From cleaning carpets to dodging land mines and eluding snipers in southern Afghanistan, Najib Noori has quite a tale to tell.

Najib’s story started in Afghanistan, where he was born. He dropped out of high school halfway through his junior year to avoid joining the military once he graduated.

At the age of 20, Najib and his family moved from Kabul, Afghanistan to Pakistan as refugees around the same time the Soviet Union was pulling their troops out of Najib’s home country – 1988. After living in Pakistan for about two years, the family of 11 gained political asylum and moved to America.

Najib’s father, Latif, worked for Pan American World Airways while in Afghanistan, so getting asylum wasn’t very difficult, Najib said.

The family chose to relocate to Seattle after a friend who lived on Vashon Island, and who had previously lived in Afghanistan, recommended the Emerald City.

Speaking very little English, Najib started taking college classes at South Seattle Community College to improve his language skills. The culture and customs in the Middle East are very different compared to the U.S., he said.

In the classroom, Najib was accustomed to standing up when he addressed the instructor. That practice, a normalcy in Afghanistan, was pretty foreign to most of his teachers, he said.

“‘That’s because of respect,’” Najib recalled saying to his teacher. “‘That’s what we do in Afghanistan.’”

Najib started working for Coit, a national carpet and home cleaning company, in 1994. He worked there for 16 years, seven of which he earned the title “employee of the year.”

In 2011, Najib said he saw a TV commercial for a contract job working as a linguist in Afghanistan for the U.S. military.

“They were looking for someone who knew the language, the culture,” he said.

Because he knew two languages in Afghanistan and he grew up in the culture, it seemed like a perfect fit.

He applied and after numerous background checks, including FBI agents interviewing his neighbors, he was accepted and deployed in November that same year.

Najib was stationed in southern Afghanistan, the most kinetic and hostile region

in the country, he said. He and his team of U.S. Army soldiers traveled, usually by foot, from village to village. Some days those journeys would be 10 or more miles one way. He interpreted for the American soldiers and advised them on the cultural customs they encountered.

The differences between American and Afghanistan culture vary, and not just in a classroom setting. A lot of Americans only have war films as a point of reference for these differences. And, according to Najib, those films are generally pretty accurate.

One culturally contrasting situation Najib described involved respect for the women of the household. If the soldiers needed to search a residence and there was a woman in the house, it would have been highly offensive to conduct the search. Najib said he was there to advise the soldiers what to do in these and other similar situations.

“A lot of bad things happen in Afghanistan because they don’t know the culture,” Najib said of the war in general. “People get offended pretty quick.”

Najib worked as a linguist and cultural adviser for the U.S. military with top secret security clearance until September 2014. During those nearly three years, he came home to Maple Valley only once and it was for just one month.

He said he was able to talk with his wife, Hamida, and two young daughters, Sahar and Sadaf, every night via Skype. But the time away from them was still difficult, he said.

The time did, however, give him an opportunity to think about what he wanted to do when he came back stateside permanently. Even though his former employer offered him his old job back, he decided to open his own carpet cleaning business in Maple Valley instead, Spotsfree Carpet Cleaning.

“Cleaning carpets…it sounds pretty easy,” Najib said of his work. “But there’s a lot of details in it.”

He could have continued his work in Afghanistan but he said it was time to come home to his family, which included his neighbors, Russ and Beverly Stubbles.

“I consider them my family,” Najib said of Russ and Beverly.”

And the feeling is mutual.

Even though they came to Maple Valley while Najib was already overseas, Russ, a Vietnam veteran, said they have no trouble striking up conversation.

Beverly and Hamida also share conversation over coffee, despite their completely different backgrounds.

“We couldn’t have asked for better neighbors,” Russ said.