In My Father's Country (36 page)

Afghans in villages all over the country would tell you the same thing: Taliban rule was merciless and cruel, but at least people knew where they
stood. They knew that if they obeyed the many unforgiving rules, at least they would be secure. Cruel certainty provided cold comfort. The central government claimed to have rules, too, but they were not enforced with any consistency. People were uneasy. From day to day, no one knew what to expect.

Once, returning from a medical operation at a local village, where we’d gone to deliver Band-Aids, aspirin, and antibiotics—the usual for any med op—our convoy was speeding through a stretch of barren landscape. Most of the roads in Kunar are a series of dizzying S’s carved into the sides of mountains, but not this road. We were making good time. I had stopped seeing the sand and empty space in front of my side window and instead was daydreaming about how nice it would be if there were green trees like the ones back in Oregon, when suddenly there was a muffled explosion and the Humvee rocked to one side and stopped.

We got out. There, splattered on the side of the vehicle, were the remains of a suicide bomber. We would learn later that he’d been detonated remotely by someone watching from a far-off hillside. From the angle at which the insurgent had been watching, he had misjudged the distance and hit the button just before our convoy was in range.

Most villages are not a part of any master urban plan in Afghanistan, but are a collection of
qalats
built near the road by people whose livelihood depends on the road in one way or another. They might be families of drivers who decided to settle around the road for easy access. When we’d arrived in this area, there were a few
qalats
and a couple of shops around the main road. Later I would learn that if you drive through an area like this and there are no children around, something bad is about to happen. If the shops are closed, something even worse is about to happen. The locals have likely seen the suicide bomber, who most of the time is stoned before meeting his maker; they have seen the bad guys lurking around, up to no good. They know that when these people appear, an IED, a roadside bomb, a suicide bombing, or an ambush will soon follow. The villagers don’t want to be in the middle of any of it. So they take their children and hide.

In 2007 the insurgents were still perfecting their suicide-bombing methods. They were not yet using suicide bombers as casually as they do now, especially in remote areas like this one. The time had not yet come when the initial attack—usually an IED—was the first step of a complex ambush, where the soldiers were drawn out and away from their vehicles, the better to be targeted with small arms and RPGs. By 2009, this had become the common method of insurgent attacks and it remains so to this day.

Slowly, the dust began to settle. The breeze picked up the smell of burnt flesh. We decided to stick around until the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s version of the CIA, showed up. There were pieces of the suicide bomber everywhere I looked. I moved off the road to get away from the smell. I was watching my feet, to make sure I didn’t step on any bloody chunks of flesh. When I thought I had left the worst behind, I almost stepped on the head. The explosion had blown it clean off the body. His eyes were open, and he was staring at me. It wasn’t even slightly burned. He looked no more than twenty years old. He had eyebrows and eyelashes. I noticed his hair—it was long, chin-length, and curly. Perhaps it was my mind’s attempt to deny what I was seeing, but he reminded me of an
Attan
dancer.
Attan
is an ancient Pashtun dance and the national dance of Afghanistan. It is known for, among other things, the long-haired male dancers. Sherzai loved
Attan
. Every Friday night he would host a performance.

I was enjoying the new respect I’d earned from John, Kevin, and the soldiers. Word had gotten around that I had more to contribute to our fight there than just my language skills. I didn’t want to scream like a girl, like a civilian, so I calmly called to the sergeant, “You probably want to see this.”

I was an interpreter. My orientation never covered anything related to suicide bombing. The soldiers inspected the Humvee. My ears were ringing. My eyes stung with the still-flying dust. Standing by the side of the road, I looked around and saw that there was no one in sight. I had been in many firefights by then, but the personal nature of a suicide bombing was very different and harder to take in. At least it was for me.
Someone wanted to kill us so badly that he was willing to give up his life in the process. That was hard to take in when I felt that I was truly there, with all the young soldiers, to help the Afghans stand on their feet. But this was not the last time I would be baffled by what had gone wrong in Afghanistan. How could two nations who had helped each other defeat a superpower less than twenty years earlier get to this point? Something had gone terribly wrong, and as I looked at the severed head of the youth, I vowed to find out what it was.

