In My Father's Country: An Afghan Woman Defies Her Fate

by SAIMA WAHAB

  It was a year after I’d called off my wedding, and I was returning to Afghanistan; I couldn’t believe it had taken me this long to find courage to face what lay ahead of me, again.

  I RETURNED TO Afghanistan with a company that had a contract to provide interpreters for a small section of the country. Unlike my first time, when I had to wait at BAF for over a month to be sent out to my site, I was assigned to Asadabad in Kunar Province within hours of arrival. BAF had grown bigger and had more of a city feel now. There was a Jamba Juice, which I thought was just too much. Were we trying to fool the soldiers into thinking they were in a mall in the United States instead of in the dry desert of Afghanistan?

  The next morning I caught a ride on a Chinook headed for Asadabad, where I was supposed to be yet another PRT commander’s interpreter.

  The helicopter took off, then hovered for several long minutes over BAF. Out the window, I could see the row of battered Soviet tanks by the runway that had been abandoned decades ago. All over Afghanistan abandoned Soviet vehicles decorate the landscape, commemorating the time when the Afghan people brought a superpower to its knees. When an ordinary car breaks down and is left by the side of the road, within minutes it is stripped for parts. But these same people would not touch Soviet machinery of war scattered all over the vast landscape of Afghanistan. It’s as if Afghans had an unspoken understanding that the sight of all the tanks and other vehicles left behind by the fleeing Russians as they exited from our country was worth more than the money they would get by stripping them. I’ve experienced this same feeling while driving down roads throughout the country. I see the old rusted tanks and I feel a surge of Pashtun pride, a reminder that we are strong and have defeated many fierce enemies.

  Suddenly I felt my stomach drop as the Chinook descended. We weren’t going anywhere. Mechanical problems, we were told.

  I WAS HAPPY to leave BAF so quickly, even if I was being sent to Asadabad. At the time, in March 2007, Kunar was one of the hottest spots in Afghanistan. The Korengal Valley, a few miles to the southwest in the neighboring Pech district, was known as Ambush Valley. As if I could have missed this detail, a few days after I arrived at the PRT I went to the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation center and turned on one of the computers. The home page had been set to Yahoo!, and the pop-up news headline read: THE HOTTEST SPOT ON EARTH: KORENGAL VALLEY. I clicked away from it. I had learned some of the soldiers’ tricks while in a combat zone; one of them was not to dwell on the news when you’re the news.

  While I waited for the Chinook to be repaired, I stood on the tarmac with the other passengers, soldiers deploying to different parts of eastern Afghanistan. The one standing beside me introduced himself as John. Tall and burly in all his army gear—the armor vest, weapons, and a dozen other gadgets hanging off of him—he was a newly promoted lieutenant, and full of friendly optimism.

  “What were you doing at the retirement center?” he asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s what we call Bagram. There are interpreters who are too old to be sent outside the wire, but their company won’t send them home. So they lounge around, drink tea, and take lots of walks. Just like retirees at a community retirement center in the States.”

  “You think I belong in a retirement community?”

  “No, you’re far too young to retire. Plus I don’t know if you speak any other languages, but your English is great, already something that most those interpreters lack,” he said with a grin. He told me about the few interpreters they had at Asadabad, including a CAT II who was quite popular with the younger CAT I men. It was rumored that she bought them alcohol, and spent most of her days doing her hair and makeup, and smoking like a chimney. “We have no real evidence that she speaks Pashtu,” he said.

  That sounded familiar. “Is her name Suraya?” I asked.

  “No clue,” John said. “Never got close enough to find out.”

  Late that night when we arrived at Asadabad PRT, I was shown to my B-hut by a sergeant major, where I unpacked my sleeping bag and alarm clock and went to sleep. Just as I was drifting off—kaboom! The flimsy walls of my hut shook. Things started falling around me; my clock broke. I could feel my heart pumping in my chest. Another earthquake? Was God still upset with me? I threw on my jacket and ran outside in the dark.

