From Afghanistan to the Arts District
A soldier fights to resurrect The Skinny
By Chris Busby
Todd Doyle joined the u.s. Army in 1991 and served in Europe on a variety of missions, including time with nato enforcing the Dayton Peace Accords in Bosnia. He left the military in 1997 and, after a year in Hawaii, moved to Portland to study English at the University of Southern Maine. During that time he also worked as a manager at Stone Coast Brewing Company, the now-defunct restaurant, brew pub and concert venue on York Street, at the edge of the Old Port.
After 9/11, Doyle reenlisted, this time with the Army Reserves, and spent several years training troops at bases around the country, including West Point. In late 2004, Doyle volunteered for service in Iraq, but was offered, and accepted, an assignment in Afghanistan.
He returned in late April of last year and settled in Yarmouth with his wife and their young daughter. The couple had a second daughter this past winter.
Doyle has partnered with Johnny Lomba, proprietor of The Skinny, to resurrect the music and arts venue
a couple blocks from its original downtown location. The pair have spent close to a year refurbishing the second floor of the old bank building at the corner of Congress Street and Forest Avenue, last occupied last decade by the dive bar Whits End.
Complaints about loud crowds outside Zootz, a dance club a block down Forest Avenue that closed over five years ago, prompted the city to rezone that part of the block to prohibit “drinking establishments” and “chem-free night clubs.”
Though The Skinny’s doorway would be on Congress Street, the rezoned area includes its building. And though the first floor would be a restaurant, the second floor would have a bar and performance space that will occasionally levy a cover charge, which requires a type of liquor license banned in the zone.
The Portland City Council will consider The Skinny’s request for licenses and a zoning exemption at its June 18 meeting. At two previous hearings on the zoning request, several downtown residents and business owners spoke in opposition to The Skinny reopening there. The Portland Police Department is also in opposition, citing concerns about noise and public safety.
The Bollard spoke with Doyle in mid-May inside the space that may or may not become The Skinny this summer. He talked about some of his wartime experiences, and what it’s been like to come home and face a battle over much smaller things.
The Bollard: What were your duties in Afghanistan?
Doyle: Originally, we got sent over there to train the Afghan Army. When we got into the country, we got sort of divvied up on where we were living, and I get sent all by myself, [away] from the other six people that I was deployed with, to live behind the U.S. embassy in Kabul.
It wasn’t really in the embassy compound. It was in these ‘safe houses,’ which used to be like diplomat houses back during the Soviet [occupation]. So you’d have, like, 25 people [coalition troops and various special agents] living in a two-story house.
I ended up becoming house commander, which meant I was in charge of the safety and welfare of the house, where all these people lived. They would go and work in the Green Zone or out in the sector, and every night everybody would come back in within the secure area and bed down for the night.
My job was to orchestrate the security for that, and to talk with the engineers and the private contractors if we had problems, and deal with the Afghan security force. We had an Afghan security force surrounding this couple-block area 24/7, and they were in charge of our security at night. But if something happened, like if there was an explosion or a rocket attack, or if somebody started shooting or whatever, I would have to orchestrate the security within that area of the building.
That was one job. I [also] became mentor and trainer at the National Military Academy of Afghanistan, which is a military college for Afghan officers in the template of West Point. I would mentor them and teach classes on westernized military tactics; I gave classes on their own constitution, the parallels between a free and democratic society and voting process, and how they are the entity to uphold that constitution, and what it means …
We facilitated a lot of the construction of the place, because the military academy itself was a dilapidated, Soviet-era flight school. They used to fly MiG jets, and there’s this old MiG simulator in this building. It was like the last thing in the world you’d expect, like a Planet of the Apes kind of thing, where you walk inside this room and there’s this MiG jet, half a MiG jet, with the cockpit and this mechanical system just covered in dust.
Myself and my predecessor and the [soldier] after us, we probably infused about $10 million into the whole academy. They are going to be the future. They bring in the best academic and physical specimens Afghanistan has to offer, and they train them.
The other job was I worked with the Afghan secret police in a listening post position. I got earmarked for a couple months to do that.
They would have informants throughout the whole city of Kabul and throughout the rest of the country from other cities, and they would call these listening posts. They were manned by the Afghan Army intelligence and secret police. I was one of the shift liaisons, so I would go in there and read the reports of what was going on in the cities every day. I was privy to all the one-on-one violence, the Afghan-on-
Afghan violence that was going on—the homicides and the beatings and all the crime that was actually going on. It was pretty enlightening.
During one of my duties during that time, I worked with the Danes and the Italians. They have what’s called a QRF, which is a Quick Reactionary Force, so if anything disruptive or violent happens in the city, they send out these infantry people, this qrf—it’s set up through a joint task force coalition of Americans, Danes, Italians and Canadians. If there was an explosion or whatever, they’d go and secure the area and chase down the bad guys. What my job was, if there was an explosion or something would happen, I would have to drive out and verify it, and then report back to command.
