The soldiers quickly learned that no night was the same as the one that came before. This was the reality of life in special operations. That was the reason the men trained all year, and it was one of the reasons the Rangers had been so apprehensive about having the CST women attached to them. Beyond the issue of gender, their far shorter and entirely different training cycle made them seem a dangerous liability. “You don’t rise to the occasion when things go wrong,” Sergeant Marks had told the women in pre-mission training. “You fall to your lowest level of training.” The urgency, the fear, and the sensory assault of war destroy the response instincts of most people in the heat of the moment. This truth made constant training not just important, but essential to survival and success in combat.
And yet, the handful of weeks of training in search and tactical questioning were now paying off for the CSTs at war. Each week the women shared stories on their internal email of what they found in Afghan households, the different scenarios they had faced on mission and how they had handled them. In the eastern part of Afghanistan, a week or so in, one CST discovered an AK-47 buried in the ground just beneath a woman she was searching. Kimberly and her partner, on their first night out with a decidedly skeptical team of SEALs, had found the intel items the team sought wrapped up snugly in a baby’s wet diaper. Out one night with her Ranger platoon, Cassie was called up to the front of formation to help calm a young girl whose father was known to be part of a group planning attacks on Afghans and Americans. The U.S. and Afghan forces hadn’t yet cleared the house, but the Rangers didn’t want to enter the compound while this girl was screaming at ear-piercing levels certain to wake the entire village. Cassie knelt with the girl and explained that she too was very close to her father, and she understood the girl’s desire to protect her dad. But, Cassie told the girl, her father was doing some things that were killing her countrymen and U.S. soldiers. The girl told Cassie to go to hell and spat obscenities at her in a fury of angry Pashto, but while the two women interacted, the Rangers were able to clear the house without incident.
Slowly the CSTs were waging and often winning the battle to belong: letting their work speak for itself, acknowledging that they weren’t Rangers but wanted to make a difference out there, going to the shooting range, hitting the gym, and marching their asses off each night without falling out. It was a fight every CST knew would be won slowly—and could be lost in an instant.
10
The “Terp”
* * *
September arrived and with fall’s advance came a slight respite from the Kandahari heat.
Like the war in Afghanistan, the CST role itself was constantly evolving, most significantly in the makeup of its teams. Lane had just left Ashley and Anne in Kandahar for a base in another region. Sarah had moved as well. Instead of the pairings of two that had originally been envisioned, most of the women were now going out on their own with just an interpreter. The demand for CSTs from special operations was high enough that the women were spread out as widely as possible. And so as they were getting to know their fellow CST teammates better, they were also getting closer to their interpreters, the civilian women and men without whom they had no shot of doing their jobs each evening. As the CSTs came to learn, the interpreters were some of the bravest and most effective members of the special operations teams, even if their work was among the least known—and least appreciated. Demand from the entire U.S. military for Pashto-fluent and physically fit interpreters far exceeded the supply. The civilian contracting firms that specialized in recruiting the interpreters could not come near matching the surging demand from American forces.
This was hardly a new challenge for America’s military. The Civil War had been the last battle in which all sides spoke the same language. In the months before Pearl Harbor the United States began recruiting second-generation Japanese-Americans and trained them in working with Army soldiers at the Fourth Army Intelligence School in San Francisco. After the 1941 attack the school was moved to Minnesota, since by that time anyone who asserted Japanese heritage was officially banned from America’s West Coast. Historians would later attest to the extraordinary contribution of the Japanese-Americans during World War II. James McNaughton wrote: “Their courage, skill, and loyalty helped win the war sooner and at lower cost to the United States than would otherwise have been possible.” During the American occupation of Japan “they helped turn bitter enemies into friends, thus securing the victory and serving as a bridge between the two cultures.” Women played an important role in this effort; the WACs recruited American women from Japanese and Chinese families, some of whom spent the war years in Camp Ritchie, Maryland, analyzing seized Japanese documents.
But the Pentagon found itself utterly unprepared for the language demands that the twenty-first-century, post-9/11 wars placed on its troops. Finding language-skilled, battle-ready translators proved a major challenge, and Afghanistan was a lot harder to staff than Iraq because the Afghan and Persian communities in the United States were only a third the size of the country’s Arabic-speaking population. Pashto, one of the two official languages of Afghanistan, is not spoken in huge swathes of the world, which complicates the task of finding translators in neighboring countries. The lost-in-translation dilemma highlighted a far broader problem: America lacked language skills in the places where it was fighting, and it was up to the military to find a solution. One of Admiral Olson’s priorities was an initiative called Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest, or MAVNI, whose goal was to increase “our level of regional expertise through the recruitment of native heritage speakers.” The translators had to be resident, legal noncitizens already based in the United States, and in exchange for their services they were promised an accelerated push through the opaque process of naturalization.
