The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (18 page)

White bandages hid Loyd’s body. She couldn’t talk, but she recognized them when they came in and tears welled in her eyes. Cooper could barely look at her. Pull yourself together, he thought. He brought his face close to hers, whispering so only she could hear him. ‘You’ve got to get better,’ he told her. ‘We need you for this project.’

*  *  *

Back in Maiwand,
Ayala sat cross-legged against a wall in the shade.
The soldiers didn’t know if he was nuts or what, so they put a guard on him. When Ayala got up to stretch his legs, the soldier told him to sit down.

‘Are you here to watch me?’ Ayala asked.

‘What do you think?’

Ayala sat down. He caught sight of Jack Bauer. ‘Hey, Jack,’ Ayala called. ‘Give me a cigarette.’

Jack handed him the pack. The interpreter was shaken and confused, first by the attack on Loyd and then by Ayala’s execution of the captive. Ayala who, a few minutes earlier, had ordered Jack to stop kicking the very same man because it was culturally inappropriate. Ayala must have loved Loyd, Jack thought.

‘Why you killed that person?’ he asked.

Ayala lit up and inhaled deeply. When he heard what had happened to Loyd, he told Jack, he’d lost control. He didn’t know what was going to happen next. Ayala looked at the interpreter. ‘Do you know what’s going to happen to me?’

After a while, an officer came over. They were taking Ayala back to the base. Ayala rose and dusted himself off. ‘Hey, take care, Jack,’ he said. ‘See you.’

Jack stood there watching him go.

They took Ayala to Ramrod, the desert base where he, Loyd, and Cooper had landed a few weeks earlier. He sat in the command center waiting for someone to tell him what was going on. A few soldiers came up.
‘Everything’s going to be okay,’ one told him. ‘Are you all right?’ someone else said. ‘Sorry about Paula.’

Ayala had been a soldier. He wanted someone to look him in the eye and tell him what was going to happen to him, whatever it was, but no one would. Finally, he asked the unit’s senior enlisted man what he should expect. The command sergeant major said he didn’t know.

At last, two young soldiers took him to the landing zone. They boarded a Chinook like the one Ayala and his teammates had flown in on. The copters usually carried scores of soldiers, but on this day Ayala and his escorts had the aircraft to themselves. They flew fast and low over desert and farmland, the late-afternoon light turning the landscape a glittering gold, and landed at Kandahar Airfield at sunset. Mike Warren, the team leader, stood waiting as the helicopter lowered onto the tarmac.
As he watched armed escorts lead Ayala off, he noticed something different about his friend. Ayala always stood exceptionally straight. Now his shoulders slumped and he walked with a shambling aimlessness, as if he were lost.

Military police cuffed Ayala and took him to a truck. Warren tried to get close enough to talk to him, but the police wouldn’t let him.
They took Ayala for a physical exam, then to a holding cell that had once been a bathroom: sewage pipes cemented into the floor, a lingering stench. The two soldiers who had flown with him took turns standing guard outside. They didn’t talk to him much, and
studiously avoided discussing what had happened that day. What little they said concerned football, women, and things they’d done in the Army.

That evening, Army investigators showed up and questioned Ayala until midnight. He refused to write a statement without a lawyer, but he
had nothing to hide, so he answered their questions.
‘I was thinking I saw Paula and thought fuck this guy,’ Ayala told them. An investigator asked how he’d felt after the shooting. Ayala said he was angry at the Afghan and worried about Loyd. “He had no remorse about shooting the man because he deserved to die for what he did,” an investigator wrote.

After three days, they cuffed Ayala and shackled his legs. Four airmen escorted him north to the American base at Bagram. Once there, they put him in a six- by ten-foot cell designed to house prisoners overnight. When he had to use the bathroom, they marched him to the portable toilets in leg shackles. When he showered, his guards made everyone else clear out and wait for him to finish.

