John Velis joined the Army in 2010, and a couple of years later he and his unit found themselves at Forward Operating Base Smart, in Qalat City, Zabul province, Afghanistan.
The place was crawling with pistachios and Taliban.
“I was in charge of the rule of law stuff,” said Velis, a Westfield guy who earned a law degree from Suffolk and a Bronze Star from his country.
He needed a good translator, somebody who understood not just what was said, but more important, what wasn’t being said. That’s when he met a young Afghan named Alix.
Alix was 27 and worked for the State Department. His reputation was stellar. Captain John Velis basically stole Alix from State for the Army.
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“We became friends,” Velis said. “We drank gallons and gallons of tea together and I appreciated why he was willing to work for us.”
Alix was willing to work for the Americans because he had seen what the Taliban had done to his people. He was a high school student when the Taliban came in and threw all the kids out and closed the school.
“They didn’t want us to be educated,” Alix said. “They were forcing people to wear beards. I saw them beat people. I saw worse.”
He wanted to help the Americans keep the Taliban at bay.
Velis had the Herculean task of trying to build a real legal system in a place where law was often administered with a wink and a nod.
“We would detain insurgents, then turn them over to the Afghans to prosecute,” Velis said. “Three days later, those guys were back on the street, laying down IEDs.”
When Velis expressed his frustration to a local prosecutor, the guy replied, “Why don’t you just kill them?”
Velis had his work cut out for him.
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Every day, he went outside the wire and every day Alix was with him. Alix had to cover his face. That didn’t stop some Afghans from cursing him for working with the Americans. When Army foot patrols stopped suspected insurgents and plugged their faces into a biometric identification system, the suspects would stare hard at Alix, studying his eyes.
“They weren’t looking at us. They were looking at Alix,” Velis said. “The joke in our unit was, ‘OK, you walk next to Alix.’ ”
But it was all deadly serious. The Taliban had a $50,000 bounty on the heads of Afghan translators who helped the Americans.
“They would look at me and say I was working for the infidels, that they’d kill me, that they’d kill my family,” Alix said.
The threats were delivered with an almost casual menace.
Alix could smell trouble. They were in the Qalat City prison one day when Alix sidled up to Velis and whispered, “We’ve got to get out of here, right now.”
Relatives of detained insurgents were circling them.
On April 6, 2013, Alix proved again that his worth went well beyond his language skills. Some soldiers were escorting a US foreign service officer and others to a nearby school for a book donation ceremony. The Taliban attacked, killing three soldiers, an Afghan doctor, a civilian contractor and Anne Smedinghoff, 25, the first US diplomat to be killed in Afghanistan.
“Alix led our efforts to find the detonator,” Velis said. “We got who did it.”
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John Velis left Afghanistan in July 2013. Alix continued working for US forces until March 2014, when the Army left.
He moved to Kabul, the Afghan capital, because it was bigger and easier to blend in. He rarely ventured from his hotel.
“I was hiding,” he said. “I was paranoid.”
Velis had not forgotten his friend. From the moment he left Afghanistan, Velis was working on securing approval to resettle Alix in the United States. In the meantime, Velis was elected as state representative in Westfield.
When Alix called, Velis would see Afghanistan as the origin of the call and would answer, only half-kiddingly, “You’re still alive?”
Velis felt guilty keeping their calls brief, but he was afraid someone would overhear Alix speaking English. When Alix talked about sneaking back to see his family, Velis begged him not to because the Taliban had put up checkpoints. Alix reluctantly agreed.
“The Taliban go through your cellphone when they stop you,” Alix said. “If they saw the numbers I was calling in the States, they would have beheaded me.”
During their furtive phone calls, Velis suggested that Alix move to California where Alix’s cousin lives, or New York City, where there is a large Afghan community.
But Alix had other ideas.
“I wanted to move to western Massachusetts because John is my best friend,” Alix said.
Last winter, Velis got a call from a social services agency that resettles refugees.
“Do you know some guy from Afghanistan named Alix?” the social worker asked. “He’s going to be here in two weeks.”
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Alix now works as a candlemaker near Northampton. He and Velis get together regularly at a tea house in West Springfield, which makes the next best thing to the green tea the two friends shared in Afghanistan.
“The nicest thing is not thinking I’m going to be killed,” Alix said, over tea. “And all the nice people here. And not hearing gunfire.”
Alix worries about his
parents and his brothers and sisters still in Afghanistan. The Taliban would kill them if they ever put two and two together.
Velis has brought Alix to the State House, where Velis has made fighting for veterans his cause. He considers Alix something of a vet, too.
“He’s done a lot for America and keeping Americans safe,” Velis said. “That’s why I worked to get Alix here, and why I’ll continue to work to get his family here.”
The other day, John Velis’s cellphone rang. The caller ID indicated it was from Afghanistan.
“Mr. Captain John!” the heavily accented voice sang. “Mr. Captain John! I’m coming to western Massachusetts!”
It was an Afghan lawyer who had worked with Velis and Alix in Qalat City.
Mr. Captain John smiled and told his friend that he had a good place to take him for tea.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.