The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (21 page)

Ayala had already been severely punished, Nachmanoff told the judge. As a felon, he would be forbidden to carry a gun or get a security clearance, making work as a battle zone contractor impossible. Then, turning to the rows of chairs behind him, Nachmanoff asked Ayala’s supporters to stand. As if choreographed, the somberly dressed men and women who filled the visitor’s gallery rose to their feet in a single motion. Patty Ward was there, pale in a ruffled shirt and black jacket, and Loyd’s half brother, Paul. Nearly everyone in the courtroom stood. “He’s affected many, many people in his life in a positive way,” Nachmanoff told the judge. “The government wants the court to impose a punishment now based on one moment, one act.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Rich rose to address the court. He was in an unenviable position. Early on, the government’s case had seemed admirably straightforward: it was advocating on behalf of a handcuffed victim and defending the laws of war. But this simple and compelling narrative had lost much of its potency since the defense had filed photos of Ayala handing out stuffed animals to Afghan children, the letter from Paula Loyd’s mother endorsing Ayala’s execution of her daughter’s killer, and
a moving sentencing documentary in which Loyd’s boyfriend, Frank Muggeo, had said that punishing Ayala would
amount to a terrorist victory.
Rich was a veteran himself—a retired Marine general who had led the Corps’s Judge Advocate Division before becoming a federal prosecutor. He had taken his LSATs in Da Nang, Vietnam, the year before Michael Nachmanoff was born. Now he found himself arguing for the punishment of a man he seemed unwilling to blame.

“Ms. Loyd and her friends and supporters and family deserve all of our sympathy,” Rich told the judge. “Abdul Salam, the nominal victim in this case, the person whose despicable act set these terrible events in motion, deserves none, and neither does the defendant, Your Honor, which I hasten to add is not to say that we don’t empathize with what the defendant did. He did what he thought he had to do. Whether it was morally or philosophically right is for each of us who know the facts of this case to individually decide for ourselves. Whatever the answer to that question is, Your Honor, what he did, most assuredly, was not legally right.”

Here Rich ceded the battle for the better narrative, retaining only the cold comfort of the law. It was not an auspicious strategy. Figley’s report was “a bunch of psychiatric mumbo jumbo,” Rich told the court. Ayala was having it both ways: “He can’t be a hero on the one hand and somehow be mentally deficient on the other. It simply doesn’t wash.” But in the next breath, he found himself almost defending Ayala for shooting the Afghan out of “passion born of friendship and respect for Ms. Loyd, passion born of abhorrence of what Salam had done to her, passion exercised in the heat of the moment.”

Rich was not arguing for six to eight years’ imprisonment. He agreed that Ayala’s crime merited a more lenient sentence. Yet he was defending one of the most basic rules of combat: that capturing forces are forbidden to shoot prisoners. Ayala was not some green young soldier. He had years of training and experience, Rich told the court, and he knew better. When he killed the handcuffed detainee, he had
threatened to erase much of what had been drilled into the heads of the impressionable young soldiers he’d been accompanying. A tough sentence would make the point that prisoners could not be killed with impunity, that no matter how angry you got, killing a captive was wrong.

In the legalistic realm of his written filing, Rich had pursued Ayala with greater verve than he now seemed able to muster in a courtroom filled with Paula Loyd’s relatives. “The facts and circumstances of this case are not complex,” the prosecutor had written.
“It was an execution.” He went on to highlight the fact on which the battle of narratives turned, the fact that Nachmanoff had so successfully exploited and that, had Ayala’s crime occurred on an American street and not an Afghan one, would have been impossible to obscure.
“We know much about Paula Loyd and the defendant,” Rich had written, “but very little about Salam.”

In the emotionally charged courtroom that day, Salam remained a cipher. Had he been American, or even a citizen of some more developed and less frightening country, a country where America was not at war, his crime would have been no less heinous, but neither would he have been such a complete blank. Indeed, if Salam had been described to the judge as anything other than simply a “terrorist,” he would not have been entirely deprived of sympathy by the government prosecuting his murder. In constructing Ayala’s defense, Nachmanoff had tried to show that people are complex, that every act grows from a dizzying web of antecedents, and that punishment should be based on a life’s entirety rather than a single instant. He had urged the judge not to punish Ayala “based on one moment, one act.” But it was impossible to overlook the fact that, in this Virginia courtroom, Abdul Salam’s life had been reduced to one moment, one act.