He spent three weeks there. As in Kandahar, two soldiers sat beyond the barred door of his cell, watching him sleep, eat, and read. Sometimes he talked to them, drawing them out as he had the young soldiers in Maiwand. They told him about their fifteen-month tours, how they would come home after a couple of those and find their wives had left them for someone else. This was why so many soldiers were committing suicide, Ayala thought.
They had been sent to do jobs they hadn’t been trained to do in a war they didn’t understand. To pass the time, he read
Roberts Ridge
and
Lone Survivor,
stories about heroic battles waged by Navy SEALs in the Afghan mountains. In these books, as never in the real war, a reassuring morality guided the cosmos, a sharp and unmistakable line separated good from evil. When one of Ayala’s guards finished John McCain’s memoir,
Faith of My Fathers,
he handed it through the bars, and
Ayala read about McCain’s time as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, how political considerations there had hamstrung servicemen, how Navy pilots had been forbidden to fire on North Vietnamese surface-to-air missiles unless they were fired on first.
How similar that war had been to this one, Ayala thought.
American soldiers in Afghanistan watched their buddies get killed and were
ordered not to shoot back unless they were sure the area was clear of civilians. Ayala himself had delivered those lessons to the soldiers of the 2–2. But now he saw things differently. The Taliban were the enemy, but the Taliban were also the people they were trying to help.
It was an impossible conflict—impossible and unwinnable.

He had killed the Afghan captive at a politically sensitive moment. U.S. and NATO forces had been firing from the air on Taliban fighters and people they believed were Taliban since the beginning of the war, but
their intelligence was often flawed, and many civilians had been killed in the strikes. Anger over those killings had crested the month before Ayala and his teammates arrived in Kandahar.
In August 2008, a coalition air strike in the western village of Azizabad killed some ninety unarmed men, women, and children. The military at first denied that its bombs had killed any civilians, but a U.N. investigation and cell phone video confirmed the deaths. It made Afghans wonder, as they always did when things like this happened, whether the war was worth its human cost, and the Karzai government made a lot of noise about whether it could continue to support NATO.
Then–Secretary of Defense Robert Gates flew to Kabul to apologize, and the NATO commander in Afghanistan,
General McKiernan, declared reducing civilian casualties “of paramount importance.” That fall, McKiernan ordered soldiers to “demonstrate proportionality, requisite restraint, and the utmost discrimination” in their use of firepower. When infantrymen read that, some started to wonder if they would be punished simply for firing their guns.

The Azizabad bombing was one more event driving the shift toward counterinsurgency that would occur, at least temporarily, under Barack Obama and the generals he would choose to run the war. Civilian casualties played into the hands of insurgents, who accused the Americans and their international allies of a brutal occupation. Karzai used the civilian deaths to distance himself from U.S. and NATO policy
and win political support at home.
He cried on TV as he spoke of children maimed by coalition bombs, and he accused the foreigners of arrogantly failing to cooperate with his government. On November 3, the day before Paula Loyd had been attacked,
U.S. aircraft had bombed a wedding party north of Kandahar, killing thirty-seven civilians, including twenty-three children. At a news conference later that week, Karzai said that ending civilian casualties would be his first demand for Obama, the U.S. president-elect.

Ayala knew that as a civilian contractor working for a new, experimental program, he was of little value to the Army. He had killed a cuffed detainee, a crime that fit neatly into
the prevailing Afghan narrative of an arrogant foreign occupation that valued Afghan lives cheaply. If the Americans were looking for someone to hold up to their Afghan partners as a symbol of the military’s ability to police itself, he would do just fine. That Ayala’s victim had attacked and severely wounded an American—that many Afghans would have considered death an appropriate penalty for setting a woman on fire—did not change the laws of war. With Loyd’s Afghan assailant dead, U.S. forces might never know what had motivated him, and this was exactly the kind of question Ayala and his teammates had been sent to Maiwand to answer.
Ayala knew that he would be accused of betraying his mission. He knew that people would blame him for killing a man who, had he been convinced to talk, might have helped the Americans fight the insurgency. But he had seen that kind of information misused or ignored too many times to put much stock in the notion that it would do any good, and here, his real-world experience ran up hard against the idealistic goals of the Human Terrain System. What was anybody going to do with that information? Ayala wondered. How many Americans had died in Afghanistan, were still dying, and what good had information done them? A few months earlier,
more than one thousand men had escaped from the main prison in Kandahar, about four hundred of them insurgents.
The jailbreak had been carefully planned and masterfully executed,
almost certainly with help from inside. Now they were going to hand Loyd’s attacker to the Afghan police, to the Afghan prison system? No, Ayala had thought in those fateful seconds before he pulled the trigger. Not on my watch.

