Day 71
After yesterday’s encounter, I’ve started to be more aware of ladies in the tent. I don’t want to fail someone by missing the fact that they need help if they do. It was by sheer coincidence that I found that woman yesterday. I should pay more attention to the people close by.
Something consistent strikes me about them. For the most part, they’re pretty in a way I’ll never be. They are thin and tall and typically all-American blue-eyed blondes. They are the kinds of girls, I imagine, who would have both made cheerleader and captained the chess team—smart and accomplished with a continual expectation of success. It’s interesting to me to see the makings of Marine officers.
There’s not much interaction to be had. It’s still true that my schedule is different than others, so I don’t get back to the tent early enough at night to spend much time with the ladies before the lights go out, nor do I share their schedule in the morning. It’s also true that I’m not one of their own.
They’re polite. So am I. Women Marines. “Even Fewer, Even Prouder,” I think to myself with a smile. They earned it.
There are harsh differences that seem to keep us separate, although our goals are so much the same. Most are required to carry their M-16 rifles everywhere. To them it is a symbol of pride, of Marine-hood. No rifle rattles in when I enter the tent, so I lack that badge.
I, however, without a rifle or the well-earned pride of a Marine, am required to go into dangers that they are not allowed. With their rifles, these are the dangers they long to face. I seem to be unforgivable on both counts. To some degree, I understand.
Looking around, I’ve noticed that as neatly as the bunks are made, nobody is ashamed to have a teddy bear perched on top. We all certainly need a little comfort. It makes me wonder about the men’s tents. Was anyone hiding a teddy bear there? (“Um, it’s from my girlfriend,” I could just imagine a teenage Marine trying to explain in his best baritone.)
I have a little stuffed lion from my Mom. At least he’s a trusted friend. He loyally stowed away in my luggage when I spent long and lonely months on recital tours. Mom chose a lion for courage, so I named him, aptly, Couraggio.
“Couraggio!” Nanu would always say. It was advice, encouragement, and admonishment combined. “Couraggio!” he insisted on in everyone, if nothing else. It was a family motto.
No rifle, but little Couraggio. He, a rosary, and a knife are what lie next to me at night. Each is its own comfort.
Chapter 11
“If They Are Stronger, it is Theirs for Them to Take”
Day 76
Much like before, we have accomplished what was possible out of Leatherneck for the time being. Enough patrols have gone out into the surrounding areas that the neighbors are familiar with the Marines, we are thoroughly familiar with important villages for great distances, and the commander feels that is adequate for now. There is no work for us and, far worse, the chow hall has not opened.
So the commander has sent us off to assist the British forces with which the Marines are now working closely. The Brits have bravely held surprisingly large areas of southern Afghanistan with incredibly small numbers of troops. Now that the Marines will be taking over some of those areas, everyone wants the transition to be smooth.
Naturally, the British commander at Lashkar Gah has his own patrols going out to the more rural areas, and information that we can gather will be of use both to the Brits and the Marines. That’s the plan, at least. Right now, all that has happened is that we have made plans with the commander and shuttled back and forth to Leatherneck trying to retrieve our gear.
Catching a helicopter to wherever you might be trying to go is a fascinating art here. There are flight schedules, but they change so regularly (due to the chaos of the obviously intervening war) that they’re almost not worth anyone writing down. You can run to the helopad at a supposedly scheduled time, and occasionally you will see a helicopter. If you do, it is very likely that this helicopter will keep on flying by while you jump and yell frantically from the ground.
Tiny triumphs.
According to the “schedule,” if this happens to you, the next possible flight will be days away. The only real solution, we have learned as a team, is to sleep on the helopad. Not on it, necessarily, but right next to it. I purchased a nice new British sleeping bag—much lighter than the American issue and a much prettier green—precisely for this purpose.
When you hear any helicopter coming, you wave and beg to get on if it is going in remotely the direction you are headed. I have learned this is easiest if you are female and smile broadly. You charge into the rush of the propeller blades while the air is sucked powerfully from your lungs and the blowing sand shreds your skin and clothing. If you make it through, you jump on.
Your sand-blasted self then gets completely covered in the greasy lubricant that drips from most parts of the craft’s interior. (Incidentally, this is the real reason everyone wears camouflage in a war zone. It’s the only fabric that still looks presentable when it’s covered in stains.) You repeat this process until you ultimately reach your destination. You retrieve your gear, and you then begin the adventure of attempting a return.
I think this process has finally reached its conclusion as of yesterday. I now have enough gear between Leatherneck, Lash, and Kandahar, that I should be able to move between the three locations without much trouble. It seems I am usually required to do so lately.
I am surprised to find that my “team” works as a team quite rarely. We are often separated, which only makes sense given the area we try to cover. However, when we are together at one location, I still find that I am typically assigned to patrols and execute the team’s research plans and reports on my own.
My team leader says he has delegated me these tasks because I “like writing papers.” I don’t believe anyone actually likes writing papers, and I’ve told him so, but I want to fulfill my role the best I can. I do wish we worked together more closely. I like the feeling of having a team, and I miss it when it’s not there.
