A month before I started my freshman year of high school, my father was killed in a cycling accident. Overnight my mother became a single parent and our sole breadwinner. She was forced to work twelve-hour days to maintain our standard of living and consequently I was often alone in an empty house.
Like most teenagers, I rebelled. With the loss of my father came a profound loss of discipline in my life. Combined with the sudden absence of my mother who was now compelled to work long hours, the tragedy had an important tertiary effect: I stopped attending classes.
Eventually, to the distress of my mother, I left high school, opting to take the G. College was the last thing on my mind, because college was for savvy, affluent students who studied for SATs and graduated on a normal schedule. I sought challenges but had no purpose. Luckily or unluckily for me there was a war. Throughout most of my seven years in the military I gave little thought to the outside world. When provided the discipline, direction, and the brutish encouragement of male authority figures, I began to excel, rapidly advancing through the ranks.
I was given ever-greater responsibility β making sergeant in two years. After my first three-year contract expired I enthusiastically re-enlisted for another four. Five years later everything changed during a deployment to Afghanistan in One of our missions was to facilitate the opening of schools in Kunduz Province.
That April, in an effort to intimidate girls from attending, the Taliban attacked the schools with poison gas. The girls continued to walk to class despite the threat. As a teenager, I had taken for granted the opportunity to have an education not because an armed insurgency prevented me, but because of my own ambivalence. In Afghanistan, a country plagued with incessant violence, the decision to go to school was often one of life or death.
