Farewell to Foreign Shores…
Afghanistan + 330
I’ve been meaning to write for two weeks now, and there’s no way I’ve been able. Now, on a plane back to New Mexico, I comprehend something I glimpsed both in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I never truly owned. The Navy chaplain once told me as much.
Today I understand. I just finished my initiation as a Navy officer. I am overwhelmed with more emotion than I possibly could have imagined.
The training I went through wasn’t nearly the miserable length of the boot camp to which enlisted Sailors are subjected or the ridiculously demanding ordeal that most officer candidates endure, but it was enough to teach us “DCO’s.” My company consisted of “direct commission officers,” meaning that we had earned the credentials of officership in our fields elsewhere, and had both chosen and been selected to use them in service to the Navy. Therefore, happy to have us aboard, the Navy went easy on us in our training.
Still, these weeks have taught me what I needed to know. Just like in the movies, we were unexpectedly awoken our first day at three in the morning by a hugely intimidating, shouting instructor (with an impressively powerful bass-baritone) barking commands. We couldn’t do a single thing he wanted correctly, earning us only louder shouting and a bit of physical punishment. (Try posing as if you’re sitting in a chair without one, your head resting, as if pondering, on your fist, for a few minutes. That’s the “thinking position,” the one you use to consider what it is you might have done wrong.)
It wasn’t really that bad, however, and somewhere, just beneath the instructor’s “studly voice,” as he referred to it himself, was a teasing smile—even affection for us obviously surprised and green newcomers. It was a game. We just needed to figure out exactly what the rules were.
The impossible demands continued. Our rooms, which we worked feverishly to make perfect, the hospital corners of our beds at precise 45-degree angles, were turned over, the mattresses flipped and our uniforms and belongings scattered through the halls, because we hadn’t been precise enough.
Chopper. (Photo courtesy Department of Defense)
We failed uniform inspections because our shoes were laced in the wrong direction. Quickly, our frustration taught us something. We tried to outsmart the instructor. If he was going to criticize our shoelaces, then we would get up earlier and made sure everyone checked everyone else’s shoelaces.
If someone was particularly good at making perfect hospital corners, he made everyone else’s while everyone else cleaned and prepared the rest of his things. We each found a specialty and helped one another. We were figuring out the game, we thought.
We began to like one another, to rely on one another—to depend on each person’s generosity of spirit. “Sierra Company!” we began to exclaim in unison with pride when we were asked who we were.
The physical aspect (running miles at four in the morning along the beach, and doing more sit-ups and push-ups than we possibly thought we could) was grueling. There were bizarre demands on our clothing, our walking, our eating, and every other imaginable detail of our being. In addition, our day consisted of academic classes on which we would be tested and either pass or fail the course.
We were deprived of sleep and exhausted beyond our means to cope, but the classes were the most important part of our training. We stood rather than sat, so we could avoid falling asleep. We assigned each other particular portions to learn, and traded notes in the evening. We wouldn’t let one another down.
So, the instructor tried to make us turn against each other. If one person made a simple mistake, we all endured the physical punishment—usually an impossible number of push-ups—for it. We were smart, we thought. We had a policy among ourselves.
Whenever we were punished as a group for an individual’s mistake, we never allowed ourselves to blame that person. It could just as well have been any of us, and no one wanted the blame to eventually fall upon them. The person who made the mistake got reassuring smiles, showing them that the push-ups weren’t so bad.
We decided to be impossible to discourage in our cheerfulness. We wouldn’t let anyone, particularly the instructor, see us down. When we were allowed three hours of sleep, and it was interrupted halfway through by a fire drill forcing us out of the building, we stood on the lawn in perfect formation. Then, as loud, happily, and off-key as we could manage, we burst into song.
“Anchors aweigh, my boys, anchors aweigh! Farewell to foreign shores we sail at break of day (day, day, day)!” We ran through every verse, then started it all over again. Our instructor could only shake his head. I wonder if he ever went home and laughed.
We had it together. We were passing our academics. We spun on our heels at just the right moments. We were pretty smug. “Walking tall and looking good, we ought to be in Hollywood!” we sang, as we marched in perfect time. Even our scary instructor finally allowed himself an open smile.
The silly demands and the marching and the shoelaces had nothing to do with anything. Being in the military didn’t mean following mindless and arbitrary directions like those we were being given. That was just the game of training, and its lesson. Being in the military meant, more than anything else, being there for anyone who relied on you.
We were too smug, however. We asked for it. We found ourselves berated not by our own scary instructor but by a whole group of Navy Chief Petty Officers and Marine drill instructors (who managed some extraordinarily colorful language), apparently suddenly disgusted with us.
We were thrown in the “sand pit.” In complete uniforms, we were made to lie in the surf. We were made to do push-ups to exhaustion, to the point of not being able to lift our faces from the sand. Then we were made to do more. The sand began to turn muddy, and the mud became unmanageable.
Then we were told to do a hundred sit-ups. We pulled each other out of the muck. We tried to do the sit-ups, and few of us could manage one. We tried until an idea struck us.