We are together for the time being, even though it may be weeks more before our first planned patrols with the Brits, and I will be sent to Kandahar and Leatherneck again in the intervening time. Today, it was my turn to attend the early morning briefing here in Lash. I sat respectfully among the tiny group gathered.
The British commander is an exceptionally proper, intelligent, and kind officer. He grasped on the value of HTT work right away and has spent hours talking to us and planning with our team. He was the perfect model of military formality until today.
The commander looked down to collect his thoughts before the briefing, and suddenly became unable to suppress a laugh. He finally snorted out loud and managed to say “bitty little boots” between gasps. He then turned pink with laughter.
“I’m sorry, it’s just that CC’s got those bitty little boots. I’ve never seen combat boots so tiny. I didn’t know the Americans made them. I guess they have to if they send bitty little CC.”
“Sorry CC,” he added, clearing his throat, suddenly contrite, formal, and very British once again. That sent me into fits of laughter. The meeting was dismissed.
Day 83
Today, a schoolteacher—the only one I have yet met in Afghanistan—gave me what I know will be one of my most lasting and treasured memories. He was a kindly and humorous older gentleman with a severely malformed eye that had never been repaired. He joked that the disfigurement always allowed him to keep one eye on his class.
He brought out his students to greet us as we walked to observe a local shura, or community meeting. A functioning and integrated class was an extreme rarity. Anticipating our arrival, he had taught them, girls and boys alike, to recite and write out a message in English: “Welcome to our home.”
One boy, with a brand new pen, wrote his best English in my diary for me, so I could keep the words:
The teacher then took me aside and asked me to please remember his class’s sincerity in t
his sentiment, especially when I encountered villages that felt otherwise.
I am reminded that on almost every patrol lately, we are besieged with groups of children. Afghan children know well not to fear Western forces, but to view them as potential sources of treats, gifts, and candy. The way the children behave when they do this, however, is as widely varied as are the attitudes of their individual villages.
There are times when the children of a village will approach the patrol with twinkling eyes and smiling, gentle faces. They remind me of the class we met. These children don’t ask for treats, but simply greet us with “Salaam!” and happy waves while they march and run along beside us.
When we, with melted hearts, dig in our pockets for gifts, they receive them gratefully and share them without fighting. Girls in these groups receive gifts equally with boys. These are always the same villages in which we find adults fiercely opposed to the Taliban and working with great determination to build their own future.
However, the schoolteacher was right about the contrast we would encounter as villages greeted us with the opposite of his class’s welcoming message. Other groups of children could be as frightening as the villages from which they came. They would mob the patrol with demands, and if they believed they did not receive everything that you might have, the boys would grab at you and attempt to dig in your pockets. You could hear these groups of children approach from a distance, because they would yell for pens and candy. Their fierce shouts of “Qalaam!”—a demand for a pen—became almost a battle cry.
Being mobbed by these children—“the Qualaam kids”—often posed dangerous tactical issues. More frequently than I care to remember, our patrols would become penned in in narrow streets or alleys by two large groups of demanding children on either side. Narrow passageways are called “gateways of death,” because it is so easy for even a large patrol to be trapped and killed by a small number of enemies in that unique situation.
It was a gut-twisting circumstance, because we didn’t want the mob of children hurt if someone should open fire upon us from above or from a side door, and we knew we couldn’t fight our way out of the trap with children hemming us in on either side. The Taliban had no problem risking and sacrificing young lives for its cause, so an enemy sniper would have no compunction about firing on us, even surrounded by children, from the walls above.
We were “easy pickings” in this situation—trapped by the angry children that we wouldn’t harm to escape. I knew what was possible. I vividly remembered our training for snipers in the Mojave, and I was horrified. It seemed by sheer miraculous intervention that a massacre hadn’t happened yet. Each time we were again trapped, the odds increased against us.
At night, when someone in the tent would wake up suddenly shaking from a nightmare, we would tease them that it was not gunfire or explosions they were dreaming about—they must have been dreaming that they were being chased for a pen. It has become a running joke around base to startle each other with outbursts of “Qalaam!,” as if this is the most frightening exclamation one could imagine. In a certain way, it is.
The behavior of the demanding children, besides being disturbing, is revealing in many ways. When faced with these groups, it is essential to have exactly enough gifts for each child to receive one. Otherwise, it is safer to give nothing. If one child is perceived to have gotten more than another, a fight will break out, which will quickly turn into a violent free-for-all until the stronger boys have everything or until the gifts—usually pens or notebooks—are destroyed in the fighting.
In these groups, one would notice that the girls do not join in with the boys, but hang back if they are seen at all. If a gift is given to a girl, it will immediately be taken away by the boys. There is a danger that she may even be hurt for the offense of having it.
