In My Father's Country (37 page)

T
WENTY-FIVE

A
sadabad also had an empty swimming pool, but its history was benign. The base had been opened by a U.S. governmental agency a few years earlier, and when the PRT took it over, it was decided that the added expense of paying a local pool boy was unnecessary. The pool was drained and converted into—of course—a basketball court.

There was a young blond soldier Haseeba and I liked to watch play basketball. Haseeba had spied him one day leaving the gym, a towel slung around his neck, and told me about him. Haseeba did a little snooping around and found out that his name was Ben, and he was from Georgia. We knew we could find him most afternoons in the middle of an intense pickup game. The cement steps leading down into the pool were our makeshift bleacher seats. When Haseeba and I weren’t needed anywhere, we’d wander over and watch him play. I had never done anything as silly as watch a boy play basketball in high school—the Professor forbade it—but in 2007, in the middle of the hottest spot on earth, I did just that; sat on a bench, drinking iced soda, with the sun on my arms, watching the boys show off for us, the girls.

Because it was the dead of summer, and the sun was so hot it could have been classified as a weapon, Ben wore only his regulation army
shorts and a T-shirt. When he smiled, his dimples were deep, and his eyes were as bright as the sun.

“There is your rebound man,” Haseeba proclaimed. “He’s pure eye candy.”

“He is probably not even eighteen!” I said. I was thirty-one.

“You better make your move. I think you need him more than I do, but if you don’t step up I’m going to steal him from you!” Haseeba teased me. She knew about my broken engagement, about the e-mails I was still receiving regularly from Eric.

Ben was a gunner under John’s chain of command, and Haseeba urged me to see if John would make an introduction. I said I had a professional relationship with John and wanted him to see me as a competent interpreter, not some silly girl. I told her to leave it alone. I wasn’t ready for another man. It was so much easier not to get into anything.

There was a small bazaar at the bottom of the hill, just inside the wire. One day Haseeba and I hiked down to see if there was anything exciting for sale. I had asked one of the shopowners a few days earlier if he could bring me some fabrics. There was a local tailor at the PRT who worked mending uniforms and sewing on patches. In fifteen minutes I’d purchased enough material for half a dozen outfits.

As I was paying the shopkeeper I heard a voice behind me. “Is it true you’re from Portland, Oregon?”

I turned to see Ben, smiling, with his deep dimples and eyes you could lose yourself in. “I’m stationed at Fort Lewis, in Washington. Just a few hours north of you.” He ambled alongside Haseeba and me as we walked back up the long hill. He took the bags from me as he talked. He was always a gentleman.

“Yes, I know where that is. The drive is a nightmare,” I said.

“It’s not that bad,” he countered.

“I have a really good friend, Hina, who lives in Seattle, but I hardly ever visit her because of the drive.”

“You know you could see her more often now that you know us at Fort Lewis. You could stop there and take a break before continuing on to see her.”

It was one of the things that I would grow to love about Ben—this roundabout way of telling me how he felt without making me wary of him.

“Oh, but you see, the great thing about Hina is that she’s very understanding, and she loves to drive. So, I see her often, without having to drive for hours,” I said. I watched him trying to figure out how he could have been clearer in inviting me to come see him. His reluctance to come out and say it actually endeared him to me more than if he had been aggressive.

After we reached the PRT and Ben excused himself, Haseeba glared at me. “What’s wrong with you? Why did you say that stuff?”

“I don’t want him to think I’m that easy.”

Several days later, at the Officers’ Club, we were having a
Sleeper Cell
night. A few years earlier Showtime had produced a miniseries about a Muslim FBI agent who infiltrates a terrorist sleeper cell hatching a plan to bomb Los Angeles. Someone had purchased the DVDs at one of the PRT shops.

Haseeba wanted to invite Ben, but I argued that he was an enlisted soldier. “But we already said it was okay to invite enlisted soldiers, remember?”

“Did we?” Of course I remembered.

