The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (8 page)

In photos from this period, Loyd’s hair is cut radically short. In jeans and a blouse, talking with friends at a house party or smiling in a bar, she exudes a new kind of grown-up confidence.
She and Johnson worked together at a student-run coffee shop where people drew pictures and wrote poetry on the walls. Loyd mixed homemade honey-walnut cream cheese and helped Johnson with her Spanish homework. They talked endlessly about friends, family, and relationships. “She dated a lot and broke a lot of hearts,” Johnson told me. “People just fell
in love with Paula. It was hard not to.” By this time, Loyd had become captivated by anthropology.
For one of her classes, she was assigned to conduct an ethnography of a Boston neighborhood. Her teacher, Sally Engle Merry, asked students to learn about the neighborhood’s ethnic composition and describe the social and economic issues affecting its people. This was not easy for college students. They had to walk the streets and brave the awkwardness of talking to strangers. But Loyd was her mother’s daughter, and she did this with ease. She impressed Merry as an ideal anthropologist-in-training: outgoing, poised, independent, and genuinely interested in what other people were thinking.

At Wellesley, Loyd championed human rights and equality.
Her much older half brother, Paul Loyd, Jr., by now a wealthy Texas oilman, grew accustomed to their arguments. He saw himself as a pragmatist, while Loyd was more like Don Quixote, always off on a worthy but possibly hopeless crusade. “Paula would say, ‘It’s right, it’s moral, it’s what we should be doing,’ and she’d go ahead,” Paul Loyd told me.
He and others were shocked when, upon graduating from Wellesley, she joined the Army.
Loyd’s decision also surprised Johnson, who remembers talking with her about it at the time. “She made it sound like there was a place in the military even for people like her, who loved peace and didn’t like war,” Johnson told me.

A possible clue lay in an ambitious academic project Loyd had undertaken
before leaving Wellesley, where she had been one of a very small number of students selected to write an honors thesis in anthropology.
Her paper clocked in at 181 pages, and it hinted at questions about the military and the lives of people in conflict zones that would absorb her for years to come. Loyd’s thesis was a sensitive and meticulously researched account of the growth of underground resistance in the gay bar scene in San Antonio, which was home to three major military bases.
Drawing on Marxist and feminist theory, Loyd wrote that she was seeking a “subtle and nuanced account of the various ways
subordinate people subvert domination.” While some social scientists focused on armed peasant uprisings, Loyd was more interested in “small acts of everyday resistance.”
“I have found that subordinate groups use the forms of resistance most readily available to them,” she wrote. “Yet, resistance is also structured according to the social networks it makes use of.” Bars were natural gathering places for working-class gay people, often in rough parts of town that lay beyond the easy reaches of civilian and military authority. Their patrons committed small but crucial acts of rebellion against San Antonio’s dominant heterosexual order and the newspapers, churches, police, and military authorities that enforced it.
Loyd wrote that she was interested in “the numerous gray areas between overt rebellion and abject submission.”

Loyd had always identified with the underdog, always craved a challenge. With her college degree, she could have become an Army officer.
Instead, she enlisted. Some acquaintances wondered at this, but it was a choice anthropologists would have recognized.
Loyd thrived as an outsider; morally and politically, her sympathies lay with the grunts. The Army gave her an aptitude test that showed she was mechanically inclined. Loyd’s maternal grandfather had been a mechanic, and her mother had always been good at fixing things. When Loyd turned sixteen, Ward had taught her how to change a car tire, and Loyd had helped her mother and stepfather rebuild their house in St. Thomas after two hurricanes. Now the Army trained Loyd as a heavy-wheel vehicle mechanic.
Soldiers with this job description fix trucks weighing more than five tons; they must be able to lift more than one hundred pounds on occasion and more than fifty pounds frequently.
Loyd stood five foot six and weighed 120 pounds at most, but she routinely scored in the men’s range on fitness tests.
Her commanders marveled at the contrast between her flaxen delicacy and her physical toughness, this tiny woman who could take on a roaring deuce and a half.
She was sent to Korea, where she lived for a time on a remote outpost ringed with
barbed wire. She was attached to a Patriot missile unit, which had little need for a truck mechanic, so Loyd expected to spend much of her deployment pulling guard duty. She told her half brother these things in a card she sent him, decorated with a cutout in the shape of a dove. It was the kind of card a peacenik would buy, but the scrawl inside belonged to a soldier.

