American Spartan

by Tyson, Ann Scott

  The dangers were real, as I was reminded the day after we arrived. Despite our efforts to stay under the radar as we traveled from Jalalabad, insurgents had spotted our faux Afghan caravan. A report made its way to the military that night that Abu Hamam had talked about killing an American woman. Hamam was the Taliban commander for the nearby Shalay valley and surrounding areas. Thirty-five years old, with long black hair and a black beard, Hamam was known for kidnapping and ruthlessly killing Afghans he suspected of supporting the Afghan government or U.S. forces. He made videos of the executions to intimidate other villagers. He had also ordered attacks that had killed several U.S. soldiers. Jim knew from sources inside the Taliban that Hamam had a crude sense of humor and was also an uneducated but effective commander. He made the most of his scraggly band of sandaled insurgents who lived in the mountains and survived on whatever food and shelter they could get from the people. They waged a primitive form of warfare, using smoke signals to warn of approaching U.S. troops and then ambushing them with old Russian weapons. The fighters were agile, unencumbered by armor, and knew every footpath and village in the valley. Hundreds of dry streambeds snaked through the Shalay, allowing them to hide and stage lethal attacks virtually unseen. Ghostlike, they vanished as quickly as they appeared.

  A military friend—a smart young officer in Jim’s chain of command who respected Jim’s expertise and knew about me—alerted him about Hamam in an urgent email: “Jim, heads up . . . where is Ann?? We have some [information] from Khas Kunar/Abu Hamam where they are discussing plans to kill an American woman. They are also mentioning you by name.”

  Jim, disturbed and angered by the intelligence, spoke with me harshly that night in our room.

  “Ann, you must never leave the qalat, even to step outside the gate for a minute. Do you understand?” he said, almost glaring at me. “If I ever come back and I do not know where you are, this is over,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said with a nod, looking straight at him and stiffening. I knew I could say nothing more. I felt what it was like to take orders from him—a twinge of what his men felt every day. I also knew it was because he loved me, as he loved them.

  “Always know where your AK-47 is. If I ever ask you and you do not know where that rifle is, I will be furious. Do you understand?” he continued, his voice rising and his face as stern as I had ever seen it.

  “Yes,” I answered again.

  “They are watching us. Every minute. They know we are here, they know when we leave, they know about you . . . I can hear them out there, right now,” he said. Then he walked out, letting the wooden door to our room shut loudly behind him.

  I gathered my composure, put my head scarf back on, and climbed a wooden ladder into one of the two unmanned guard towers in the corner of the qalat above our room, listening, and looking at the moon.

  CHAPTER 19

  A FEW DAYS AFTER arriving in Mangwel, I went on one of my first long walks around the village. It seemed a little surreal as I followed Jim and Abe—just the three of us—down a dirt path that ran between rustling fields of green cornstalks on the outskirts of the village. I felt a strange mixture of sensations as I took in the tranquil beauty of the Konar River valley.

  We wore Afghan clothing and no body armor. Our only overt protection was the rifles Jim and Abe carried. I felt freer but also vulnerable without the heavy plates I’d lugged around for years on patrols in Afghanistan and Iraq. I had on my one black embroidered Afghan dress and sandals, and tried to keep my head scarf firmly on while watching my footsteps to make sure I didn’t trip on the uneven path.

  Ahead of us the fields stretched for about a quarter mile to the Konar River, which fed the narrow strip of crops with water channeled through irrigation ditches. Across the river a string of mountains rose under a clear blue sky. This was the heart of rural Konar. I knew from my research that about four hundred thousand people lived in the province, 98 percent of them Pashtun and 96 percent rural. Konar covers some sixteen hundred square miles, an area about the size of Rhode Island, and is shaped like a sideways bow tie resting on the border with Pakistan. The Konar River runs through the middle of the bow tie, roughly northeast to southwest and parallel to the rugged Pakistani frontier. The hills and mountains that make up 90 percent of the province rise from the flat plain of the valley. The idyllic landscape is deceiving, though. Konar is one of the deadliest places in Afghanistan. As we moved down the path, I was uneasy knowing that cornfields often provided cover for insurgent attacks.

