I saw where they were leading me. It was beautiful. The chapel they had worked on for months was finished.
FOB Ramrod was more dirty and remote than Leatherneck by any imagining, but there, on the side of the camp where once the garbage was piled, was an actual wooden building, painted white. Over the months of its construction, soldiers had scrounged to find bits of clear plastic and markers. They drew and colored stained-glass patterns for the windows.
These were the soldiers of the Army’s 1st Infantry Division. The young soldiers who had faced such heavy losses just earlier in the year—the friends over which the “little brother” I spoke to over warm cereal had cried. These were the soldiers who called me “Barbie.”
I would sing for them. I would do anything for them.
“Perfect. Just sing the National Anthem before we start, and then I’ll wink at you when you’re supposed to sing Amazing Grace later. I’ll say a few words, and then the newspaper people will take pictures,” the chaplain instructed briskly, while nervously and proudly straightening pews and dusting off prayer books.
“Seriously? Newspaper people out here?” I asked.
“Yep. After everything that’s happened to these guys, I guess the chapel’s a great ‘feel good’ story. They’re already landing!”
“Huh,” I thought, as I sat down and tried to make sure I actually remembered the words to the National Anthem and Amazing Grace. Then it suddenly struck me it might be easier not to remember them at all. I felt myself choke up at their meanings in a way I never had.
I sang, and I sang every word. I just don’t know how.
The service finished with smiles and hugs all around. “Hey,” the Chaplain put in, “I’d like to be the one to do your wedding if I get some of that good goat you guys promise at the party! Your Marine’s been telling me all about it.”
“Count on it, Sir!”
Day 107
I have been studying the table arrayed with oddities and necessities, free for the taking of the troops. It tells a strange story if these are the things we might happen to need. Playing cards and holy cards, sardines and condoms, bandanas and cigarettes.
They weren’t cigarettes so much as cigarillos. My favorite. I often smoked on stage in performances of Carmen (she was a tobacco worker and a gypsy, after all), and just sometimes, kept carefully hidden from my voice teacher, as I shared good scotch with good friends at favorite dark hideouts near DC.
There were moments here, though, that could only be celebrated with an excellent big cigar. The safe accomplishment of another month in theatre, for instance, which I tracked by the return of the full moon when the desert was bathed in its soft light, reflected off the sand.
Officers and contractors alike gathered together then and smoked. I was often invited among them—accepted warmly among the men if not the women, I suppose—to share a rare quiet camaraderie before uninterrupted work returned. When I think of this deployment in the future, I hope it is these moments I remember.
Day 109
I suppose that when interacting with any new culture, there are times when you are left completely taken aback if you still hold to your own perceptions of propriety or normality. It’s important both to be aware of these perceptions and to hold them at bay. Today was one of those days where this became a challenge.
Translators at the Forward Operating Base deep in Kandahar province were young men from the surrounding areas, and some knew only very little English. This proved to be a problem when soldiers needed to ask or communicate something very specific to Pashto-speakers in the villages. Sometimes, the translators would simply have pleasant conversations with the villagers, completely unrelated to whatever the English-speaking soldier had hoped to say.
To help remedy this, the HTT in Kandahar province began a series of informal English lessons every evening in the translators’ tent. The team was entirely men, but thinking I might have some teaching skill, they included me in the class as a new instructor. I was happy to oblige but apparently completely unprepared for the experience.
The musty tent smelled powerfully of sweat, perfume, and male presence. The center was covered with lush but stained oriental carpets, where men lounged together smoking or sharing bits of local delicacies. Instead of arranging the beds in a dormitory style, mattresses lined the walls in shadows, surrounding the central carpeted space.
I know well to keep my own cultural interpretations in check, but the place reminded me unavoidably of a bordello. Still, my academic mind admonished me that this needed to be interpreted in its own cultural context, not through a lens of my own. After all, the furniture arrangement wasn’t unusual for an Afghan home.
I reprimanded myself, thinking that I must still be overly preoccupied with the camel story and had sex on the mind. How incredibly inappropriate of me! I needed to get my thinking out of the gutter, and resolved to do so.
Telling myself firmly that I had not just walked into an all-male bordello, I primly channeled a Mary Poppins personality and began with the instruction. A few men sat interestedly at my feet, and they were actually those who knew English best and hoped to come to the U.S. after the war. A few more regarded me as a fascinating curiosity.
However, from most of the rest I got the distinct impression that they found my presence repulsive. They wrinkled their nose and spat on the ground after looking at me, even though I was completely and respectfully covered. To some it had to be whispered, “Calm down. She will be gone soon.” Others left the tent to wait for my exit.
Finally, toward the end of the lesson, I couldn’t avoid seeing what was happening openly in front of me, so I decided to give up on Marry Poppins and address it frankly. Two men lay on one of the corner mattresses together, resting intimately intertwined. Taking a matter-of-fact approach with one of the good English speakers near me, I indicated the two and asked, “Wasn’t that prohibited under the Taliban?”