She tracked Ben down at the chow hall and issued the invitation. He showed up midway through the episode. It was awkward—John, his boss, and another officer were there. Ben entered our tent, fresh from the shower. My heart knocked a little at the sight of him, but I didn’t let my eyes stay on him too long.

Even though Ben and Eric both had southern, more traditional upbringings, their personalities could not have been more different. Ben was expressive. He said whatever sweet thought passed through his head. Once, while I was watching him play basketball and he kept missing his shots, he called time out, then jogged over and said, “I just really wanted you to know that I’m a much better player than this, but you’ve got me really distracted.” When he would come back from a mission, he liked to come to our tent just to smell the air around me. He said that
he was too dusty to hug me. “When I’m out there all sweaty and dirty, I think about you and how good you smell.” The simplicity of his emotions and the way he expressed them were so unlike anything that I had ever had in my life.

Because John always asked to have me translate on his various missions, Ben and I sometimes ended up in the same convoy. One of the ways I measured how dangerous Afghanistan had become was the number of Humvees in our convoys. When I’d first arrived and had been posted in Farah, Eric and I had tooled around outside the wire in a bulletproofed Land Cruiser. Now no one ventured outside the wire with fewer than ten Humvees.

One day we found ourselves in the same Humvee, which happened to be second in line behind the lead truck. Ben took his position as the turret gunner and I sat in the backseat. Had we been ambushed, my job would have been to hand rounds of ammunition up through to Ben. We set off down the hill. Not twenty minutes after we passed through the friendly village where we’d held our tea party months before, there was an explosion. The Humvee ahead of us had tripped an IED.

The truck commander ordered us out of the Humvee to assess the damage. When we climbed back inside I was trembling. I have been in many convoys that were attacked, and it always unnerved me to think about how close we all were to dying. Why were we spared? What is it that we were still meant to do on earth? Thinking about unfinished personal missions, and my father and Baba and the three people I loved the most being so far away in Portland all got to me that day more than usual. Unexpectedly, I started crying.

“You’re going to be fine,” said Ben. “It’s going to be fine. I promise. Please don’t worry. No one will touch you. I’ll protect you.” He held my hand, there, in front of everyone.

I pulled it away. Before this moment, no one knew anything was going on between us. “Please,” I whispered, “you can get in trouble.”

“I don’t care,” he said. “I only care about you. If it makes you feel better to have me hold your hand, then I will do it.”

Our flirtation had advanced. Were we now dating? That hardly seemed like the right word. I liked him very much. People had started to realize that if I wasn’t out on a mission translating or at the Officers’ Club, most likely I was sitting on the bench at the top of the PRT—so if Ben and I wanted to be alone, we went for a walk around the perimeter, just inside the wire. Here people could still observe us, but no one bothered us.

The trail was mountainous. We found a fallen oak that looked as if it had been there for a hundred years. Smaller trees had taken root in its bark. After dinner, and after he had cleaned his weapons for the next day’s mission, Ben and I would sit on “our log” and talk. His tour was nearly over, and he’d be returning to the States. He had big plans. Fort Lewis was two hours from Portland, straight down I-5. We could be together every weekend. He talked about our future as if it were already decided.

He held my hand, just as he did after the IED explosion. Once the sun eased behind the mountain it got cold and he put his arms around my shoulders. Ben was an old-fashioned romantic—not only did he not expect that we would sleep together before marriage, he fully expected to wait. He told me that he had watched me for weeks before he approached me because he wanted to make sure I wasn’t like those deployed girls who slept around with everyone. He was kind and emotionally honest, and sometimes I felt like there was something wrong with me for not jumping up and down and telling him, yes, let’s be together forever, eating peaches in Georgia. He told me that he didn’t think he would ever be good enough for me, but he would spend his life doing everything to make me happy.

All of this only served to remind me of Eric, who was now working as a civilian in Hungary, training soldiers. Hadn’t he said similar things? And hadn’t everything fallen apart the moment we returned to the States and were forced to deal with real-life issues? I hadn’t known life in a war zone, and Eric hadn’t prepared me for it, for the ever-present fear of death, and the rush that creates, and how that rush fuels fantasies that lead to promises that make perfect sense at the time. Then your tour is
over, you leave the wire, and come home, and everything dissolves, like dreams when you wake up.