  The path entered a shady grove of trees, and Jim stopped to talk with an elderly Afghan farmer and his son. I noticed through the trees in the distance a few Afghan women watching us in front of a mud-brick home. Then, unexpectedly, Jim turned to me.

  “Go talk with them,” Jim said, tilting his head in the women’s direction.

  I gave him a questioning glance.

  “It’s okay. Go,” he said.

  Jim had to keep his distance. It would have been a cultural misstep and violation of Pashtunwali for him—or any man outside their family—to approach the women and speak with them. As a woman, I could do so. Still, Jim wasn’t sure how the Pashtun tribeswomen would react to me, likely the first American they had ever met. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Jim was testing both them and me.

  I walked toward the women slowly but deliberately, smiling as I went.

  “Salaam aleikum. How are you?” I greeted them as I got closer. To my surprise, they didn’t vanish inside the walls of the house.

  “Aleikum salaam,” replied an older woman, dressed head to toe in black. She smiled and looked at me curiously. “Are you Commander Jim’s wife?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Her face lit up. News traveled fast. Using my basic Pashto, I began to ask her about her family. How many people were in the household? How many sons did she have, and daughters? It turned out the woman was a cousin of Fazil Rahman, the man whose life Jim had tried to save after Rahman was fatally wounded by the Taliban. She was clearly grateful.

  A few moments into the conversation, the woman invited me to sit next to her on a typical Afghan bed, made of woven rope on a wooden frame that was about the size of an Army cot. She poured me a cup of green tea from a kettle that was steaming on a small fire in front of us.

  Then she reached out and touched the wide, beaded sleeve of my dress and pointed to the fitted ankle bands of my pants.

  “You are wearing gypsy clothes!” she said, and burst out laughing. Afghan gypsies own no land and the men stay home while the women work, begging or telling fortunes.

  Realizing the costume I bought in the Virginia market looked a bit comical, I laughed, too, and replied: “That is because I am a gypsy!”

  I had passed the first test and gained a degree of acceptance from local women. In a small but powerful way, my first foray into a world that was closed to Jim and his men deepened our connection to the tribe and also our safety.

  Word traveled quickly. In the days that followed, visitors from the village and surrounding area began arriving at the qalat bringing gifts of clothing for me. One of the villagers who had relatives in Jalalabad gave me a glittering pink dress, pants, and scarf in the more fitted fashion worn by women in the city. The local police chief brought another “gypsy” outfit, a turquoise gown with hundreds of shiny pieces of mirror sewn onto it. But my favorites were the hand-stitched dresses made by the wives of the arbakai in the rural Pashtun style—simple tunics with straight sleeves worn over matching baggy pants.

  Then one afternoon Noor Afzhal arrived at the qalat and asked to see me. I met him in the arbakai tent. As we sat together, he took out two cardboard boxes and handed them to me.

  “These are for you,” he said.

  Inside one was a beautiful handmade red tunic, scarf, and pants, ornamented with multicolored embroidery and sequins. I opened the other and found wrapped in tissue paper a shiny pair of red plastic sandals. All were my size.

  “Thank you very much, it
wasn’t necessary,” I said, using a Pashto phrase I had learned was polite.

  “You and Jim can come to my home tonight, we will all have dinner together,” he said, a statement as much as an invitation.

  “I would be delighted to,” I said.

  I had shown Noor Afzhal I would respect the Pashtun ways, and so, it seemed, I was passing the test with him, too.

  Late that afternoon, Noor Afzhal swung open the heavy wooden door at the entrance of his house and invited Jim and me into his hujira, or guest room. His sons Asif, Azmat, and Raza Gul were waiting there. We sat on a crimson patterned carpet and leaned against large pillows, talking. The hujira was the formal greeting place in Afghan homes where men and male visitors gathered to discuss weighty issues. I never saw an Afghan woman in the hujira, but as an American, I was allowed not only to be present but to participate, as I did that night. After a short time, though, Noor Afzhal got to his feet.

