My New Poetry Book

1 November, 2022

Hello everyone,

October was a busy month for me. While moving into a new home, I published my second poetry book on Amazon. “She Is What Fire Would Look Like If It Were A Woman: Dark poems from the edge of sanity in an insane world” is a collection of poems based on real-life experiences that I wrote from the end of 2017 to 2022. I see the poems as a snapshot of my life from when I moved back to California from Washington, DC, in late 2017 to my life in the Netherlands in 2018, and finally, the war in Afghanistan and my work in Qatar. This will be my last poetry book. At least for a while. I am excited about continuing my writing in the short story format. I will submit my next story, “HKIA,” to the New Yorker. I am busy editing it currently. Wish me luck. Once I submit that, I will continue publishing more stories on this site. I hope everyone had a nice Halloween. I am looking forward to spending the holidays with my family. It’s been a long time.

Take care, everyone.

Kind regards,

Scott

Good morning,

I recently moved back to California from the Middle East. I wanted to be closer to my daughters. I was away for two years in Afghanistan and Qatar. That life is over for me now. I want to focus on a simpler life where I can spend more time writing. I have an endless well of stories I want to get into print. This brings me to my latest story, “The Rosary.” It’s a story about a brother and sister traveling to the United States to be with their father after their mother died. The story is based on several events I witnessed when I was a young Border Patrol agent and before I became a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). One afternoon I was tracking out a group, and their sign (footprints) led me to the Twin Bridges over the All-American canal, where I found a wooden rosary on the shoulder of the bridge. I always imagined the girl who lost it. “The Rosary” is a fictionalized account of the experiences of millions of real people.

I drew from my own experiences to complete the story. I was on the Border Patrol ATV Desert Safety Unit. We rode ATVs in the dunes with the mission of saving the lives of people who were lost in the desert, attempting to make the journey North from Mexico in one of the harshest environments in the world. I was there when my supervisor admonished a woman for making her toddler walk through the dunes in patent leather dress shoes. I was also there when the metal arm of the drop crushed Pipas as we slid spike strips under the vehicles. I remember finding a blue canvas backpack while tracking a group. Inside were some important documents that I knew were unintentionally left behind.

I wanted to highlight the reality of sexual assaults against migrants. In researching my story, I was shocked to learn that eighty percent of women who are smuggled into the United States are sexually assaulted and often involve the use of drugs. I wanted my readers to get a feel for the border. It was never black and white. The border has always been grey. The media tends to manipulate opinions based on their agenda. The truth is there is a genuine human factor to any border story. I hope you enjoy reading “The Rosary.”

Take care.

Scott

Good morning,

I’m writing in the early morning from Doha, Qatar. I hope everyone is doing well. As I wind down my final weeks in the Middle East, I am reminded of how far I’ve come to get here. I left California in mid-September 2020 for Afghanistan, about six months after I retired from the federal investigative service. I underwent two weeks of deployment training at Fort Bliss, Texas. I’m a defense contractor, not a soldier. I arrived in Qatar and was housed in old Air Force barracks quarantined. My fellow travelers and I were considered clean of Covid-19 by the military. After five days, we boarded an Airforce C-17. We landed in Herat, Afghanistan. The Italian base was blacked out, as was the protocol when they faced barrages of artillery and rocket attacks. The flight crew loaded an armored vehicle on board, some bomb disposal robots, and a cargo container. We landed at Bagram Airbase in the middle of the night.

My team and I were shown to transient quarters, a large open bay of rows of bunks. The next evening was a rocket attack—indirect fire, or IDF as we call it. The attack happened in the middle of the night. I heard the loud buzz of the Counter Rocket and Mortar (C-RAM), followed by explosions. The CRAM fires 20-millimeter rounds at about two thousand rounds per minute. The C-RAM is a radar-controlled chain gun with a fast-moving rotating barrel.

I stayed at Bagram for about seventeen days before boarding a helicopter for Kabul. My assigned station would be the Turkish-led NATO base of the Hamid Karzai International Airport, or HKIA. On this base, I did most of my time in Afghanistan, aside from special missions with the British Commandos, Royal Marines, and the Norwegian special forces. I was there from October to my final evacuation in late August 2021.

I was evacuated to Doha, Qatar. My team spent the next year spearheading the humanitarian evacuation mission in support of the Department of Defense. I am the senior special advisor to the military. Operation Allies Refuge was the name of the mission to evacuate Afghanistan. My team processed over 50,000 evacuees. On September 1, 2022, the President signed an executive order renaming the mission Operation Allies Welcome, which is an ongoing effort to evacuate those Afghans who worked with coalition forces throughout the war.

I am returning to the United States. Two years is long enough. I will miss my friends and colleagues here in Doha. Perhaps one day we will meet again.

Kind Regards,

Scott

Good evening everyone,

I hope everyone is enjoying my content. I have made some changes to the site. I've added comments to build a sense of community. Let me know what you like and dislike or say hello. I've also added this Blog section, and I’ll soon be reading from my work in an Audio area. I’m still working on editing Parts VI and VII of my Twitter novel, “An Untitled Life in Bullets.”  I hope to release them soon. I will continue writing short stories and will attempt to post them regularly on this site, depending on my work schedule. I have a day job that gets quite demanding. That might be changing soon as my time in Qatar nears its end.

As many of you may know, I was in Afghanistan until the war’s end and was evacuated a year ago today. During the ongoing Afghan evacuation, I’ve spent the past year in Qatar as the senior special advisor for the Department of Defense, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of State, United Nations, and US Citizenship and Immigration Services. I plan on traveling some after visiting my home state of California.

I have many stories to tell.

Thank you for signing up for my website.

Scott Steward