After four years, she switched to the reserves, moved to Washington, D.C., and began work at Georgetown University on a master’s degree in diplomacy and conflict resolution.
In the rarefied atmosphere that nurtures America’s policy-making elite, Loyd and her fellow students discussed the relative influence of coercive military instruments and diplomatic efforts in Bosnia, but she also drove a UPS truck part-time.
Then came the attacks of September 11, 2001, and her reserve unit was called up.
By now, she had given up fixing trucks in favor of civil affairs, a job that put her at the intersection of military force and humanitarian aid. Civil affairs units are made up of reservists with special skills. Originally part of the Army’s Special Operations Command, they work with psychological operations soldiers to bridge the divide between combat forces and local civilians and governments. They hand out food, water, and blankets, talk to local leaders, and pay local laborers to build bridges and clinics. They are the closest thing the Army has to professional nation builders.

Kandahar is a desert city: hot days, cool nights, fine dust that coats your skin and sticks in the roots of your hair. A year after the fall of the Taliban, it hung suspended between a violent past and an unimaginable future, alive with political intrigue that remained largely incomprehensible to the American troops stationed there. Old rivals plotted one another’s demise, bearded American Special Forces soldiers rode around in pickups trading cash for dubious information, and the shops in the bazaar sold fat yellow raisins alongside candy with Osama bin Laden’s face on the box.

Loyd was assigned to the 450th Civil Affairs Battalion, an airborne unit.
She had made staff sergeant by then, and she was the noncommissioned officer in charge of a small team. She and her fellow soldiers lived in a rudimentary canvas-and-plywood tent at Kandahar Airfield, where they slept on cots. They spent about eight months there, visiting villages, assessing water and health facilities, asking people what crops they grew, and doling out aid and school supplies. If a school had been damaged by fighting, Loyd and her teammates would try to repair it. Sometimes they got money from the United States Agency for International Development to dig a well, and Loyd would negotiate with local laborers to do the work. Alert to the potential for corruption, she was especially careful to ensure a wide field of bidders, “not just the local friend of the mayor or the governor,” her teammate Mike Rathje told me. She and her fellow soldiers helped repair a radio station in Kandahar and traveled to the Kajaki Dam in Helmand to learn about problems with the power grid.

Because of her line of work, Loyd was one of only a handful of Americans who spent time listening to Afghans, and she began to get a feel for the place, its people, the way power worked, the structure of tribes. Women were confined to their homes, unable to speak their minds.
‘We are screaming into the silence,’ one woman told her. In her Wellesley thesis, Loyd had written about an anthropological study of Bedouin women in Egypt who were simultaneously resisting government efforts to assimilate them and rebelling against the Bedouin men who ran their community.
“They banded together to hide information from the men, helped each other resist arranged marriages they did not want,” Loyd wrote. “At the same time, younger women fought against older women to wear makeup and lingerie, items bought from Egyptian society. They would also side with young men against older Bedouins, when arguing for the freedom to choose romantic marriages instead of
having an arranged marriage.” Many of the same complexities defined Afghan society, and Loyd was primed to see what other Americans missed.
At ribbon-cuttings for American-funded schools, she tried to convince Afghans to educate their girls. Male doctors were not allowed to treat women in these conservative areas, but in a country with the world’s second-highest maternal mortality rate, Loyd found that even men had an interest in improving women’s health. If they wanted more female doctors, she told them, they would have to send their daughters to school.

It was so uncommon in southern Afghanistan to see a woman walking around in uniform that
Afghan men sometimes asked Loyd’s translator whether she was male or female. But they weren’t hostile. They treated her with deference because she was a foreigner and a guest, and as an American woman, she occupied a powerful middle ground.
‘The fact that I’m a woman doesn’t mean I need to be in a burka and they can’t deal with me,’ she told a reporter in 2003.
‘They take me for who I am, they accept me for who I am. And they’re willing to work with me.’ Loyd tied her hair back and covered it with a cloth Safari-style hat, but she still stuck out. One day, when she was driving one of the team’s pickup trucks, a group of Afghan women pulled up their burqas and gave the Americans a thumbs-up signal. “I was astounded,” Rathje, her teammate, told me. “I had not seen that the whole time I was there.”

