The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (51 page)

“They were working all the time”:
Qala Khan, interview by author, January 19, 2009.

after Salam’s death, the Taliban sent a message to Salam’s father:
Sadoo Khan, interview by author, January 19, 2009.

Salam must have known they would kill him:
As one soldier told Army investigators: “There’s really no where [sic] to avoid people because it’s so narrow and there’s a creek. There’s no where [sic] you can run to try and get away.”

Sadoo Khan and Qala Khan condemned Salam’s crime in the strongest terms:
Loyd’s attacker didn’t “have the right to do such kind of thing as he has done,” Sadoo Khan told me. “This was a woman. Why did he do that with a woman?” In fact, “the people in the area don’t like [Abdul Salam’s] family anymore because they have committed a big mistake to attack a woman.” As Qala Khan put it: “Traditionally the law is that if someone [kills] our women  . . . of course we are executing them. Those who are killing our daughters or sisters or mothers. So if we are killing other people’s daughters or sisters, of course we must also blame ourselves, and we must suffer the punishment.”

In Kandahar, men sprayed acid at Afghan girls:
Men doused girls going to Mirwais School in Kandahar with acid on November 12, 2008, just days after the attack on Loyd. Dexter Filkins, “Afghan Girls, Scarred by Acid, Defy Terror, Embracing School,”
New York Times,
January 13, 2009.

it is also true that many Afghans would consider attacking a woman  . . . more egregious than attacking a man:
“Traditionally, women in our society are more protected than men,” Sadoo Khan told me. My experience as a foreign woman in Afghanistan bears this out. While the situation is much more complicated for Afghan women, being
a foreign woman has won me special protection from Afghans far more often than it has drawn threats. Sadoo Khan, interview by author, January 19, 2009.

they would not attack a convoy with a woman in it:
“It has a very deep roots in our culture,” Sadoo Khan told me. “[There is] an area called Dera [in Maiwand]. Dera was the place where the robbers were coming and waiting for convoys to rob. And even if they were spending, like, two or three, four or five nights, when the convoy would come and pass them, if in this convoy there was a woman, they would say, ‘Okay, in the convoy there is woman, because of that woman, don’t touch it, don’t rob it.’ ” Ibid.

A female American lieutenant  . . . was stunned when he told her that she was the daughter of a whore:
Lieutenant Kirsten Ouimette, interview by author, October 2, 2010.

In at least one case, insurgents even threatened to burn a teacher’s daughter:
Rachel Reid, “Who Benefits from Taliban Revisionism?”
Guardian,
January 21, 2011.

Afghans who lived “independently” and clung to their culture:
Specifically, “that the woman has to be protected and the woman has to have value.” Sadoo Khan, interview by author, January 19, 2009.

“We are not blaming the Americans for what they have done”:
Qala Khan, interview by author, January 19, 2009.

Amir Mohammad worked as a police officer in Maiwand:
Amir Mohammad’s account of the events of November 4, 2008, is from Mohammad, interview by author, January 19, 2009.

He had also said something about having epilepsy:
Statement of the interpreter known as Tom Cruise to Army investigators.

“epilepsy” is what they call it when the spirits seize you:
See, for example, M. Miles, “Epilepsy in the Afghan Village,”
Disability World,
no. 9, July–August 2001. According to one group of doctors: “People report a high burden of mental disorders and seek refuge to traditional shrines or self medication with psychopharmacological drugs.”
http://www.ayubmed.edu.pk/JAMC/PAST/14–4/Peter.htm
, accessed March 6, 2013.

he was still trying to erase it from his memory:
Skotnicki told me the shooting was “just one of those things I try to forget.” Skotnicki, interview by author, March 24, 2009.

Salam’s father and brother had arrived with a group of villagers to collect his body:
Amir Mohammad, interview by author, January 19, 2009. That the body was kept overnight at the district center and not released to his family until the following morning is also noted in the Army investigation.

