by SAIMA WAHAB
Afterward, Mike said, “That teaches me not to assume.”
“Especially with an Afghan woman,” I said.
“You’re Afghan?” he said. We all got to see Mike surprised.
At Fort Leavenworth I met two other HTT members headed for Khost. Audrey was a tiny Texan with a big personality and master’s in anthropology from Columbia. She had the dust of the world on her feet; she’d worked in Serbia and had spent time in Kabul trying to educate international NGOs and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) on gender issues. I didn’t know much more about her than that at the time. I didn’t ask her about her personal life, as women tend to do, because I didn’t want her to ask me about mine. I didn’t want to have to talk about Eric, Ben, or my disapproving family. Audrey didn’t seem to mind that I was withholding. We learned that we shared a passion for edamame, and initially, that was enough.
Billy—the second member of the team—and I were staying at the same hotel. We were attending different training sessions, so I rarely saw him. One day he made a beeline for me in the lobby, staring at me intently as I introduced myself. He was tall and too thin, like some long-legged bird, with a head of unruly blond curls and pale eyes. On the bottom of his face was a would-be beard. He was going to be a human terrain analyst, but he didn’t have much interest in chatting about what lay ahead of us. He said he used to work for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, which provides humanitarian assistance around the globe, and told me in great detail how he used to love to ride his bike around Kandahar City.
The day I left I was sent to the infirmary for a physical exam. I also had to be inoculated. The soldiers who received these shots were given them over a course of several weeks. The nurse handed me an information sheet on the injections I was about to receive: inoculations against anthrax, smallpox, cholera, typhoid, yellow fever, hepatitis A and B, and flu. It advised against getting more than one live-virus shot at a time, and I knew there were three in the injections she was preparing for me. When the nurse snapped on her latex gloves I pointed out that anthrax, smallpox, and the flu were all live viruses. “I’m flying out tonight,” I said.
“You can’t leave the country without these. They won’t even manifest you on the flight.”
“But what if I get sick?”
“It’s up to you. But you can’t deploy without them.”
I sat on the exam table with my sleeve rolled up, my arm swabbed and ready. The nurse pursed her lips. What was there to do? I could roll down my sleeve, return to my hotel, turn on the TV, and wake up tomorrow to take the months-long training courses.
Instead, I told her to have at it.
Then it was Fort Leavenworth to Atlanta; Atlanta to Shannon, Ireland; and Ireland to Kuwait. Audrey, Billy, and I were on the same flights, but we’d been separated, seated according to our social security numbers. My seat was at the back of the plane, between soldiers I’d never laid eyes on. One listened to his iPod and stared out the window; the other fell instantly asleep, snoring lightly.
Somewhere over the Atlantic all my bones broke at once, every joint snapped, and my skull was squeezed by an invisible vise. My lungs refused to inflate. My body lost its ability to keep itself warm. I struggled to stand up, to see if I could find Audrey. I looked for her long blond hair among a sea of no-color crew cuts. I slipped back into my seat, felt my eyes close for what I was sure was the final time. I was dying, and I was dying alone.
Someone laid a blanket on me. The weight of the rough cloth on my skin made me feel as if I was being crushed. From beneath my closed lids I cried.
Sometime later I found myself lying down across a row of seats. Someone had moved me. A medic was leaning over me. Or maybe he was a doctor. His face was tan, his cheeks creased. His breath smelled like spearmint. The drone of the engine made my jaw ache, my teeth hurt. My temperature was 103 degrees. He told me that I had fainted but that I would live.
“I am not so sure,” I said.
“Yes. As long as I’m here, you’re not going to die.”
He quizzed me about what I had eaten. I told him about the shots, showed him where he could find my yellow ICVP card in the pocket of my backpack.
“What the hell were they thinking?” he asked. “The nurse should have known better.”
He gave me an injection, which temporarily solved everything by masking all my pain. I said I was better. I tried to sit up and nearly vomited. “You’re not better, you just don’t feel anything. That was a little morphine I just gave you.”
