Welcome back to A Man Should Know, a weekly column from Elliot Ackerman about how today’s lost boys can become tomorrow’s good men. This week, as Christmas nears, Elliot reflects on the quiet power of good hospitality and how even the smallest gestures can brighten your guests’ lives.
In June 2005, the Taliban discovered a team of Navy SEALs on a reconnaissance mission deep in the mountains of Afghanistan. A multi-hour firefight followed. The Taliban wiped out the team, save for a lone survivor named Marcus Luttrell. Luttrell fled to a nearby Afghan village inhabited by Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s majority ethnic group, where he was offered asylum in the home of a local man, known simply as Gulab.
When the Taliban came looking for Luttrell, Gulab refused to hand him over, citing the Pashtun custom of nanawatai, a traditional form of hospitality whereby sanctuary is offered to a person to keep them from their enemies. This incident was later celebrated in Luttrell’s 2007 memoir, Lone Survivor, and, later, in Peter Berg’s 2013 movie of the same name.
Years later, when I was stationed at the American base where the incident occurred, people still talked about it with admiration. For us Americans, one lesson was clear: Afghans take hospitality seriously.
