(Content note: discussion of suicide)
Back in September I decided to do something I rarely do: watch a TV series in its entirety. The series is called "Counterpart," and you can find it on Prime Video. It was originally a Starz show.
The show is an incredible meditation on free will, nature versus nurture, and living life with and without regrets--wrapped up in an intensely suspenseful, occasionally violent, paranormal espionage thriller. And let me tell you this: it is magisterial. I have some nitpicks about it, but it is a serious contender for the title of my favorite TV show of all time. I give it my highest recommendation.
There is one moment of the show that has stuck with me. Don't worry--I'll explain it in such a way as to minimize spoilers, although if you want to go in blind you should stop reading now.
The show involves a clandestine militant organization whose members have an intense commitment to their cause. At a certain point in the show, an operative of the organization commits suicide in order to maintain the integrity and viability of the organization's mission.
There are many things that are striking about this moment in the show, such as the sight of this operative committing suicide in the manner that they do. But more important than that--and something that is commented on by another character who is witness to the suicide--is that the operative was clearly distressed and afraid to kill themselves. Yet they did it anyway, for the sake of the mission.
Six months later and I still can't get this scene out of my head.
I have seen several hundred--perhaps over a thousand?--suicides thanks to my previous job. The overwhelming majority of suicides committed were via car bombs or other explosives-laden vehicles such as armored personnel carriers (APCs). I have likewise seen several hundred people make final statements about their beliefs and their wishes for their comrades and families before setting forth to kill themselves for the sake of some mission. In these statements, which have been mostly practiced and pre-written, the men generally come across as confident and committed.
But ever since that scene in Counterpart, my mind has been stuck on the one and only time that I have ever seen someone afraid of the suicide that they were tasked with committing.
The scene: a bucolic field with gently rolling hills in northern Syria. A motley crew of men are gathered around an APC. At the top of the APC, lowering himself into the driver's position, is a boy.
He appears to be Central Asian and no older than 13 or 14 years.
He stops his descent into the APC and climbs back out. He approaches the men gathered some feet away and he begins to cry. One of the men approaches and puts a hand on his shoulder in a maddeningly subdued, painfully inadequate gesture of reassurance. The other men around begin to utter words that are unintelligible, but their tone and their body language clearly indicate that they are encouraging the boy to go back into the APC.
After a minute or two of crying, he does.
He then sets off for his target--a Syrian military outpost in the distance. The video cuts to show a plume of smoke rising from behind the distant hills, cueing the boy’s success.
I can't stop thinking about him. He was, presumably, an orphan--the children of ISIS's "Caliphate Cubs" soldier program were almost all children of previously killed ISIS fighters. The children of foreign fighters, in particular, were prone to being orphaned and conscripted into ISIS's service.
I have no idea what this boy's name was. It is highly likely that his father was already dead; his mother may have been dead too, or in any case not in a position to prevent her son's conscription. In the moments before he set off to kill himself and others, he couldn't even express himself in his native tongue; instead, a bunch of grown men, foreigners themselves, speaking the formal language of the country he'd been brought to, was all the comfort he had before ignoring his impulse to preserve his own life.
My heart aches for him. I don't believe in gods or afterlives, and as such the closest I get to religious rumination on death is the importance of remembering people, and the sheer terror that accompanies my own contemplation of whether or not anyone will remember me when I'm gone. It seems insult on top of injury that this boy exists as an anonymous character in a smuggled video that I happened to see. It hurts that I don't even know his name, that the people who cared for him were probably dead before he took his own life, that he never had a fucking chance.
So anyway. This post is dedicated to him. I remember him, and I hope someone else does, too.