The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (29 page)

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Hajji Sadoo Khan,
the Maiwand elder, had begged Salam’s father and brother to come to Kandahar to meet us, but they refused. The father, Mohammad Umar, was old, weak, and terrified. Was it us the old man feared, foreigners who might lure him into a trap? Or was he scared of what the Taliban might do if anyone learned that he and his son had talked to a foreign journalist?

Through intermediaries, we found a cell phone number for Salam’s brother. We reached him briefly, but the brother refused to talk. At last, we got through to Salam’s father by phone. Muhib asked the questions, taking notes as he listened.

Abdul Salam had been about twenty-five years old, his father said. He was married with one child. He worked with his brother, driving a tractor on construction jobs and delivering crushed stone to the district center. And since childhood, he had suffered from a mental disorder that seized him occasionally, maybe twice or three times a year.

During those spells, Salam lost control. He had a history of arson. The previous year, in the crowded Maiwand bazaar, he had set fire to his motorbike and then pushed it into the water, likely the same stream where the soldiers had dunked Loyd. When Mohammad Umar asked
why he’d done it, Salam had told his father: ‘I did not understand what I was doing.’

“What he did with that American lady, I did not like that,” Mohammad Umar said. “She did not have any kind of hostility with him, and I have never seen any kind of sign from him that he will do such bad things. But what he did, he was not in a normal condition. A normal person won’t do such things. My son did not want to do those things, but the time came that he was not in control. He had changed from normal condition to abnormal.”

Mental health care in Maiwand is nonexistent, but even a peasant like Salam’s father knew this was not the case everywhere. “The Americans are not mentally ill,” the old man said. “They are wiser than us. If someone blames my son for what he did, that is right. I agree with that. But I can prove that my son was mentally ill. Was the American who killed my son mentally ill, too? I blame him. He must not do that. I would bring him into the court.”

Mohammad Umar likely meant something more like “judgment”—he would have liked to bring Ayala before a council of elders, before the shura. “They did not give a chance to my son to express his views, why he did such a bad deed,” the old man said. He started to cry. “It would be better if they kept him alive in prison, or at least they could hand him over to the Afghan police. They would bring him to court. They did not do that. They killed him.”

Salam was not an insurgent, his father said. He was not even a Taliban supporter. “These are all lies,” he said. “I am working with the government, Abdul Salam was working with the government, and my son, Abdul Salam’s brother, is working with the government. Even today, he is busy with his tractor and working for the government.”

What about the story of the kidnapping and the stolen tractor? Had Salam been put up to the attack by the Taliban on the condition of getting his tractor back?

“What you were told, these are lies,” Mohammad Umar said. “The truth is that the tractor was captured by the Taliban a year before this attack on the foreign woman.” The Taliban had taken the tractor because the family was working for the government, bringing gravel to the district center, where it would be used to level lots and pave roads. Mohammad Umar and his sons had appealed to a local contractor to help them get the tractor back, and eventually the Taliban had handed it over. Abdul Salam and his brother had returned to work. “I wanted my son to help me and live with his young wife and help raise his children,” Mohammad Umar said. “That was his ambition, too.”

It was unlikely that anyone in the Maiwand shura would have seen fit to punish Ayala for killing Salam, but Mohammad Umar felt differently. He viewed his son’s shooting in much the same way the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the American judicial system did.

“That American did an illegal deed,” Mohammad Umar said. “When my son was handcuffed, he killed him.”

I
n October 2010, nearly two
years after the attack on Paula Loyd, I returned to Maiwand. I landed at Forward Operating Base Ramrod amid
news that a group of soldiers recently stationed there had been accused of killing Afghan civilians for sport. They had snapped pictures of themselves with the corpses, and cut off the dead men’s fingers as trophies. Things had changed since Loyd, Cooper, and Ayala had arrived there, full of hope for what the Americans could achieve.

In conversation with a young American officer that fall, Abdul Salam’s name came up. The Afghan police had recently told the Americans that Salam’s brother was planting deadly homemade bombs around the district. The Americans and Afghans were planning to raid his home and arrest him.