Right around the parliamentary convening while I was there—which was the first time the Afghan Parliament convened in, like, over 100 years, all the tribal leaders and voted officials through the whole country—there was a car bombing. It was like my first day on the job—an explosion. So I jumped inside the truck with the Danes, because they have level-seven armor on their suv’s and they have air conditioning [chuckles]. I rode with them and we got to the scene.
[The bomber] had intended to try to get to the Parliament building, but [security] had blockaded the roadways, so he was driving around looking for a target of opportunity, and a Danish convoy had been driving by, and he detonated himself. None of the convoy was injured, but about fourteen people—bystanders, Afghans—had died.
It’s just unfortunate, because that person, that man who was driving the car, was an insurgent. He was from another country, he wasn’t Afghan, and he killed, murdered, these Afghans.
When I showed up … there were these Afghans in uniforms, running around with cameras, and they were putting little triangles down with numbers next to these things, and taking a picture. Then they’d pick up the triangle and whatever they took a picture of, and run it over to another area, this containment area, where they’d drop it off.
There was a group of Afghan colonels standing over there—and this is literally like 15 minute after this explosion happened, and they had all the qrf’s surrounding the area, holding back the crowds and everything, and the car was still smoldering. So I went over there to find out what the Afghan colonels were doing, because I’m trying to fill out a report in my mind so I can call it back to command, and I get up there and they were arguing.
Basically, what they were arguing about was that what the guys were taking pictures of were body parts. They were taking those body parts from the explosion and reassembling them on the ground.
The Afghan colonels were arguing, ‘No, no, no! That arm doesn’t go with that guy, that arm goes with the other body.’ I was standing there and this guy came running up, and he threw the torso of this dead man on the ground directly in front of me. It was one of the most gruesome scenes I’ve ever seen, watching them piece together 14 dead, blown-up people.
Then, right in the middle of that, somebody started shooting. What it was was that another bomber was trying to detonate himself in the crowd of people who responded to the bombing—which is basic Taliban guerilla protocol. So I grabbed my interpreter, Wali, and [the suicide bomber] hid behind a car, and they started firing on the car—everybody did—and they killed the man before he detonated.
That was my first day on the job for that job, which just heightened my situational awareness after that to such a huge level. Because not only was I privy to the actual violence that was going on in the city—that wasn’t just Taliban, but the violence of the hardship of the Afghan life—but also the Taliban and Al Qaeda and the insurgents.
We had liberated a prison of female prisoners when I was there. The [Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom] had a refugee house, where if you’re an abused woman or a daughter, you could
seek refuge and they would take you in and protect you from the family.
Because in Afghanistan, you can kill somebody over pride. You’re granted one a year—it’s legal. I’m allowed, if you insult me in such a way, I can kill you, and I’m allowed one of those a year. I don’t have to explain it at all. All I have to say is it’s an issue of pride. If I kill two people, then I have to explain it to the court.
Women are property there—there are progressive Afghans who sort of share westernized morality of equality, but there are a lot who don’t.
We had found out [there were women in the prison], so we went to the prison—myself, these Americans [with wilpf], and some Danes and some Italians. The warden and the chief of the guards came out and started glad-handing people. The officers and some of the other people went off with them, and [the warden and chief guard] started showing them parts of the prison, because they knew they were coming—‘No, we don’t have any women here,’ was what the thing was.
So I started talking to some of the Afghan guards, because I had sort of learned that you started with the lowest man. I started passing out chocolates and smokes and waters, and shootin’ the shit and hangin’ out.
To be able to befriend an American in Afghanistan is a big thing, so these guys sort of felt empowered. They wanted to keep me as their friend, so I used that to my advantage. All these guys want to be Big Man on Campus, so they started showing me around the prison.
I started badmouthing women, telling ’em that they’re only good for one thing, blah, blah, blah. What I was really trying to figure out was, Are there actually women here? I eventually got them to show me, and they were in a section of the prison that the delegates never would have gotten to through the warden or the chief of the guards.
We open up the door and went in there, and there was probably twelve to fifteen women in some of the worst conditions you would ever think of in your entire life. Absolute freakin’ squalor. It was like squalor, like the word ‘squalor.’ It was just filthy, horrible.
So you’re talking about fifteen women in a Muslim, all-male prison, run by Muslim, all male, guards. And when I say the word ‘Muslim,’ what it is is that in Muslim society [in Afghanistan], a lot of these men, they don’t have any kind of sexual relations with females until their late 20s, if at all, because there’s a wedding dowry.
These women were obviously abused.
So I backtracked and found the delegation of the commander and everybody, and told them where the women were… They ended up calling in backup, and the warden and the chief of the guard sort of disappeared in the fracas. I don’t know what the hell happened with them, but those women got released. They were taken in by the Women’s League.
I’ll tell you some of the things that they were incarcerated for: for the crime of failure to marry.
There was this one girl that was 13 years old, who’s scheduled to get married against her own will—arranged marriage—by her father. And the day of the wedding came, and she said, ‘I don’t want to marry him,’ and the father beat her unconscious. The next day, the father came to the daughter, ‘Are you getting married today?,’ and she was like, ‘I don’t want to marry him,’ and he beat her unconscious.