  On the other side of the B-huts, not far away, was a shallow, circular ditch reinforced by sandbags. The mortar pit. Two soldiers worked in the pit, their beige T-shirts bright in the moonlight. “Outgoing!” one of them hollered. I saw a white flash; right after that the earth rumbled. Kaboom! The sound of the explosion set my teeth on edge. Making sure there was no incoming, I ran back to my hut and tried to go back to sleep, but it was no use.

  The next morning I walked outside my B-hut, and there, sitting on a plastic patio chair with her legs crossed, a cigarette dangling from her lips, was Suraya, my first roommate in BAF. I recognized her perfect hair. It was dyed light brown, then highlighted. She wore lipstick, eyeliner, and eye shadow. Even though it was 8:30 A.M., she looked ready for a night on the town.

  When she saw me she leaped up from her chair, knocking it over. “Oh, Saima-jan! It’s you! We’re roommates again! This is going to be so great!”

  Suraya’s use of jan, a Farsiban term of endearment, didn’t help her case. I’ve always hated this faux-friendly term that Farsibans throw around so casually in conversations that it has lost all endearing qualities. It implies the kind of familiarity that I had never had with Suraya.

  Suraya had been one of the first people I’d met in Afghanistan, back in 2005 when I was new.

  We had been roommates at BAF with two other interpreters in our wooden B-hut. Even there she sat outside and smoked a lot. She’d been a hairdresser in Southern California, and she liked to give the soldiers free haircuts.

  One day, soon after I had arrived at BAF that first time, she had presented me with some doughdi. I hadn’t adjusted to the food in the chow hall and was always hungry. Suraya had made it her business to know all the CAT I interpreters, who regularly brought her Afghan food. I told her I loved the bread and was so happy to have it.

  She said that she could get us an entire Afghan meal for dinner. I offered to pay for it, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Then she went outside to have a cigarette. The walls of the B-hut were only plywood. I heard her say, “There’s a new female here. You should come by tonight.”

  Later, a bunch of Farsiban guys showed up to share the meal. I thought perhaps it was always this way, that BAF was just a warm and friendly place, with interpreters mingling, sharing tea, and hanging out. Then I began to notice a pattern: These large gatherings always happened on the nights after Suraya had made a series of phone calls, telling her callers that I, the “new female,” was going to be there.

  I began to avoid the B-hut on those nights. I would go to the MWR and use the computer or watch a movie. If it wasn’t too cold, I would take a walk. The first night I did this she was annoyed when I finally turned up. “Everyone was here waiting for you,” she said.

  “I left my family in America so I wouldn’t have to constantly check in with people!” I half joked.

  She laughed the loud, forced laugh of a person who is not amused. I was never sure what exactly was going on with Suraya. Was she using me as bait to get male interpreters who normally would not be interested in her? Or was she simply lonely and inept and trying to make her life a little more interesting?

  I’d heard that there were interpreters who didn’t speak the language, people the company had lost track of, who got paid for being a name on a list, who spent their days sitting around BAF, but I hadn’t given it much thought. Apparently Suraya was one of them, one of the “retirees” John had mentioned. Now I was going to be her B-hut-mate again. Maybe God was still mad at me.

  THEN I HAD a piece of good fortune. I was sitting on my bed reading while Suraya, as she had done at BAF, lounged outside smoking and calling to people as they passed. She hated Asadabad
. If BAF was New York City, Asadabad was a town in Wyoming, high in the mountains. The rumors had already started that Suraya blamed me for her posting here, for having pointed out to a site manager over a year earlier that she had somehow fallen through the cracks, that she was collecting a fat paycheck for giving the occasional free haircut.

  I could hear her talking to someone outside. I concentrated on my book. The door opened, and in walked a pretty woman with a head of springy reddish curls and freckles scattered across her nose. I looked at her with disbelief.

  “Haseeba!”

  “Saima!”

  We embraced and started jumping up and down like a couple of high school girls. Haseeba had been on a mission when I’d arrived. I’d heard there was another female CAT II here, but I had never imagined it would be the only real friend I’d made in years.

