In My Father's Country (11 page)

The transport plane landed in the middle of the night at a U.S. Air Force base in Bishkek, in a blizzard. Almost twenty hours of flying to get there had given me plenty of time to doubt my decision to return to this war-ravaged country, where it seemed that there was a price for everything and everything was for sale. For a few dollars, people would sell you anything, even their grandmother—or at least that is what I had been told during orientation by a couple of the guys who had spent time in Afghanistan as interpreters. Would the country my father sacrificed his life for be a country where the very values—friendship, loyalty, family—he gave his life to were for sale? On that long flight to my motherland, I made two promises to myself: one, that if ever I saw that Afghanistan had become a country my father would be ashamed of, I would leave that same day. The second was inspired by my paranoia, a true American quality, that I would be stranded without my American passport, which guaranteed my rights and gave me freedom of movement: I would guard my American passport with my life. I feared that the men of Afghanistan would suck me back into a life with no rights, a life that I thought I had escaped—the shackles that so many Afghan women accept as their fate.

Did I expect to come out of it alive? Was this a rational decision? Or had I been guided by a greater force? Had it been my destiny from the beginning to be an Afghan woman in Afghanistan, one that I had only postponed by going to America? Is it foolish to try to run away from your fate?

I had not slept for hours, with these answerless questions racing through my head as I sat in that loud cabin, surrounded by very young American men in uniform who had the ability to fall asleep before the plane had even lifted off. Did they not worry about what lay ahead of them? How I envied their acceptance of whatever was coming their way. Later, I would find out that, in reality, most of them didn’t know what was coming their way.

As the engines were turned off, I still had the buzzing in my ears that would persist for a couple of days. I lugged my duffel bags across the icy tarmac to a Kmart-sized tent where I joined the other soldiers and civilians waiting for a flight to Afghanistan. I sat in a cold metal chair. Three televisions broadcast the same football game. There was no sound. I thought the volume of the TVs was just turned down, then a soldier offered me a bottle of water and I was forced to read his lips. I was temporarily deaf from the roar of the engines. At least I hoped it was temporary.

I sat and waited. Morning came. The day passed. If there is one thing that Pashtuns excel at, it’s waiting. All around me soldiers slouched in chairs, watching TV, listening to their iPods. Some slept with their heads thrown back, snoring as if they were in their own beds at home, and I’m sure in their dreams they were.

The tent was overheated to compensate for the frigid temperature outside, but a burst of cold air came in every time one of the soldiers entered or exited. I slept on one of the hard sofas in my turtleneck, my arms wrapped around myself. On the morning of the third day I wondered if I’d been forgotten. Was it possible? Would someone have noticed if I’d boarded the military transport in Atlanta and had never arrived at Bagram Airfield? I could have asked someone, but I was too intimidated. I’d spent all my time in the United States in Oregon, a state with
no major military installations. The only experience I’d had with people in uniforms was signing for packages from the cute UPS man who’d come to my office every day. The young soldiers with their brush cuts, desert fatigues, and weapons made me nervous. Had they used those oiled black guns, which they strapped to themselves so casually, to kill an enemy? Could they tell I was an Afghan? Would they consider me an outsider? An enemy? Would they hate me because my people were the reason they were so far away from their families? I have always been too afraid to ask my soldier friends this question because I knew I would resent leaving my family if the boot was on the other foot, so to speak. How might I react to their resentment? Would I be insulted by their attitude? How would I avenge their insult? I was so busy with these incessant, one-way conversations in my head that it was three days before I even thought about going up to the window and asking if they had my name on any list.

Eventually, in the early afternoon of the fourth day, a guy with a clipboard called out the last four digits of my social security number. I boarded a plane that had a row of seats running along the cabin sides and two Land Cruisers strapped down in the center. They looked like beasts that had been captured and were being taken to a faraway zoo. Once more the engines were loud enough to make your joints hurt. But this time I had remembered to grab a pair of earplugs as I boarded.

“So, what are you?” the soldier sitting next to me yelled. He nodded at my civilian outfit, my gray down jacket, Express jeans, and the same turtleneck I’d been wearing now for half a week.

