by SAIMA WAHAB
FIFTEEN
Just outside the chow hall was a row of small troughs where you could wash your hands. I ran my hands back and forth beneath the little plastic faucet, but it didn’t work. I tried the next one, which was also broken. As I moved on to the third one, a voice behind me said, “What, you think you’re at Nordstrom? Use the pedal!”
I turned and saw Lieutenant Colonel Peerman. He wore a big grin.
“Hello, Eric,” I said, ignoring his comment. In Afghanistan people rarely call one another by their last names, so I called everyone, even high-ranking officers, by their first.
When I took this job I knew so little about the military, I hadn’t realized they insisted on using only last names. Later, I would give briefs and refer to a colonel as Mike, which would make the entire room gasp in disbelief, thinking, “No one calls him Mike but his mom!” I worried that I was being disrespectful, but the officers assured me that they preferred it that way. To address them by their first names showed their soldiers that I was outside the chain of command, reinforcing that I was at the PRT in an advisory capacity.
Eric and I walked into the chow hall and got our food. Because it was a small room with very few available chairs, we sat next to some soldiers who gave big smiles and a “Hello, Saima” and a timid “Sir” to Eric, ate quickly, and got up. Eric gave me a strange look and said, “You need to be careful how friendly you are with my guys. They are young and they are at war; their emotions are running high, and you are a beautiful female, and being a Pashtun makes you even more exotic and appealing. But I would hate for your reputation to get ruined at my PRT.” I thought this was a very strange thing to say, and asked him if he said this to all the female newcomers. He said he knew the female soldiers could take care of themselves, but he felt more protective of a female civilian. I reassured him that I wasn’t interested in any relationship with anyone, and the soldiers knew it. Eric said something then that I have heard many times over the years; “In the army, perception is reality.” Also very true in Pashtun culture.
The next afternoon the rain began. In the far west of Afghanistan there are a few weeks of blood-warming sun between winter and the monsoon spring. The day would dawn bright, the sun beating hard on the PRT, the mountains their usual rosy orange. By late afternoon a hard rain would come, as if someone was tipping a giant pitcher over the desert. After ten minutes, it would stop as suddenly as it had begun. The first time it happened, I thought the entire PRT would be washed away. Arif noticed I’d grown shaky and pale. He laughed when I told him that every time there was some epic act of nature or natural disaster I was sure it was God’s wrath, directed at me. It is the Pashtun ego in me; my sins had to be the greatest and therefore the only cause of God’s wrath.
Most of my interpretation duties involved accompanying Eric to meetings with the governor twice a week. Each province in Afghanistan has a governor appointed by President Karzai, but each one conducts his business in his own way. This particular governor, Izzatullah Wasifi, enjoyed socializing with Americans. He called for biweekly meetings and also threw huge barbecues on Friday nights. Wasifi didn’t really need my services; his family had fled to New York during the Soviet invasion, and he was completely Americanized. He’d owned a pizza franchise in New York before being convicted of selling heroin in Las Vegas. He was scrawny, with dark hair, dark skin, and a quick smile—but behind his smile you could see that he would be just as quick to anger. This made him only more Afghan in my eyes, because most Afghans hold their anger very closely behind their smiles. It can be scary, because you never know what might cause the thin veil to lift, making you the recipient of the famous Afghan temper. Being the PRT commander’s interpreter, I knew I was protected from Wasifi’s temper because he was always on his best behavior with Eric. Most governors try their best to nurture cordial relationships with the PRT commanders because they view them as allies who can deflect any negative attention from the U.S. forces away from them, and provide them with monetary assistance. Unless a commander is tuned in to Afghans’ thoughts, and also has a skilled interpreter who translates more than just words, he might not have a good sense of the agenda of the people he is dealing with when interacting with Afghans.
Eric immediately saw my potential value for the PRT. In 2005 there was no talk of counterinsurgency and building relationships with Afghans. COIN was not yet a sexy term thrown around at meetings, the way it is now, but some commanders, especially those with military backgrounds like Eric’s, were realizing the impact of building genuine relationships with the locals.
Eric figured that Omar, the CAT I interpreter, was well qualified to do the basic translation; the most important thing I could do was to help him understand what Wasifi was really saying to him, as well as to the other Afghans in the room. I could read and assess their body language and tell him what they were communicating to one another in Pashtu. Being Afghan gave me a greater capacity for deciphering Afghan behavior. Over time it became clear that on paper I may have been an interpreter, but in reality I was doing something else. I was an observer first. I observed the relationship dynamics between the Afghans and their government, between the PRT and the locals, and between the PRT and officials from the central government.
It became clear over the years to those at the forefront of development efforts in Afghanistan, that if the PRT focused on building relationships with the governmental officials, while neglecting the locals, the United States would eventually lose the fight for the hearts and minds of the Afghans. The governors were temporary; as soon as there were any rumors of corruption on the part of a governor, Karzai would pull him and place him in another province. It was a kind of musical-chairs game, except everyone got a chair. They just didn’t know which chair they would be sitting in when the music stopped. Things only got worse as time went on, and rumors of corruption started before the governor even got to a province. Later, in 2009 when I was in eastern Afghanistan, locals would start lobbying against corrupt subgovernors before they were sent there by Kabul.