ONE NIGHT I
was awakened at 3:30
A.M
. by my team and told to come to the clinic. I pulled on a tunic and jeans, grabbed my jacket, and stumbled down the hill. There was no moon—it was a dark FOB, which meant there was no other light allowed either, and there was shouting in the distance. The soldier who fetched me said someone had just arrived, a civilian who’d been injured by one of our outgoing mortar rounds.

Most likely he was an insurgent. This was not uncommon. The PRT would have been attacked by rockets or mortars, we would have responded with outgoing, using technology to locate the point of origination, and within a couple of hours Afghans would appear at the front gate, bearing their wounded. We were always told, “This is my cousin. He is an innocent civilian, and you bombed him while he was sleeping!” More often than not they were the insurgents themselves, knowing we would have no choice but to take them at their word. We never turned away an injured Afghan, and they knew it. It happened more in mountainous areas where there weren’t any local doctors that the insurgents could intimidate into treating their injured. Most claims of “innocent civilian” injury were made in remote villages where there were no clinics and the U.S. Army medics provided the only medical help, unless there was the option of crossing over to Pakistan to get treated. There was no way the U.S. Army could disprove these claims; there were no marks or tattoos that could be used to identify insurgents.

At the clinic a young Afghan, perhaps eighteen years old, was being treated for a bad leg injury. He was thrashing and screaming. His leg had
been blown apart. Nestled in the mass of pulpy red tissue I could see a wink of bone. In Pashtu he screamed that he was in pain, that it was unbearable, it was going to kill him.

Suraya was on duty at the clinic as usual, an assignment she relished. For hours at a time it would be quiet, with no incoming patients. This gave her time to chat up the medics, offer haircuts, gossip, and smoke.

The Afghan screamed until he was past hoarse. The pain! he roared. The pain! Behind his shoulder, out of his line of sight, the medic was prepping a syringe.

Suraya tried to shout over him in Farsi, “The doctors are fixing you.”

He didn’t care. He didn’t seem to understand a word she was saying.

I stood with two other soldiers who were there to report on what had happened. After the boy had been stabilized they would question him and I would interpret. There was nothing for us to do until the boy had been sedated and the bleeding had stopped. I don’t know how long the boy moaned and howled. Suraya kept saying that he should not worry, that the doctors would fix his leg, all in Farsi, all lost in translation.

It was an unwritten rule among interpreters that you didn’t barge in and correct someone’s translation unless you were asked to offer your opinion, but I couldn’t stand it another minute. Professional courtesy kept me silent for as long as I could stand the screaming, but finally, in Pashtu I yelled, “The doctors are giving you some medicine. It will take a few seconds, but then the pain will start going away.”

Suraya glared at me. The harsh light of the clinic made her appear green, her red lipstick brown. I knew I was making her look bad, and that I would pay for it later.

The boy stopped screaming, took a breath, held up his hand, and nodded. The medic gave him the injection. “Ask him how his pain level is now,” he said to Suraya.

“Is gone?” she asked him in her broken Pashtu.

The boy shook his head and groaned. “No!” he cried. “No.”

“Yes!” Suraya insisted, “It’s better.”

“No,” said the boy. “No!”

The medic took a few steps back. “What’s going on here? What are you two arguing about?”

I told my team that I was going to step in and help. Otherwise, we’d be here all night, and the boy would probably perish simply from being misunderstood. I went and stood at his side, looking into his face and away from his torn leg.

“Brother,” I said, “is your pain getting any less, or is it the same as before the doctor gave you the injection?”

“Oh, sister, you speak Pashtu, thank God, thank God. It’s a little less, but it’s still terrible.”

I told the medic, who gave him another injection.