  Before I deployed for Asadabad I had been required to take a two-week training seminar at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Haseeba and I were the only women in the program. We bonded one night when some soldiers and a few other CAT II’s going through the training took us out to allegedly the best place in town for wings: Hooters. Haseeba was in her late thirties, a housewife from Houston with five children. We were both appalled at the sight of the waitresses in their skimpy shorts and tops. We kept our eyes on our chicken wings, and the soldiers laughed at our discomfort. They insisted that the only other dining option was one of the many strip clubs.

  Haseeba and I realized we had many things in common. She was from Peshawar, and we talked of growing up there. Like me she had also moved to the States at a young age and had spent spent her entire adult life here. She was also fleeing a complicated situation with a man.

  When the training session ended and we parted company, we never imagined we’d be lucky enough to be posted at the same PRT. Female Pashtu-English speakers were rare. There were females at the so-called retirement community in BAF who spoke Pashtu but only rudimentary English, and there were, of course, Farsiban who claimed to speak Pashtu but didn’t, and almost no one spoke both with equal expertise. When I had first arrived in Afghanistan two years earlier, I was told I was the only female in the country who could claim fluency in both languages. Haseeba’s mother language was Pakistani Pashtu, but she had trained herself to speak as an Afghan Pashtun.

  Suraya wandered in, cigarette in hand. She watched our reunion from beneath her carefully fluffed bangs. I released Haseeba and introduced her to Suraya, forgetting that they already knew each other.

  “This calls for some tea,” Haseeba said.

  We invited Suraya to join us. There was no reason to exclude her, no reason to be impolite. I made a toast with my teacup to old friends and new ones.

  “Pashtuns don’t believe in toasts, do they?” asked Suraya crossly.

  “No, but Americans do,” I said. “Here’s to the female interpreters of Asadabad!”

  But Suraya could not be jollied. She didn’t speak Pashtu, and when Haseeba and I conversed, she was excluded. Matters were made worse by the fact that Haseeba was a Pakistani Pashtun.

  Afghans and Farsiban alike hate Pakistan, which they believe, not unjustly, is more than a little responsible for the current war. Afghans are well aware of the role that Pakistan plays in the instability and unrest in Afghanistan. They see with their own eyes Pakistani intelligence agents crossing the border to recruit and train Afghans for their cause, which creates chaos in Afghanistan. This would be one of the topics that Afghan villagers would want to discuss with me to no end years later when I was no longer an interpreter and free to carry on discussions. To most Afghans, the Pakistani role in the war and the destruction of Afghanistan is unforgivable and when the United States looks away from the stark knowledge of Pakistani influence, it loses credibility in Afghan eyes on every front.

  Although Afghans know that not all Pakistanis support what their government and secret intelligence agency do in Afghanistan, using the notorious Pashtun logic, they still hate all Pakistanis. While the Pashtun in me shares the Afghan feeling about Pakistan, the American in me believes individual Pakistanis should be treated as individuals. Haseeba came to America when she was nine years old. She grew up in Texas and Michigan. She was just a woman trying to make some money and have a life. As far as I was concerned, she had no hidden agenda. She was a very good friend.

  DURING THE FIRST few weeks at ABAD, as soldiers called Asadabad, Larry LeGree, the PRT commander, was still on R & R, which left me on my own. This was one of many things about working as an interpreter that I hated—being on call, never having your own projects or missions, but also having a lot of free time to sit around doing nothing. There were many administrative duties that a PRT commander performed that did not require an interpreter, so most of my time was spent just walking around trying to keep myself busy. Every unit would claim one or two interpreters and train them according to how the unit worked. This meant that by the time I got there, the PRT commander was the only one waiting for an interpreter, and so if he didn’t use me for a meeting, I had nothing to do. Like everything in Kunar, the PRT was built on a steep hill. The members of special forces that shared the installation with us zipped up and down the hill on dirt bikes; the regular army soldiers struggled on foot.

