In My Father's Country (16 page)

“No, no, it’s just our tradition,” said Mrs. Sadiqqi. “Women get scarves and men get turbans.”

“I know about our traditions, but I would have liked a turban better.”

Later, when I visited the governor, he gave me a beautiful turban, gray raw silk woven with gold threads.

F
OURTEEN

W
hen I first arrived at Farah PRT, I avoided the chow hall as much as possible. It seemed as if everything contained some form of pork. Hot dogs, pepperoni pizza, chicken Cordon Bleu, bacon and eggs. As a Muslim I don’t eat pork, so I would ask one of the local CAT I interpreters to buy me some chicken kebabs and
doughdi
(flat bread) from outside the wire, which they were happy to do because I would make sure I paid them more than the food cost, to thank them for their trouble. Or I made do with vegetables, cereal, and bread. I loved salads, but, like all food items, the lettuce was flown by the U.S. Army from Europe to BAF, then loaded into a refrigerated CONEX to be trucked all over Afghanistan. It always happened that the refrigerator would break down somewhere on the slow roads, and by the time the lettuce reached us, it would be beyond wilted.

I planned to tackle the issue of what to eat at the PRT at some point, but initially, I wanted to take some time to observe how the soldiers interacted on this small (compared with BAF) FOB and find myself a niche. In my time at BAF, waiting to be sent here, and then working at the hospital, I had naïvely romanticized my coming back to Afghanistan, imagining that I’d instantly connect with the people and be welcomed without any hardships. I should have realized that if leaving Afghanistan at the age of six had been such a trauma, coming back
nearly twenty-five years later was going to be just as traumatizing, if not more so.

The soldiers in the unit had been there long enough to develop routines that seemed second nature at this point. There was a set time for every daily activity, down to calling their families back home. Most of the time was spent on responsibilities to do with their army chores, and so there was very little time left for me to interact with them. However, there was one thing we all did three times a day: eat at the chow hall. So I resolved that, no matter how horrifying and culturally insensitive I found the food to be, I would be there, eating dry cereal at every meal if I had to, just so I could be sitting with the U.S. soldiers, speaking with them about Afghanistan, America, family, or whatever they wanted to talk about.

THE HUB OF
our base was a U-shaped structure that housed the medics’ office, the laundry rooms, bathrooms, and barracks for both male and female soldiers. The chow hall, the Civil-Military Operations Center (CMOC), and the Tactical Operations Center (TOC) were housed in separate buildings on one side of the U; a small gym was on the other.

At the bend in the U was a huge porch with a view of the mountains where the soldiers liked to congregate. Every evening after the soldiers had completed their chores, one of them would sit on the porch and play his guitar; several others would surround him, smoking or chewing tobacco, most with their eyes closed, leaning against the building. Every morning Arif, a local who worked as an administrator at the CMOC, would bring me homemade milk tea—made with cardamom pods, milk, and black tea boiled together in a pan. I had told him I liked drinking chai in the morning, and he decided to make it every day. Yes, I realized, he wasn’t doing that just to be a nice guy, but I didn’t know how to tell him not to bother. In those early days, I was so afraid of offending the local Afghans that I thought it was better to just drink the tea and hope that he would stop on his own. No way was I going to willingly make my childhood nightmare come true by marrying anyone from my culture, even if he was sweet enough to make me chai every morning.

One morning, almost three weeks after I arrived at the PRT, on my way to the CMOC, which was my workplace while I waited for the PRT commander to get back from his R & R, I glimpsed a soldier I hadn’t seen before. He stood with his back to me talking to Major Carrillo on the porch. It was already hot. He wore his desert camouflage pants and a beige T-shirt. Had he been wearing his regular army shirt, which advertised his rank and name, I might have acted differently. Maybe.

As I passed him he called out, “You must be the new interpreter they’ve finally sent me.”

I turned and gave him a withering look. He had dark hair cut close to his scalp in the army way, big, dark eyes, and lines in his forehead that revealed that he wasn’t a kid. He smiled a lot, I would soon find out. He could easily have been an Afghan man, which didn’t endear him to me. He struck me as being full of himself.

I’d been told that Lieutenant Colonel Eric Peerman, the PRT commander, was going to be my boss. Who was this guy?

“Last time I checked I wasn’t anyone’s anything,” I said, “but I’d be happy to work with you if you need an interpreter.”

“You really know how to make a first impression,” he said.

“No more than you,” I said. “You act as if you own the PRT and everyone in it.”