The Afghan police commander who had told the Americans about this was named Hajji Ahmadullah, but everyone called him Hajji Lala.
He was built like a troll, brief and squat with a black beard, a gold watch, and rough hair sprouting from his toes. Lala was a powerful man in Maiwand. He was in charge of the police post at the district center, and the Americans held him in high regard.

Abdul Salam’s brother was named Omar Bank, Hajji Lala told me. Bank was a committed insurgent, just like Salam. In fact, by Lala’s lights, the whole family was a bunch of radical jihadis. Lala had learned of Bank’s insurgent activities some time back, when the Americans had seen someone planting a bomb and radioed him to investigate. He had driven to the site and when he got out of his truck, he saw a man running. The police fired at the man, but he got away. They questioned some children who had been standing around. One of the boys identified the fugitive as Bank and said that Bank had given him ten Afghanis, about twenty cents, to go to a shop and buy himself corn chips for a snack. Lala surmised that Bank wanted to get rid of the kids so they wouldn’t see him planting the bomb.

The allegation that Bank was Abdul Salam’s brother weighed heavily against him. Abdul Salam had been “a Talib,” Lala told us without hesitation—“a big person of the Taliban.” He entirely rejected the notion that Abdul Salam had been mentally ill, but his argument was a self-fulfilling loop: Abdul Salam was an insurgent because his family were insurgents, and his family had to be insurgents because Salam had been one. “Is his brother also mentally sick?” Lala asked. “Then why does he love bombs and things like that?”

Lala exemplified a certain kind of old-school Afghan official whose survival depends on patronage.
He griped that the Americans took his intelligence informants for granted, underpaying them and spending too much money on fuel, roads, and other “useless things.” Lala had a better idea. “Give some money to those Taliban,” he suggested, “and buy them.” Lala had consolidated his power in Maiwand by making himself valuable to the Americans, and he knew that in some corners,
Paula Loyd’s killing had not been forgotten.
He had met with her the day before she was attacked, he told me. He had been on his way to Kandahar, and they had planned another meeting when he returned. He never saw her again.

A few weeks after I talked to him,
Lala and the Americans arrested Bank. He was detained for a time at Kandahar Airfield. But although the Afghan police had told U.S. soldiers that they had multiple tips incriminating him, the Americans couldn’t make the charge stick. They had arrested Bank in part because he had tested “weakly positive for explosives,” a young American intelligence officer told me later. But the more they learned about him, the clearer it became that the tips that had incriminated him might have stemmed from a personal dispute between Bank and one of the Afghans who had informed on him. “This is just one example of the many situations we have to deal with when working with tips from locals and our Afghan National Security Force counterparts,” the intelligence officer told me. “Many times they offer great information that leads to IED finds and legitimate detentions but, on occasion, there are situations such as this where the information just simply doesn’t pan out.” The Americans turned Bank over to the Afghan intelligence service, which promptly let him go.

The allegation that Bank and Abdul Salam were brothers also turned out to be wrong. It had been based entirely on the single, brief statement of an Afghan informant, the same informant who had reported seeing Bank detonate a bomb that struck an Afghan army patrol. “As best we know, Bank Mohammad has three younger brothers, a younger sister, and lives with his mother and father,” the American intelligence officer told me. “None of our information provides any possible connection to Abdul Salam.” Abdul Salam had become a symbol. He stood for violence against Americans in Maiwand, and anyone related to him was guilty by association.

No Human Terrain Team was operating in Maiwand when I visited
in 2010, but the soldiers had inherited a fair amount of information from their predecessors. Their commander,
Lieutenant Colonel Bryan Denny, acknowledged that there was much he didn’t know—might never know—about Maiwand. “Who really controls the governance here?” he wondered aloud during one of our conversations. “Where is the shadow government for the Taliban? Who really pulls the strings?” By late 2010, the American objective in Afghanistan was to get out as quickly and cleanly as possible. Denny’s job, as he saw it, was
to train the local Afghan army unit so his men wouldn’t have to come back.