Salam’s brother yelled and cursed the police:
This account is from Amir Mohammad, interview by author, January 19, 2009.

the Taliban had issued a statement saying that children had poured fuel on a female foreign soldier:
According to Reuters, the original statement was posted on the Taliban website, but I have been unable to find it. The quote given here is from “U.S. Civilian Kills
Afghan After Fire Attack,” Reuters, November 4, 2008,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/11/04/us-afghan-violence-idUSTRE4A34MW20081104
, accessed March 6, 2013.

He went by the name Al Fathy, an Arabic nom de guerre:
Al Fathy, interview by Muhib Habibi with author, March 29, 2009.

Amir Mohammad, didn’t believe that Salam was crazy:
Neither, incidentally, did Jack Bauer. “I don’t know,” Jack told me. “If he is crazy, he is talking, like, thirty-five, thirty minutes with Paula. I never seen him [act] crazy [while] talking to her.” Jack Bauer, interview by author, September 23, 2010.

The Afghan police investigation had yielded little of interest:
“The investigation that we did, we did not find out any kind of activities Abdul Salam was doing before, except that he was a poor man and he was working for his family.” Amir Mohammad, interview by author, January 19, 2009.

Agents from the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division had arrived in Maiwand:
The Army investigators gathered a good deal of crime scene evidence, but by the time they got to Maiwand, the flex cuffs that had restrained Abdul Salam were gone. They had either been thrown in the trash by mistake or purposefully removed, perhaps in an effort to spare Ayala from blame, according to the Army investigation.

“maintain good relations with the officials he dealt with constantly”:
Army investigation.

It was a clear, warm, windless day when Lieutenant Pathak took them out there:
Details about the weather on November 5, the cleaned-up death scene, the burn marks on the ground, and the grass come from the description of the scene in the Army investigative report. Of the place where Salam had been killed, the investigators wrote: “There were no stains associated with heavy blood flow. Several feet away there was miscellaneous trash in the drainage trench.”

“She had a disproportionate effect on a lot of people”:
Hurlbut, interview by author, March 26, 2009.

“They asked us, ‘Please don’t kill the family’ ”:
“When we went and talked to all the leaders, we had a little shura, and we brought in all the elders. . . . and [the district governor] just let them have it. And the one question they had was, ‘We would ask that you don’t wipe out the family.’  . . . They asked us, ‘Please don’t kill the family.’ And we’re, like, is that an option? We’re, like, what are you talking about? And that was all they wanted to talk about for twenty minutes, ‘Are you going to kill the family?’ And, ‘We’ll take care of it.’ I was, like, ‘You don’t need to kill anybody. No one needs to kill anybody. Enough dying’s happened.’ ” Hurlbut, interview by author, March 26, 2009.

Salam was not a hard-core militant:
“Often the Taliban use mentally challenged people to do their dirty work, whether it’s a small kid at the age of ten detonating himself, or this guy,” Hurlbut told me. “He was definitely mentally disturbed. We found out after the fact that he was not a Taliban sympathizer but became a Taliban agent provocateur kind of guy, that they just churned up, got high on, I think he was high on drugs and then did the thing. Why they were targeting Paula, if they were
targeting Paula, remains to be seen.” After Salam was killed, the soldiers checked him against their biometric data system and found that he was “not on any watch list,” according to the Army investigation.

Salam, he told me, had been known around Chehel Gazi as “the village wacko”:
Warren, interview by author, March 20, 2009.

“He didn’t have Taliban connections”:
Ibid.

“People were just making a joke of him because he was an abnormal person”:
Hajji Mohammad Ehsan, interview by author, October 12, 2010.

Abdul Salam had been about twenty-five years old:
This and other details below are from Mohammad Umar, interview by Muhib Habibi with author, March 29, 2009.

