The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (11 page)

For a kid raised on cowboys and Indians, Kandahar was a letdown of existential proportions.
Cooper returned from Afghanistan a changed man. Once gentle and uncommonly patient, he was now distant and quick to anger. He raged when a cop pulled him over, dressed down his boss, caught himself mentally preparing to destroy his adversary in an argument. His wife, Kathy, felt as if she had been married to two different men: Clint before and Clint after.
They moved to Sierra Vista, Arizona, at the edge of Fort Huachuca, where Cooper had
been hired to train teams collecting HUMINT, or human intelligence.
Coyotes howled at night, rattlesnakes slid into their son’s sandbox, and migrants sneaking across the border died by the hundreds, littering the Sonoran desert with sweat-stained clothes and empty water jugs. Cooper turned inward until he had no friends outside work and Kathy. He didn’t want to know people and he didn’t want them to know him. Panic attacks seized him in church. He would sweat, his hands would shake, he would weep.
He started seeing a counselor, who suggested that revisiting the scene of his earlier trauma in a different capacity and replacing bad memories with good ones could help him heal.

Good experiences, good memories—that was what Cooper had been looking for when he applied to join the Human Terrain System. He was convinced there was more to Afghanistan than the filthy, bruised men he’d questioned. There were good people, too, and the Army wasn’t reaching them.
Once during his time in Kandahar, he had accompanied the Special Forces to a village, where soldiers herded the men into a shallow streambed and kept them there all day for a security screening. The soldiers’ behavior wasn’t criminal, but it wasn’t smart, either, and it certainly wasn’t in keeping with the elaborate social customs of Afghans. The next day, the soldiers returned to the village and handed out coloring books and pencils. Man, Cooper thought, we’re just clueless. The Human Terrain System was designed to address the stupidities that made Afghans hate the Americans who were trying to help them. Sometime early in 2008, he read a news article about it and applied.
The project hired him immediately.

Seven months later, he was in Afghanistan, sweating beneath a field pack and body armor, fine dust scouring his regulation sunglasses. He and his teammates stumbled over stones and through shifting sand toward the Tactical Operations Center at the heart of the base.
Someone directed them to a tent with a few cots, where Loyd curled up in her dust-covered clothes, stuffed a sleeping bag under her head, and
fell asleep. Don Ayala threw down his gear and went outside to look around.

Ayala had missed this place. He had lived the war’s early optimism, back before so much went wrong, and he remembered the thrill he’d felt flying to Kabul for the first time in 2002. At home, his life had grown comfortably routine. He had worked in telecommunications, occasionally moonlighting as a private bodyguard to earn extra money. After a shattering divorce, he had started a promising new relationship; he and his girlfriend, Andi Santwier, had recently bought a house together in a Los Angeles suburb. But the September 11 attacks had stirred an old restlessness. When a friend had urged him to send his résumé to the State Department, he’d quickly complied. A few weeks later, he’d been hired as part of an elite bodyguard team protecting Hamid Karzai, the new Afghan president, on whose survival the success of America’s Afghan campaign depended. For a longtime soldier committed to his country, there was no more important job.

Ayala and the other bodyguards lived in tents on the grounds of the presidential palace. It was winter and cold, snow and mud thick on the ground, and they burned wood in stoves at night. There were no showers or permanent toilets, but they had their own cooks and cleaning crew and Ayala was paid sixteen thousand dollars a month, more than three times what he’d made at home. Back then, Kabul was so quiet that Ayala and the other Americans didn’t even wear body armor. Maybe a bulletproof vest if they were going to Ghazni or Gardez, but nothing around the capital. Fighters loyal to the Afghan militia leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar occasionally fired rockets at the palace, but they always landed outside its walls. The Taliban had mostly fled. As far as Ayala could tell, the main threat to Karzai in those days came from within, from ethnic Tajiks in his government and their loyalists, who resented the president’s rapid rise.