In the United States, the Human Terrain System’s administration had been overhauled. In the spring of 2010,
the project had come under scrutiny from Congress and the Army, which found that
it suffered from inadequate government oversight, an overreliance on unaccountable contractors, and “unprofessional conduct” that included racism and sexual harassment. Human Terrain System workers submitted time cards that exaggerated their hours, yielding annual salaries between $224,000 and $280,000 and allowing workers to take almost six months of paid leave after completing nine-month tours. The government had spent $28 million a year on a contract with a social science research unit, the quality of whose reports was “frequently questioned.” It was paying contract instructors $1,200 to $1,500 a day even though they received “extremely negative student feedback.”

All this had transpired on Steve Fondacaro’s watch, and,
faced with a mess it had helped to create, the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command cut him loose. Fandacaro had been the right person to start the enterprise, an Army official told me, but the experiment had spun out of control. Fondacaro had always said he didn’t want the Human Terrain System to be corrupted by the Army’s DNA.
“He was right to a degree,” the official told me. “But at some point, it has to accept some of the DNA to be recognized as a child.” Montgomery McFate quit soon afterward. She seemed exhausted.
“I want to retire to obscurity
and raise llamas and go surfing,” she told me. Instead, she moved to Rhode Island, where she teaches at the Naval War College. The Training and Doctrine Command tapped one of its own to lead the Human Terrain System forward, and the program quietly began turning itself into an institution. By 2013, its sleek new web site described it as a “sociocultural intelligence enabling capability.”

Clint Cooper had returned to Afghanistan briefly after Loyd’s attack to serve on another Human Terrain Team, but he had left the program in the spring of 2009 and returned to Sierra Vista, Arizona, where he worked for the Army Culture Center, writing handbooks for soldiers about Afghanistan and Pakistan. By 2012, he was traveling often to train deploying soldiers, teaching them basic cultural cues, how to exchange polite greetings, in his words, how to “understand the Afghan frame of mind.” As so-called insider attacks by Afghan security forces multiplied, he told soldiers that Afghans had distinct ideas about personal space, honor, and pride. If one of their Afghan counterparts were unhappy, he hoped the Americans would at least see it coming.

Don Ayala had gone home to New Orleans and returned to painting, between regular visits to a court-ordered psychologist and his probation officer. Although he had been sentenced to five years’ probation, Nachmanoff convinced the court to release him from the system after only two and a half. In 2012, Ayala and Santwier moved back to Southern California to be close to their families. When I visited, they were still moving in. We ate dinner on a card table in the unfurnished living room, their pack of regal copper-colored ridgebacks snoozing nearby. Since his conviction, Ayala had patched together stints in telecommunications and short-term jobs training close-protection officers, but applying for steady, full-time work terrified him. He hated the idea of being rejected because he was a convicted felon. He thought often of the three lives that had ended that November day.

When Paula Loyd traveled to Afghanistan for the last time, she left
behind detailed instructions in case anything should happen to her. She wanted to help bring young Afghan women to the United States to study at Wellesley College, and not just any women, but members of some of Afghanistan’s most disadvantaged communities: girls from the southern provinces of Kandahar and Zabul, and ethnic Hazaras. Loyd stipulated that the scholarship recipients had to return to Afghanistan after completing their education, a noble goal but practically difficult for young Afghan women from poor backgrounds who, after four years studying in the United States, might find it almost impossible to go back to the way things were.
“Your daughter was a remarkable public servant, and I know her work changed lives and helped us forge a better future for the people of Afghanistan,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote to Loyd’s mother in 2010. “Her spirit will live on in the wonderful work you will do and through her legacy, and in her honor, the women and girls of Afghanistan will know a brighter future.”

Finding young Afghan women from disadvantaged backgrounds who spoke enough English to meet Wellesley’s entry requirements proved difficult, but in the years since Loyd’s death, her mother and stepfather have worked hard to secure her legacy. By 2013, they were helping an Afghan girl attend Choate Rosemary Hall. She plans to apply to Wellesley.