We landed in Kuwait at night. Outside, it was sultry, humid with recent rain. My eyes kept closing. I felt the crunch of the gravel beneath the doctor’s boots. Then I heard my name—Oh, Saima!—and there was Audrey, struggling along beside us, lugging one of my duffel bags. A wiry soldier who looked as if he was in middle school had grabbed my other bags. They followed the doctor and me to the large tent that served as the boarding area for other flights.
The doctor settled me in some plastic chairs near the manifest desk. I would need to manifest before I could fly on to BAF, but I couldn’t be manifested until my fever went down and I had been cleared by a doctor to travel. I sat with my arms wrapped around myself, teeth chattering. Audrey stood beside the chair, as if she were guarding me. I told her she should fly on to BAF without me. Will had already gone on ahead, and she should too.
“No way,” she said. “Don’t waste your energy trying to convince me. I am not leaving without you.”
“I just need to sleep for a little bit,” I said. I knew I still had a fever. My T-shirt and hoodie were drenched with sweat. I was so hot I thought I would explode, then so cold I couldn’t talk with my chattering teeth.
“I’m not going anywhere until I take you to the hospital,” said Audrey.
We argued a little longer. No one can make me do what I don’t want to do. In my veins runs the sort of stubbornness unique to people who’ve been hunkered down in their mountain villages for millennia. I didn’t want to be inside a hospital ever again. Army hospitals are all the same; the portable machines beep and sigh, the overhead vents roar, the air smells of gauze, blood, and disinfectant. They all reminded me of Angelee, the tiny girl who’d been burned in the explosion, whom I’d met during my first weeks at BAF, the little girl for whom I’d done nothing. Why hadn’t I tried to find her after her uncle had collected her?
But Audrey was well. She wasn’t falling asleep sitting up, woozy from fever. She hauled me up by the arm and steered me out of the boarding terminal and toward the clinic. There a doctor put me into bed. A nurse hooked me up to an IV. Audrey found a place to nap. For three days I lay there. My fever wouldn’t break. Several times a day the doctor would inject me with one medicine or another and relief rolled through me. I remember thinking that I liked these injections much better than taking pills—they worked so much faster. I drifted. Audrey sat on the edge of my bed and patted my hand.
On the third day the fever departed. My arms were merely red and swollen. The doctor said the nurse who’d administered the shots should be fired. I defended her. I said I had done what I’d needed to do to get deployed. What I didn’t say was that I hadn’t wanted to be given a chance to rethink my decision.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Khost City is a big, sprawling metropolis, with rolling green hills and several rivers weaving through it. As the C-130, which already flew pretty low, descended, I was surprised by how green it was, how many fields were filled with corn, wheat, and rice. I spied the famed Khost blue mosque out the tiny window. Almost all big cities in Afghanistan have at least one blue mosque, but the blue mosque in Khost was especially beautiful because it was surrounded by tall green trees, something I had not seen very often in the drought-ridden country of Afghanistan. It must have just rained, leaving everything including the blue mosque shining in the sun. Every color, like the blue of the mosque or the green of the fields, was vibrant and seemed to glow from within. As we flew over Camp Salerno, the c
ontentment I had felt only in Afghanistan settled into me once again, and I knew I had made the right choice by coming back.
With more than five thousand residents, Camp Salerno was a small city within a city. It was built on a dry riverbed, surrounded by olive and almond trees. When I arrived the almond flowers and the orange blossoms were in bloom. The air smelled like expensive perfume.