We started to link our arms. We started to brace our feet against one another. When the person next to you was in tears, you reassured them and you somehow found, where you had no idea it lay, the strength to pull them up with you—just for that one sit-up.
You were exhausted, and it was the person next to you who pulled you up. You lent strength where you could, and you had strength to rely on where you couldn’t. We saw the surf rolling in toward us, the sun over the sea, and it was unspeakably beautiful. We did the hundred sit-ups.
“You have FIVE minutes. FIVE MINUTES, we heard screamed, until uniform inspection in DRESS WHITE.” We were filthy. We ran, stumbling and falling, back to our bunks. We threw the muddiest of us in showers. We grabbed for uniform items.
In minutes we were clean and dressed. We fixed the lines of each other’s collars. We checked each other’s shoelaces. We had done this so many times, in our mind-spent exhaustion, we knew how to do it perfectly.
With thirty seconds to spare, we lined the halls, and even made sure each of our heels stood the same precise distance from the wall. We took a deep breath. We found ourselves at sudden still attention, perfect in our whites, with immense and inexpressible love in our eyes. We passed.
The love wasn’t simply for the people there, we knew. We would likely never see each other again. The love was for everyone who would ever share the same reliance on one another, and who would ever rely on us. Our Shipmates, our Country.
“Shipmate,” we called each other, hugging and slapping backs. “Shipmate,” we couldn’t say enough. We were Sailors, we were officers, and we, even the smallest among us, myself, had arms strong enough to bear anyone who needed to lean.
Our culture as a Navy, we insisted, is what made us Sailors. We all knew in the course of current wars, all our company would most likely become “sand Sailors,” seeing service in the desert rather than on the sea we loved. Our work would bear little difference, really, to that of other services. Still, I knew my Sailor’s soul belonged to the Navy, though the Ma
rine Corps had come to own my heart as well.
In the meantime, during the course of the class, I heard the strangest whispers when we shouldn’t have been talking. “Ssssst… Cardinalli, is this you?” someone asked, pointing to an online version of a newspaper in class. “Did you write about sex?”
“Cardinalli wrote about sex in the newspapers!,” the confused telephone game passed around the room.
“What? Like an advice column?”
“Who knew?”
“No, look!” The story was in all the newspapers anyone checked, often on the front pages. Joel Brinkley, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, had interviewed me about my work, and now his article was syndicated.
I’ll worry more about it after I get home and get some rest.
Afghanistan + 333
My Shipmates were right. The article had gone everywhere. I think Mr. Brinkley, at least, got things right. I had been afraid, when I first heard the article had come out, that it was salacious, and made something of my work that it was not.
My Shipmates certainly made it sound that way, but they were just teasing me. They said they didn’t know many “sex experts” and were delighted they knew me. The article was nothing like what they implied.
Unlike the previous article that had me so disheartened, Mr. Brinkley’s primary concern was the abuse of children. He also actually called to interview me personally. He asked me what my real worries might be.
While Mr. Brinkley introduced a reference to the possible involvement of the Karzai family in the practice of child prostitution, which was news to me, he also allowed me to state the point I longed to make.
“There’s no issue more horrifying and more deserving of our attention than this,” I told him. “I’m continually haunted by what I saw.” If this work has become public, I thought, I hope it might shock the general American public into a human rights concern about the issue.
The statement was a point I had not had the opportunity to make so strongly previously, even in my report itself. It was to say that my findings weren’t an anthropological “oh, isn’t it interesting that this is how things happen in another culture,” but an actual condemnation of the abusive practices themselves.
I am finally encouraged in my hopes.
Afghanistan + 335
I was up all last night obsessively reading internet posts, and I need to stop. They are upsetting me, and I’m not sure why the negative ones, which are the fewest, bother me the most. While Brinkley handled the subject matter with sensitivity, some responders have not.
The vast majority of the reaction was simply the public outrage one would expect regarding the large-scale sexual abuse of children. I am sincerely gratified and hopeful to see America react with the concern I anticipated. However, a few determined reactors have begun an ugly and angry internet battle.
Twisting the meaning and context of my findings, they accuse me of “Gay bashing.” The purpose of my work was entirely for the protection of human rights and dignity, so I found it particularly distressing to see it somehow contrived to serve the opposite intent. I am also confused at how offensive such an argument must be to the community it purports to defend.
I can’t imagine how someone would confuse Western adult Gay culture with abusive Afghan pedophilia. Much like the outrage I had at the South African contractor before I understood his concern, I am angry now. The accusation hurts more than I could have imagined.
I need time away from the computer so I can stop obsessively looking over the infuriating internet blogs. I must remind myself that most of the thousands of postings understand my findings and react with the moral concern I so wanted to see. Why am I so sensitive to the ones that misunderstand things? And how can they misunderstand things so severely?
Afghanistan + 340
Okay, now this is getting funny. My few internet detractors posted what they have labeled “incriminating” video and photographic evidence of my incompetence in writing the report, therefore, by their logic, invalidating my findings. Apparently, I have an unacceptable tendency to play flamenco and sing opera. One never knows just when I might do it! However, it’s possible to actually witness me in the act!
