The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (24 page)

A few days after I arrived at Leatherneck, I joined Cardinalli and a Marine unit known as Fox Company for an early-morning patrol to a cluster of compounds just outside the gates of the base. Cardinalli had olive skin, glasses, and long dark hair, which on this day she hid beneath a khaki bandana.
She had grown up in New Mexico, where she told me she had been something of a prodigy, finishing high school at thirteen and recording her first album at fifteen.
At Notre Dame, she had written a PhD dissertation linking the musical and liturgical traditions of the Penitentes, a Catholic lay confraternity in northern New Mexico, to those of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in medieval Spain.
When hijacked planes hit New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, Cardinalli had wanted to help. But given her background in music and theology, a practical role in the Global War on Terror wasn’t immediately apparent. Nevertheless, she got to thinking about the connection between her research on the Penitentes and intelligence work. In her dissertation, she
had written that the “secrecy” of the Penitentes made their communities difficult for an outsider to penetrate.
Later, she would describe her dissertation research as “directly relevant to current intelligence and counterterrorism issues” and say that while working on it, she had “employed a variety of techniques typical of intelligence, investigative, and ethnographic work.” She connected her research on the Penitentes to penitential themes in Shiite Islam and served as an
intelligence analyst, deploying briefly to Iraq.
“Being an activist type, I had a lot of preconceptions about how the military operated,” she told me. Yet she was touched by the work U.S. soldiers were doing to improve Iraqi lives.

Cardinalli was now in the final days of an abbreviated tour as AF6’s social scientist, and that morning’s patrol would be her last.
It had grown out of a medical mission a few weeks earlier, when Cardinalli had accompanied female marines and a female Navy doctor on a visit to the small group of houses that the Marines called Settlement 1. She had gone along on the medical mission because it offered a rare opportunity to interview Afghans in the desert around Leatherneck where few people lived.
When the Navy doctor had finished talking to an Afghan family and doling out pills, Cardinalli had gotten to pose a few questions of her own, though the Afghans were not as forthcoming as she’d hoped. But the thing that struck Cardinalli most forcefully was the Navy doctor’s lack of bedside manner. The Afghans had seemed to grow visibly angry when they were handed small packets of six or eight pills. The Marines didn’t give out large quantities of medicine for good reason; they were doing all they could to prevent overdoses.
But this concern struck Cardinalli as unimportant compared to the possibility that Afghans might view Americans as “stingy.” When the military doctor told people she could only give them a small number of pills, her words “were inevitably perceived by the local residents to be a lie,” Cardinalli wrote later. Afghans “view American forces to be resource-rich and  . . . it is inconceivable that our supply would be so limited. Instead, local residents are forced to view the Americans with the anger of unfulfilled expectations and question the team’s motives for intruding upon their homes in order to provide something of such little benefit.” Cardinalli wanted to make things right with the people of Settlement 1. She wanted to show them that Americans were not just rich, but generous.

Cardinalli planned to conduct a follow-up medical mission of her own. She had filled a camouflage backpack with over-the-counter cold medicine, ankle braces, Carmex lip balm, motion sickness tablets, and pain relievers. She had gathered these medicines from boxes of donations outside the chaplain’s offices around base or bought them at the PX.
She had no medical training beyond a brief combat first aid course, and when she told me about the mission, I wondered what the Afghans in Settlement 1 would do with all these pills and potions with their incomprehensible English instructions.

The officer in charge of Fox Company was a thirty-eight-year-old captain named Bob McCarthy. He wore his uniform open to reveal a triangle of chest and walked with a swagger. The Marines planned to hand out child-sized Crocs, knapsacks, notebooks, cooking oil, beans, and tea. Before we set out, McCarthy told Cardinalli to make sure she took time to thoroughly explain the medicines to Afghans she met. But he also cautioned that the patrol would be short—a little over two hours. Some of us climbed into a Max Pro, a giant armored vehicle, while the rest of the marines piled into Humvees. We drove about two miles over soft dunes studded with volcanic stones and climbed down near a scattering of compounds. Cardinalli and Flo, an Afghan-American interpreter from Los Angeles, pulled out a cardboard box full of book bags and school supplies. It said “The Church of JESUS CHRIST of Latter Day Saints” on the side.