“An interpreter,” I said. “A Pashtu
turjuman
.” It sounded strange to me to be introducing myself as an interpreter. It was an alien title.

“Awesome. Can you come with me and my soldiers?” His grin conveyed the easy charm that I would later see in almost every soldier I met out there.

I opened my mouth and laughter probably spilled out, but I couldn’t hear it. “I think you’ll have to ask my site manager!”

“I’m working on my Pashtu.” He unzipped one of the many pockets on the arm of his uniform and showed me a small Pashtu dictionary with a tattered pale-blue cover.

“Ah! I know that dictionary! It’s put out by Pakistani Pashtu speakers.” I recognized it, having seen one in a bookstore in Portland when I was looking for a Pashtu dictionary.

“Is it good?” He flipped through it. I could see dog-eared pages and words underlined. “I want to be able to say a few things in Pashtu to Afghans I meet on patrols,” he shouted.

“I’m not sure,” I said. I couldn’t possibly explain over the noise that, like everything else in Afghanistan, the language issue is maddeningly complicated. Ahmed had told me that the army routinely sent Farsiban interpreters who spoke only Dari, as Afghan Farsi is called, into Pashtun villages. While a lot of Pashtuns might understand Dari, they dislike speaking it because of the historical ethnic tensions between the two main groups of Afghans. The Pashtuns have their own language, Pashtu, which is the language they expected the U.S. Army to speak if the Americans wanted their support in the fight against terrorism. Otherwise, the army would be wasting the Pashtun men’s time, and if the Afghans were to agree on anything, it would have been that the Pashtuns were running out of time.

THERE ARE 60
million Pashtu speakers worldwide (although hard data hasn’t been collected to confirm this number), most of whom live in Afghanistan and Pakistan. According to
The CIA World Factbook
, Pashtuns comprise over 40 percent of the population of Afghanistan, the other five or six major ethnic groups making up the rest. I have asked Pashtuns in remote villages about how many Pashtuns they think are in Afghanistan, and their response is millions. For as long as I can remember, and long before then, Farsiban and Pashtuns have been throwing around percentages and numbers to claim majority, but due to the insecurity and inability of anyone to go door-to-door, no one has solid data. In my experience, having worked all over remote Afghanistan, I find it safe to say that more people speak Pashtu than Dari, the other official language. For the last three hundred years, whenever Afghanistan has had a king, he’s been Pashtun, and the national anthem of Afghanistan is sung in Pashtu; still, Dari has traditionally been the language of business
and higher education, which accounts for the often arrogant and condescending attitude of Farsiban people toward Pashtuns. Dari was the lone official language until 1936, when Pashtu was added by royal decree.

Pashtu is complex. In general, there are two grammatical genders, as well as singular and plural. Verbs must agree in person, number, grammatical gender, and tense, and word order is usually subject-object-verb. However, there are so many exceptions to the rule that attempting to learn Pashtu by grammar and word order will drive almost anyone to just throw up his hands and seek out another language, any other language, to learn. I have mastered several languages, but I know that if Pashtu had not been my mother tongue, I would never have been able to learn it. I tell my soldier friends who wish to speak Pashtu fluently that they shouldn’t bother. You can speak Pashtu if you are born with Pashtun genes—otherwise, it’s impossible to keep track of the rules and countless exceptions.

There are major regional accents, even for words describing simple, everyday activities. A favorite pastime of Pashtuns all over Afghanistan is to try to convince one another that their form of Pashtu is the correct one. I can’t count how many times I have sat in villages surrounded by young and old men, while they tell me my Pashtu is not the real one because I pronounced my “sh” sounds as “gha,” for example. Of course, it was expected that I would make fun of their Pashtu, too, and I did, gladly.

Even before setting foot in Afghanistan I knew that we couldn’t expect to build rapport with the locals or show that our soldiers were there to help them, not conquer them, if we didn’t even understand the difference between the two official languages, not to mention the locally well-known historical ethnic tensions between their speakers.

So I was both surprised and relieved that this soldier at least knew the importance of learning Pashtu to speak to Pashtuns. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that his little dictionary was useless, that in some parts of Afghanistan the animosity toward Pakistan was so great that he shouldn’t even try if he was going to make the mistake of speaking
Pakistani Pashtu. The hostility most Afghans feel for their Pakistani neighbors is nothing like the good-hearted humor Americans employ when talking about Canadians.

