Crossing the Wire

by AnnaMaria Cardinalli

  Several themes were repeatedly confirmed:

  Addicts, especially those with a dependency on Hashish, were consistently the butt of jokes. Beginning a story by stating that it involved an addict almost immediately produced laughter among Pashtuns interviewed, prior to the delivery of any humorous outcome.

  Occasionally, when conducting interviews in other contexts, HTT has heard persons disliked by the interviewees laughingly referred to as “Hashish addicts.” It was at times unclear if the persons were in fact addicted or if this was a humorous disparaging accusation. Most likely, both were true.

  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 the most consistent recurring theme in Pashtu and Afghan humor investigated thus far. Traditional jokes featuring the personality of Mullah Nasurdin exemplify this brand of humor, although it occurs in other contexts as well.

  In the paper “Intentional and Unintentional Afghan Humor: ‘Local Logic’ at its Best,”[8] Don and Alleen Nilsen state: “To Afghans, the stories are very humorous, but to Westerners, the stories are illogical and enigmatic. Mullah Nasrudin stories are perfect examples of local logic, and in fact, they are ways of testing even this local logic.”

  Examples of this humor follow: “Mullah Nasrudin said that he was as strong now as he had been as a youth. When asked for proof, he said, ‘When I was a youth, there was a huge boulder that I was not able to lift. I am still not able to lift that same boulder, so you can see that I am as strong now as I was then.’”[9]

  “How old are you, Mullah?” someone asked. ‘Three years older than my brother,’ he replied. ‘How do you know that?’ ‘Reasoning. Last year, I heard my brother tell someone that I was two years older than him. A year has passed. That means that I am older by one year. I shall soon be old enough to be his grandfather.”[10]

  Perhaps the most discrediting and humorous aspect of the Hashish addict, addressed above, is his loss of logic. This is seen in the following example, which is not self-evidently humorous to a western listener. “Two Hashish addicts were smoking by a river. One decided to take off his clothes and cross the river, but was swept away. He waved to his friend for help, but his friend only waved back responding, ‘don’t worry, brother, now that you are part of the river, I will see you everywhere.’”

  Portraying a personality as guilty of faulty reasoning, especially if that person presents themselves to be educated, like the Mullah, may be perceived as humorous and derogatory. Mullah Nasrudin hardly knew what to preach on a Friday. He began by asking the congregation, “Who knows what I’m going to say?” Nobody raised their hands. He said, “I will not preach to stupid people,” and left. Next Friday, he asked the same question. Everybody raised their hands. He said, “Good then. Why should I preach?” The following Friday, the people wanted a sermon and had a new strategy. Half raised their hands and half did not. The Mullah said “Good. The half that know, tell the half that don’t.”[11]

  Other established themes of oral tradition were evidenced but were less suited to ISAF purposes. These included flatulence,[12] vulgar language, and violence toward women. Sadly, the most repeated joke in interviews was a series of variations on this: A man’s mother had been known to sleep with all the men of the village. Upon realizing this, the man killed his mother, because it was more efficient than having to kill so many men.

  Even this, however, can be categorized as a play on logic.

  Precedence

  There is yet no evident local humor regarding the Taliban in the TF Helmand. This is likely due to the seriousness of the Taliban’s imminent threat in the daily lives of villagers. Nevertheless, precedence exists, both psychologically and historically, to indicate that such humor, if culturally appropriate, may strike an important resonance—even if villagers are afraid of being “caught in the act” of making such jokes themselves.

  In Cultures of the Comic under Socialism, Justine Gill states that Afghans turned to humor as a safe release mechanism for their discontent under Russian occupation. She writes: In the Afghan milieu, these types of safety-valve tales which attack certain institutions by using individuals as butts of jokes and are often filled with double entendre are common traditionally. This tradition is partially seen in the Afghan heritage of “Mullah Nasruddin” jokes, common throughout the Islamic world. Mullah Nasruddin was a character through whom criticism and analysis of people in power, religion, common sayings, ‘folk knowledge’ and paradoxes could be presented.[13]

  In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, one of the principal works dealing with the attempt to define humor in any culture, Freud argues: Where a joke is not an aim in itself… there are only two purposes that it may serve… It is either a hostile joke (serving the purpose of aggressiveness, satire, or defense) or an obscene joke (serving the purpose of exposure).

  The mechanism of humor may allow for an essential release of tensions that are disallowed expression in daily village life, and may therefore solidify an affinity with ISAF in a way that could not otherwise be achieved.

  Everyday life.

  __________________________________________

  [8] Available through the ERIC database at http://www.eric.ed.gov/

  [9] op cit

  [10] Archive available at http://www.afghan-web.com/culture/jokes.html

  [11] Archive available at http://www.virtualafghan.com/fun

  [12] In addition to HTT interviews, see “Searching for Comedy in the Muslim World: Reflections of a Harvard Joke Collector” at http://www.wrmea.com/archives/Jan_Feb_2009/0901035.html

  [13] Paper available at http://slavic.princeton.edu/download/files/Justine%20Gill.pdf

  Chapter 17

  Incoming!

