The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (37 page)

She had made staff sergeant:
Many details about Loyd’s time with the 450th in Afghanistan here and in the paragraphs below are from Mike Rathje, interview by author, January 21, 2013.

‘We are screaming into the silence’:
Wendy Solomon, “American Women Soldiers Are Opening Afghan Eyes,”
The Morning Call,
September 2, 2003.

“They banded together to hide information”:
Loyd, “Lesbian Resistance in the Bars of San Antonio, Texas,” 20.

At ribbon-cuttings for American-funded schools:
Ibid., and Rathje, interview by author, January 21, 2013.

Afghan men sometimes asked Loyd’s translator:
‘They’re usually surprised I’m a woman,’ Loyd told Solomon in 2003. ‘Sometimes I’ll be talking to the men in a village and they’ll turn to the interpreter and say, ‘Is that a man or a woman?’ But I haven’t had any problems with them. They’ve all been very nice.’ Ibid.

‘The fact that I’m a woman’:
Ibid.

‘They take me for who I am’:
Loyd was realistic enough to know that many Afghan men treated her respectfully for their own practical reasons. As a civil affairs
soldier, she had access to aid and development funds. “She said, ‘Well, mom, I’ve got the money.’ ” Ward, interview by author, December 14, 2012.

Loyd understood these concerns:
For Loyd paying the Afghan police directly, Ward, interview by author, December 14, 2012.

Soon she was in Kabul, working for a nongovernmental group:
Ward, interview by author, December 14, 2012.

One winter day, she attended a briefing on the upcoming expansion of NATO forces:
Frank Muggeo, interviews by author, February 2009 and October 18, 2012.

In late 2004, Loyd got a job with the United States Agency for International Development:
She worked for USAID from December 2004 through December 2005. Ward, interview by author, December 14, 2012.

The provincial governor, Delbar Arman:
Information about Arman here and below, Delbar Arman, interview by author, January 14, 2009.

elders covered their faces when they came to meet the governor:
Ibid.

Some woman was sick:
This account of Loyd’s evacuation of a pregnant Afghan woman is from ibid.

They tore the building apart:
This story is from U.S. Air Force Colonel Kevin P. McGlaughlin, who got to know Loyd and Arman when he headed the Zabul PRT between 2006 and 2007. McGlaughlin, interview by author, February 20, 2009.

During her year in Zabul, Loyd established a women’s tree-planting cooperative:
Ward, interview by author, December 14, 2012. Loyd received a USAID award for her work in Zabul.

She helped return the bodies of development contractors:
Remarks of Paula Loyd, “Stabilization and Reconstruction Operations in Post-Conflict and Crisis Zones: The Challenges of Military and Civilian Cooperation,” Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Panel, June 7, 2006. For more on the killings of Chemonics workers in Zabul and Helmand, Golnaz Esfandiari, “Afghanistan: Killings Raise Concerns for Aid Workers’ Safety,”
Radio Free Europe,
March 20, 2005.

strange women moving around the province:
Walker, funeral address, San Antonio, 2009. “Though the missionaries probably didn’t know what she had done, she was their guardian angel that day,” a military officer who worked with her recalled.

In 2005, Loyd took a job in Kabul:
For details about Loyd’s work with the United Nations, Stacy Crevello, interview by author, December 17, 2012.

she was one of the few people in Afghanistan with whom he could talk openly:
“Paula was very smart, easy to talk to. She spoke military because she’d been in the military. . . . [F]or a guy in my position, she was as close to a peer as I was going to have. . . . I could talk to her normally as opposed to, say, my NCOs and other officers.” McGlaughlin, interview by author, February 20, 2009.

Loyd had no problem telling him he was full of shit:
“She was soft and fuzzy but she could be cold and prickly if she wanted to be,” McGlaughlin told me. “She was more
than happy to say  . . . ‘You’re full of shit, this is why you’re wrong.’ She could do what we did because she’d been there, done that, got her T-shirt, but she also saw the bigger picture.” Ibid.