“Oh, no,” he responded with some shock. “The Taliban punished homosexuality. No one here is a homosexual! We just enjoy each other for pleasure.” He spoke with a certain outrage that I would have confused the two.
My eyes couldn’t help but dart to a fawning youth stroking the hair of an older man. Seeing this, he went on, with somewhat increasing offense. “Some of the younger ones are uneducated, but it is right that men who fight together should be very dear to each other.” There was that word again, “uneducated,” the same one that the Mullah had used to warn me about the men in his village.
I can’t imagine feeling comfortable in that tent again. I doubt I’ll give any more English lessons, but my male colleagues plan to continue teaching, as they felt liked and welcome. They still can’t understand my new hesitancy to keep visiting the translators, but the clear impression I got from most the men in the tent was that I was something both offensive and disgusting for them to have to see. I have no desire to increase their offense.
I compare the experience to the occasional times circumstances have demanded that I walk through male quarters in the American tents. My presence raises a stir of attention there, but of an entirely different kind. The whistling and teasing of the American men, even when it is objectifying, is at least highly appreciative of female-ness, even at its least attractive.
I remember recently having to pass through the American men’s tents, looking for someone after a patrol, as wind-blown, dusty, burnt, gaunt, and bedraggled as a person can manage to be, when a young soldier fell to his knees, exclaiming melodramatically, “My goddess of the desert! How may I serve you?” I ruffled his hair affectionately, and he comically swooned to the good-natured laughter of the tent.
Clearly, my norms of sexual interaction don’t entirely apply here. I’ll try to keep this in mind, both to avoid mistakes or offense in the future, and to better understand the lives of the people whose friendship and alliances we hope to gain. No matter the differences between us, if we hope to interact on a human level, we must comprehend this culture well enough to d
o so.
Chapter 15
“If You Go to a Medic, You had Better be Missing a Limb”
Day 117
It’s been a while since I have been capable of writing. In the course of this deployment, I have drunk a significant amount of tea and eaten older goat than I really care to think about. I don’t mean only that the goat was old when it was slaughtered, but that it was old meat—hung out in the sun in the village square for a bit too long, so that worms were clearly visible.
At the core of my job is the need to be accepted by the communities I hope to learn about, and to do this, I can never afford to cause cultural offense. So, whenever a poor village invited me to share a sparse meal—particularly where I was allowed to observe a shura—I could not turn up my nose at the offerings. Whenever we might eat with a village, we made sure the patrol stopped at a bazaar on the way. That way we could arrive as good guests—providing more food than we might possibly consume.
Still, when it came down to accepting the cup of tea that preceded any real possibility of discussion—even if that tea was not quite boiled and made with the very water that was making the village sick—I would accept and drink it. Other patrol members often backed away from this offering as well as from the prepared meals, but as I was the one doing the talking, I could not excuse myself.
Like the villagers and the Marines, I fought a constant battle with intestinal bugs, but at a combat outpost past Ramrod in Kandahar, I fell truly ill. It had been drilled into me that as a female in remote combat areas, I needed to appear especially “tough” lest I embarrass my team or my program. So far, I had done well. However, I had been told, “If you go to a Medic, you had better be missing a limb.”
Fortunately, the only other female on the outpost was a medic, so I shared her tent. I said nothing, but after she observed me stumbling outside the tent all night to vomit, then returning, not quite able to walk, she pressed a bag of medications into my hand. “Look,” she said, “you’ve got to get back to a bigger base and get some help. Take the convoy leaving tomorrow morning, since it’ll be the last one leaving here for a week. These medications will get you there. Then get help.”
The morning was a blur to me, but I was incredibly grateful that I was in Kandahar province. This meant that I was with my fiancée’s team. He was there with me the morning of the convoy, and the medic surreptitiously took him aside. I began to slip in and out of consciousness, but we made it back to a Forward Operating Base. I remember him helping me to a cot and taking off my combat boots for me. I reached out with just the strength to touch his cheek. In my confused state, I had only one thought. What a wonderful man would do something like take off my combat boots.
My world became the fabric wall of a tent. It began to seem a fascinating world, as I soon lacked the strength to turn my head and look elsewhere. With the canvas snapping gently and the sense of motion I felt, I started to believe I was sailing on a ship. The holes in the tent that let in specks of sunlight became stars over a beautiful sea. Sometimes it would occur to me that the pretty stars were merely holes, but as soon as it did, my tent would shift back to into a soothing ship. I didn’t know where I was, but I believed I was going home.
It was only much later that it occurred to me that I had actually been going out of my mind. I was severely dehydrated and too weak to move, let alone acquire water by myself. I had been left alone for days in a tent lacking air conditioning in temperatures that approached 120 degrees. I was no longer vomiting because there was nothing left in my system, and it was almost three days before I could rise from my cot for any reason—nor did I have any reason.
I eventually saw that a bottle of water and box of saltines had been left for me, but they were out of my reach. At one point, I managed to fall off my cot and crawl to them. My fiancée later told me that he had checked on me, but because he usually saw that I had not touched the water, he doubted that I was dehydrated—clearly I hadn’t been thirsty.