How could I explain this to Ben, who was on his first tour out of the United States, who really did think that he was going to be with his Pashtun lady until the day he died?

Unlike Eric, Ben was young. He had no baggage, no ex-wife or children, no overpowering demons nourished by twenty years in the military. He said every word in the English language that conveyed his devotion to me, his commitment to our relationship—and his actions followed his words. It made me sad. I just couldn’t bear not to be independent. I wondered, as I sat next to Ben listening to him spin tales about our future, whether the pronouncement I’d made years ago about never marrying an Afghan pertained not only to Afghan men but to all men. I felt that familiar sense of dread in the pit of my stomach. I knew then, as I’ve always known, that it would be easier for me to find happiness alone than worrying constantly that the man I was with was trying to control me and take over my life. That is no way to live, I thought, for me or for any man crazy enough to want to be with me.

T
WENTY-SIX

O
n a frigid day in fall 2007, I opened my in-box to find an e-mail from a Department of Defense company recruiting for a new program. It was called Human Terrain System, and the U.S. Army had already had some success with it in Iraq.

The first Human Terrain Team, or HTT, had been deployed to Iraq in 2003. The program mandate was to map the cultural and social landscape of the country in the same way the armed forces mapped the military landscape. When it came to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it had finally dawned on the coalition forces that we couldn’t simply roll into a country with our superior forces and weaponry, perform a little shock and awe, and expect to win the trust and support of the people who lived there. We needed to know about the culture, the way the locals thought, how they operated, what they needed and wanted, and then figure out how we might use all that knowledge to garner local support.

After seeing success in Iraq, the government had deployed the first HTT to Afghanistan, to Camp Salerno in Khost Province. Some of the recruits in this team were finishing their contracts and coming home, and the program was searching for replacements. Would I be interested in joining this first team? I would no longer be an interpreter. My official title would be research manager.

I felt settled in Asadabad. I loved the missions that took me into the
surrounding villages, where I was able to chat with the locals. I loved living in the big tent with Haseeba, hosting the Officers’ Club, and hanging out with Ben in the evenings.

But during quiet moments when I sat on my bench at the top of the hill, looking out at mountains, at the enormous divots in the earth made by our outgoing mortars and the boulders tumbling into the river, I knew that I was ready for a change. I was growing bored with interpreting and felt conflicted about some of my duties—I was thrilled to be viewed as a Pashtun cultural expert but resentful that my job title as an interpreter didn’t reflect this. I felt the itch for change. The desire for a new challenge was always there, percolating just below the surface.

I knew that once I replied to the e-mail, something new would be set in motion. I wrote back, saying that I thought the position sounded very interesting. Before I’d logged off, another e-mail dropped into my box. I realized I was in correspondence with the team leader at FOB Salerno. They wanted me, as soon as possible. E-mails shot back and forth. There were decisions to be made, negotiations to take place. For me to become part of the Human Terrain System I’d have to meet new requirements and undertake new training—six months’ worth—back in the States.

Lieutenant Colonel Evan Sanders was the HTT leader at Salerno. He interviewed me over the phone.

“Look,” I said. “I want this position. But I have been working with the army for years now. I have been in Afghanistan for almost three years. I am from here. I don’t need a course on
Pashtunwali
. I don’t need to be taught how to find Kabul on a map. I don’t need area studies. And I really don’t need to learn how to live in a combat zone.”

Evan agreed. He was enthusiastic. He pulled some mighty strings. I asked to be transferred directly. Tiny, mountainous Khost was just southwest of Kunar. The brigade commander could easily have sent a couple of his birds to fetch me. It could have been done in a day—the end of the old contract, the beginning of the new. I could have slid down the southern flank of the country without having to face Mamai, Khalid, and Najiba, who would be deeply unhappy about my new plans.