  The local Afghan National Army base was right next door. It shared a wall with the PRT and used the PRT entry gate. The ANA soldiers, who were high on danger—or something stronger, as was rumored—used to roar up and down the hill in their Datsun pickup trucks at high speeds, ignoring the SLOW DOWN signs. I joked with the sergeant major, who’d ordered the signs to be posted, that maybe they didn’t speak English. He asked me to write new SLOW DOWN signs in Pashtu, which I did, but there was no noticeable difference in their speed. The only time the ANA soldiers slowed down was when they saw one of the few females on the PRT walk by—I guess there are some traits all guys share, regardless of differences in cultural backgrounds.

  I hiked up to the farthest point of the PRT, and there I found my new favorite bench. The view made me forget my exhaustion, my sadness at having left Eric, my frustration at being stuck living with Suraya again. This PRT looked down on a blue river right out of a children’s book. Rising behind it were huge mountains, brown and orange and green. There were no radio towers, no power lines, no planes flying overhead. Just some mud houses clinging to sides of the mortar-pocked mountains.

  Moments after I sat down I felt the earth tremble. Before I could go into a full-blown earthquake freak-out, I saw the mortar hit one of the hillsides and an avalanche of earth and rock cascade into the valley. I wondered whether there were any Kuchi, nomads, passing through the valley and hoped they’d escaped being buried by the debris.

  An older sergeant walked by. He stopped and asked me whether I was a bird-watcher.

  “Not so much,” I said. “But I can see some birds in that tree there.”

  “There’s a bird I sometimes watch from this bench. It’s turquoise, as bright as a piece of tile. I haven’t found it in any guidebook. It’s only here, in this part of Afghanistan.”

  “There are a lot of things around here that aren’t in any books,” I said.

  “It could be a new species,” suggested the sergeant.

  We sat silently and watched the shadows change as the sun moved across the mountains. For a few minutes it was quiet—no outgoing mortars—and we could hear bird calls, and from below, the soothing sound of the river. I felt at peace.

  LARRY RETURNED FROM R & R, and the first order of business was meeting with the governor. The PRT had erected an administration building for the governor’s office and the other departments that made up the provincial government. It was a simple building with a courtyard and a little pond in the middle. There was a small mosque to one side and a kitchen to the other, where a male cook made green tea all day long. There was also a Civil-Military Operations Center there, where a couple of the local PRT staff members lived because their homes were too far away to go to every night. It was too dangerous
to travel after dark, and it got dark pretty quickly those days. Assadullah Wafa, the governor of Kunar, was very different from both Wasifi of Farah (the Afghan American onetime pizza-franchise owner) and Sherzai (the larger-than-life Pashtun warlord).

  Wafa was slim and serious. He wore wire-frame aviator glasses and reminded me of Al Pacino. The moment he set eyes on me he frowned. Before I showed up they’d been using a male CAT II who spoke only Farsi.

  “I wish you were a man,” he said. “As a Pashtun woman you should not be sitting here with the men.”

  “What do you need to talk about that a female can’t be present for?” I asked.

  He waved his hand at me. He could hear the teasing in my voice. “It’s not the topics, Miriam, but there are certain things a Pashtun woman should never do, and sitting in the middle of men is one of them.”

  I had expected hostility from Afghan men, but I had not expected resistance from an official of the central government, who had pledged with the United States to improve the lives of Afghan women. How was the governor supposed to do that if he wasn’t even comfortable with me as an interpreter? This was a rude awakening, and I wanted to share it with the PRT commander, who was to mentor the governor and assist him in finding solutions. Well, here was the number one issue, as far as I was concerned, and I wanted to see what solution they would come up with. I leaned over and in English told Larry what Wafa had said, so he could see his closed-mindedness firsthand. I didn’t know anything about Wafa’s background. Americans think that because these men are in positions of power, they are highly educated and well traveled. It is possible Wafa had only a middle school education and that he was there because he was a relative of Karzai.

  “I understand that this is shocking to you,” I told Wafa, “that this is not something that your daughters would do or that your wife would do. I respect that. However, I am also an American and am going to continue to do this because this is what I was hired to do. If you are really uncomfortable, I will ask for the other interpreter to come back, but he is going to speak Farsi, so it is up to you who you want to work with.”