Day 121
The requests for transfer were swiftly denied. My heart is heavy, as I still have a long while left to my deployment, and I can no longer enjoy the useful illusion that I work among friends. Perhaps it’s just my upset over the transfer issue that has me anxious, but I worry that I have not heard from my fiancée in three days.
I suppose this is reasonable, as phones and email communications go down regularly, and he could have gone on a mission somewhere inaccessible. Three days, however, is unusual. We write every day, and often he writes me a few times in a day.
He bought me a cell phone that works in-country just so he could call me. I think he gets a bit jealous and likes the ability to know where I am. I don’t mind it. I want to reassure him. That’s what makes it unusual that he hasn’t called or written, and that I can’t reach him.
If he were planning on a long mission, he would normally mention this to me. I would send him some thoughts to keep him company along the way. Communications go out, but technical issues are quickly fixed.
Sometimes communications black out when someone on the base is killed, but this lasts only as long as it takes to notify the family. It’s usually one or two days at the maximum. I supposed a number of these circumstances could have piled up at once, but still, three days is just a tiny bit over the line of “odd.”
I can’t let my mind run wild thinking the phones are out because he might have been killed. That’s a wild assumption. I know better.
I am obsessing. Nothing is wrong. I am sure.
Day 122
No word. Has anyone heard about anything going on in Kandahar? Surely we would know about casualties by now. Wouldn’t we?
Day 123
No word. I cannot find any logical explanation for this much time passing that does not involve something tragic. No one is talking about deaths, and I think the program would have somehow gotten the word out if we lost a member. However, if he or someone on the Kandahar team was wounded, perhaps that word wouldn’t get out as quickly.
Day 124
No word. If he is wounded, is he alone at a medical facility somewhere? Would anyone know to contact me? What if nobody at the hospital understands that I’m really his wife—that only a matter of weeks separates me from that fact. Until then, though, how would they know to call me? What do I do?
Day 125
No word. I have no logic left in me. Please, somebody just tell me he is alive.
Day 126
He emailed. He’s alive. He’s unhurt. There was no tragedy. That’s enough for me.
The message I got from him was brief. It was to tell me that his house had gone into foreclosure. It was unbelievably better news than hearing his patrol had been attacked!
“That’s okay, my love!” I wrote back with immense relief. “I have a house where we can live, and it’s silly to have two. You know, though, foreclosing on a house can affect your security clearance, and once we are married, it will affect mine too. How much do you owe? We’re a team, and maybe I might have enough money to prevent the foreclosure. Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll find a way to help.”
I called Mom, and even she is willing to lend me money to prevent my future husband from foreclosing. We just need some sense of how much is owed. I wrote to ask him, reassuring him that we would help.
Day 129
No word again for the last three days. When I finally sent him a desperate email today, he did respond. “If you think you or your family has any right to ask me about money, you’ve got the wrong idea about our relationship. You need to realize this before we get married. I don’t have to tell you a thing about my personal affairs.”
His message went on. How dare I email him and expect a response? Didn’t I understand the stress he was under? “Every time I pass a doorway on a patrol, I don’t know if someone inside is planning to kill me!” he complained.
If I wasn’t crying, I would have almost had to laugh. Of course I understood that kind of stress—it was precisely the same stress I encountered on every patrol. However, he faced that danger as a big well-armed male, while my five-foot self was still without the paperwork to carry a gun. I was vividly reminded of our first patrol when I was nabbed into one of those frightening doorways he mentioned while he stood by.
He was right. I did need to realize all of this before we got married. I was willing to risk everything for him—not only my life, but the money that my Mom and I had worked so desperately to earn. Again, the feeling didn’t appear to be mutual.
I believed his “I don’t need to tell you a thing,” was meant to extend into other aspects of our relationship as well. It reminded me of the angry words of abusive men I had known before. With my heart breaking, I realized I would not be marrying this man.
Because the HTT community is small, ugly rumors are already starting to reach me. They may be true or they may be simply intended to hurt me further. It’s being whispered that the reason my Marine didn’t want me to know much about his house was because another woman, who he kept at home while he trained and deployed with me, was living there.
If this was so well-known, why hadn’t someone told me sooner? Apparently, this wasn’t the least bit uncommon among men who deploy frequently. Was I the “other woman,” or was she? My world and hopes were shattered, and I was utterly alone—without even a friend in whom I could confide.
I wandered out into the desert night and wept at the full moon. Inshallah. I never understood God’s will, but I trusted it. Still, I ached. The thing I believed I wanted most—a good marriage to a strong man and happy children—was not to be mine. As important as it seemed, perhaps this isn’t what I was meant for after all.