At the home of one large family I visit or pass by with some frequency, there is a girl of about nine or ten who watches me with a certain curiosity. Unlike her brothers, who are usually part of the angry mobs, she is gentle and inquisitive. I could tell she was fascinated by my watch—which was oddly pink and frilly for military attire.[7] Last week, away from the mob and in the sight of her parents, I gave her the watch, thinking this would ensure she would be allowed to keep it and perhaps retain a pleasant memory of an American when she grew older.
Day 86
Just today I saw the oldest brother of the young girl I befriended. As usual, he was leading an angry mob of children, but waving a fist adorned with the pink frilly watch. I borrowed a translator and stopped him.
“Hey! That’s your sister’s watch.”
“It’s mine now. She gave it to me.”
“Did you take it from her?”
“I would have if she hadn’t given it to me, but she knows better.”
“Can you tell the time? I showed your sister how.”
“No, I like the way it looks.”
“But everyone can see that watch is meant for a girl. It’s a pretty bracelet. You’re a big strong boy. Aren’t you ashamed to wear girls’ things?”
“I can wear girls’ things all I want! I can take girls’ things and I can like them!”
The conversation left me surprised. I erroneously thought I could shame the boy into returning his sister’s watch by pointing out the gender-confusion issue, but it didn’t faze him. In fact, he seemed quite proud to like wearing girl’s things. At the same time, he was also proud of his ability to dominate a girl with threatened or actual violence.
More interestingly, he was the boy whose behavior appeared to be emulated by the peer group he led, as they nodded along in agreement with him when he spoke defiantly to me and the translator, then resumed their “Qalaam!” chant at his urging. Therefore, none of the other children seemed to think his penchant for obviously feminine apparel was unusual or a cause for any teasing or ostracization, as it most certainly would have been in America. Instead, they idolized him.
The attitudes of children, of course, are formed by the adults around them. I found many similar patterns involving the deprivation of women and the automatic usurping of whatever might be theirs in the homes of adults and community leaders with whom I visited. While the children wanted treats, the adults were at times equally demanding of food, fuel, and other resources. I was always disturbed to see households of malnourished women, sometimes too weak to even stand in the summer heat, headed by portly and apparently vigorous men.
The men who were successful enough to marry in Pashtun society sometimes married more than one woman, and almost always had astonishing numbers of children. The challenge of keeping them fed was daunting, and women, because of both physical and social issues, were the most deprived. The malnutrition issue was beginning to come to the forefront of my awareness—much like the Battle of Pepto Bismol had a bit earlier.
Day 90
“Stop them! I have plenty of gifts for them, but that is especially for your youngest daughter, who needs it. If she doesn’t eat more iron, she will only get weaker.”
The girl, not quite in her teens, looked confused as her own sisters took the food and medicine from her hands. Then she slipped into a more resigned weakness. I thought she might faint in the heat.
Her father responded flippantly to my insistence. “If they are stronger, it is theirs for them to take.” I could not help but be reminded of the behavior of the children in the mobs, who in their desperation to be the strongest, destroyed what they could have had.
A Qalaam boy.
Day 91
With that father’s casual cruelty carved into my mind, I find myself alone, crying with rage. I am again attempting to sort out my thoughts through re-examining field experiences. I plan to rant here for a while, as I have an entire weekend to write. I am not planning on, nor capable of, moving a single inch.
The temperature, here in the shade of my tent, is 115 degrees. Power is out thanks to what air conditioning there was blowing all the circuits in Lash. In case you might want to take a “showe
r” (really a short burst of cold water), what little water supply we had has been out for three days. The latrines are backing up.
The unmistakable aroma of hot humanity sits thickly in the air, and despite the temperature, I am tempted to wrap a shawl fashionably around my face, just to cover my nose and mouth. I am too exhausted from the heat to go anywhere, and too bothered on several fronts to do anything but sit here and think. I am literally and figuratively steamed.
Many of my visits to villages have begun to show me the reality of the lives of women and children in relation to the lives of men. I am stunned as I start to see the truth of which members of the family get whatever resources are available, and the effort that people are and are not willing to put forward in order to improve their own situation when the opportunity is presented to them.
While men occasionally share a goat with each other at their community meetings or “shuras,” at which women almost never participate, most women I meet in the extremely rural areas receive very little protein or iron. It seems that once a young girl begins her period and is relegated completely to a woman’s world, she is almost permanently doomed to physical problems. The girls that confide to me that they have particularly long and heavy periods suffer from obvious anemia, and the women whose bodies are taxed by almost constant pregnancy suffer worst of all.
Again, it’s hard to visit these women and establish friendships without offering some simple gestures of help, but the same restrictions that apply to the distribution of medicines also apply to food. No regulation can stop me, however, from developing a hoarding tendency for the bags of beef jerky and packets of peanut butter that are served in the chow tents, or from stashing away my M.R.E.s to share later. These are the best sources of protein, iron, and calories I can find. The copious pockets of my uniform bulge after I leave the chow tent on days I have patrols, and the female translator with whom I work has quickly picked up the same habit.
Crossing the Wire Page 11