That went on for seven days in a row, so finally the family called the police and the police came and arrested the daughter. The daughter, at age 13, was incarcerated for three years, inside this all-male prison run by all male guards. She was probably raped everyday for three years.
Part of me thinks that I volunteered and I risked my life for that woman and for those women, like I was meant to be there, because if I wasn’t there, I don’t know if those women would have been found. And I get a little choked up about it whenever I talk—whenever I think —about it, just how horrible their lives must have been.
And it was funny—it was just another day. It was just another day. I went back and I washed the dirt off from the day, and I cleaned my weapon, and I got up the next day and I had like a whole ’nother ten months to go, and a lot more happened during that. No medals were passed out, there was no recognition. It was just another day in Afghanistan.
Were there experiences that gave you hope?
I was at a listening post [one day] inside this Afghan garrison in Kabul, and I’m in this room with, like, twenty other Afghans, all these soldiers who are working inside this listening post. It had black phones with land lines—all twelve of them lined up on a table with scratch pads. There’s, like, no technology whatsoever, and this little 14-inch television playing some incredibly crappy television in the corner, just going for distraction in the place.
Then [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai comes on for the parliamentary convening, and he gives this speech, and I’m sitting next to Wali, and he’s telling me what Karzai is saying…. Karzai got to this section of his speech when he starts talking about, ‘No one will ever occupy us again. We will never succumb to anybody. We will always fight.’
And I look around the room, and there are these hardened, hardened men, these colonels who are in their 50s and 60s, who have fought the Taliban and the Soviets, and they’re crying. They’re crying silently, watching this, and I knew right then just how much that freedom means, and what they were fighting for.
It allowed me to survive emotionally in that environment, because I knew that I would be able to come home someday, but they were going to continue that fight even after I left, and I damn well better work as hard as I can everyday that I’m there to try to make not only their lives better, but the children’s lives better.
I’ll always remember that. These men, they were like cast in stone, that’s how hard they were. Lines in their faces….
So you come back to Portland…
I come back and you see … you realize how lucky we are, how opulent of a life we have as Americans and Western society as a whole, and the freedoms and liberties that we have. And it’s incredible.
I came back, and I had been friends with John Lomba for a long time, going on ten years. He had told me about his plan, and we talked about it.
We both love the arts. I studied English literature, and I love theater and opera and jazz and blues and film, and I do [filmmaking and photography] as a hobby. It just seemed like a perfect niche for the idea that we could open up a performance space and sort of use it as a means to an end, to fuel our own passion and contribute to the city.
But how do you make a performance space financially viable? Because you’re not going to be able to pay a lease rent for an entire building off of a couple jazz shows and a couple film festivals —not in downtown Portland, you’re not gonna.
So how do you do it? You do it through food and spirits…
You come back, and there’s, like, this bureaucracy. You have to sort of embrace that bureaucracy and love it, because some places, like Afghanistan, they have corruption on such a monumental level. And here you just have people who are well-intended, but maybe—I don’t want to use the word ‘inept,’ because I think that’s too cruel of a word, but they lump everything together. They say, ‘OK, yeah, bar, performance space, that’s automatically going to be a bad thing.’ Why? Because that other place was a bad thing, this place around the corner or this place that was here ten years ago was a bad place, and so obviously this place is going to be bad.
I think they need to look at the character of the people who are going to be opening it.
The police department has warned city officials not to allow The Skinny to open here, but have they ever met you?
No.
I can go to West Point and I can train some of the brightest minds in our nation, 1-percentile students whose academic achievements are incredible, and I can train them. And I can go and train United States Army soldiers who are active duty, who are going off to war, and I can train them on policies and procedures and standards and protocol. And then I can go to Afghanistan, with a language barrier of, like, seven different types of languages, and all these other sub-tribal dialects, in a hostile environment, where I have to watch my back 24/7—things are blowing up, people are getting shot—and I’ve still got to continue and train in that environment.
Then I come home, and I have some uniformed officer, that is sent in happenstance from the police department, to say, ‘Well, no, you shouldn’t open up. We don’t want that bar, that drinking establishment’—which is not what we are. ‘You can’t do it. The end. And we have no idea who we’re talking about when we say it. We’re just putting a rubber stamp of “no.”’
To me, that’s like telling an architect not to build a building because it may catch fire.
Basically, it’s the police department saying, ‘Well, one more type of this establishment’s gonna make our job harder, it’s gonna make us work harder, and we don’t want it.’
I don’t like that mentality at all. Because you know what? I, myself, and a lot of other American soldiers worked hard, and we deserve, I deserve, an opportunity to come home after enduring that for the well being of my nation and my neighbors and this city, and the people who live in it, to have the freedom to come back and operate a business of my choosing.
I’m a person of good standing. I’m reputable. I have a great work history. I’m a model character. I have a good business plan. I’m using my own money, my own finances, to set it up. I should be afforded the opportunity to operate this business.
If I fail, if I do something wrong, then take it away from me. But at least afford me the opportunity to try.
