The whole thing was really too odd to explain anyway. Any attempt to do so would sound as strange to me as to him. I simply hoped his impression would pass if he got to know me better, but in fact, Lanky began to look at me somewhat askance afterward.
By the end of the exercise, there were all sorts of uncomfortable feelings between myself and Mema, between Lanky and myself, between Lanky and Pop, between Pop and Mema, and between Lanky and Pop and a bossy soldier from the exercise I didn’t even know. Lanky, unable to stand any of it any longer, made a “command decision” by seizing an armored truck for the team and insisting he was driving us off the exercise grounds before anyone could order us otherwise.
On the back of a truck.
Shrugging, we piled on in our dirty desert clothes with all our gear, as did anyone else we passed who was finished and wanted to get back to the main base. Lanky, however, didn’t know the way quite as well as he thought he did. After an hour of long stretches and wrong turns, we found ourselves not on the trails of the exercise grounds but turning on to the main street of a tiny California town in what amounted to a tank.
Perched on top, and not quite sure what else to do, I smiled and waved to jaw-dropped onlookers like a parade queen on a float. It got more awkward when we stopped at intersections and other cars pulled up next to us, so everyone took up the friendly waving as well. “Hello, hello…Sorry… Just passing through… Have a nice day!”
Day 43
The office of the Chaplain has now become my favorite stop on nights before patrols—and not just for a prayer. The Navy Chaplains who accompany the Marine Corps usually have access to toiletries that kind people back in the States send for the use of the troops. Every once in a while, Chaps can provide me with that precious pink bottle, the Pepto Bismol I’ve been so adamant about providing to the villages.
He doesn’t know many people who operate outside the wire, so in exchange for the Pepto, he’s involved me in a scheme of his parish back home. Together, we’ve started to load my backpack with teddy bears and other cuddly toys—soft gifts for children living in a too-harsh world. Wherever I am able, he has entrusted me with getting them into the right little hands.
He doesn’t know that this is a project after my own heart. In Iraq, when I couldn’t sleep, I would knit teddy bears for the Iraqi children who were transported to our hospital on base for care when they were injured by terrorist or insurgent explosive devices. It happened all too frequently.
I learned to make the exact size that they could keep with them on the stretcher during the often-frightening helicopter transfers to larger hospitals, when almost everything else they had would be stripped away. At Leatherneck, however, when the sun went down, there was no light by which to knit in our shared sleeping tents. The Chaplain had the perfect solution.
Day 45
This is exciting. A huge hard-sided structure is going up—bigger than anything here. There’s official confirmation: it’s a going to be a chow hall. Not a field-expedient chow tent like the ones where we’ve been eating. It’s going to be a real chow hall—the kinds they have on established bases, like the ones I knew in Iraq.
We’ve been eating “sea rats,” really C-rations. They are as delicious as they sound. They are huge re-reheated re-packaged portions of whatever small pre-packaged portions might have been in an individual field ration many years ago, before M.R.E.s were adopted.
Because they are indestructibly non-perishable, it is rumored that some date back to previous wars. They taste as if they all do. The usual fare features some version of noodles with meat.
A chow hall, though, would mean something entirely different. There would be food that was actually cooked, right there, by a real cook! Those halls make meals the highlight of your day.
Sometimes, they offer different meal selections at different “bars.” A friendly cook might grill you a hamburger, or even make you an omelet right before your eyes! There might be pasta that was actually boiled fresh. There might be soda fountains, where you could possibly obtain a fizzy Coke.
Alright, as experience elsewhere has taught me, these chow tents are rarely staffed by Americans but by contractors from a variety of other parts of the world. Therefore, the cooks are not always familiar with the fine details of American cuisine. In Iraq, I can remember breakfast pancakes being offered with marinara sauce instead of syrup, but for the most part the chow halls were wonderful. (Besides, pancakes marinara is better than it sounds. It beats sea rats any day.)
Chow halls are so wonderful, in fact, one can lose perspective entirely. I remember how a big burly friend from my Iraq team once sat down despondently across from me at dinner and lamented, “They’re out of my cran-raspberry lemonade.”
“War is hell,” I sympathized, and we both died laughing.
Morale at Leatherneck is at an all-time high as we watch the hall go up.
Groomed beard, darkened eyes.
Chapter 8
Huh? What Does it Mean?
Day 49
I made a mistake on patrol today that presented me with a somewhat confounding fact. I have worked long enough in Iraq and on issues of the Arab world, and have enough Arabic-speaking friends, that I’ve learned childlike, beginner’s Arabic just to the point that it’s become reflexive to answer “Al saalam alekum” with “Wa alekum al saalam.” It is as natural to the language as answering “Hello,” with “Hello.” All it means is “Peace be with you,” and “and also with you.”
However, doing so to a Pashtun man who offered me the greeting today earned me only the most confused and offended look at whatever it was that had just come out of my mouth. While Pashto speakers use the Arabic word “Salaam” as “Hello,” because they consider it part of the Koranic tradition, no one seems to actually speak Arabic more than that one phrase. It makes me truly wonder how they understand their own sacred texts—the language of their own religion.