Americans had to take responsibility when they killed innocent people, Ayala thought; that went without saying. But they also had to take responsibility for the young men and women they sent to war. The nation owed its soldiers the right to self-defense, the right to defend their comrades, and the right to know what they were doing out there. He was thinking about the way counterinsurgency required soldiers to act like police or development workers.
But rushing aid and development into Maiwand was getting soldiers killed, and just as important, it was failing.
The U.S. military was building a new office for the district governor, but the current governor would soon be gone, and his successor would prefer the old office with its mature garden of trees and flowers. He would continue to work there, only visiting the new building for meetings with the Americans. Meanwhile, a series of U.S. military units would busy themselves installing plumbing and electricity in the new building and buying fancy furniture that remained encased in plastic. Soon, bored Afghan police would be chipping holes in the new plaster walls and shitting in the unplumbed toilets, and the governor and his administrators would start asking the Americans for satellite TVs.
American commanders seemed more interested in winning awards and promotions back home, Ayala thought, than in what would become of Afghans after they left.

Alone in his cell, Ayala thought about his time as Karzai’s bodyguard. Back in the early years of the war, he had accompanied Karzai to open a girls’ school and a hospital in Ghazni. Now both had been shuttered, and the Taliban ran a shadow court there. How had this happened? Ayala wondered. Who had fallen asleep on duty? It was
perhaps the critical question of the war, and the question of responsibility lay beneath it. Who fell asleep—was it us, or was it them? The United States had lost interest in Afghanistan, but Afghan leaders, too, had failed to seize the most powerful moment of possibility their country had seen in decades. In Maiwand and Kandahar, Ayala had seen how local big men kept American money for themselves, using it to buy weapons, armored cars, and property in Dubai. The fledgling political system that America had helped build in Afghanistan was a cruel joke.
“It’s not what you can do for the people,” Ayala would tell me. “It’s what can you guys do for me as a leader, how can I get power and fame?” Afghan politicians made sure everyone in their family and tribe got paid. The powerful grew stronger while the weak stayed weak, if they survived at all.

Ayala believed that the work he’d done in Iraq and Afghanistan had made a difference. That, along with the money, was why he had signed up to guard Karzai and Maliki. It was why he had gone to work for the Human Terrain System. He’d wanted to change the way the Army dealt with Afghan civilians. He had kept himself from shooting Salam as he ran, when he heard someone yelling those words—
Stop him! Shoot him!
—but there on the path, with the Afghan in handcuffs, his judgment had betrayed him. He knew what he’d done was technically wrong, but it hadn’t felt wrong, still didn’t. He had come to Afghanistan to make a difference. Over time, he would feel that the real difference he’d made in the war—
maybe the only difference one man could make—was having killed the man who had attacked Paula Loyd. Everyone was always talking about information operations, the fight to control the narrative, the battle for hearts and minds.
“Fuck this Muslim shit,” he would tell me later. “You want to be part of the information operation? Well, this is a message sent. This is a message sent to the Taliban.”

Ayala was known among friends and acquaintances for his calm good humor. He had trained men who would guard American
diplomats in war zones, teaching them about the use-of-force continuum, the idea that the force used to counter a threat should be proportional and that only a grave threat could justify a lethal response. He’d taught them to make sure there were no allies or civilians in their line of fire, that they had a clear shot. He knew that in a counterinsurgency, shooting the wrong man could be worse than failing to shoot the right one. If he of all people had killed an Afghan detainee, what could Americans expect of an eighteen-year-old kid going to war for the first time?

About a week after Ayala arrived in Bagram, his military lawyer asked a magistrate on the air base to release him to the custody of the Human Terrain Team stationed there. But military prosecutors argued that with his combat training, Ayala could easily escape to Kabul, just forty-five minutes away by road. The magistrate agreed. Ayala would remain in the cramped holding cell until they could figure out whether he would be tried by the Army under the Uniform Code of Military Justice or back home in federal court. Members of the Bagram Human Terrain Team visited often, bringing warm socks, long-sleeved shirts, magazines, and sometimes barbecued ribs or a cup of coffee from the Green Bean, a Starbucks look-alike on base. Soldiers brought him cigarettes, and even though he didn’t smoke, he would say he needed one just so they would take him outside in the sun. He would be shackled and cold, but at least he got out of his cell. Mike Warren flew up from Kandahar.
Outraged at how the Army was treating his friend, he drove to Kabul and tried to get a message to Karzai. This man protected you, Warren wanted to tell the president. This man is not the enemy. He passed the message to a Karzai bodyguard and left. He never found out if it reached the president.