zainab Salbi, along with Rob Corso, Casey Kahn, and Howie Kahn at FreeTime Media. Our music is by John Palmer. Special thanks to Neal Goldman, Caroline Pincus, and Sherra Johnston.

See you next for part two with Damien Mander.