  “Come with me,” he said with a smile.

  Walking with his cane, he left the hujira and ducked through another doorway into the inner courtyard of the home. I followed, leaving Jim and the others behind. Suddenly, I was surrounded by a group of women—Noor Afzhal’s wife, Hakima, two of his five daughters, and three of his sons’ wives—as well as several children. Dressed in black, Hakima took my hand and motioned me to sit on a pillow placed on one of the woven rope beds. Looking around as we talked, I immediately felt how lively and relaxed that space was—how it was the heart of the Afghan home.

  The inner courtyard was open to the sky and had a packed-dirt floor. In one corner, a wood fire burned in a small pit lined with stones. One of Noor Afzhal’s daughters stirred a pot of stewed chicken for our dinner. Another baked wheat flatbread in a pan on the fire. Adjacent to the fire pit was a small manger enclosed by a low mud wall and covered with a thatched roof. In the manger, a goat, two cows, and a donkey chewed on hay. Several hens strutted around the courtyard flapping their wings, as the barefoot children chased them and played on a swing hanging from a roof beam. Along one wall of the open courtyard were four bedrooms, one for Noor Afzhal and his wife, and the rest for his three married sons and their families. The rooms were to me like art pieces of simplicity and functionality. Babies and toddlers slept in small cloth hammocks hung by the sides of the wooden beds. Brightly colored pillows and blankets lay neatly folded on the beds. Shiny aluminum pots and kettles and painted enamel bowls on wooden shelves decorated otherwise bare walls.

  In coming weeks and months, I would spend many hours in the interior of Noor Afzhal’s home, speaking in my broken Pashto with his family members about their daily lives. His wife, Hakima, and his daughters Farmeen and Naida showed me how they made bread, yogurt, and other Afghan foods. They tried to teach me how to milk their cow and laughed at the dribble I squeezed from the udder into the pail. They joked about how hard they worked both at home and in the fields. But even then, they delighted in showing me how they beautified themselves. They sewed clothing for me on a hand-powered machine, and braided my hair with colorful tassels made of thread. Naida painted my palms, nails, and fingers with ornate designs in henna. She mixed a paste made with dried, ground henna leaves and squeezed it onto my hands like frosting from the tip of a tube. After letting the paste dry for about an hour, I washed it off, revealing an intricate reddish brown design. Then she squeezed glittery plastic bangles onto my wrists.

  I played with the children and prompted the school-aged ones to practice English with me and recite the alphabet. I told them about my own children and how I missed them, and they nodded with understanding. One of my happiest moments was when Hakima allowed me to cradle Noor Afzhal’s newborn grandson, swaddled in a tiny bundle.

  I visited the separate schools for girls and boys, met with the teachers, and learned about their needs. Later through donations I was able to provide all the children with backpacks, notebooks, and pens and pencils, and outfit the schools in Mangwel and other villages with basic supplies from chalk to carpets. I also offered to train local female teachers to expand the grades at the girls’ school.

  From then on, whenever I went on walks with Jim, women from families in the village would peek out of the big wooden doors of their homes and beckon to me (in the Afghan way with their hand downturned), inviting me in to chat with them. I would disappear inside for as long as I thought Jim could comfortably wait without getting too worried.

  Still, I was surprised during one visit when a young woman I had been speaking with excused herself and then returned with a box. She opened it and took out a heavy book wrapped in cloth. Removing the cloth, she showed me a beautiful golden Koran. Then she began reading a prayer to me. Most Afghan women are illiterate, including 90 percent of those in Konar, but she had learned some prayers in Arabic.

  “Now you say it!” she prompted.

  “Ashadu Allah Ilaha Illallah, Wa Ashadu Anna Muhammed Rasulullah. There is no god but God, and Muhammed is the messenger of God,” I repeated the Muslim creed, which I recognized, in Arabic. I had partly memorized the prayer a few years earlier at the urging of my Jordanian Arabic teacher. She wanted me to be prepared in case I was ever kidnapped in Iraq, and believed that if I recited the creed to my captors, it would save me from beheading or some other gruesome death. I carried an English transliteration of the prayer on a worn green note card in my wallet.