In retrospect, even if no one was willing to take me to a medic for fear of embarrassing the team or the program, someone should have at least started an IV of fluid in my arm as we were trained and equipped to do. The danger of death from heat stroke and dehydration is so great in a desert environment that we were trained to recognize the symptoms (like weakness and hallucinations) and promptly administer an IV. While the help with my boots was touching, real “caring” would have involved a desperately needed IV.
Still, I couldn’t find it in my heart to be upset with my Marine who had made me a fruit salad and taken off my combat boots, although I was continuing to feel—as I had so often before—that I truly could trust no one to have my back if I was in trouble. The wedding didn’t take place on this visit, but I was still sure that it would soon. I had word that huge boxes from Mom, containing my dress and veil and decorations for the party, had begun to arrive back in Helmand. I was still blissfully happy that my deepest hope was coming true.
Chapter 16
Really? No, Really?
Day 118
I was up and around for the first time yesterday, and today I rejoined my original team. We were to brief the incoming Marine general on the large base in Kandahar about our mission and capabilities. It went exceptionally well and received an uncharacteristically enthusiastic response from the General. There had been enough stars on collars in that room to intimidate the stoutest heart, so the fact that we left unscathed, and even with the General’s approval, was a victory unimagined.
Afterward, we caught a helicopter back to Lashkar Gah. I was happy and relieved for the success, even if I was still a bit tired and weak in general. I looked forward to landing in Lash to find some dry toast and a welcoming cot. Upon our arrival, however, Lanky and Tex herded me briskly into a little room for an apparently urgent meeting.
“Next time, please don’t lie when you brief a General,” they said almost in unison, as if they had discussed exactly how they would address me. Horrified and confused, I asked, “What do you mean? Did I make a mistake somewhere? I am so sorry!”
“You always say that you have a Ph.D. when we present our background and qualifications. Don’t do that in the future.”
“Okay, I’ll remove the statement if you want me to, but it is certainly not a lie. I can provide you any documentation you need to prove it. You know as well as I do that it’s a job requirement for my position, and that it would have been vetted.”
Fortified against invaders and the wind.
“Fine, then it’s true, but that doesn’t matter. It still comes off as a lie, and we don’t want the General perceiving us as liars.”
“Why on earth would it come off as a lie?”
“Because you are too young, and you’re female, and you’re clearly Hispanic or somehow otherwise ‘ethnic.’ In our society nobody in their right mind would believe that you have a Ph.D., let alone from Notre Dame.”
My heart sank when I realized that this was about the odd combination of my age, gender, and background, and I was dismayed why Tex, a Hispanic woman, was nodding in agreement! After being surrounded by the extreme example of gender prejudice that enveloped us in Afghanistan, I had thought that we as Americans would have become less prone to it. Still, I responded:
“We were instructed to brief our career and educational background, and that brief was approved before we left training. I do not dwell on my background, but I want the General to know that he has a qualified team doing this work. How is it any different from you listing your own qualifications, which add to the capability of the team just like mine do?”
“The difference is that a General could believe me, a respectably older white male, but he could not believe you. It may not be fair, but it’s true. I come off as credible.”
I wondered if this was true. The General, in fact, and generals I had briefed before him in my career, seemed to have no problem taking me seriously or finding me credible. The problem, it appeared, was only with my team itself.
Lanky
’s words perhaps revealed more about what he himself believed than what might have been true of the General. He was talking about his own cultural attitude, and it was one in which the idea of an educated young minority female seemed incomprehensible. Frustrated, I went on.
“Would it be preferable, then, that I introduce myself to the General as an incompetent and arbitrarily selected wench off the street who brings no abilities or qualifications to the table other than my sheer willingness to risk my neck?”
“That would be far more believable.”
The saddest part about this conversation to me was not the prejudice, with which I was already intimately familiar, but the sudden realization that Lanky and Tex, my own team, didn’t feel the same way about me as I felt about them. I actually thought the world of them. They could not have thought well of me and simultaneously accused me of lying.
Having been formed by the lessons of my first team in Iraq, I automatically considered my teammates to be my brothers and sisters, and I treated them as such. I assumed the same was true for them. Now, in the light of their hard glares, I could see past my happy optimism for the first time to the cold fact that they simply couldn’t stand me.
At times we faced the unknowable threats of the villages together, and thinking them my closest comrades, I was committed and comfortable with the idea of protecting them with my life. Clearly, the feeling wasn’t mutual. Again, I realized that whatever I faced, I faced alone.
“Would you prefer I did not serve on this team?” I asked.
“You know how we feel. Whether you stay or go is your decision. However, I would support you strongly in a decision to go.”
Slow though I am, I got the distinct impression that I was not particularly welcome. With Lanky’s “support,” I submitted a request to the head of the program that I be transferred to another team. The leader of the Kandahar team put in an immediate request that I be transferred to them, as he thought my work for their team had been excellent. Now all I can do is wait, hope, and in the meantime, keep doing my work shoulder-to-shoulder with my teammates with what dignity I can, despite the fact that I feel like a fool.
Crossing the Wire Page 13