When I wasn’t at meetings with the governor I sometimes went out with the deputy commanding officer or one of the Civil Affairs Teams, just so I didn’t have to sit idle. One day, the Civil Affairs Team was going to the local hospital to make an assessment, and I asked if I could go along, in case there were females and they needed me to translate for them. When we got to the hospital in Farah City I met a local girl who had tried to end her life by burning herself alive a couple of days before. In talking with her mother, I learned her horror story, one that is disturbingly common all over Afghanistan. Shaista, “beautiful” in Pashtu, was indeed a remarkably beautiful girl of about sixteen (judging by what was left of her face) who had been sold by her mother to a forty-five-year-old man as a second wife. The first wife and the husband both beat her and made her work like a slave. She complained to her mother, but having used up the dowry to feed her other children, her mother sent her back to the abusive couple. Finding no help, Shaista took matters into her own hands: She poured gasoline on herself and set herself on fire. Her husband’s first wife caught her in time and put out the fire; the husband brought her to the hospital to try to save her life.
When I met Shaista she was surrounded by her family, including her mother and her husband. Half of her face was covered with gauze, with the now familiar yellow ointment at the edges. She stared up at me beseechingly with one lashless brown eye. The conditions at the public hospital were dirty; the doctors had hung filthy sheets around the bed to create a little tent to keep flies away, but she was still covered with them.
If Angelee, the tiny girl I’d tried to help care for in BAF, reminded me of my cousin Mariana, this young bride was a stark reminder of what I myself could very easily have become. This young burned Afghan woman was about the same age I was when I was sent away to the land of freedom and opportunities. If my uncles had delayed even a few months, could this have been my fate? Suddenly, I felt truly blessed from above and lucky to have the men in m
y life be the hands of God in reshaping my fate. This was the day I started to forgive my uncles, because no matter how they had ended up making me feel, it was the Professor’s sponsorship that had me standing over the bed in that hospital right then, instead of being the one in the bed.
The girl wouldn’t talk to me; she only cried. But I could feel her desperation. I wondered how it must have been for her, uncorking the plastic container and splashing the gasoline on her dress and her long shiny hair. Did the smell make her swoon? The second before she lit the match, was she afraid or relieved? When she lit the match, did her hands shake? Did she worry about God, and whether or not He would judge her harshly? Did she judge Him to be unjust? Did she hold her mother responsible? Did she want to be saved?
I thought of how trapped, angry, and depressed I’d felt during the last days under my uncles’ roof, how much I despised them, how sometimes, after having one of my arguments with them, I would sit in my room and feel so desperate that I couldn’t breathe. I would have to stand and walk up and down the length of the room just to stop myself from screaming out loud. But even in my darkest moments, I could never imagine killing myself. Looking at the burned girl, I tried to imagine the degree of hopelessness she must have felt, but—blessedly—I couldn’t. My inability to put myself in her place made me feel horrible about what I had been doing with my life. All I had wanted was the freedom to stay out past 9:00 P.M. Now that I had my freedom, was I using it in a way that would make my father and grandfather proud of me? It had been slowly sneaking up on me until that moment, when it was screaming loud in my face: I was not proud of how little I had done since that night when I drove off from my uncles’ house.
The husband stood guard by her bedside. His anger felt like a toxic cloud in the room. Of course I knew and the wife knew that he had tried to save her not out of love but because he had paid money for her and wanted to get good use out of her before allowing her to move on to the next world. I got rid of him by inventing an urgent question that could only be answered by the doctor. Having soldiers standing next to me made it hard for him to refuse my request. After the husband left the girl told me she hated him, and she hated her mother for what she had done to her. The girl’s mother sat there listening, no emotion on her face. She said she’d had no choice, that her other children were starving and the only commodity she had was her beautiful daughter. I was distraught. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do for the girl.
I returned to the PRT and asked Eric whether we couldn’t fly her to BAF, or anywhere where they could so something, anything, for her. He said no, it was impossible. Eric had been trained as a medic and knew from experience that most likely this girl would die before we could transport her to BAF. Her family had waited too long before bringing her to the hospital. Infections had already invaded her burns. It was awful and unfortunate, but the hard truth was that if she died in a U.S. military installation, we’d be held responsible for the death of a civilian. The fact that she was female would make it even worse. The United States simply could not afford the bad PR. I understood his point, even admired his appreciation of the difficulty of the situation, and yet I argued with him. Even though I viewed myself as being in the unique position of belonging and having a total understanding of both the girl and army regulations, I thought the least I could do for her was to fight for her. Five days later I sent Omar to check on the girl at the hospital. She had died feverishly of infections three days after I saw her. It was one of the very few times in my life I prayed to God for something. I prayed for peace and comfort and a better chance at happiness in the afterlife for Shaista.