  Day 131

  Over my dinner break, I received an emailed invitation to a release party for the Kanye West CD I sang on between deployments. I would not be there, but I felt embraced by my first love—my music. I still couldn’t bring myself to eat, so I walked to the most remote area of the base I could find, next to a perimeter wall, where I could be alone and bother no one with my voice.

  Like on the first day of this deployment, I found myself preoccupied with a song. The music always arrives in my head before I realize how it is meaningful to my situation. In my mind, I heard over and over Kathleen Ferrier singing the simple, haunting old melody that begins Che Faro?

  What is life, if life is without you?

  Who am I, if I am not your love?

  Where am I to go? What am I to do?

  What will be my life if now my life is not with you?

  Ferrier was a Contralto whose voice somehow captured the world’s own feelings during World War I. When she died unexpectedly young, she received a funeral grander than the Queen of England’s. To me now, it is finally easy to understand why the few songs she was famous for spoke to everyone who had lost so much to a war. One way or another, war seems to rob us of what it is that we love and leaves us wondering who, exactly, we are in its wake.

  I sang. I poured my heart and my hurt into the aria, and it was let free. As I reached the final highest notes, I calmly registered that I was hearing a descending whistle over the melody, almost as if it were accompanying me.

  I was utterly without sleep and my mind wasn’t very sharp. As it quickly grew louder and I finally registered its meaning, the aria ended in a shout of “INCOMING!!!” for anyone close enough to hear me yell. As Lashkar Gah was rarely attacked, no early-warning siren had sounded. The rocket sailed over my head and impacted on just the opposite side of the wall next to which I stood.

  I had a decision to make. The wall provided some cover, but was useless if the next rocket should land on my side. There was good hard cover further inside the base, but I would have to cross a wide open area with no cover to get there. I counte
d to ten. No second rocket had fallen. Maybe no more rockets would come.

  I broke to run for better cover, and as soon as I was away from the protection of the wall, other rockets began sailing by. Now I heard the theme to Chariots of Fire in my mind as I ran, and I did one thing that I thought my Mediterranean assets were never equipped to do. I moved like a gazelle.

  I slid into a building and out of sheer exhaustion, heartbreak, and relief, laughed and laughed at the ridiculousness of the whole circumstance in which I found myself. A number of similarly relieved British soldiers joined me, making bawdy jokes about where they had been when the rockets hit. We all laughed until our eyes watered.

  Day 132

  At Lash, there are a variety of government employees. There are the British troops, there are U.S. State Department employees, and there are USAID workers. Everyone gets along nicely, generally, or they rarely intersect.

  Today was one of those days when a bit of cultural translation—not regarding the Afghan communities, but just us here at the base—was in order. Charging through the hall approached a young USAID worker, his blonde hair in a floppy style, which he had to flick constantly out of his eyes. (“Why not cut it?,” I couldn’t help but wonder, as did everyone else, but I never asked.)

  “Guys!” he announced as he passed our office, “I just made the scariest, coolest, most awesome mistake ever!”

  Not able to resist that introduction, I took the bait. Tex scowled at me for doing so. “Okay, what happened?”

  “I met this little British guy with the most unbelievable knife. You should have seen it. It was fancy and wicked.”

  “Oh, you met a Gurkha. Yeah, those guys are amazing, and their knives are works of art.” The Gurkhas are the elite of the fighting culture of Nepal, and they have served with British forces for well over a hundred years. The famous quote about them goes, “If a man says he’s not afraid of death, he’s either lying or he’s a Gurkha.”

  “I didn’t know who he was—I just asked him for a knife.” I swallowed hard at that. I knew something about Gurkhas’ knives.

  They were prized emblems of their service, and they were also fiercely, almost legendarily effective. Ornate with an elegantly curved blade, they were also beautiful. I knew every service had a knife they thought symbolic and particularly loved. I thought of the Marines and their Ka-Bars.

  The young man, struggling to open a cardboard shipping container, asked the first person to pass him, “Hey, got a knife?” That’s perhaps the most interesting thing you could ask a Gurkha, and also, perhaps, the most inappropriate.

  The Gurkha officer smiled amusedly. “Sure, my friend. Want to see something?” he asked.

  In the storeroom, there was a stack of perhaps 40 cardboard boxes, flattened and tightly bound to save space. Before the young man could nod, the Gurkha drew his knife and sliced through them, top to bottom, as if he were slicing the air. Then, delicately but expertly, with just the tip of his blade, he cut our floppy-haired friend’s box so that it fell open at his feet

  To the utter shock of the already-stunned young man, the Gurkha then winked, drew the blade across his own hand, wiped the blood from the knife, and sheathed it back at his waist.

  “Why’d you do that?” our friend managed to ask.

  The elegant officer answered, “When this knife is drawn, it’s drawn to spill blood, son. It doesn’t go into a sheath until it has.”