Rathje wondered at Loyd’s energy and persistence. He never saw her get discouraged, as he sometimes did. Once during their time in Kandahar, they met a group of young Afghan girls. Loyd smiled and joked with the kids, but Rathje found it hard to look at them. “I saw someone who looked like my daughter with no future, and it would make me sad,” he told me. “She was really more jubilant about that than I was, more hopeful, maybe.”

‘Their fathers love them,’ Loyd told him.

‘Yeah, they do,’ he agreed. But he remembered their visits to hand out aid to young widows who had been married to much older men and left penniless, whose children had no shoes in the middle of winter.

Loyd and her teammates helped lay the ground for one of Afghanistan’s first Provincial Reconstruction Teams. Known as PRTs, the teams are made up of rings of combat forces protecting a core of civilian governance and development workers from the State Department, the United States Agency for International Development, and the Department of Agriculture. In those early years, PRTs represented an institutionalized blending of security forces and development personnel not seen since Vietnam. The aim was to extend the nascent Afghan government’s reach to unruly provinces, where local thugs and insurgents were seizing power. The U.S. military announced the new concept with fanfare, but the very idea of pairing development workers with soldiers enraged many in the international aid community. Organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross and CARE viewed the civil-military teams as a risk to aid workers, who depended on their neutrality to move safely around the country. Using government and military-sponsored aid and development to win Afghan allegiance muddied the waters, these groups argued, making it impossible for independent aid workers to convince people they were apolitical. Moreover, these new arrivals often didn’t know enough about the communities they were serving to do meaningful development. They chose projects the people didn’t need, put them in the wrong places, wasted money because they didn’t know the going rates.
Loyd understood these concerns, but she was that rare American who had the foresight to pay the Afghan police in her area directly instead of funneling the money through their commanders, knowing that if she trusted the hierarchy, the men on the bottom would probably never see their salaries. Loyd also knew that the battlefield was changing and that Afghan
insurgents increasingly viewed even aid workers as political actors. In southern Afghanistan in 2003, a Red Cross staff member was pulled from his truck and executed. The Taliban commander who ordered his killing had been unmoved by his organization’s commitment to neutrality. To the insurgents, he was an emissary for Western imperialism.

When her tour in Kandahar ended, Loyd returned to Georgetown and finished her degree, graduating with honors. The School of Foreign Service aims to train practitioners, not scholars, and this suited Loyd’s goals. She didn’t want a career in academia, at least not then. She wanted to go back to Afghanistan.
Soon she was in Kabul, working for a nongovernmental group called the International Organization for Migration.
One winter day, she attended a briefing on the upcoming expansion of NATO forces in Afghanistan. The American officer delivering the talk had gray-blue eyes, a square jaw, and a lean, muscular build, but a scar near the outer edge of his left eye hinted at an alluring vulnerability. His name was Frank Muggeo, and he was one of the Army’s emissaries to the aid and development world. Loyd was sitting near the front, and Muggeo noticed her immediately. He was in a tough spot, trying to bring together soldiers and humanitarian experts when the simple fact that he was an American Special Forces officer caused many aid and development workers to view him uncomplicatedly as a trained killer. He and Loyd chatted afterward, and he sensed her optimism. She wanted to believe that things could be different, that an expanded NATO presence would better Afghan lives. Muggeo had just arrived in Afghanistan. He had no idea who was who. Loyd knew everyone.

Muggeo and Loyd met at NATO headquarters in Kabul and talked about work and their lives. She was dazzling, he thought. She was a good-looking woman in Afghanistan, which counted for a lot, but there was more to it than that. He was just stumbling around, but she really knew the place, the way things worked. She’d come from a
comfortable background, had a good education, more than a lot of people got, yet she’d chosen to spend her time in this shithole where they needed everything. He learned of a time when she was in the Army, when an Afghan had brought his nephew to an American base for treatment. The boy had been shot. It wasn’t Loyd’s job, but somehow she’d managed to get him on a plane to the big American base north of Kabul, where doctors had treated him. Muggeo noticed that out of respect for Afghan culture, she always wore long sleeves and coiled her hair in a bun. The only time he saw her wear it any other way was when she used the treadmill at the NATO gym. He learned that she was never on time, that she loved to sleep late.