One important tenant of the Muslim faith is that the Arabic of the Koran is the sacred word of God, exactly as it was transmitted to the prophet Mohammed, in the precise language in which it was transmitted. If each word is the sacred speech of God, it is considered sacrilege to alter it. Therefore, translations of the Koran into languages other than the precise Arabic God spoke to Mohammed are desecrations and are strictly prohibited to the faithful.
If an average person can’t answer in the simplest language of the Koran, how do they understand the Koran itself? I think to myself that a Catholic of a previous generation would answer the liturgical phrase “dominus vobiscum” with “et cum spiritu tuo” and, despite the fact that they wouldn’t speak Latin in their daily lives, would know enough to understand it basically meant “The Lord be with you,” and “and also with you.”
The solution, I now am reminded, is that people are taught their religion by local Mullahs, who speak the Pashto the people understand. The confounding issue is that in rural areas, Mullahs are chosen from the same villages they lead, frequently inheriting the position, or gaining it because of their prominence in the community. Typically, therefore, they don’t speak or understand Arabic better than anyone else might.
If the meaning of the sacred texts, then, is never actually transmitted to the people of the faith here in southern Afghanistan, how does anyone come to truly understand the teachings of their religion except through local tradition? I wonder how often, over countless generations, local tradition might have gotten things wrong?
I remember how easily Mema seemed to have gotten her religion completely mixed up with some strange superstition—and she actually spoke Arabic herself! What could happen, then, to someone who didn’t? Things foreign to a faith can sneak into it so easily. I worry about Islam when it is taken away from Arabic, and the real meaning of the Arabic isn’t taught.
So many Muslims seriously educated in the Koran feel that many practices of the Muslim world (extremely drastic female mutilation in other parts of the non-Arabic speaking world, for instance) are not a part of Islam but an aber
rant (and abhorrent) association of a local cultural practice to Islam. Was it even in the name of Islam at all, then, that local movements like the Taliban here imposed their extremist practices? Thinking of faithful Muslims I knew, I couldn’t imagine so.
I am reminded that even when boys are educated worldwide in madrasas, the religious schools where they are taught the Koran, they are often taught to recite the syllables of the book by memory, like poetry. They are not taught, necessarily, to recognize what any of those syllables, so daunting and impressive to memorize, might mean as words. Instead, they are taught the beliefs of whoever might be educating them on the faith in their own language.
I worry. I truly worry. I understand more and more why it may be important for us to acquire as deep an understanding of this local culture as possible. Local culture, not Islam, may mean everything.
Putting that distressing issue out of my mind for the time being, I approached Lanky about the mistake I had made. Oddly, although we were deployed to a Pashto-speaking area, the HTT program gave us an immersion course in the other prevalent language of Afghanistan, the Dari common to the north of the country. At least more people in the Pashtun areas spoke some Dari (as opposed to almost none who spoke Arabic), so we put together a helpful review.
Lanky had an impressive talent for coming up with catchy melodies. Together, we made up a happy Sesame Street-style song to trigger our memories to the most important phrases and grammatical structures we might need to speak a bit without our translators and better establish rapport. Tex wouldn’t sing along but rolled her eyes instead. The first part went:
Salaam, Salaam, Salaam alekum.
Fikir mekenoum che resish kadem.
Chittor astein? Chi al darein?
Fikir mekenoum che resish kadem.
Khoob shood marifischudem….
Fikir mekenoum che resish kadem!
Hello, Hello, Hello, to you…
I think I might be catching a cold!
How have you been, and how’s your health?
I think I might be catching a cold!
It’s so very nice to meet you.
I think I might be catching a cold!
The refrain about catching a cold was not because we thought we’d often need to say it, but because it reminded us of a word pattern that was useful for saying a myriad of other basic things. Plus, it rhymed and struck us, for whatever reason, as hysterically funny. I bopped along to the song for the rest of the day.
Day 50
Just before leaving work, almost at midnight tonight, I heard a ruckus in an adjoining tent and poked my head in just to see if anything was truly wrong.
“No, no… It just can’t be like that!” exclaimed a distraught Marine master sergeant—thin, fit, and remarkably young for his rank. His haircut was the perfect length of fuzz, and I wondered how he managed to keep it precisely so. The contractors he was talking to shrugged, and looked at him with both confusion and a bit of mockery.
The Marine actually sobbed in frustration. I walked in and fiercely motioned his colleagues away as they rolled their eyes. No one has a right to mock if a Marine has a reason to cry, I thought.
“Master Sergeant, what happened here?” I tried respectfully. He held out a folded flag to me. A line of red showed where the end was tucked.
“It just can’t be this way,” he said through gritted teeth. “It has to be blue. It has to be all blue.”
“Teach me. I’ll be very careful, and we’ll fold it the right way together.”
He straightened and nodded. We unfolded the flag together and held out its corners. We measured just right to ensure that when the triangles folded, the stars were perfectly set and the seam was blue. I had met someone perhaps as obsessive as me, and we got along.
He told me about the flag as we folded. The red, he said, was for blood. If it showed on a folded flag, blood would be spilled.
“My brother deployed yesterday. My kid brother. He joined because I joined. There can’t be any red.” When we were done, there wasn’t.