“Well, as a matter of fact, as the commander of the PRT I do own everything here.”

I suddenly realized I’d been talking to Lieutenant Colonel Peerman. I still didn’t like the possessive way he was talking to me, and as a civilian I knew I didn’t have to take it. “Well, not me.” Men who are too strong and cocky have always made me uncomfortable; my response is to want to get as far away as I can, as fast as I can.

I turned around and walked away from the two of them on the porch, hastily making my way to the CMOC. I’m not going to lie; I was a little nervous about how I had behaved. My curse in life was my attitude, it seemed, and I really did not want him to send me back for having too much of it.

Half an hour later Lieutenant Colonel Peerman found me at CMOC.
“I think we got off on the wrong foot,” he offered. He asked me if I would take a walk with him. We strolled around the base. He wanted to show me the sights, even though I protested that I’d been there for nearly a month and knew where everything was. He was annoyed that no one had given me a proper tour. “When I’m not here no one can do anything,” he huffed. “Have you seen the shop and met Muhammad?”

“I’ve been sitting on the bench near his shop since I got here,” I said. “It’s my favorite place on the base.”

“You’ve already met Major Carrillo, then?”

“Sure. The only one I had not met was you.”

So he took me on a tour of the whole PRT. I could hear the pride in his voice as he talked about everything he and his soldiers had built from scratch. Watching him interact with those under his command, I could see that he loved them. I forgave and forgot his earlier arrogance.

LIFE AT THE
Farah PRT was surreal, like life always is on a military installation, especially for the civilians, and even more so for the female civilians. It didn’t take me long to notice that I was one of just five women on a base of more than a hundred male soldiers and the only female civilian. This female-to-male ratio was about the same on every base I would work at over the next five years. The soldiers used terms such as “deployment nine” or “deployment queen” to talk about the female soldiers on the base or ones they knew in Iraq. Once they explained what these terms meant, I would get mad at them for using them, so at least in front of me they refrained from using them. When I arrived at Farah, some of the soldiers had been there for almost eight months. Being a single Pashtun female, that elusive creature they had all heard about but had hardly seen, apparently made me harder to resist. Soldiers would declare their love to me within days of meeting me, without knowing what they were saying. I was not a psychologist, but it was clear to me what they were going through. Not knowing whether or not they would make it out of Afghanistan alive they wanted one last chance at love, happiness, and most coveted of all, companionship.

As soon as a soldier would say that he loved me and was always thinking about me, I would try to talk sense into him by explaining why he was feeling that way. My purpose was not to embarrass him or make light of his feelings. I have always been very protective of our young soldiers in uniform, deployed to a land few of them barely knew existed until just a few years earlier.

It was a thorny role I had to adjust to. I didn’t want to stop talking to the soldiers, because I wanted them to come to me when they had questions about anything Afghan. I just didn’t want to mislead them. The constant adrenaline rush that comes from living with the stress of daily combat intensifies all emotions, and love was no exception. That attention could easily have gone to my head had I not been very comfortable in my own skin. I remember sending an e-mail to Najiba from Farah, jokingly saying, “I had no idea I was so hot! All these guys love me!” And, my sister being the wiser one, and maybe being a little worried, said, “Just remember those feelings might only be good in Afghanistan, and most likely will expire once you leave the country.” That Greg and I were having real issues around this time might have made me susceptible to the soldiers’ romantic overtures, but there were underlying issues for me that did not allow the male attention to go beyond flattery. My fear of being controlled by men made it hard for me to relax around most of them because they threatened my sense of independence. I had been accused by several casual dates, who were trying to take our relationship further, that I built walls around my heart. One of them who was familiar with Afghan architecture said that those walls resembled the tall, huge walls called
char dewal
(Farsi for “four walls”) you see around
qalats
. How accurate he was! It had taken a long time for me to lower my guard around Greg. He was my first real relationship and the man who I could see myself potentially growing old with, if he wasn’t so stuck on the idea of marriage in the traditional sense.

The soldiers’ casual use of those three precious words—I love you—scared me to the point where I started having doubts about Greg’s use of the same words at the end of every phone conversation. Perhaps his
feelings weren’t genuine either. Did he have any more clue than they did about who I was? This doubt only widened the chasm between Greg and me. I couldn’t handle the distance or the disconnect. Greg and I broke up, and even though I was devastated to lose that unconditional love and support, I knew that in the long run he would be better off with a nice girl who didn’t bear my childhood scars, and who wasn’t cursed with a past like mine.

F
IFTEEN

J
ust 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.