Each month the North Kingston Free library partners with the Episcopal church in Wickford to co-sponsor a poetry series. Poetry is used loosely because sometimes other genre writers are featured. The series started when Father Spencer Reece, a poet, was hired as rector in 2023. We discovered it a year ago when Pádraig Ó Tuama of Poetry Unbound was a guest speaker. Every time, I walk away feeling (and Reed does too) that something deep inside was stirred during the session. Last night was no exception.
Thomas Gibbons-Neff, a former marine and journalist for the New York Times and Washington Post, read the final essay he wrote for the New York Times: Why I Sought Out a Taliban Commander I Had Fought. The first sentences:
I’ve had a hand in killing around six people. Maybe seven. I don’t know if one man bled out on the side of the road or was taken to a doctor. I think about him often. The killings occurred in the winter and spring of early 2010, during one of the largest operations of the Afghanistan war: the battle of Marja. I was the 22-year-old leader of a scout sniper team of seven Marines and one Navy corpsman. It is a strange thing, having killed people in a conflict that spanned 20 years and was ultimately lost. The sum of such an intense expenditure of human lives and trauma left Afghanistan much as it was in 2001, before any American boots touched the ground...
It is essentially a story about seeking forgiveness. About coming to terms with one’s own ability to do harm, about guilt and shame. It is about asking forgiveness from the people you feel you have wronged and then finally trying to forgive yourself.
You will likely need a NYT subscription to access the rest, so I will summarize the highlights. We all face our human condition, the capacity to do both harm and good, when we allow ourselves to really look, to examine our hearts.
After serving as a marine, Thomas studied journalism at Georgetown University and then covered the Ukraine War, the ICE raids in Minneapolis, other crises, and finally the Brown shooting last December 2025. When speaking to a Brown student whose friend was shot, Thomas realized that he’d been there, he’d experienced the death of one or more marine brothers. He recognized covering more war and violence would not give him forgiveness. He was chasing ghosts. It was time to move on. He applied for a Pat Tillman Scholarship and is currently studying to be an English teacher in a Masters program at Brown. He’s fallen in love with teaching.
His final request from the NYT was to return to Kabul and to try to interview one of the Afghan commanders he’d fought against. He was seeking closure. He succeeded in locating the commander and they had difficult conversations. His opponent was curious about the soldiers who were injured, treated at top-notch medical centers, and returned to the US but struggled, some committing suicide.
The commander told him that Afghani soldiers have none of that, they fought for Allah. The Taliban won, but human rights for women in Afghanistan are terrible. The US continues to fight forever wars — now Gaza and Iran, and turns a blind eye to human rights. As Thomas left the meeting, he thought perhaps that he and and his opponent had shared some humanity. He left with a modicum of peace.
A few days later, he was back in Rhode Island, walking the dog he’d rescued in the Ukraine, and his phone rang. The Afghani commander called him on WhatsApp to make sure he got home. Thomas knew the story he would write.
The audience had the usual gray hairs who attend monthly, but the room was packed with new faces and more forty-somethings, many there to support Thomas. Father Spencer introduced Thomas and said that they spoke together beforehand and talked about forgiveness. Father Spencer had told Thomas about his own shitty day and Thomas had listened, commiserated, forgiven him.
Thomas approached the podium reluctantly, his shoulders tense, he opened a new bottle of water that crackled in the microphone. A young man sitting in the audience, to Thomas’s right, gave him a thumbs-up. As he read from his piece, he had difficulty projecting his voice, his mouth was dry, he paused to drink water frequently. His face was strained, he gripped the stapled pages and flipped them awkwardly. When it came time for questions, he took them hesitantly and answered through gritted teeth.
Watching him was a visceral experience. Telling his story to an audience of friends and strangers was difficult for him. Someone in the church had given the rector the article, and the rector had asked him to speak. Thomas did it for Father Spencer. The audience witnessed his pain, his declarations, his efforts to seek forgiveness and to forgive himself. We all held our capacity for both good and evil, and the public admission of both.
As a physician, I am used to hearing the best and worst of people’s lives. In addition, my journey has given me other opportunities to witness horrors. In late 1990s, Putin managed the war in Chechnya and Ingushetia as our team tried to support physicians providing care for the refugees. My boss was kidnapped but returned unharmed physically. Putin’s success guaranteed him the presidency in Russia. You know the rest of that story.
I thought about what my colleagues were suffering in the West Bank, all their lives under occupation and now much worse their lives had become given the Gaza war and the US’s blind support of Israel in Iran. I thought of the horrors many of the asylum seekers I have interviewed have endured, the torture, their difficult journeys to try to live the American dream. How that life of freedom and equality is currently crumbling. I thought of my own “sins” and struggles, my impatience and my rashness.
These are difficult times, especially with the negativity and the degradation of political decorum. They force me to consider my toxic aspects, examine them, hold them, forgive myself, move on and seek ways to sow peace and justice in the world. What can I do one-on-one? What can I do in my corner of Rhode Island? That will have to be enough.