“I would just watch the box,” McCarthy told them. Cardinalli stuffed it back into the truck.

She and Flo made their way to the nearest compound, where an Afghan dog, long-legged and rangy, barked at them. The man of the house had a tanned, open face, a clean beard, and dark hair under a white turban.
He later told me he was from Nad Ali, a place in Helmand that had seen a lot of fighting. He had bought the house and land where he and his family lived for ten thousand Afghanis, about $200. They
had been there about three years, and he worked as a laborer, building mud houses. He invited us inside. Cardinalli and Flo had been here before with the female medical team. The Afghan led them through a hallway into a clean, sunlit room with mats on the floor and sleeping mattresses piled high. The walls were adorned with some of the family’s prized possessions: embroidered cloths, silver serving spoons, a plastic fork, a scrub brush, a clock, and a headless doll.

Cardinalli and Flo arranged themselves on the floor across from a woman in a red sequined dress and matching headscarf. The woman had curly dark hair and black eyes, and her forehead was tattooed with blue ink. She wore thick sets of red and gold bangles, and her feet were dirty and calloused. She held a baby with a blue pacifier on her lap and eight other children of varying ages clustered around her. They were Kuchis, nomadic herders whose regular migrations had been disrupted by war and drought. Many Kuchis were now settled, but putting down roots had made their traditional herding impossible. Some had been industrious enough to farm or find work in villages, making bricks, doing manual labor, or driving taxis. Others, like the residents of Settlement 1, were desperately poor.

Cardinalli opened her bag of medicines. The Afghan man immediately assumed she was a doctor—the Marines had, after all, brought a doctor to visit his family before. He asked Cardinalli to feel his wife’s stomach, which had been hurting since she had given birth to her latest set of twins. She had borne ten children in all, the man told us, and her stomach tissue had stretched. It hurt when she did chores around the house. They’d been told that she needed an operation, but they couldn’t afford it.

“Tell him that I’m not a doctor, but I’m a medic, a nurse,” Cardinalli told Flo. She wasn’t a medic or a nurse. She and her teammates had taken an emergency first aid course before deployment, learning to clear an airway, bandage a bullet wound, and apply a tourniquet.
“Obviously I can’t do an operation,” Cardinalli continued, “but what I can give her is things that can help relieve the pain.” She dug into her backpack and pulled out a container of Icy Hot, a cream for arthritis and joint pain. She handed it to the Afghan man. “If the tissue hurts—when it’s hurting—rub this cream on,” Cardinalli said. “It’ll feel hot at first, but then it will help the tissue. It’ll ease the pain on the inside.”

The man took the cream. The woman asked for food for her baby. Cardinalli offered them a handful of honey sticks and four strawberry protein bars from the chow hall on base, suggesting they dissolve the bars in milk. The woman said she was always in pain. Cardinalli handed her some pink tablets, a generic form of Pepto-Bismol. Flo dug into her bag and pulled out a pile of scarves. She handed them to the woman and her daughters.

Cardinalli scanned the room, gazing at the embroidery on the wall. “Her work is very beautiful,” she told the man. “Americans would pay good money for it.” She began asking questions. Where did they get their news? From Lashkar Gah, the man said. Did the woman listen to the radio? Yes, the man told her. What kind of programs did she like? Programs for women, songs with a fast beat for women to dance to. Cardinalli dutifully recorded his answers in her notebook. The woman said nothing.

When they were done, the man walked us to the door. Outside, the marines were ornery. One of the kids had been goading the dog to bite them.

“Next time that fucking dog gets near, we’re going to kill his fucking dog,” a twenty-one-year-old lance corporal from Texas said.

An Afghan man in a tunic and vest appeared and led us to the next compound, which lay about five hundred yards away. I asked the man what he thought about the Americans.

“It depends which Americans,” he said. “Some are tough and aggressive with us and as Pashtuns we feel kind of threatened by them.”

“Tell him we’re not here to threaten,” Cardinalli put in. “We’re here to help.”

At the next house, children swarmed the marines. “You guys are a lot better than those other fucking brats,” the lance corporal from Texas said.