Epilogue

news that a group of soldiers recently stationed there had been accused of killing Afghan civilians:
The week I landed in Maiwand, the free copies of
Stars
and
Stripes
piled around Ramrod carried a story about allegations that a handful of American soldiers had killed three unarmed Afghan civilians between January and May 2010 while they were stationed in Maiwand. The soldiers, known as the “kill team,” belonged to the 5th Stryker Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division headquartered at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State. Four are now in prison for their crimes, including Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs, the ringleader, who was sentenced to life for the three murders, and Specialist Jeremy Morlock, who is serving twenty-four years for his role in the killings. See Megan McCloskey, “A Question of Accountability: Worst U.S. War Crimes Case to Emerge from Afghanistan Leaves Some Asking: Where Was the Leadership?”
Stars and Stripes,
October 5, 2010; Adam Ashton, “Army Sergeant Is Sentenced to Life in Murders of Afghan Civilians,”
Stars and Stripes,
November 11, 2011; Mark Boal, “The Kill Team: How U.S. Soldiers in Afghanistan Murdered Innocent Civilians,”
Rolling Stone,
March 27, 2011; and Luke Mogelson, “A Beast in the Heart of Every Fighting Man,”
New York Times Magazine,
April 27, 2011.

Abdul Salam’s brother was named Omar Bank:
Hajji Lala, interview by author, October 10, 2010.

He griped that the Americans took his intelligence informants for granted:
Lala said that the Americans had asked for help locating a Taliban prison in Maiwand. He had contacted an informant, who found the prison. The Americans took aerial photographs and paid the informant two thousand Afghanis, about forty dollars. “They came  . . . and said to me, ‘Take this, this is for the informant.’ And I said, ‘Please be kind, keep your money in your pockets.’ It’s a shame and it’s a joke and it’s disrespect,” Lala told me. “This man, three days, four days, he was riding on a motorbike with his own expenses and he was looking for a Taliban prison for us, and he put his life in danger, and you are giving two thousand Afghanis. I’ll give something to him from my own money.”

He had met with her the day before she was attacked:
“One day before the incident, she came to me and we had a meeting and she told me, ‘When will we have the next meeting in the FOB?’ I told her that I’m going to Kandahar today, when I return back I will see you. But after that she just went to the next village near the district office, and a man by the name of Salam, he came and he threw petrol on her and she was burned by that. She was alive in the beginning and after two months, she passed away.”

Lala and the Americans arrested Bank:
They picked him up on November 5, 2010. For this and the additional details below, Lieutenant Roy Ragsdale, 3rd Squadron, 2nd Cavalry Regiment, correspondence, March 11, 2011.

Lieutenant Colonel Bryan Denny, acknowledged that there was much he didn’t know:
Lieutenant Colonel Bryan Denny, commander, 3rd Squadron, 2nd Cavalry Regiment, interview by author, October 8, 2010.

to train the local Afghan army unit so his men wouldn’t have to come back:
“To me, winning means being able to turn Maiwand over to my Afghan army battalion counterparts,” Denny told me. “Winning for me means no American having to come here again.”

the project had come under scrutiny from Congress:
The result was the Center for Naval Analyses study previously cited. See “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010, Report of the Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, on H.R. 2647,” 154–55,
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CRPT-111hrpt166/pdf/CRPT-111hrpt166.pdf
, accessed March 6, 2013.

it suffered from inadequate government oversight, an overreliance on unaccountable contractors:
The Army’s Training and Doctrine Command initiated an investigation of the Human Terrain System in March 2010 to look into an array of allegations of impropriety ranging from sexual harassment to fraud. Department of the Army, Headquarters United States Army Training and Doctrine Command, “Appointment of Investigating Officer for an Informal Investigation,” March 5, 2010, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The results noted here are from “Findings and Recommendations, AR 15–6 Investigation Concerning Human Terrain System (HTS) Project Inspector General Complaints,” 1–3, and attached memorandum of Lieutenant General John E. Sterling, Jr., Deputy Commanding General/Chief of Staff.

faced with a mess it had helped to create:
Before becoming head of the Human Terrain System, Hamilton was the deputy chief of staff for intelligence at the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command. Jim Hodges, “Cover Story: U.S. Army’s Human Terrain Experts May Help Defuse Future Conflicts,”
DefenseNews,
March 22, 2012.

“He was right to a degree,” the official told me:
A TRADOC official, interview by author, July 1, 2010.