I now wonder if what I truly wanted was to believe in a hero. I came to idolize my fiancée because I believed him heroic—a fearless defender of good in a troubled world—strong where I knew myself to be weak, brave where I knew myself to be afraid. Even when he showed me otherwise, I refused to see. I have decided to open my eyes now, and what I do see is beautiful.
The heroism I so longed to believe in is all around. Everyone here might be flawed and frightened like me. The amazing thing is that they are nevertheless risking everything to make an effort toward a safer, better world for others, as best as they can see how. I don’t need to look for heroism, I just need to see it.
Day 130
I’ve been too preoccupied over the last several days to write much about work, but much has transpired. In stark contrast to my distraught mood, our British colleagues cheerfully put in a most unexpected research request. They were my two closest friends at Lashkar Gah, “Action Man” and “Slasher.”
Slasher, my usual British counterpart on patrols (about whom it was rumored that I shared the dubious honor of once having gone to war instead of jail), had an incredible talent for respecting and commanding respect from Afghan village leaders, and he was always insightful in his analysis of them. He was also about as strong and stout as anyone could wish to stand beside in a fight, and I was proud to call him a friend.
Action Man was distinguished and gracious. At this point in his career, he was more prone to sit and give thoughtful consideration to the means of touching hearts and minds with a message of peace and understanding than he was to engage in any action. However, a toy called Action Man was the U.K. equivalent of America’s G.I. Joe, and like G.I. Joe, our soldier tended to wear every conceivable gadget attached to his vest of armor—as if he was prepared to go into the field for months.
“Could you please explain what’s funny around here?” they asked.
“Just about everything,” I answered, raising an aching and exhausted head off my desk. They guffawed. It took me a moment to realize they were actually asking for a definition of local humor.
In truth, it was a brilliant question. There so was much to it. The troops had noticed that they possessed no shared sense of humor with the Afghan men they engaged.
The Afghans would tell a story, laugh hysterical
ly, and the Brits, because of some apparent meanness or mockery or even downright grossness in the jibe, wouldn’t be sure whether to laugh at all. They just didn’t “get” what was funny, but they didn’t want to fail to fit in and interact in friendly ways. No one likes a stick-in-the-mud, Afghan villagers included.
There was also an even more interesting application to the question. What if we wanted to “make fun” of someone? What if we wanted to paint extremists or Taliban supporters in a clownish light to the villages?
What would make them seem ridiculous to local people, rather than frightening and powerful? What if someone could draw a really funny cartoon? Make up a slogan that stuck? If we didn’t understand the local humor such attempts would surely fall flat, or even backfire.
The question of what constitutes humor—what it is that makes us laugh when it does—is one of those issues philosophers and psychologists have debated for eons. I hoped to avoid that mire entirely and aim for a practical solution. Certainly there were specific and identifiable cultural differences in humor. Being around the Brits demonstrated that! So it seemed right to approach the question from that angle.
The next problem, then, was how to ask the question that allows someone to articulate what they think is funny. “Could you please explain the nature of humor in your cultural context?” while it was the actual question we wanted answered, would never work.
Instead, it would be necessary to interview as many people as possible with as revealing but simple questions as we could develop, and then compile and analyze those answers. The questions I proposed were:
What’s the funniest story you’ve ever heard?
What makes you laugh when you think of it?
Tell me a good joke!
No matter how clever I thought those questions were, however, there was no way to know if they would really make any sense to nearby residents unless we somehow “tested” them on local people first. The translators were a perfect solution. They could both understand the questions and tell us, in English, if and why they made sense or not.
There was a South African contractor working for the Brits. He was the nicest gentleman, and always talked about his gorgeous wife and their pack of giant mastiffs at home on his ranch. I often asked to see pictures of his four-foot-tall “puppies,” as we both called them, and he always had new ones to show.
His job, whatever else it might have included, involved having tea every day with the translators, both to gain some language skills and to offer them a constant sort of interface with the military, so things would be friendly in their camp. We asked if we could accompany him.
“Sure,” he said, “I’d be very glad of the company—especially the women.”
“That’s nice,” I responded, a bit flattered, “but why?”
“Because there’s this guy over there… and he’s gay…,” he said quietly, looking sideways.
I was suddenly irate with him for his apparent homophobia and simple prejudice. “What on earth would that have to do with anything? Do you think he’s suddenly not someone to have tea with, then? Do you think that makes him a bad translator? A bad person? What exactly is your problem?!”
I ranted furiously. I had always been a bit sensitive to the subject since I became so proud of my Dad’s honesty in coming out. I wasn’t going to let this guy get away with something like what he had implied.
“No, no!” he said, waiving his hands innocently. “It’s nothing like that! It’s just that since I’ve been going over, he’s said he likes me, and I didn’t really know how to react at first, and now the more I go, the more he thinks I like him too, and I don’t know what to do to fix the impression without being incredibly rude—which is just the opposite of what I want. I was just hoping you being there might make things less, um, uncomfortable. Maybe you’d seem like—how do the Americans say it—a ‘beard’!”