  The Gurkha walked away whistling, and the young man, here in a war and yet so rarely aware of the actual business of fighting, joked he felt the sudden need to change his pants. I guess we can all continually benefit from understanding our neighbors a little better.

  Slasher alongside.

  Day 133

  Thank goodness I’ve been spending so much time seeing what transpires in the Afghan gentlemen’s tents lately. I think it helped me answer a question today. It regarded the same difficult issue that faced the South African contractor. I wasn’t sure how to react the first time, but now I hope I’m understanding a bit better. Though my response was by necessity tentative, I can only hope that it was helpful.

  A soldier took me aside to visit in an unfrequented alley between tents. Though he wasn’t a member of a Special Operations unit, I knew him to work closely with one. The secrecy with which he approached me made me think his question must have to do with something that would interest James Bond—something shadowy and classified.

  The Special Operations community, like HTT in a certain sense, frequently has the responsibility of building close relationships with village communities. The soldier was comfortably familiar with the local practice of men wrapping languid arms around one another’s shoulders, embracing fondly, etc., and he had been trained to understand these behaviors as “just the way guys got along here.”

  However, he was bothered by a conversation he had just had with one of his local contacts, and sought me out afterward. The slightly older gentleman took him aside to tell him that “he was not like the others, who simply sleep with each other.” (This in itself was news to the understandably unprepared soldier.)

  The older man wanted him to know that he had genuine affection for the soldier, and would not “use him thus.” He wanted to reassure the soldier that he actually enjoyed and preferred to sleep with men, much as the Mullah had tried to reassure me regarding his preference.

  The soldier, maintaining his friendship with the local man, thought he could put an end to the matter by telling the man he had a wife and children back home. He even pulled out a family photo from his uniform pocket. “I do too,” said the older man with confusion, as if this was no obstacle.

  The soldier then replied, with as much diplomacy as he could, that while he was flattered, he did not enjoy being with men. “Ah, my sweet friend, but you keep your face so beautifully smooth,” said the older man, running a finger down his regulation-shaved cheek.

  My best advice to the bewildered soldier was to grow his beard from that day, as most Special Operations personnel are free to do. I am just learning there seems to be significance to beardlessness in Pashtun culture. However, American military grooming regulations are extremely strict.

  If that soldier is not actually attached to a Special Operations unit, I don’t know if he will be allowed to grow a beard. I wonder how much of a problem this might be for other American men, or if they are even aware that the problem might exist. I wonder if this particular bit of cultural confusion could be widespread, or if I am witnessing something more isolated.

  It’s funny, the South African contractor mentioned needing a “beard,” to keep him from seeming available to the Pashtun man, but I doubt he knew how literally it might have been true!

  Female Engagement Team

  Chapter 18

  The First U.S.M.C. Female Engagement Team

  Day 135

  Back to Leatherneck again. I have been fine most days, but I don’t know how I got through last night. While we were at Lash, the beautiful wedding dress arrived here from my Mom. It has been stored on my bunk because there is nowhere else to put it. Now I must sleep curled up next to it. I’m afraid this requires more strength than I actually possess.

  I am throwing myself into the commander’s new project, which I find fascinating. He has slotted HTT to develop and train teams of female Marines to operate in Afghan communities, much as I do. As confused as my feelings are about women on the front lines (or in the case of a counterinsurgency, outside the wire), I see an undisputable logic to the teams.

  In a region as completely gender-segregated as southern Afghanistan, it would either be necessary for women to function outside the wire or for the Marines to deal only with one half of the population, which would be a strategic detriment to their efforts. Our war here is not one of bullets and bombs, no matter how much they fly. Our victory can only be found in the people themselves, and therefore women, as true and full warriors, have become necessary in order to reach the country’s women.

  The most
significant individual act of warfare in Afghanistan is not in causing harm or damage, though one must be highly skilled and continually prepared to do so in defense of innocent life, but in creating true human connection. The women I first spoke with, so compelled to “outpace” their brothers in all the demands of being a Marine, I dare argue have some natural advantage to this task, in the same way that men have other natural advantages.

  If the people of Afghanistan sincerely support the Taliban, al Qa’ida and other extremist terror groups, then no matter how many terrorists the U.S. might fight and kill, endless replacements will crop up in their place and the war will continue indefinitely. However, if the people realize that they no longer wish to live under the oppression of extremist violence, rally to create their own future, and cooperate with Western forces to help identify and eliminate the terrorist “hold-outs” that threaten us along with them, then the war is truly won, and Afghanistan is its own.

  Realizing the impossibility of winning a war for the hearts and minds of an entire country if only attempting to engage men, the commander has ordered the official creation of the United States Marine Corps Female Engagement Team (USMC FET)—the first team of its kind. While there had been a “Lioness” program in Iraq, where female Marines were used to screen Iraqi women for explosives in order to ensure safety but avoid cultural faux pas, the members of the FET would be trained to actually speak to, assist, and otherwise engage with Afghan women outside the wire—in the homes and communities where the women lived (and were typically not allowed to leave).