In My Father's Country (38 page)

But for bureaucratic reasons I was still required to return to the United States. I went home to Portland for seven days, before flying to Kansas for training. Evan had succeeded in reducing the six-month training requirement to a few weeks, and then I would head back to Afghanistan. My family and I sat in the big living room in the house my siblings and I had bought for Mamai in Beaverton. It was December, and the afternoon was dark with clouds and rain. Our tea had grown cold. I promised them that this would be the last time. Najiba sat with her arms folded. “You said that the last time,” she replied. Khalid added, “I should just lock you in the basement and take away your passport.” Mamai wondered for the hundredth time about the unforgivable sins she was paying for.

I told them it was a desk job. I wouldn’t even be going outside the wire. Research manager was my new title. Could any position sound more boring? In truth, I had very little information about what was going to be required of me. The job description sounded challenging. I was supposed to identify informational and cultural gaps in the army’s knowledge of the region, fill them in with facts about the villages and the local population, and brief commanders and soldiers about the findings. In addition, I was meant to ensure the continuation of said knowledge to incoming units.

My family was unhappy, but they were used to being outraged by my decisions. With Ben, it wasn’t so easy. Before I had decided to take the HTT job, Ben’s tour of duty had ended and he’d returned to Fort Lewis. I hadn’t told him about the job offer because I knew it would upset him. On the days before he rotated out he worried incessantly. His constant questions about how he was going to live without me both touched my heart and made me feel guilty. I loved him but couldn’t really imagine us sharing a future—a pattern, it was starting to seem.

Ben was thrilled when I told him I was coming home. I had given him Najiba’s cell number, and he had called her every day while I was traveling. He’d assumed I was home for good and that now we could begin making a life together. He drove to Portland from Fort Lewis the
day after I’d arrived. When I opened the front door I was struck again by how handsome he was. He was wearing washed jeans with a white T-shirt. I’d never seen him in civilian clothes before.

He took me out to an Italian restaurant downtown. I remember that we went under a large parking structure to get there because I was trying to map out an exit route, a habit I had learned from living too long in a combat zone. The light was low and golden. The waitress brought bread for the table. Ben prided himself on his good southern manners and began ordering for me.

“My lady would like a glass of red wine,” he said, as if he’d accomplished a great feat. The girls he’d known before me had been beer drinkers.

“Which one would she like?” the waitress asked as she set the tall wine list between his fork and knife.

“Just the house red is fine,” I quickly said to the waitress.

“I think she would like the house red,” Ben repeated.

He didn’t look at her but reached across the table and placed his hand over mine. His smile was that of an eager young man taking the first steps down a new path. His lady, on the other hand, could not bear another moment of his optimism.

“I’m going to Kansas in seven days,” I blurted out.

“Kansas? What are you doing there?”

“Training for a new program.”

“Okay … Kansas. I can do Kansas.” He nodded, thinking, recalibrating our future. His flexibility was a precious trait, one I would need in a mate. He didn’t want to be at Fort Lewis forever. There were jobs he could apply for in Kansas, and Kansas was closer to Georgia, where his large family lived, including his twin brother, whom he joked would try to snatch me up the second he laid eyes on me.

“Afghanistan,” I said. “The training in Kansas is for a position in Afghanistan.”

Since he’d been back in the Northwest his tan had faded. His smile disappeared. The math he’d been doing in his head didn’t allow for an
equation that included Afghanistan. My house red appeared, with his bottle of beer and a chilled glass. He didn’t know how he could get back to Afghanistan. He supposed he could reenlist, but he would have no power to choose where they sent him. But my contract wouldn’t be more than a year, would it? He said he would wait for me. “You can’t wait for me.”

“I love you. Of course I can wait for you. I can wait as long as you need me to.”

“I don’t want you to wait for me. You’re too young to wait for someone who is at war.” I am sure I was referring more to the war within me than the one in my country. “I want you to find someone here you can take care of, a nice girl.”

“Now you’re being silly. I want to take care of you,” he said.

“I might not be coming back, and I wouldn’t want you to have to mourn the death of a girlfriend,” I said. The words made it true. There was always the chance that I might die. That wasn’t new. But I was also tired of flying home between contracts for what had become the usual knockdown argument with my family. What if I loved my new position? I could easily imagine moving to Afghanistan and never returning.

The conversation stuck on his determination to wait for me and my refusal to allow him to. Nothing was decided. We ended the evening by my eating the salmon he’d ordered for me, but not the way I liked it, because he didn’t let me tell the waitress to cook it for longer. I remember thinking that I would have to eat raw salmon for the rest of my life if I decided to be with Ben, because I wouldn’t ever want to hurt his feelings by correcting him. I tried once again to talk him into breaking up, and not waiting for me. Life was too short to waste on waiting for someone to return from a lost cause, especially when he had so many other options, I argued.

For a while after I arrived at Salerno, he called and e-mailed me every day. In time, our e-mails got less and less regular. In 2009 he sent me his last message, with the news that he was about to get engaged and was giving me one last chance. I pretended I thought he was joking. His
new girlfriend, soon to be wife, reminded him so much of me, he wrote. I asked how this could be—was she Afghan? No, he said, but she had long, dark hair and liked to drink red wine.

I PACKED UP
my stuff: all my civilian clothes, my shampoo, body lotion, and pounds of Peet’s coffee, plus the stuff the army issued me—a gas mask, a mosquito net, and a little steel coffee mug. Twenty pairs of socks. Four uniforms. Knee pads, elbow pads, and random pads for which I never discovered a use. I shipped it all to Afghanistan, all except the military issue. I had to carry that myself.

I spent several days at Fort Leavenworth, undergoing a medical exam and weapons training. In my new role I would be expected to carry a sidearm.

I never imagined I would love shooting. We were required to be certified in the use of one type of weapon, but I was certified in three. Mike was the instructor administering the training. He was retired army and walked with a slight limp. From what I could tell he had a single mood: annoyed. Still, he taught me a lot. Near the end of the training, I think I finally managed to invoke one other expression on his face—surprise.

I’d brought along a pair of beige boots with three-and-a-half-inch heels I’d purchased at Cathy Jean in Portland. I don’t know why I packed them. There would never be an occasion to wear them once I returned to Afghanistan. But I loved those boots, so I wore them to the range.

There was old snow on the ground. The sky was a sharp blue. The temperature was so far below freezing it wasn’t worth remarking on. There was a waiting room beside the range, with a heater, magazines, and hot water for instant coffee and tea. When my team was called to the range and Mike saw the shoes, he grimaced. “Are you kidding me?”

“What do you mean?”

“How are you going to maintain your balance in those things?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess we’ll find out.”

I raised my nine-millimeter and squeezed off a round, easily hitting the center of mass. The targets were man-shaped. I enlarged the first
hole with a few more good shots. A pair of young guys training at the target next to mine took notice.

I reloaded my weapon. Mike ordered me to shoot three to the head. The guys cheered as I put three neat holes, all in a row, across the target’s forehead. It was impressive, but not
that
impressive. Were they responding to the fact that I was a woman? An Afghan woman? An Afghan woman in three-inch heels? I didn’t know, but when the guys, who later turned out to be working for one of the secret U.S. agencies going to Iraq, wanted to turn it into a competition I said sure. It was easy to beat them with the nine-millimeter, a smaller, sleeker weapon that fit my hand. We were shooting for beers. They’d arrived at some complicated equation: The person who wins has to buy everyone else three beers. Or else it was the other way around—the losers had to buy the winner three beers. It didn’t matter to me. I didn’t drink beer, and I wasn’t going drinking with them. I beat them.

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.