Speakers of Pashto and Dari, Afghanistan’s other national language, were eligible for the program, but there were precious few native speakers who could provide the linguistic firepower the war required. So the U.S. military and its civilian contractors went hunting for candidates in the nation’s largest Afghan-American communities, from Northern Virginia to Southern California. Private contractors paid several times what the military could, with salaries hovering around the $200,000 range, but even so it was a challenge to find people who met all the qualifications—especially women.
For the CSTs, who were busy getting used to their unusual new assignment, the ideal “terp” was a female who understood Pashtun culture; spoke American English as well as they did; grasped how special operations functioned; could relate to and connect with Afghan women and children in a hot moment; embraced the women’s mission; was athletic enough to keep up with the Ranger men while wearing body armor; and could speak most dialects of Pashto.
Ashley had the good fortune to actually get to work with the ideal terp, a young Afghan-American named Nadia Sultan.
Nadia had come to the United States in the late 1980s when she was only one month old. Her parents were Afghan refugees from Kandahar, fleeing their country’s nine-year war with the Russians, which was then taking especially bloody turns through the surrounding cities and their own neighborhood. They first stopped in Pakistan, where Nadia’s mother gave birth to her baby girl, out of concern that the United States wouldn’t let them in without health insurance. Once in America, her family spent its first few years in New York City, among a tight-knit neighborhood of Afghans; then they moved to Orange County, California, where a larger and more established community of Afghans was forging a new life. Nadia grew up a real Orange County girl; the raven-haired stunner never left the house without flawless makeup and a fresh manicure.
Nadia’s family may have left Afghanistan, but they did not shed all the traditions of their native home. Nadia and her sister were raised in an insular Afghan-American community to study, find a job, and marry a successful fellow Afghan-American approved by their parents. After that they were to begin having babies—as soon as possible.
But once
she was in college, Nadia swerved from the preordained path her parents had tried to forge for their girls. She worked at a bank while studying at the University of California and graduated at the height of the financial crisis, a time of few jobs and stiff competition. Initially she had wanted to work with the police or FBI helping to rescue abused kids. Then she had heard about the interpreting gig from an uncle in New York; several of her cousins had already accepted positions and departed for Afghanistan. Nadia decided that if she could interpret for Americans doing humanitarian work in her parents’ homeland, she would go, too, and get experience that would help her when she returned. She was energized by the idea that she could make good money doing a job she believed in while also serving the nation that had given refuge to her own family when it was too dangerous to stay in Kandahar.
But Nadia’s parents knew enough of war to question her idealism. They were furious when she shared her news, and exploded in anger. Neither could believe that after all they had lost and all they had risked—their own lives included—to get to America, their daughter now wanted to go back there. “The Taliban are going to kill you!” her mother cried in Pashto. “They will murder you as soon as they lay eyes on you. And you cannot escape them, because every day there are rockets landing at the bases. If you go there, you are going to die.”
Nadia heard the same thing from nearly everyone in her family, but she ignored their entreaties and pushed ahead with her plans. She landed at Bagram Airfield in the summer of 2009, and three days later started her new job. Colleagues “welcomed” her the same way the commanders had received the CSTs: as if she had been there for years and was ready to hit the ground running without any breaking-in period or on-site training. Only she had had no training. She began working twelve-hour shifts interpreting at the base at Bagram, translating for the Americans when they brought in high-value detainees who supported the insurgency, and trying to help gain intelligence that would foil future attacks. She told her company she wanted to do more humanitarian work, like distributing food or opening schools, but they told her that unfortunately, this was the only work they had just then. Orange County and the days of mani-pedis couldn’t have felt farther away.
As she encountered Afghans from around the country, Nadia couldn’t believe how her parents’ countrymen were living. She had never seen so much suffering, had never interacted with people for whom food, shoes, and water were luxuries. Her parents had described Afghanistan as a land of plenty, of monster-size watermelons, juicy pomegranates, and newfangled electronic gadgets that people from India and Pakistan flocked across the borders to purchase. But all Nadia saw was insurmountable poverty and the fragility of human life. The only thing she had in common with the Afghans she met was their language.
She vowed she would never tell her parents how bad it really was. Their Afghanistan now existed only in their imaginations, and she wasn’t about to destroy it.
During her first two weeks at Bagram, Nadia struggled to endure each day. She hadn’t adopted her own “combat mindset” yet, and she had been ill-prepared for what she would witness and hear. She remained stoic on the job, but returned to her room after each shift to cry for hours, only to turn around and head back to work. She wondered whether she could keep doing the job, regardless of how much money she was earning. We need to get our troops out of here; these people are from a different century, she thought. We need to leave this place and never look back.
Nadia was equally disgusted by the partying all around her. Civilian contractors and NATO troops on base stayed up all night, drinking and reveling until dawn. She couldn’t think of anything more inappropriate than dancing in a war zone. How on earth can these people be out all night partying when men and women are dying right outside these gates? she wondered.