Loyd buried their guns in her purse:
“Paula’s got this bag the size of Texas, so we deposit our sidearms in the bag, and we blow through the metal detectors and she goes around the metal detectors. There was no way they were going to stop her with that big old smile and blond hair, there was no way they were going to touch her. There we were eating breakfast, armed to the teeth,” McGlaughlin recalled. Ibid.

In 2006, Loyd spoke on a panel at the Woodrow Wilson Center:
Remarks of Paula Loyd, “Stabilization and Reconstruction Operations in Post-Conflict and Crisis Zones: The Challenges of Military and Civilian Cooperation.”

She was not opposed to the war:
“We need fighting to be done,” Loyd said at the Wilson Center. “So when a PRT can work in coordination with an infantry unit to stabilize an area, I think it’s really useful.” Ibid.

Every American unit and every national force in NATO:
“Every rotation that comes in has to show that they’ve done something, so they want to put their stamp on something,” Loyd said at the Wilson Center. “Sometimes that can be counterproductive to working with the local governments, and working with the national government. They want to put  . . . their flag on the project.” Ibid.

the U.S. military had shown itself incapable of sustaining long-term relationships:
“The lack of institutional memory is a serious problem,” Loyd said. Ibid.

During her time in Zabul:
“When I was in Zabul with USAID at a PRT, I worked with two different Special Forces units,” Loyd told the Wilson Center audience. “I found that one was excellent, one was not so excellent. One of the reasons that the group that was not so excellent had some problems is because all of their interpreters were from one tribe. That means that all of their information came from that one tribe. Then we started having problems of certain people getting arrested, that maybe were for more tribal reasons than because they were with the Taliban or al Qaeda  . . .” Ibid.

Loyd’s lungs had begun to bother her:
Ward, interview by author, December 14, 2012.

They’d dated on and off, but work had kept them apart:
Frank Muggeo, interviews by author, February 2009 and October 18, 2012.

‘You’d rather be sitting on a rug talking to elders’:
Ward, interviews by author, February 15, 2009, and December 14, 2012. Loyd wanted to get a PhD in Afghan studies, Ward told me, but she needed to work on her language skills, and she knew going back to Afghanistan was the best way to do that.

Chapter 4: Maiwand

The Chinook touched down amid a swirl of dirt and stones:
Visual details here and below come from photographs taken by Loyd’s teammates, Clint Cooper and Don Ayala,
and from interviews with Ayala, Cooper, and the soldiers and officers of the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, known as the 2–2.

It got up near 120 degrees, the heat so oppressive:
For the temperature range, see Ali A. Jalali and Lester W. Grau, “Expeditionary Forces: Superior Technology Defeated—The Battle of Maiwand,”
Military Review,
May–June 2001. According to the 2–2’s executive officer, Major Cale Brown, who arrived with the first soldiers on August 15, 2008: “It was just bare desert. It was roughing it. It’s very hot out here in the summer. It was guys hunkering down underneath the camouflage nets and drinking a whole lot of water, letting the engineers work putting up the initial walls. . . . The sort of rectangular [perimeter of] Hescos, that was the first thing they put up, and then they just pushed up sort of piles of dirt in a triangle around it and that was home sweet home for the first three months.” Major Cale Brown, interview by author, March 22, 2009. According to Captain Michael Soyka: “When we first got here it was pretty rough. . . . It was no rocks. We wished there was rocks. It was just sand. We had to bring all that rock in. It was pretty austere. When they first showed up all they did was dig a fighting position, with a shovel, and man their fighting positions and the ground was ours.” Soyka, interview by author, March 20, 2009. Captain Trevor Voelkel told me: “[O]ur first time out here was about August 18 of [2008]. . . . Ramrod was in the dust, in the dirt, and that was that.” Voelkel, interview by author, March 24, 2009.

The battalion intelligence section consisted:
Cooper, interview by author, April 22, 2010.

Loyd’s teammate, Clint Cooper:
Biographical information about Cooper in the first several pages of this chapter comes primarily from my interviews with Cooper, April 20–23, 2010.