This place was poorer than the other compound, and more ragged. Eight children crowded the room where we sat. One little girl had tangled, matted hair and glassy eyes. A boy tried to grab my water bottle. The patriarch was big and unkempt, with a loud voice and a gray beard. He wore a dirty green tunic unbuttoned at the top, a white turban, and old black shoes.

“Did you guys bring me dollars?” he asked Cardinalli and Flo once they were inside. “It doesn’t matter if you speak Farsi or Pashto, I just need the medicine,” he told them. “Every time I stand up I get dizzy.”

“When you stand up and get dizzy, that’s because your blood doesn’t have enough water, it doesn’t have enough fluid, so it doesn’t reach your head in time,” Cardinalli told him confidently.

I had no idea what she was talking about, and the big man wasn’t listening. He asked again for medicine. The kids moved around uneasily in the shadows, where a thin, dark-haired woman sat. She had a shrill voice and a crescent tattooed on her forehead; more blue ink patterned her lower lip and chin. Cardinalli was asking the man about his ailments. She gave him two packages of cough drops, a bag of vitamin C tablets, and a tin of Carmex.

“That’s all I get?” he asked.

The woman wanted skin lotion. Cardinalli told her to rub Carmex on her face. Flo handed out Sprite, Snapple, and grapefruit juice from the base cafeteria. Cardinalli wanted to know if they had trouble sleeping. She was holding a package of motion sickness pills. They had no problem sleeping, the man said. Cardinalli handed the woman a knee strap and an elbow band for athletic injuries.

The man wanted more. Cardinalli handed over all that was left of her plastic bag full of medicines, hurriedly explaining that he shouldn’t eat a cold pack meant for icing athletic injuries. When there was nothing more to give, they remembered the book bags and shoes in the Humvees outside. The man wanted those, too. He walked them out. A few cornstalks grew in front of the house. Cardinalli asked what he did for work.

“I don’t do anything,” the man said. “No food, no water. We just grow a few things here.”

“Does he have any other training or education?” she asked Flo.

The man ignored the question. “Tell these Americans not to destroy our country,” he told Flo.

The man’s children had streamed out with us, and now I watched them grab the schoolbags and shoes.

“Some people really get the idea about self-sustainment,” Cardinalli said, “and some don’t.” She turned to the Afghan man. “What do the ladies do mostly during the day?” she asked hopefully. “How do they spend the day?”

“There’s nothing to do,” the man said.

“Do they have any hobbies or talents, like sewing?”

He waved the question away. When he was gone, I told Cardinalli what he had said about the Americans destroying his country.

“They live in the security that we provide. They moved here because of us,” Cardinalli said testily. “So we’re destroying their country!” We climbed back into the Max Pro. “It just sucks the life out of you, doesn’t it?” Cardinalli asked me. “You end up kind of—sad.”

She was not wrong about the complicated, parasitic relationship between the Afghans of Settlement 1 and the foreign troops who had taken up residence in Helmand. A trickle of mostly transitory Afghans—nomads, internally displaced people, returning refugees—had settled on the unwelcoming dirt around the American and
British bases. Some undoubtedly hoped to benefit from their newfound proximity to foreigners, but the nature of that benefit was mixed. On the way back to Leatherneck, we stopped at a compound next to a stand of green vegetation. The plants were rooted in blackish mud, and a cornfield stretched along one side of the property. It was the only cultivated area in a sea of desert.

“This is the compound that flourishes from shit runoff,” someone announced. I looked around and saw a dark stream.
The Afghans were growing vegetables in the sewage runoff from the nearby military bases.

“We’ve told him about the health risks,” one of the marines said. “He moved here because of it. Says it’s good fertilizer.”

On the way back to the base, I asked a sergeant whether he thought giving out Crocs, notebooks, beans, and tea could sway local opinion about the Americans.

“Some of them like us, some of them don’t,” he told me. “I really don’t know if we’ve had much effect changing people’s minds.”

He was right. When Lacy and I stopped by Fox Company’s tent the following afternoon, we learned that a military convoy had hit a buried bomb just south of the second compound Cardinalli had visited; the marines had found two other explosives buried in the road nearby. It was likely that the old man in the compound had seen the insurgents burying the bomb near his house, or at least heard about it. He had taken everything Cardinalli had to give, but he had said nothing to warn the Americans.