Only a couple of small gestures by the government even hinted at the fact that Salam’s backstory was entirely absent from consideration.
“All we know about Ayala’s victim, Abdul Salam, is that he was a
‘frequent stranger’ in the village where he died,” Rich wrote in his sentencing memo.
“We know nothing at all about what caused him to torch Paula Loyd. But we do know that when Ayala executed him, he was no longer a threat to Ayala, or his other teammate or the soldiers who were with them. In fact, Salam was his prisoner. That is what makes this a serious offense.”

A few days before the sentencing, the government had entered fifteen photographs into evidence. They were pictures that agents from the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division had taken when they traveled to Maiwand the day after the killing. In some, Lieutenant Pathak, the platoon leader, restaged Ayala’s killing of the Afghan. A soldier playing Salam lay on the dirt path with his hands behind his back, while Pathak, pretending to be Ayala, knelt behind him with his knee in the man’s ribs.
One photograph showed Salam’s forearm bearing a rudimentary tattoo of his name, which means “Servant of Peace.” In another picture, Salam’s dead body lay on the path, his feet toward the river. A stain darkened the sand beneath him, and a body bag waited a few feet off. The most disturbing picture was taken at close range. In it, Salam’s body was unnaturally twisted, his head bent away from the camera. He had been turned on his side to reveal that his hands were still bound behind his back. He was small and thin and his tunic was hiked up to reveal the pale skin above his hip. The ground beneath his legs was wet from the stream, where Jack Bauer had wrestled with him. Blood ran from his head, small black rivers in thick dust.

When Rich finished speaking, Judge Claude Hilton looked up from the papers scattered across his desk. He asked if Ayala had anything to say. Ayala walked to the podium and stood there, solid as a wall in his dark suit.

“The day of November 4, 2008, I wish it never occurred,” he said,
his voice soft and gravelly. “I’m standing here in a not so very favorable position, but whatever is imposed on me, I will continue to serve honorably and professionally. Thank you.”

In the gallery, Santwier sat next to her father, a criminal defense lawyer who had devoted many hours to Ayala’s case. Loyd’s half brother and his wife held hands as Judge Hilton began to speak. Although the guidelines called for a sentence of six to eight years, the judge said, the facts of the case called for less. Salam’s attack on Loyd had provoked his killing, “and would provide provocation for anyone who was present there at the time.” Ayala had a sterling record of military service and had led a productive life.
“You can’t forget that this didn’t occur here on the streets,” Hilton said. “This occurred in a hostile area, maybe not right in the middle of a battlefield but certainly in the middle of a war. Considering all those things, it will be the sentence of the court, Mr. Ayala, that you be placed on probation for a period of five years—”

He wasn’t going to prison. Gasps and sobs drowned out the judge’s words. Loyd’s mother hunched forward, leaning against her husband, her shoulders shaking, and Loyd’s half brother and sister-in-law cried in each other’s arms. The judge was saying that Ayala would have to pay a $12,500 fine, that he wouldn’t be allowed to work in security or protective services, that he would have to undergo whatever mental health counseling his probation officer required, but Ayala was already standing and hugging his lawyer and Santwier, and everyone spilled out into the hallway, where Patty Ward threw her arms around Loyd’s half brother and someone picked Santwier up and swung her around until a bailiff came out and said, “Can you hold it down? The judge is still on the bench.”

I
n the months after Paula
Loyd was attacked, I retraced her steps. I flew to Zabul, the poor province in southeastern Afghanistan where she had worked for USAID, and to Kabul, where, one evening, I mentioned her name to a member of Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission. He had known Loyd but hadn’t heard of her death, and when I told him what had happened he sat still and stared at the floor. After a while he rose and walked to his computer to search his email inbox for her last note to him. I switched off my audio recorder, feeling like a voyeur.

