It's still a gulag, even with `Harry Potter'

BECAUSE I'M in my 30s, I am too young to remember the Vietnam War. But there was a time in my teens when I was fascinated with the subject. Perhaps it was the powerful depictions of the war in the movies "Platoon" and "Full Metal Jacket" that stirred my interest in a conflict that I otherwise believed was unjust. But I remember feeling a strange empathy toward some of the soldiers portrayed in these movies. I read several books about the Vietnam War and always hoped to meet a bona fide vet of 'Nam someday, but there weren't too many in Birmingham, England, and I wasn't planning any trips to the United States.

Ten years later, the U.S. came to me. In January 2002, I was abducted from my home in Islamabad, Pakistan, in front of my wife and children. It had been months since we'd evacuated Kabul, Afghanistan, where we had helped establish a girls' school and dig water wells. I was held captive for three years, one in two prisons in Afghanistan, two at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

It was there, inside an 8-by-6 cell in a maximum-security isolation block, that my teenage desire to meet a Vietnam War veteran was realized. Although I never learned his true age, Sgt. Foshee must have been in his 60s. His job, like the other guards, was to simply watch detainees. He often sat in a chair reading his Bible. Foshee, an Alabaman, spoke with a Southern drawl I'd only heard in shows such as "The Dukes of Hazzard." He was a good ol' boy.

He told me about his volunteer tour in Vietnam, often fighting North Vietnamese units in the north of the country. Listening to Foshee from inside my cage, I soaked in his tales of losing comrades during enemy assaults and ambushes and when crossing minefields. He told me how he'd felt when called a "baby-killer" back in the U.S., less than 24 hours after seeing his friends shot or blown to pieces on the battlefield. He told me about how some of his buddies had survived imprisonment in notorious torture camps like the Hanoi Hilton.

The anguish of no significant communication with my family (including a son I'd never seen), isolation from the rest of the world, no right to challenge my detention and not knowing what crime I'd committed was eroding my sanity. After almost two years in U.S. custody, much of it in solitary, there were times when I felt I was losing my mind.