Understanding his issue, then, I tagged along, clipboard in hand. The translators were amused by the whole line of questioning. They understood and approved of the survey—though they and my team made modifications to the questions—and they answered with some funny stories of their own. Mostly, though, their happy conversation centered not on humor but on who liked who in the tent!
Now it became clear that the translator who concerned the soldier wasn’t the only man who seemed to like other men. I thought immediately, of course, of the translators’ tent in Kandahar, where sex was happening openly. Here I found myself again!
Confused, it occurred to me that perhaps I was thinking of homosexuality in strictly American cultural terms, where I tend to consider it a fairly rare personal trait. Something else entirely seemed to be happening here. It would be too unimaginably enormous a statistical anomaly for two whole translator’s camps of men to, by happenstance, all possess a single rare trait.
Something unnatural, mathematically, at least, was going on here, if I continued to think of homosexuality in its Western sense. Okay, I thought, I don’t get it, but I guess I get that I don’t get it. It was the same sort of thought that had occurred to me so often in this deployment—the thought that emphasized my utter foreignness, and also the potential usefulness of my lens as such a complete outsider—since, perhaps, I first saw a goat in a tree.
Completely aside from the sex issue, we have since spent the last several days executing our research plan. It is perhaps the strangest one I’ve attempted so far. We drive to a village perimeter in a convoy of armored vehicles, pile out dramatically camouflaged and geared-up like Rambo, enter into the village in a patrol formation, and ask, essentially, “So, heard any good jokes lately?”
Sadly, there was one joke I heard over and over, from almost every one of my interviewees. I had heard it before, quite frequently from men I interviewed prior to initiating our research on humor. It was so common I supposed it was the local equivalent of “Why did the chicken cross the road?”
When it was first told to me, I wondered if it was some odd way of telling me that women weren’t worth much. It always went something like this:
“My father is dead and everyone has sex with my mother. I found out that my neighbor slept with her. Then his cousin. Then his cousin’s brother. I realized a simple solution to the problem. I killed my mother.” (This is always followed by gales of hilarity. It is no wonder that our forces are often confused where humor lies, or when to laugh.)
Anyway, I hope I’ve discovered a bit more depth to the local humor than that, and I hope I’ve also sorted out some of the context in which the joke is funny. I guess it’s truly been a good thing that I’ve been so occupied while my life has been going so poorly otherwise. I’d rather be here tonight, just having finished the report, than alone in my bunk, or wandering the camp, thinking about anything else. I’m including my report below.
Human Terrain Team (HTT) AF-6
Research Results Update
Background
HTT-6 has been tasked with investigating the Afghan, particularly Pashtu, sense of humor in support of ************************ efforts to integrate culturally-applicable comedic campaigns intended to discredit Taliban personalities. This is a difficult question that warrants special attention, as humor is notoriously difficult to define in any culture, and an error could result in a loss of ISAF credibility.
HTT has taken the following three approaches:
1) Engaging willing Afghans with these questions:
Can you give an example of something that makes you laugh?
What makes something funny?
What is the funniest joke you know or story you’ve heard?
2) Extending an inquiry to the HTT Research Reachback Center (RRC) on both the methodology of assessing a culturally unique brand of humor and on any previous work available on defining Afghan humor.
3) Conducting open-source research on humor or comedy presented by Afghans and on reporting of such humor from non-Afghan sources.
Summary
HTT has begun approa
ch 1 by vetting the proposed interview questions with interpreters present on LKG. The interpreters have confirmed the intelligibility and applicability of the questions, and, as targets of opportunity, have also provided responses.
HTT has found certain themes in these initial responses to be highly consistent with open source research and previous engagements with Afghans where humor was present but not the focus of inquiry.
HTT confirms that precedent exists, both historically and psychologically, to indicate that humorous degradation of the Taliban, if culturally appropriate, may strike an important resonance, even if villagers remain fearful to make such jokes themselves.
Key Findings
The portrayal of a personality as a Hashish addict will most likely be regarded by Pashtuns as both appropriately humorous and discrediting.
The misapplication of logic is a key element of traditional Afghan humor, highly applicable to Pashtuns. The portrayal of a personality as educated or pompous but illogical will successfully and humorously discredit an individual.
“Mullah Nasurdin” is a humorous fictional figure highly popular in Afghanistan as in the rest of the Islamic world. Well-researched references will be accepted and appreciated.
Research Results
The Afghan, and particularly Pashtu, tradition of humor is oral (rather than written or pictorial) and is integrally dependent on the spoken language and its intonation. Nevertheless, a written or pictorial message may communicate this oral humor if it follows upon a theme already established in the oral tradition.
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