His family had lived on Navajo Nation land:
Cooper’s father spoke Spanish, having done a Mormon mission in Uruguay and Paraguay. His work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs was an extension of this outreach, but it also connected him to a long and controversial tradition of American ethnography among native peoples. The time Cooper spent on the reservation was formative. Along with his later travels in Germany and elsewhere, his experience among the Navajo was “what got me interested in culture and language,” he told me.

They would set up chairs in the gym:
Navajo Lucy Toledo, who attended a boarding school in California in the 1950s, recalled something similar: “Saturday night we had a movie. . . . Do you know what the movie was about? Cowboys and Indians. Cowboys and Indians. Here we’re getting all our people killed, and that’s the kind of stuff they showed us.” Charla Bear, “American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many,” NPR, May 12, 2008,
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16516865
, accessed August 17, 2012.

Bosnia wasn’t much of a war:
The Bosnian War officially ended with the Dayton Accords in 1995; by the time Cooper arrived, a NATO peacekeeping mission had been in place for seven years.

One man told Cooper he had been forced at gunpoint:
The man refused. “They said, ‘Either
you rape your daughter or we’re going to kill her or we’re going to kill you.’ And he knew in his mind that regardless of what he did, his daughter would probably, you know  . . . and he didn’t do it. And in fact, his daughters disappeared. He never saw them again.” Cooper, interview by author, April 20, 2010.

As Cooper listened, he looked into the man’s eyes:
“I mean, just watching that kind of pain and suffering in his eyes, you relate to that and you share a little bit of what’s going on,” Cooper told me. “It’s just horrible some of the things that we’d hear.” Cooper, interview by author, April 20, 2010.

The National Security Agency was looking for linguists who spoke Pashto and Dari:
Pashto is mainly spoken in Afghanistan’s south and east by Pashtuns, members of Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group. Dari, which dominates in the north, west, and center of the country, is a cousin of Farsi, or Persian. It has historically been the language of Afghanistan’s ruling elite.

“And honestly, a lot of them weren’t Taliban”:
Cooper, interview by author, April 20, 2010.

With the Taliban out of power and Afghanistan relatively stable:
I witnessed the returning waves of refugees when I was reporting in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2004, and heard often about land disputes then and afterward. Cooper told me: “You know about the blood feuds, and the revenge. You had a huge influx of refugees going out of Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion, and there was, like, seven million refugees that left and, like, a couple of million internally displaced persons. And so once we arrived, all these people are coming, flooding back into the country. Well, you know, the piece of land that you left five or ten years ago, somebody else is now living on it. And so where are you going to go for justice? Are you going to call the police? You have to take care of it yourself. And so that was a convenient way of getting rid of people. Call the coalition, and say your neighbor’s Taliban. So we would run into a lot of that.”

Cooper learned that the insurgents moved in groups:
Cooper, interview by author, April 20, 2010. “Taliban usually operate in groups,” Cooper told me. “They’re not from the local area, but they depend on local support. They usually stay on the perimeter of villages and they’ll send one or two people into the village to get food or whatever they need, supplies. And then sometimes, if it’s a friendly village, they’ll actually come in. Sometimes people would send their kids out to serve them because they’re obliged to provide for the Taliban. If you don’t, there’s repercussions. So it’s a conflicting situation. When the military says, ‘Do they support the Taliban?’ Well, yes. Are they bad people? No.”

But as he looked at the child lying there wounded:
Cooper, interview by author, April 20, 2010. “When you have a kid laying in front of you and you’re interrogating him, it’s complicated. He’s a Taliban fighter. He fired on American troops. But he’s a troubled kid that was indoctrinated and someone gave him an AK-47 and fed him full of lies. Your top priority is still force protection, because you want to protect the soldiers around you. And so you have to manipulate the kid, one way or the other, to get information.”

The longer he stayed, the harder it became not to empathize:
Cooper told me: “I could easily relate to what the people were going through, and a lot of times, I saw them more as victims than the evil Taliban fighter or whatever. I mean, they are. They’re just victims themselves.” Cooper, interview by author, April 20, 2010.