"They treated me like a crazed criminal" says defiant Major

Major Gant can't understand that bringing his girlfriend to Afghanistan and living with her among the "natives" plus drinking and popping pills, were the wrong things to do.

Green Beret brings girlfriend to Afghanistan, ‘goes native’
New York Post
By Gary Buiso
June 29, 2014

In a remote village in the dangerous northeastern Kunar province of Afghanistan, Army Green Beret Maj. Jim Gant was doing something few others had — he was making progress against the enemy.

To do so, he and his men went native — trading their body armor for traditional Afghan garb, growing long beards, speaking the local Pashto tongue, and forging close alliances with tribesmen, who would come to revere Gant as “Commander Jim.”

But when he went to bed at night, Gant had one thing his men did not — company.

Ann Scott Tyson, a Washington Post war correspondent, quit her job to live secretly with him on the front lines — where he taught her how to shoot an assault rifle for protection. They drank alcohol and made their own rules.

When his commanders got wind of the domestic bliss he carved out for himself in the heart of a war zone, Gant was quietly relieved of his command and pushed to retire in disgrace.

Once nicknamed “Lawrence of Afghanistan” by Gen. David Petraeus, Gant was now more like Col. Walter Kurtz, the Green Beret who goes native — then loony — in the 1979 film “Apocalypse Now.” Gant indulged in a “self-created fantasy world,” his commanders charged.

To this day, Gant remains as defiant as Kurtz.

“They treated me like a crazed criminal instead of who I was,” Gant, 46, tells The Post. “My expectation was only ever that I would be treated honorably, and that just did not happen.”
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