I’m unlike your typical Pashtun in many ways, but even my blood pressure rises a tiny bit when someone mistakes me for a Pakistani. It is not hard to imagine how villagers who have lived under the conditions of war most of their lives, and who blame the conflicts on the involvement of Pakistan, feel when someone addresses them in Pakistani Pashtu. And, unfortunately, the accent is unmistakable.

Speaking the right language is a matter of respect and shows that you understand the history behind the language. You understand the tensions between the two groups and you are respecting the Pashtun history by bringing in a Pashtu speaker instead of a Farsi speaker, who might insult with his tone or attitude, which I have seen happen in meetings where I was asked to observe. Pashtuns expected American soldiers to bring competent interpreters who spoke the correct dialect and with the right accent. On that first meeting I felt bad for the soldier, who was obviously eager to do the right thing, but I was too new at my job to know that I should have told him what little I knew about Afghans at the time.

“You’re the first soldier I’ve ever met!” I said.

We shouted a short conversation about his tour, which was lost in the roar of the aircraft. He nodded a lot and maintained his white-toothed American smile. I watched him tuck his useless dictionary inside the pocket of his duffel bag and was reminded of my biggest worry. If Afghans would be insulted by this well-meaning soldier’s failure to address them in the proper language, what would they think of
me
, a female Pashtun working with the same American soldiers? Would they find me unworthy of speaking with them? Would they insult me in front of the soldiers of my adopted country? There I was thinking of myself as a bridge between the two cultures most dear to me, but would they burn down a bridge for what they perceived to be my unforgiving attempt at being American? I had left my father’s country when I was six, the continent when I was fifteen. At twenty-four I became an American citizen.
Given all this, daring to show my face in some parts of Afghanistan might even be a stoning offense.

It was becoming impossible to ignore the cold. When I sighed I could see my breath. The soldier on the other side of me was curled up in his seat, shivering in his sleep. He didn’t even look old enough to buy a beer. He didn’t have a jacket. Feeling protective of him, I took my army-issue blanket out of my duffel bag and laid it over him.

When he awoke he thanked me so sincerely that I was humiliated. Here was a kid, who in an ideal world should only be worried about girls and sports, on his way to my country to try to improve my people’s lives. And he was thanking me for this tiny gesture compared with what he was potentially sacrificing for my country.

The plane landed in the middle of a village that didn’t appear on many maps. There are certain images that burn in our brains, that we can recall in their sharpest detail at a moment’s notice. For some people, it is the birth of their firstborn. For others, it might be a beautiful day with a loved one in Hawaii. For me, it is my first look at the mountains of Afghanistan as I deplaned that day. I had packed my camera in a duffel bag—a mistake I will always regret, as I would have loved nothing more than to have captured my vision of those mountains. It had recently snowed. When I stepped down from the plane, they appeared to be the purest white, and were so close I felt as if I could reach out and touch their snowy crags. The sky was a bright, raw blue, and the snow sparkled in the sun. It looked as if humans had never set foot there. Even today, I can close my eyes and in a heartbeat be standing in front of those majestic mountains, shining like they were on fire, feeling so close yet so out of touch that I thought I was imagining them.

My limbs were heavy. My contact lenses felt as if they were made of sandpaper. It was below freezing, and the strong wind whipped my hair around my head. I stood there gazing at the mountains, dazed by their beauty. Finally, the soldier standing behind me gave my shoulder a little shove to get me moving.

T
WELVE

T
he news of the bus accident spread quickly. A group of local interpreters was traveling in a bus that a U.S. company had hired to transport them to Bagram Airfield from Kabul. Even the non-mountainous roads in Afghanistan are famously terrible, rutted with potholes, lined with improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and today, in 2011, openly patrolled by insurgents. The driver was speeding, the bus flipped over, and the few who didn’t die were severely injured. Suddenly there was a shortage of interpreters, and everyone who could speak Dari or Pashtu—even those like me, waiting to be sent elsewhere—was called to help.