It takes nearly two months of our working the shop together, but Schoonhoven finally decides he trusts me enough to tell me about his experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. In that time we’ve become drawn to each other in the way of those who share an uncommon experience. It’s a tentative friendship at first, between an ex-soldier and a journalist, but the bonds are forged in a number of ways: through the small talk we make while delivering air tanks to other locations in the shop’s pickup truck, through fixing and repairing things together, but perhaps more so when he shares the bounty of his natural abilities, giving me tips for finding the boat underwater before I lead my first dive and also teaching me how to drive and dock the boat without pulling up short or smashing into the pilings. We’ve also discovered that we share a mutual interest in the kind of diving that will eventually cause both of us a lot of grief—going deep.
We share a need for danger, like so many in the aftermath of combat, as psychiatrist Jonathan Shay noted in
School was never an easy fit for Schoonhoven. Intelligent but dyslexic, he had a hard time with the standard book-work curriculum. His parents divorced when he was three, creating for him some lingering anxiety and restlessness. At times, he could be a troublemaker at school, getting caught smoking and fighting one too many times and finally kicked out at the age of sixteen. It was, his mother figured, a good time for him to live with his father. Perhaps time with an adult male role model might help him straighten out. The move seemed to work. Schoonhoven went to culinary school and became a chef. Food wasn’t about reading and studying. It was real and in front of him, something he could manipulate with his hands, at which he had always been skilled. After graduating, he got a job at a top restaurant in the city of Eindhoven, where he worked for three years. He did well and made money, but as often happened with him, he became bored and restless again. Then he decided there was one job that might be able to keep his interest: becoming a soldier in the Royal Netherlands Army.
He joined in January of 2003 on the buildup to the American-led invasion of Iraq, which would begin later that spring. It was a war the Dutch government would support with words and troops. After completing a fitness test with high scores, he was given a choice of units. He chose the most frequently deployed in the Dutch army, Air Mobile, with their distinctive red berets. He was trained to fire Dragon antitank missiles and by March 2004 was deployed with his unit near the village of al-Khidr in southern Iraq. It was a relatively short deployment of only four and a half months. But while guarding a bridge one day, two men on a scooter drove by and lobbed a couple of hand grenades at the Dutch soldiers. The explosion killed a Dutch sergeant. He was an experienced soldier who Schoonhoven says helped him with his training and whom he often looked up to as a role model.
“I was fucking angry after the attack,” Schoonhoven tells me over beers at Shoreside Restaurant in Bonaire’s capital of Kralendijk. “All we did later was sit on the base after.” With no retaliation for the grenade attack, Schoonhoven says he became more and more frustrated. But the unit never got their chance to hit back before being rotated home to the Netherlands.
Despite his anger at what had happened in Iraq, Schoonhoven was discovering something else about himself in the army—he fit in.
“For one of the first times in my life, I felt like I belonged,” says Schoonhoven. “Dyslexia, all the other stuff, didn’t matter anymore. I was in charge.”
But that didn’t mean he stopped getting in trouble. Back in Holland, Schoonhoven’s anger simmered. In the barracks he would listen to Nirvana with his fellow soldiers, go out drinking and get into fights. After getting arrested during one of the fights, Schoonhoven knew he had to straighten up or risk losing the only place that really felt like home to him, the army. After being back from Iraq for almost two years, he decided to focus on soldiering. He tested so well on the shooting range that they offered him a chance at long-distance shooter school. He jumped at it. During the training he learned camouflage, stalking and the Zen of breathing, but most of all he learned patience, something that didn’t come easy for the then twenty-three-year-old. This carried over to the other parts of his life as well, allowing him to deepen his relationship with Carolien, the girlfriend who would shortly become his wife.
In July 2006, with his newly acquired sniper training, Schoonhoven and his 11th Air Mobile Brigade headed to war again, but this time to Afghanistan.
“When I left this time, I knew something was going to happen,” Schoonhoven says. “I told Carolien, ‘This time we’re going to fight.’”