Karzai was a royalist from Kandahar, the son of a tribal leader and
former Afghan parliamentarian.
A relentless diplomat who had been trying for years to broker truces between his country’s fractious militia leaders, he had risen to the presidency in no small part through his assiduously cultivated contacts in Washington. Karzai embraced the cooperative, multiethnic vision that prevailed after the Taliban’s fall, but he had a long and complex history with the Tajiks in his government, especially his defense minister, Mohammad Fahim.
In the 1990s, after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, Karzai had served as deputy foreign minister in the Kabul government led by Burhanuddin Rabbani and dominated by the famed Panjshiri militia leader Ahmed Shah Massoud.
Fahim had been Massoud’s security chief, and in 1994, Fahim had heard that Karzai was working for Pakistani intelligence. He’d had Karzai arrested and roughly interrogated. Karzai had escaped, but the incident sent him into exile in Pakistan and convinced him to back the Taliban, whose commanders he knew from his days fighting the Soviets. Karzai donated fifty thousand dollars to the conservative student militia and supplied them with weapons. A few years later, a critical event reordered his loyalties.
In 1999, appalled by the brutal consequences of Taliban rule, Karzai tried to organize a traditional tribal council and invited the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar. Instead of agreeing to talk, the Taliban assassinated Karzai’s father as he walked home from a mosque in Quetta, Pakistan. After that, Karzai reached out to Massoud, but it was too late.
Arab bombers posing as journalists assassinated Afghanistan’s most celebrated resistance leader two days before the September 11 attacks. By early 2002, Karzai and Fahim were working together, but Faulkner’s famous observation was nowhere truer than in Afghanistan. The past wasn’t dead. It wasn’t even past.

The men on the Karzai Protective Detail believed in the president; they wanted him to succeed. It didn’t hurt that the United States government lionized him as if he were some kind of philosopher king, but for Ayala the key thing was the way Karzai treated Afghans. He noticed
how kindly the president spoke to everyone, especially women and children, and he saw firsthand what this leader was doing for his country. Ayala accompanied the president as he celebrated the openings of girls’ schools and watched a game of Buzkashi, a wild, ancient sport played on horseback with the carcass of a headless goat.
He went with Karzai to inaugurate medical clinics and mosques, and to visit the Salang Tunnel connecting Kabul to the north. At a school, he and the president watched students raise kites that snapped in the wind and fluttered like birds’ wings against the sky, a tangible expression of the hope everyone seemed to feel. On Christmas, Karzai served his bodyguards dinner in the palace and thanked them for leaving their families to protect him. Ayala would sit outside the president’s office, guarding his door during days of endless meetings. American military commanders and Afghan officials streamed in; Karzai’s chief of staff, diplomats from countries whose support he couldn’t do without, journalists and visiting celebrities who had no idea what he was up against. Karzai greeted them all graciously. Sometimes, between meetings, the president would ask for a few minutes alone. He would sit by himself, staring out the window. Ayala thought about what must be going on in his head. Nearly every evening, he and other bodyguards would escort the president past a garden of carefully tended rosebushes to visit the old Afghan king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, a dignified man in his eighties who lived in a small palace inside the presidential compound.

Eventually, Ayala would lead one of two close protection teams guarding Karzai.
A natural mentor, he counseled the president’s Afghan bodyguards and bonded with the other Americans, many of whom were ex–Special Forces like him. But Ayala wasn’t your typical heavy. He painted, for one thing. He and Santwier would soon move to New Orleans, where Ayala hoped to open an art gallery with the money he was saving.
He wrote poetry on his bedroom wall in Kabul, and the other bodyguards made good-natured
fun of him.
They called him “Don Juan” because when they drank together after work, he would listen selflessly while female friends talked about their lives. He listened as if he were some kind of shrink, and this amazed his fellow bodyguards, who talked to women in bars for the same reason most men talk to women in bars.
They called him the “Minister of Hugs and Kisses” because he was the only one among them who would put his antipathy to male-on-male affection aside long enough to engage in the Afghan male practice of embracing and cheek kissing on meeting.
When a friend back home offered to send him a care package, he asked for pens and notebooks to hand out to kids.

