Disempowered, Disdainful, and Distrustful

Roger Berkowitz
David King went to fight in Ukraine in part to escape his own descent into conspiracy theories and cynicism. Alexander Clapp looks deeply into the way that King’s experience in Afghanistan led to his loss of faith in the United States cultural, military, and political elites. 
In the late 2010s, King worked in Afghanistan as a commercial pilot, carrying everything from troops to post to ammunition. He liked the work and it paid well. But going to Afghanistan was “disheartening”: after more than a decade of liberation from Taliban rule, the Afghans were still selling their children into slavery, “burning goat shit” to stay warm, baking bricks for pitiful wages and getting lung cancer in their teens. The war, he decided, was a gigantic financial boondoggle: Afghanistan had never posed a threat to American national security (“You really believe that three guys in a cave pulled off the greatest attack in military history?”). He reckoned the occupation was helping no one but American companies like the one he worked for. 
By the time he came back from Afghanistan, King says he was at “the point of suicidal depression”. He fell deeper into the conspiracy vortex, looking for answers about how the world was run. King is self-deprecating about his beliefs; he knows most are weird, some downright offensive. He says he’s even tried to dislodge some of them himself, “but there were always facts in the way to support what I was being told”. Take the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, he says: chief executives and politicians really did hang out with a billionaire sex trafficker.
As King’s disdain for globalisation and elites intensified, so, he says, did his wife’s contempt for him. Desperate to get away, he went to Louisiana to fly medical helicopters. He was “living out of a bag”, staying in hotel rooms. Then King had something of an epiphany: not only was his marriage probably over, his theories had become “too fantastical”, and had driven most of his friends and family away. King realised it was time to close a dark chapter of his life, though he wasn’t sure what was coming next. Early in the new year, he embarked on an eight-week road trip across the West Coast in his pickup, sleeping in a tent, seeing old friends, his son and, for the first time, his granddaughter.