  “Ho, good!” the young woman said.

  She was delighted, and kept adding more lines in Arabic that I didn’t know. The harder I tried to repeat it, the more excitedly she taught me.

  Paying no heed that I was an American woman and an infidel, the tribeswomen were teaching me how to live as a Muslim and a Pashtun.

  I WANTED TO BETTER understand my adopted Pashtun family and its origins, and turned to Noor Afzhal. At the age of nearly eighty, he had lived twice as long as most Afghan men. I asked him to share with me the story of his life. He agreed. We spent hours sitting together, and I filled page after page of composition notebooks with his reflections on his past. I treasured the time with him, and found that he, too, enjoyed our conversations and looked forward to them. He started arriving at the qalat every morning to talk with me, often bringing small bouquets of fragrant pink flowers he had picked and bound with straw to a stick.

  Then one warm spring day, Noor Afzhal asked Jim and me to go with him to visit what he called the “special place.”

  The next morning, we followed Noor Afzhal as he slowly walked up the valley behind Mangwel, his worn wooden cane in hand. I was glad to see him use the cane, made of twisted hickory, that Jim and I had given him several months earlier. The cane, engraved with his name and ours, rarely left Noor Afzhal’s side. It steadied his gait, but he wielded it just as readily to break up a fight or strike anyone who got out of line. With his shoulders thrust back, he leaned lightly on the cane as he navigated a rocky footpath familiar from his boyhood toward the stone ruins of his ancestral village, nestled between two ridges.

  It was midmorning, and the sun beat down on Noor Afzhal, dressed in white jami and kandari hat. He pulled a cotton scarf from his chest pocket and mopped his brow. As he climbed the path, he passed on the northwest side of the valley a large face of stratified rock etched with primitive drawings of herds. Farther along, he reached an outcrop of boulders at the head of the valley just above the remnants of the village. A spring flowed from the rocks.

  Noor Afzhal stopped next to one of the boulders, joined by Jim and me and a small group of Afghans and Americans who had made the pilgrimage with us to the home of his tribal ancestors. Noor Afzhal turned to his youngest son, Raza Gul, who was by his side. Lifting his cane, he pointed toward the far hillside.

  “Fire!” he said.

  Raza Gul squatted on his haunches and shot off several celebratory rounds, sending echoes crashing down the valley like so many breaking waves.

  Noor Afzhal stood silently, his jaw set and lips pursed in thought. His large hands rested one upon the other atop his cane. His eyes trav
eled over the skeletal foundations of a lone qalat and down half a mile to the mouth of the valley that opened onto the corn and wheat fields of Mangwel. He told me that as a child of six or seven years old he had herded his family’s sheep in the same rock-strewn hills. I could see that something was weighing on him. I wondered how the tribe he had led for decades would remember him. Would his people donate money to feed the poor, or plant poles festooned with colorful flags around his grave? Would the children know his name?

  Later back in the qalat, he told me proudly what he remembered of his forefathers. Like many rural Afghans who are illiterate and rely mainly on oral history, Noor Afzhal was not certain when he or his ancestors were born and had few papers documenting events in his long life.

  “My great-great-grandfather settled here from Manzarichina in the Mohmand tribal territory,” he said slowly, referring to a town in what is now the Mohmand Agency, a Pashtun tribal region in Pakistan.

  “Our way is Pashtunwali,” he said, speaking of the code that Pashtuns have lived by long before and after they adopted the Muslim faith beginning in the seventh century.

  The Pashtuns, I learned, are a people that since the first millennium BCE have lived in a region stretching from the Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan to areas west of the Indus River in Pakistan. The Pashtun tribes relished their independence and were never fully subjugated by the Afghan government. Afghan rulers depended on the support of tribal networks, and at times on powerful tribal confederations that installed them, but a distance always remained between the central government and the tribes. Tribal leaders and traditional laws were the only effective authority in large parts of the country where the government had no reach. While the Pashtuns are one people, the Pashtun tribes have long fought over land and other resources, but have come together when foreigners arrived.