He left Afghanistan in 2004 and spent much of the next four years in and out of Iraq, where most recently he had been mentoring a team of Iraqi bodyguards protecting Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. But that job had ended abruptly when Maliki dismissed the American security advisers in early 2008, choosing to rely entirely on his own people. The Human Terrain System recruiter had called when Ayala was looking for work. He would be trained in Iraqi, Afghan, and Islamic culture, the job description said. He would learn local languages. He flew home from Baghdad and arrived at the Human Terrain System training facility in Leavenworth, Kansas, less than a week later. At first, the project wanted to send him to Iraq. They assigned him to classes in Arabic language and Iraqi culture. He had been craving something like this, a new challenge, but the instruction wasn’t as challenging as he’d hoped. He and the other trainees were taught military rank structure, as familiar to ex-soldiers as the alphabet and as alien to many social scientists as the language of an uncontacted tribe. One goal of the Human Terrain System was to help the military understand the web of relationships that connected Afghans or Iraqis living in a particular area so they could figure out how power and influence worked.
As a research manager, Ayala was taught to use social network mapping software to link villagers by ethnic group, tribe, and political affiliation. For a class
project, he used the software to trace connections between President Karzai and powerful people in his government. It reminded him of the Kevin Bacon game.

The Human Terrain System’s mission appealed to Ayala. He knew the military needed something like this. After training him for Iraq, the program had sent him to Afghanistan, in part because he had lobbied to go there. He liked the place and the people, always had, but there was something else. The leader of this particular Human Terrain Team, a barrel-chested former Marine infantry officer named Mike Warren, was one of the few men in the program under whose leadership Ayala had felt comfortable deploying.
Warren had worked for Blackwater and other private security firms before joining the Human Terrain System. He had come to know Afghanistan in the early years after the invasion, when it was a macho fantasyland of muddy pickup trucks, guns, and no rules. Back then Warren had supervised Afghan security guards protecting laborers building the Kabul to Kandahar highway, the most important American-funded reconstruction project in the country. Warren at least knew what he was getting into in Maiwand, but Ayala suspected that many of the civilians he’d met in training would be unable to work or even survive in a combat zone.
There was a reason that people like Ayala had trained the way they had, a reason for Ranger school, where they woke you up every half hour and made you sit on watch half the night, then woke you again before dawn to do pull-ups, eat on a three-minute clock, run drills, suffer through classes, and take tests until they saw who could handle it and who would break.
What the Army needed, Ayala thought, were sharp observers who understood the mission and had enough of the human touch to talk convincingly to locals.
Ayala was no anthropologist, but you didn’t have to be an anthropologist to turn a would-be enemy into an ally; he himself had plenty of experience talking drunken men out of stupid bar fights. He felt lucky that Paula Loyd wasn’t one of the fakes. She was an Army
vet, after all. She was cordial, focused, and soft-spoken, but there was a stubbornness about her.
She knew what she was talking about and she would tell you what she thought, even if you didn’t like it.
She was in excellent physical shape and had village savvy in spades. Her boyfriend, Frank Muggeo, had met Ayala before they left Kansas, and maybe it was the unspoken bond of the Special Forces, but Muggeo immediately trusted him.
‘Make sure you stay next to Don,’ Muggeo had told Loyd. Ayala felt a special responsibility to protect her.

Loyd and her teammates had landed in Maiwand at a moment of renewed hope for the Afghan war.
The apparent success of the surge in Iraq had vaulted Petraeus to a supervisory role in America’s two Middle Eastern conflicts, and in the fall of 2008, he and his bosses in Washington surveyed the military’s Afghan project and found it wanting.
They urged the recently appointed NATO commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, to adopt a strategy that focused less on killing insurgents and more on protecting the Afghan people.
But McKiernan was an old-school commander, and he lacked sufficient forces for counterinsurgency. While he continued to pursue a conventional mission, the political winds were shifting in Washington.
“We can’t kill our way to victory,” Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress just days before Loyd and her teammates landed in Kandahar.

Loyd was one of two social scientists assigned to the seven-member Human Terrain Team known as AF4, the fourth team to be sent to Afghanistan and the first to venture into the deep south, where the Taliban were strongest.
The team was attached to an Army unit, known as Task Force 2–2, that constituted the first significant deployment of American troops in this stretch of desert since the beginning of the war.
The brigade’s other battalions were stationed in and around Kunar, a mountainous province in northeastern Afghanistan where thick forests encouraged gunfights, but the 2–2 had been split off and sent to
Maiwand by presidential order after the Canadians stationed around Kandahar had threatened to withdraw if they didn’t get reinforcements. The 2–2 was an anomaly: an American unit under Canadian command, sent to a dangerous place to sustain a fraying international partnership.