Day 51
This evening, a friend from home used my last allotted moments on a crackling phone line to ask me, “So, do you enjoy killing innocent people over there?” I was too shocked and hurt to really respond, and then the connection ended. Her words cut me deeply.
She wasn’t joking. Her perception was real. What would I really have said to her if I could have?
I bet she’d be confused to realize how much of the danger we face is based on attempts to avoid killing people who just might be innocent. (Mullah flashback!) I bet she’d never imagine I patrolled without a firearm, but just with my wits and my grandma’s knife, so it wasn’t as easy for me to kill people as arbitrarily as she seemed to imagine!
I am sure she was talking about violence in its larger sense (and the fact that I serve the goals of our military). War is not the answer, I’d tell her, and then I’d add that I just wish someone would convince the violent extremists of that fact. For whatever reasons may have led to it, at this point, they seem certain that war is the answer, and they’re attacking innocent people.
Simply as in life, I wouldn’t want to turn my back on someone clearly intent on attacking me. I’d be safer if I stood my ground and fought. Still, I’d much rather that nobody fought at all. No one longs for peace, they say, more than people actually fighting a war.
What I’m hoping to do here is help heal the situation to a degree that peace has some chance! Much like I explained to the young soldier, that’s really what we’re all doing as armed forces in a counterinsurgency effort. I wonder if I’m being naive by believing in the possibility of our success, but I truly do. I’m willing to bet my life on it, as is everyone here.
While I’m thinking along these lines, it reminds me of a parallel issue more specifically relevant to HTT work. I heard a similar confusion about what HTT was doing here quite frequently before deploying. The accusation was that we’re “weaponizing” the tools of academic inquiry, the professional ethics of which should prohibit its use in the assistance of war efforts.
A certain part of the academic community, particularly some anthropologists, argue that such powerful tools have no place but within the walls of universities, and one certainly shouldn’t exploit powerless people in war-torn countries as “human research subjects.” (I laugh to picture the fact that the “research” I do on my “subjects” involves being friendly and asking simple questions about their daily lives, not some sort of horrendous human subject research, which the name itself conjures, like radical medical experimentation!)
I care about the people I research, and their lives, quite deeply. Nevertheless, I realize that there is some risk to the Afghan subjects I approach in my use of the academically-founded ethnographic and anthropological techniques in which I was trained. There is always the potential danger to them that being seen speaking to an American just might invite retaliation from the Taliban.
I mitigate this risk by conscientiously and constantly presenting the impression that I am the “annoying American” who simply barges into villages and talks to everyone whether they sought out the conversation or not—much like the survey taker at the mall. If I talk to everyone equally or seemingly arbitrarily, then it gives no impression of someone singling me out to provide information that may be to the disadvantage of the extremists.
There is a great deal of argument as to whether HTT is an intelligence effort or an academic one. To some, it seems to uncomfortably straddle the middle. HTT work isn’t hidden in a “spooky” cloak-and-dagger fog of secrecy, as most people imagine intelligence must be. Its work is freely available for academic study.
There’s no reason for HTT work to be secret. It’s simple insight on the price of camels and kerosene and on what village needs water and why it’s poor strategy to shoot a dog. Nevertheless, it seems to my conscience that this truly is intelligence and therefore falls under the ethics of that field. Without it, more lives could be needlessly lost—both
Afghan and American.
I don’t see myself here as an anthropologist, and I make no claims to be one. I do claim to be a well-educated researcher. Essentially, though, I see my role as a collector and analyst of intelligence on the culture of a place. There are many anthropologists in the program who feel quite the opposite. I believe we are both effective to the same end.
The essential difference, which fuels the debate, is this. Intelligence personnel are willing to accept a certain degree of risk to their human sources. It seems a fair ethical balance because the risk is most often far greater to the collectors. (Never ask someone else to do something that you wouldn’t do yourself twice over, Mom always said.)
Academic efforts are unwilling to take the same risk. In this dilemma, I am compelled to make the choice most likely to give peace its best chance. I accept the risk to myself and the mitigated risk to the few to gamble for the safety of many.
Therefore, I have no compunction on the academic front, and participating in HTT seems to me an easy call. It’s a matter of common sense. I would argue that if ever one’s professional ethics should come in conflict with the concept of protecting the largest number of innocent lives, it may be time to rethink those professional ethics!
Sometimes the “ethical” call is not the truly moral call, much as sometimes the “legal” call is not the truly just call. (Jailhouse flashback!) War is one of those circumstances where all of these can easily conflict. In such cases, I dare say that it’s easy to go with ethics and legality, but right to go with morality and justice. When push comes to shove, I want to have fought on the side of right.
If this ends up being my last diary entry, I like it.
Day 56
My Pepto problem is finally solved now that a small troop store has opened on the nearby British camp called “Bastion.” Bastion is a couple of miles away, but I can walk there, and sometimes I am able to hitch a ride on a colorfully decorated Afghan truck. Passing drivers will give you a lift, but only if you can run and jump on the flat truck bed. They wave and toot a friendly goodbye when you jump off.
Crossing the Wire Page 9