Finally, his pain was under control. The boy lay back on the bed and drifted into a morphine daze. The medic went about making plans to operate. There would be no talking to the boy this morning. Suraya turned her back to me as I left the clinic and trudged back up the hill. It was just barely 6:00
A.M
. The sky was whitening in the east; a few birds were chattering.

Haseeba was an early riser. When I returned to our quarters she was sitting outside, drinking her morning coffee from the chow hall. I told her what had happened. “Now I’ve made an even bigger enemy out of Suraya,” I said.

“I bet Suraya has many enemies. Now you’ve just permanently joined the club,” she replied. I could always count on Haseeba to simplify things.

A few days passed. Suraya never mentioned what had happened at the clinic. She sat on her plastic patio chair outside the B-hut and stewed. Then she started spending her time elsewhere. She would get up very early, take her customary hour and a half to do her hair and makeup, and then disappear.

Once, late at night, Haseeba and I had finished watching a movie at the MWR and were walking back up the hill to our hut. The days were hot, but at night we were reminded we were still high in the mountains. The air was cool and pine-scented; the stars seemed close enough to touch. Groups of soldiers sat in front of their B-huts, smoking, talking,
and listening to music. Several of them called out “Good night!” to us as we walked to our rooms.

We rounded the corner and heard a giggle. It was Suraya, disengaging herself from the arms of a CAT II we only vaguely recognized. He was tall and lean but otherwise plain. He had worked at a convenience store in Maryland before becoming an interpreter. I only knew this because Haseeba had gone on a mission with him to some governmental meeting.

Haseeba and I went inside. Minutes later Suraya appeared, closing the door sharply behind her.

“I’m sure you’re upset,” she said to Haseeba, “but Hashruf is mine.”

“Hashruf?” said Haseeba.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. I assumed Hashruf was the guy she’d just been kissing.

“I know what you’re all about,” Suraya said to Haseeba. “I know what you’re trying to do. You’re going after my man and you can’t have him.”

“Okay,” said Haseeba. Suraya stormed to her B-hut and slammed the little wood door, leaving Haseeba and me in the living room, trying not to laugh.

The next day, as luck would have it, I ran into the sergeant major whom I’d met on the day of my arrival, the one who was in charge of the accommodations. He asked how it was going. I told him about Suraya, about the tension and her recent accusation. I stopped short of saying that she was crazy. The sergeant was worried that Haseeba and I were unhappy. If the PRT were to lose the two of us at once, he would be required to replace us, and who knew what he would get from BAF. I asked if perhaps there was another place for us to live on the base.

Within hours, he moved Haseeba and me to a large empty tent across from the chow hall, at the bottom of the hill. Our new home was enormous, already divided into six separate rooms. We only needed two bedrooms, so we removed the partitions and created our own guest space. We washed our comforters, helping the little old local man in charge of the PRT laundry room to spread them out in the sun, since they were too
big for the dryer, and then spread them on the floor. We also purchased a machine-made red-and-cream Iranian rug and an old TV at the local bazaar.

One afternoon Paul, one of the PRT officers, poked his head in and we offered to make him some tea. He sat on one of the comforters, and we put out some tea and cookies. He told us how every army installation in the States had a place like this where officers go to relax after hours. “This is just like an OC,” he said.

“OC?” I said.

“Officers’ Club.”

For laughs we started referring to our living room as the Officers’ Club. Later we had to adjust our policy, since we also wanted to invite some of our favorite enlisted soldiers to come have tea and watch TV.

We welcomed the chance to display our Pashtun hospitality. We made aromatic green tea, and sometimes we were able to snag some nuts or raisins from the three shops inside the wire. Once a week Haseeba and I hosted a real movie night, when we would make popcorn and serve soda. Over the tinny sound that issued from the TV’s speaker you could hear the occasional
kaboom
of a mortar being fired. It didn’t even register. The Officers’ Club Also Open to Enlisted Soldiers by Special Invitation felt like home, a place where we could relax with good friends after a long day of interpreting. Life was far from perfect, but on a day-to-day basis it was somehow better and more satisfying than the life I had lived in America.