I THOUGHT ABOUT Eric when he wasn’t around, a lot. I couldn’t help but be dazzled by his charisma. Bit by bit I learned about his background. He had inherited his dark good looks from his Argentinean father, who lived in Florida with his Italian mother. He had two ex-wives and two children, also in Florida. Before Afghanistan he’d lived all over Latin America, performing secret missions—he could never talk about them, and I never asked. The less I knew, the better it was for our relationship. His bravery and dedication to the army had earned him many medals and commendations. Then, in 2001, after the invasion, he was posted to Jalalabad as part of a special-forces operation, where his mission involved interacting with the locals. He lived in a safe house within the community, spent time drinking tea with the shopkeepers. He knew what made Pashtuns tick and was good at figuring them out. I had to wonder if this was why he knew so well how to push my buttons and get reactions out of me that so far had been reserved for family members and very close friends. He also felt great respect for the way Pashtuns protected their females. He found Afghan men’s treatment of women to be less admirable. More than once he got upset if one of his soldiers became too familiar toward me, which to Eric meant looking at me and smiling for no specific reason! I liked and appreciated that he understood the predicament I was in—wanting to be there for everyone at the PRT to answer their questions but wanting to maintain the strict gender roles of my Pashtun culture.
While eating at the chow hall, I spied him talking to his soldiers. He knew their names, seemed to know what was going on with them and their families. I could see that they liked him. I may have been a civilian, but I’d figured out quickly that if the soldiers liked and respected their commanding officer, it said a lot about his character. Before every meal he would say grace, and after every meal he thanked Agha, the local cook, for the fine meal. I was impressed by this. I thought it was so polite and sweet. It had been years since I’d prayed, and I was envious of anyone who had that kind of relationship with God.
One day we were preparing to visit the governor. I was hauling on my IBA—the fifty-pound body armor with removable plates that could easily pull double duty in Mr. Universe’s training routine—when I noticed one of the back plates wasn’t sitting right in the vest. I removed it and as I was fumbling with the vest and trying to shove it back in, I dropped it on my foot. The nail on my big toe cracked in half. For days I was forced to walk around in open-toed shoes, which then led to an infection. I went to the clinic, and the medic told me he’d have to remove the nail. “You tell me when you have a couple of days off, and we’ll take care of it,” he said.
Eric teased me when I told him. “Wow, your big toe. We wouldn’t want the best interpreter at PRT Farah to lose her big toe. You should take time off to get that surgery done ASAP.”
“Do you realize I’m supposed to get Sundays off and I haven’t asked for a single Sunday off since I got here? How about you give me all the Sundays I’ve accrued? That’s the least you could do.”
“All right, settle down,” he said. “You need to take care of this.”
“Okay, then,” I said.
“It’s surgery on a big toe,” he couldn’t resist adding.
I snorted and walked away.
I’d since been moved to my own room, closer to Eric’s, so if there was an emergency off-hours and he needed an interpreter, he would be able to grab me as quickly as possible. Several times, in the middle of the night, I would hear a knock on my door and find Eric standing there, holding his phone because the chief of police or an ANA commander was trying to give him updates of ongoing missions or insurgent activities. Since Omar was a CAT I interpreter and couldn’t live in the barracks with U.S. soldiers, it was decided that I would take those late-night calls, no matter how hard it was for me to wake up and speak coherently in the middle of the night, in any language.
ONE DAY AFTER my surgery I was recuperating in my room, my foot propped up on my backpack. In the mornings, when soldiers were out on patrols, at the CAT meeting with the governor, or just with villagers, it was so quiet and boring. I would wait for someone to knock on my half-open door and talk to me for a few minutes. I hated being immobilized this way, so I welcomed any interaction. Over the couple of months since I had been there, I’d become friends with the lieutenant of the FORCEPRO named Peter, who often stopped by to see how I was doing and ask
me if I needed anything. On this Friday, since Fridays were down days, he brought me green tea and a handful of DVDs. We were going to watch a movie.
This was before I realized that “watch a movie” was army code for hooking up. I thought when a soldier asked you to watch a movie he was really asking you to do so, which made me marvel at how many movies these guys watched. Personally I am not big on watching movies. I love to read. I used to encourage whoever was asking me to watch a movie to read instead, and offer him several books from which to choose, and then invite him to come sit on my favorite bench and read with me. In any case, as a Pashtun female I’d been taught never to be alone in a room with a man who wasn’t related to me by blood. It was easier to ignore that upbringing in the States. But I was back in Afghanistan, even though on an American base. No matter who was in the room with me, I always had the door open.
But Pete and I were friends, and other soldiers were dropping in to see how I was doing and if I needed anything. My door was wide open. It was the middle of a bright afternoon, and I was fully expecting other soldiers to join us.
Pete had brought his collection of DVDs and had spread them out on the other twin bed. He was sorting through them when, through the open door, I glimpsed Eric looking dashing in his uniform, standing in the hallway. He grinned and strode in, ready for some serious fun at my expense. He hadn’t seen Pete sitting on the opposite side of the room, going through his movies.