By early 2009, the Human Terrain System was showing signs of strain.
Paula Loyd had been the third Human Terrain social scientist killed in the field in eight months.
The previous May, a brilliant thirty-one-year-old former Marshall Scholar named Michael Bhatia had died when a roadside bomb exploded near his Humvee. It had
happened in Sabari, whose gentle green hills and winding lanes conjure a nineteenth-century landscape painting and mask its status as one of the most violent places in Khost, the eastern Afghan province where the first-ever Human Terrain Team had seen such success.
A month later, Nicole Suveges, a thirty-eight-year-old graduate student at Johns Hopkins, was killed when a bomb exploded during a meeting she was attending in Baghdad’s Sadr City.
By the fall of 2008, reports of trouble on the teams were multiplying.
It emerged that among the Human Terrain social scientists deployed to Iraq were several who knew nothing about Iraqi culture, who had done their field research in Latin America or with Native Americans or among Dumpster divers, ravers, punk rockers, and Goth kids.
In Afghanistan, a Human Terrain Team leader and other male team members mocked a female teammate, writing the Spanish words “Mata La Vaca,” or “Kill the Cow,” on a whiteboard in the team’s office at Bagram Air Base. The woman interpreted these words as a death threat and accused her team leader of sexual harassment. A military investigation found that she was not alone. Men on the team had displayed pictures of naked women around the office and several other female team members had been subject to insults, ethnic slurs, and unfair work assignments.
The military asked that the team leader and another male team member never again be deployed with their unit, the 101st Airborne Division Special Troops Battalion, but the men kept working for the Human Terrain System.
Meanwhile, the United States was planning to send more troops to Afghanistan and the Army wanted more Human Terrain Teams. In early 2009, shortly after Loyd’s death, the Pentagon more than doubled its requirement for field teams in Afghanistan.

Paula Loyd, Don Ayala, and Clint Cooper had trained in Kansas before their deployment, so in February 2009, I flew out to Leavenworth.
The training consisted of four to five months of classroom work that included basic social science and research methods, military rank
structure, and courses on culture and history tailored to Iraq or Afghanistan. There was also a period of
several weeks known as “immersion,” when trainees bound for Afghanistan spent time at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, studying Dari and talking with Afghan-Americans, while those headed for Iraq undertook a special course at the University of Kansas.

The program’s administrators told me that the most interesting part of the training cycle would be the final week, when proto–Human Terrain Team members took part in a practical exercise to test what they had learned. The exercise was called Weston Resolve, named for the town of Weston, Missouri, near Leavenworth, where some of it took place.
The Human Terrain System’s press handler, former Army intelligence officer Lieutenant George Mace, described Weston Resolve to me as “a practicum in doing ethnography in any kind of village.” Mace was a veteran of the first Human Terrain Team in Iraq, and when I phoned him from my rental car after landing in Kansas City, he quickly directed me to the National Public Radio station on my FM dial. Reporters visiting from Washington were under no circumstances to be subjected to Middle America’s standard menu of conservative talk, Christian preaching, and country music, at least not when they were writing about a project that billed itself as a politically liberal fringe movement within the Army. My minder that week in Kansas was Major Robert Holbert, an Army reservist and former high school social studies teacher who had served on the first Human Terrain Team in Afghanistan, and who embodied the offbeat, left-leaning vibe the program sought to project. A convert to Islam with a shaved head, Holbert drove a Saab and listened to the Sex Pistols.

Human Terrain System training took place in the basement of a brick mini-mall in downtown Leavenworth called the Landing. It stood a couple of blocks from the railroad tracks and the Missouri River, which lunged along thick and sullen behind a stand of trees. The old
federal prison and the sprawling Army garrison that anchor the town lay about a mile to the northwest.
Fort Leavenworth is home to mid-career master’s programs for officers; it is where the nation’s biggest service contemplates its past and tries to get ahead of its future. The Human Terrain System laid claim to this spirit of military intellectualism, but if the rolling lawns of the base conjured a gracious university, the Landing had the dismal, downtrodden feel of an underfunded community college. Trainees shuffled between classes in a warren of bare rooms whose windows, if they had any, looked out on a parking lot.