Time and war, however, changed Nadia, too, and gradually she became desensitized to the incongruous excesses of her new environment. After three months she stopped crying about her work. She even stopped taking it back to her room with her. And she stopped judging the partyers, though she never joined them. They weren’t bad people, she decided, they were just trying to survive. They are living day by day in their minds, as we all are, because no one knows what the next day will bring, she thought.
By the end of 2009, just before the U.S. troop surge began, the social scene got even more extreme. Many more interpreters came to Afghanistan, including some women Nadia knew from New York and California, and in dismay she watched these new “desert princesses” grab their seats at the “man buffet” they found on the bases. The old joke was a true reflection of life in a war zone: “twos became tens and tens became twenties.” Nadia herself—young, beautiful, and on her own—had an abundance of offers and suitors. “I would work three jobs to support a wife like you,” one told her, but she paid meager attention. This is not the real world, she reminded herself, and in time she and the other young, Afghan-American female terps forged a unique bond given their outsider status. They were civilians on a military base, Afghan-Americans whose loyalties were questioned by both the Afghans and their fellow Americans, and outsiders even to their own families; the elders thought it outrageous that these young women would choose to live there, in the middle of a war fought by men, instead of “having babies at home, where they should be.”
Six months into the job, Nadia realized that the shallow, label-conscious Afghan-American girl she once was had disappeared, and in her place was a steely professional with a front-row seat to the war in Afghanistan. Her work put her in direct contact with combatants and she—the spoiled girl from Orange County—was now part of the effort to stop attacks and learn where the insurgency’s leaders and their supporters were hiding. Nadia had by now met countless individuals who wanted nothing other than to kill her, and she had communicated with dozens of regular Afghan citizens who were destitute, uneducated, and now fully ensnared in a war much larger than they could comprehend. She could no longer bear to hear from friends back home about boyfriend issues or Botox woes. People are dying every day, all that is just so meaningless, she thought. But she never expressed any of this out loud; she just kept herself focused on her work. Gradually she became more confident in her own abilities, and developed a fine-tuned instinct for when someone was lying. She also found her own voice and stopped hesitating when she had an insight to offer military personnel for whom she translated. If she believed they were following a dead end, she would say so, even though some of the American leaders didn’t want to hear her views. She was only an interpreter; “just tell them exactly what I am saying,” they would tell her, oblivious to the fact that some of the words they used didn’t even exist in Pashto. But with time, many came to trust Nadia, and regard her as a partner who could offer insights into dangerous situations at high-stakes moments.
In spring of 2011, her bosses recruited her for a special assignment: a new mission that would take place out in the villages, not in the relative safety of Bagram. It was a new type of job for female terps: they would be assigned to American female soldiers who were out on raids searching and questioning Afghan women and children in insurgency strongholds. There was a color-coded shorthand for the special operations task forces. Nadia’s male colleagues now ribbed her for joining this new one they jokingly called “Pink Team.”
She didn’t want to take the assignment at first. She had planned to return home to California by 2012 and move on with her life: she wanted to do that long-postponed humanitarian work and maybe go back to school. But her bosses were even more desperate than usual for her to take the job; there were precious few Afghan-American females willing, daring, and fit enough to do the assignment. And she knew that if she didn’t go, the responsibility would fall to her teammates, some of whom were older women hardly athletic enough to go out on missions and others who were younger and had small children back home in the States. She felt it was her duty both to her country and to her colleagues to do what she knew she could. She would sign up for “Pink.”
Overnight, she went from the relative luxury of life at Bagram to a tent on an Army base in a province where cell phone networks stop functioning after 6 p.m. because insurgents use them to blow things up. On her first night out with the Rangers she feared her mother had been right all along: she might not make it home. Her stomach tossed in terror as she realized she had had no training for helicopter rides through pitch-black skies, or rough landings on fields of sand that kicked up a storm of dust and made breathing impossible. Nor had she trained for the miles-long treks through unknown territory. She wore a baggy Army uniform and carried a night-vision monocular, a device that has just one eyepiece and therefore a drastically reduced view of the objective. She had been trained for just a few hours to use it by a CST. It put an eerie green haze over half the landscape, making things even more terrifying. Running for her life alongside the Rangers, Nadia wondered what the hell she had agreed to. On her first night she choked on sand and threw up as soon as they neared the intended compound. “We have to keep going!” a Ranger yelled back at her as they ran. “No stopping, pick up the pace!” Eventually she did.
Nadia felt like an outsider once again. Even some of the CSTs were impatient with her, insisting that she work faster in the field. She wanted to answer, “Girl, do you understand I am from Orange County and have never done this kind of job before and have zero training for it?” But she said nothing, and just worked harder.
Ashley's War Page 18