The camp was not an American creation, unlike the Provincial Reconstruction Teams that seemed to sprout within days in remote regions. Salerno had a brave, well-known local history, as I was later told by a longtime resident, Aziz, the baker on the FOB. When the wind was right, you could smell his famous cinnamon bread from our office. He had quite an operation going. In addition to the bread, he also sold jewelry, trinkets, rugs, and bootleg DVDs of such American shows as Seinfeld and The Simpsons. One day while sharing warm garlic bread with the slices of cheese I had gotten from the chow hall, he told me the story of Salerno and the three brave young men who with just their AK-47’s prevented the Russians from entering Khost. During the time of the invasion, there were rumors that the Russians were going to attack the province. There is a hill inside the wire from the top of which you can see anyone approaching the city from any direction. There were three young men from one of the local tribes who took it upon themselves to prevent the Russians from invading Khost. These young men, with their three AK-47’s, went up this hill and decided to guard the whole city, day and night, against the Soviets. The news of this bravery spread through the province within hours, and soon other young men joined them. Within days there was a small army of young Khosti men prepared to die for their motherland. And when the Russians didn’t come, it was logical for the locals to claim that it was because they had heard about the bravery of the young men of Khost and were scared off. These young men were instant local heroes, and the hill, because of its strategic location, became a point from which to guard the city from outsiders and has been used for that purpose by the mujahideen and the Taliban and now the United States.
From the start, I found the scale of the American presence in Khost shocking. Up until then, I had worked in small, cozy PRTs where everyone really did know everyone else. For me (and I know this was true for a lot of soldiers as well), the hundred or so soldiers that made up the PRTs became my family, a feeling that made it easier to work in that environment, surrounded by violence and death. Working and living among the U.S. soldiers I knew by name, I had forgotten completely that there were thousands of American soldiers in Afghanistan.
The first few days I lived in a daze, overwhelmed and still weak from my fever, trying to recapture the feeling of living in small PRTs like a big happy family. I was trying to memorize buildings that looked all the same and faces that wore the same expressions. Despite my independent nature, I like belonging to some form of a family, and it doesn’t have to be a perfect one. (None of them are!) I knew that being part of the PRT family, and the inherent Afghan desire to belong to a family, had in large part carried me through the deployments thus far.
Although I didn’t know why, I sensed that this deployment was different from the ones before. I knew I was starting a new phase in my career, and since my career was so closely tied to my life, this new job was going to have a great impact on me. I had seen the worried-sick look on my siblings’ and mother’s faces when I told them I was going back, and I didn’t want to see that look again. I knew this was my last chance to bond with my forefathers to determine my destiny, and failure was not an option. I constantly fought the panic that resulted from the added pressure of time constraints. When the stress got to be too much, I would hike up the hill where the three young men had kept watch over what they were willing to give their lives for. I would sit there, trying to conjure some of their resolve to strengthen mine. Often I didn’t even see the green fields and faraway mud houses surrounding Salerno. Instead I would imagine the lives of the Afghans living there, and wonder if they felt as overwhelmed by their heritage as I so often did by mine.
True to what I had told my family, I had an office and a desk. The office was in a square wooden building. Just inside the door stood a bookcase holding a few volumes on Afghan culture, some of which were old enough to be collector’s items. Across from the bookcase there were hooks on the wall, on which we hung our helmets and Interceptor body armor vests. The walls were so flimsy that we had been ordered to put on our gear if the FOB was under Code Red—meaning we had a better than fifty-fifty chance of incoming. Our M-4’s were placed in a wood contraption by the door. Although our team was a mix of army and civilians, we were all armed and expected to know how to protect ourselves and one another, if needed.
At first, the ease with which I picked up the weapon and carried it around alarmed me greatly. I had thought that after all the violence and bloodshed of my childhood, their ever-present memory would be enough to make me never want to go near a weapon, much less carry one. Ironically, I think those same memories of hopelessness from my childhood likely contributed to my wanting to train and arm myself as an adult. This was different. I was making sure that if I was ever in the position I had been in as a young girl, I would be able to defend myself and those who depended on me, and I intended to learn and be prepared just in case. I also knew that if my family found out I was armed while working in Afghanistan, this would be the subject of many distressed Sunday meetings, used as another thing I was doing to bring shame to them. They would conveniently forget the huge part weapons and the mastery of guns play in the proud Pashtun culture. They would interpret it as a symbol of my aggression and hatred toward my own people. Not my siblings; I had already told Khalid and Najiba, and both had sent me back teasing e-mails about how glad they were to be physically so far away from me.