The Dutch deployment to Afghanistan in 2006 was concentrated in Uruzgan Province, north of the restive cities of Helmand and Kandahar, former Taliban strongholds and still rife with sympathizers.
The fifteen hundred Netherlands troops were the seventh-largest contingent of the NATO-led multinational force in Afghanistan and had a mission statement that put as great an emphasis on building community as providing security. But Schoonhoven hoped this deployment would turn out different than in Iraq; there he had felt powerless, almost locked down on base, after the killing of their sergeant. While he didn’t go to Afghanistan looking for revenge, he was prepared to fight. It wouldn’t be long before he got his chance.
At Cafe Buenos Aires in Kralendijk, Schoonhoven grabs my notebook and begins drawing out what happened. He reiterates that he’s better with his hands than with words, but that’s been obvious, as he’s never stopped talking with them since I first met him. He’s entertained people with sleight-of-hand magic tricks and proved himself a handyman, skilled boat captain and dive master, and in the past a successful chef and sniper. He believes in the spatial rather than the verbal to get his points across. He does it again now, as he draws on the paper in front of me.
He takes my pen and, as if he were outlining the beginning of my last name, makes a giant “S” on the pad. “This is the road,” he says, setting up the story. Schoonhoven says his unit got a call in the early evening that the Afghan National Army (ANA) base nearby was under attack by the Taliban and in danger of being overrun. By the time the Dutch Air Mobile unit could get fully geared up and on the road, the Taliban had made a tactical retreat to nearby mountains. The ANA unit was still at their roadside post, a checkpoint called Chutu, also the access way to Forward Operating Base Hadrian, where the Dutch contingent was stationed. Schoonhoven tells the story in his own words and hands.
“The Taliban had retreated into the mountains, but we knew they were still watching us because we could hear them on their radio frequencies. We stayed there for one night and one day. After that our command told us we were not an occupying force but a protective force and told us to retreat to Camp Hadrian. But when we arrived back at the base we heard that the Chutu crossing was overrun by Taliban. That meant that the Taliban could infiltrate our area. The next day, we had the assignment to recon [conduct reconnaissance on] the road to Cemetery Hill. I was assigned with the infantry, travelling in a Mercedes-Benz soft-top truck. I was sitting in the back. We were the first vehicle. After us came two Patrias [Finnish-built armored personnel vehicles]. The rest of the platoon took another road to check out. While we were traveling we approached an S-turn.” Schoonhoven points to the paper with the pen. “At the end of the S-turn we could see three scooters coming our way. They suddenly fell to the ground. We thought it was an accident but the drivers and passengers immediately ran into the gully and opened fire. It all happened in a split second and was very confusing. The person in front of me, Sergeant Beekman, got hit. He dropped into the driver’s lap and the gunner started firing his machine gun but there was a problem with the gun. At that point I tried to start firing, but bullets were flying everywhere and I could hear them buzzing near my head, only missing me by an inch. Meanwhile, the trouble with the machine gun was that a Taliban bullet had hit the lid and it got jammed. The gunner fixed the problem and started firing again. We wanted to get out of there because the distance between us and the enemy was only twenty meters. The problem was that the two Patria vehicles were behind us in the S-turn”—Schoonhoven draws their position on my pad—“so they could not offer any support and couldn’t turn properly because the road was too small. So we were stuck between the Taliban and our colleagues in the Patrias.” He emphasizes the point by drawing their position on the pad, boxed in between the two. “Eventually the Patria drivers managed to slowly drive back through the S-turn in reverse, so we could retreat. While we were retreating I looked to the right and there were a couple of kids watching the fight, sitting on a wall, hands covering their ears while bullets were flying by and hitting the wall they were sitting on. Our driver tried to reverse, but we got stuck in a ditch. Sergeant Beekman, who was wounded, got out of the truck to guide us out of the ditch and I decided to jump out to stand between my colleagues and the enemy to support them. One of the Taliban was walking towards a wall with a small opening in it. He tried to aim at us through the opening and at that point I got a clear shot at his head and killed him. Just before I pulled the trigger there was a short moment when our eyes met. There were only ten meters between me and him so I could see the bullet entering his skull.