An internet search of my name reveals information about my music and concert dates. For obvious reasons, it would not reveal extensive information about my history of government employment or the specifics of my education. Dismay has erupted over the fact that I am a musician, which somehow makes my involvement in Afghanistan incomprehensible.
I must, therefore, clearly possess no education or experience relevant to the work I was assigned. I am sadly reminded of Lanky and Tex, who simply refused to comprehend that I might actually possess a Ph.D. and a relevant background, despite my appearance. There’s not much difference here.
Then there’s that photo from the Army newspaper, taken the day we dedicated the little chapel for the soldiers at Ramrod. It is particularly unflattering due to my closed eyes and open mouth (but at least I did remember my lipstick and earrings). I was singing Amazing Grace, and now all sorts of accusations surround that.
Perhaps I was employed by the Army only as a musician, not unlike a USO girl, and I wrote the report arbitrarily and unauthorized. Perhaps, because of the hymn, I was running around Afghanistan, proselytizing Christianity among the Muslim locals. (It is prohibited for U.S. personnel to do so.)
Whatever it might mean, it must be evidence I was doing something questionable! I suppose I can’t do anything about what anyone thinks, so I’ve decided to give up so much worry. I’ll continue to happily make my music, “scandalous” as it seems to be.
I’m back in DC, and I got an interesting if teasing question when I walked into work this morning. “Hey, Mata Hari, why do you do both?”
I swiped the donut of the gentleman who dared to address me so. Then I asked, “What do you mean?”
“Why do you perform and still do this other thing you do?”
I had to think. I supposed it originally arose out of some necessity, but why was I attracted to this work in addition to music as opposed to another field? I always believed that music, that art, was essential to our common humanity. It does something irreplaceable by both connecting us and elevating us to a place where we can love better, can treat each other better.
How is that possible or even remotely relevant, though, if anyone among us is simply too busy avoiding being brutalized or killed to be concerned about something like the elevating power of art? That, perhaps, is my answer to why the Pashtun women didn’t sing. It makes sense now.
I can’t do one without concern for the other, so I do both. I wasn’t sure how to say that to my teasing colleagues. Tonight, though, I’ve realized that’s how I explain it to myself.
Afghanistan + 360
I wonder if maybe I’ve found the soldier who went silent on me—the one who told me he had a story to tell, then wouldn’t share it. I located his screen name on a blog site today, reacting to the Brinkley article. I am going to try to reach out to him there. I wonder if he would possibly let me share his story as part of further research on the abuse topic.
Chapter 23
In from the Cold
Afghanistan + 371
He is talking to me, but skittishly. His story, it turns out, was from his experience as a guard at the Guantanamo Bay prison facility. It’s no wonder he was afraid to share. He sent me this:
I would rather keep my actual name as disassociated from Guantanamo as possible. I’ve already been passed over for jobs because of my service there. It’s not a place that is well understood, and after having fought for the last eight years to help people understand it better, I’m burnt out. [46]
It saddens me to see someone who argued for the human rights of children having to hide the fact of their service, and fight for those human rights he did. If not his personal emails to me, I can share what he already stated publically in an internet forum, reacting to my work.
In GTMO, we had a kid who had
been basically sold as a “tea boy” (sex slave) to a warlord in Afghanistan. When a SF [Special Forces] team rolled up on the compound, they caught the warlord’s dudes making this kid fire an AK at US forces.
Frankly, the US didn’t know what to do with the kid. Send him back to the family that sold him into sex slavery? Send him to Bagram where he’d undoubtedly be raped again? We ended up sending him to GTMO until we could sort something out.
We initially had him in units next to adult male prisoners. Not even mesh cages stopped these sick bastards from f*cking with the kid. We’d walk up to him curled under his bed, shaking and crying, as the f*ckstick detainees in the units around him would taunt/jerk off/spit at him. Eventually, we segregated him and a few others so that they could have a semi-normal existence learning to read and speak English.
When it was reported by the press that the kids were in GTMO, the entire international community was up in arms. Calling us war criminals, etc. I even had a few arguments with people… who would insist it was “moral” and “right” that we send the kid back to the family that knowingly sold him to a pedophile. Meanwhile, the kid was treated better by our guards than he had ever been treated by any of the adults over in Afghanistan.
Eventually, the international pressure was too much and we sent them back to their families. There were a LOT of pissed off folks in GTMO. Some of us had pushed to have families adopt them in the States so that they wouldn’t have to go back to that nightmare. It wasn’t politically expedient to do such a thing, I guess. I was personally disgusted with how we abandoned our principals, and it was one of the many reasons I left the military.[47]
My soldier is only an individual telling a single story from a single perspective, so he’s not much of a “sample.” However, his story is not of the sort that one can ignore without further investigation or can hear and go on without imagining its consequences and implications. What’s scary is that his reporting runs quite consistently with the bits and pieces of information the public learned when the shocking news of the existence of children detainees in Guantanamo reached the media.
Crossing the Wire Page 22