SEVERAL LARGE DESKS lined the four walls of the office, which had a huge table with a map of Afghanistan in the middle of the room, and a picture of Hamid Karzai—wearing his famous, colorful long coat and his Persian lamb’s wool hat at a jaunty angle—gazing down upon us from one of the walls. Once, an S-2 intelligence analyst who’d been at Salerno for eleven months strolled in to introduce himself. He looked up at Karzai’s picture and asked, “Who’s that dude?” After that it became a standard question we would ask analysts coming to our office the first time. It was shocking how few knew who he was.
One day not long after we arrived, Billy was going to lunch, and since Audrey was busy, I joined him. We sat at a long table in the chow hall; at the other end four soldiers were eating and talking. I smiled and said hello.
“So,” I said, turning to Billy to try to make conversation, “what did you learn about Pashtuns while living in Kandahar?”
“I learned that I really want to marry an Afghan woman.” He pulled a piece of pepperoni from his pizza and placed it on his tongue. This was not the first time he had said this—he also mentioned it when I first met him in Kansas, but it was harder for me to take offense while I was in America. But now we were in Afghanistan, and I was very offended.
“You do know that you shouldn’t go around saying that.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s insulting, you know—inappropriate to say that to a Pashtun female. You do know I’m a Pashtun?”
“Oh. I am sorry,” he said. He was amiable and didn’t seem to mind my chiding. I thought, but didn’t say, How do you pass yourself off as a cultural expert when you know so little about it?
At that moment one of the soldiers at the other end of the table introduced himself and his friends. The fact that we were wearing civilian clothes but were also armed drew a lot of attention, as it continued to do over the following sixteen months. I told them we were part of the Human Terrain Team, and explained what that meant and how it could help them. One of them had been in Iraq. He confessed that he was amazed by how different the cultures were. “I mean, I knew they were different, obviously, but not this different!”
We laughed. He might have been eighteen years old. He had a chipped front to
oth and dimples. I was happy to suggest to him the basics about treating the locals with respect, asking permission before you take pictures, before you enter a village. The thinking behind the last piece of advice is so that if the women are out getting water or feeding the animals, the men can use the time to get them inside. Of course, one then runs the chance of having insurgents be warned of one’s presence, but most of the time the average soldier in Afghanistan is not out looking for insurgents. Billy ate his pizza in sullen silence.
On our way back to our office he complained, “You’re all about respect, but those guys weren’t respecting the fact that we were having lunch together.”
“We’re in a combat zone. Not chilling out in a restaurant, having lunch. We’re here for the soldiers, and if they have questions, answering them takes priority over eating.”
We walked along in silence. Did he think our casual cafeteria lunch was a date? Was him telling me he wanted to marry an Afghan woman his way of “claiming” me? I puzzled over this as we walked back to the office, where Billy went on to his desk and sat there, pouting.
IT DIDN’T TAKE me long to really start stressing.
It became clear almost immediately that the Human Terrain System worked better on a piece of paper sitting on someone’s desk in Washington than it did in Afghanistan. We were there because the military had realized, somewhat belatedly, that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could benefit from counterinsurgency.
By 2008, the army had started to inject COIN practices into its daily operations, and focus began to shift toward types of reconstruction efforts that would show the locals that the United States was their friend, in Afghanistan at the invitation of their government to lend them a helping hand. This is, of course, oversimplifying a few hundred pages of doctrine into a couple of sentences, but that was the gist of COIN in 2008. In order to bring over the Afghans to the side of the Afghan government, it became crucial to get a real picture of the people’s basic needs. In the eyes of the locals, there was nothing worse than wasting resources and lives on projects that they did not need. It showed wastefulness in a country that was still extremely poor, a wastefulness that would and did cause the locals to turn away from their government and Americans in disgust. The only way to build relationships was to understand this complex culture as thoroughly as possible. One cultural mistake could easily undo months of progress in the struggle to win the hearts and minds of Afghans. Even though the buzz phrase on everyone’s lips then was “cultural awareness,” Afghan culture, and especially the more complex and conservative culture of the Pashtuns, was still an enigma to most Americans, civilians or soldiers, working in Afghanistan.