In My Father's Country (19 page)

“What’s going on here?” I would finally ask.

“I hate seeing you talking to all those men.”

“Right, because at any minute I might run off with one of them to the village and become their baby machine.”

“If you were to marry a good-looking Afghan, you could take him home and everyone would approve …”

He didn’t finish his thought. I was sympathetic. Eric was handsome, accomplished, decorated for his service in the special forces, where he was a respected commander of brave American men. He was a star. Still, he knew Afghans. He knew that those things would never matter to my family and that an illiterate, unemployed Pashtun would be their preference for me.

“But I don’t like Afghan men like that. It’s not something I’m just saying to you. I have been saying that since I was ten years old in Peshawar.
Afghan men are controlling. I’ve said repeatedly that I’ll never marry one. I want to marry someone like you, who’s ambitious and romantic and adventurous. Frankly, you need to be more worried about your soldiers than about any Afghan.”

“Which soldier? Who’s hitting on you?”

“No one!” I said. “I was just trying to make a point.”

Still, he took every opportunity to show that I was taken, without ever saying anything outright. Sometimes, in the chow hall, when I couldn’t bear to eat another bowl of cereal, another apple or peanut butter and jelly sandwich, Eric would march into the kitchen and scramble some eggs for the two of us. He loved to do this during mealtime rush hour, when he could reappear with the plate of eggs and place them in front of me with a flourish saying, “I want you to have energy for our meeting.”

No one missed the message. In private I would beg him to please make it clear that we were meeting with the governor, but the very next time he would load his announcement with even more innuendo: “Miriam, eat this. You’re going to need your energy for later.”

I loved being Eric’s interpreter, but when he was off taking care of army business, I was happy to join any outgoing team in their Humvees to get a chance to interact with regular Afghans. The Afghans I met at the governor’s were not the villagers, who I have always believed represent the true spirit of what it means to be an Afghan. If my mission was to get reconnected with my past and learn about my father’s people, I needed to be in the villages.

It was another Friday, but Eric was in BAF for some PRT Commanders’ Conference and so I was going out on a mission with the CAT. We were going through a village, and as we passed one compound an old woman in dusty clothes ran to the edge of the road, waving her arms and talking loudly. The tank commander (TC) told the soldiers to be alert, that there might be some trouble ahead. I twisted around in my seat to get a look through the front of the Humvee to see what the commotion was all about. I got a very quick and distorted look at her face, but her agony was clear. She was probably only forty years old, but with her deep wrinkles and bony eye sockets she could have easily passed for sixty.
I could see that she wasn’t any threat to us, that she wasn’t part of an ambush, and her suffering was genuine. She really needed our help. In today’s Afghanistan, I would never ask the TC to stop the convoy, but in 2005, Farah was a mostly green province, one that was relatively calm and safe, and I saw a chance to actually impact the life of at least one more Afghan.

“Stop!” I touched the shoulder of the TC who was sitting in front of me. “Please! Just stop for a moment. It’s okay. Let me talk to her.”

I struggled to open the heavy door of the Humvee, and before I could step out she scuttled over to me, already crying.

“Please, tell me what is wrong,” I said in Pashtu.

She gasped. Her eyes filled with fresh tears. “You are Pashtun? How can this be?”

“Don’t worry about that,” I said. “Tell me why you are crying.”

She began thanking and praising God for bringing me to her, a Pashtun and a female, someone she could communicate with, someone who could really understand her and help her. Even in all that excitement, her confidence in my ability to relate to her was touching, and boosted my confidence in myself. She was a poor woman, one of thousands in Afghanistan. She lived in a tent with her six children, in the front yard of the compound we’d just passed. A kind man, a complete stranger, and his wife had offered her living space in his yard and given her the tent. Sometimes he brought food out to her and her children, but he was not a rich man himself, and when one of her daughters had fallen ill, he didn’t have enough money to give her to take her daughter to the doctor.

I asked what was wrong with her daughter. The woman didn’t know. She wrung her hands. She was so hot, her head ached, she hadn’t eaten or drunk anything in many days, and now she was dying.

Our medic happened to be in the convoy, and I asked the woman if she would let him look at her daughter. She hesitated only a moment before giving her consent. When you are dying, you don’t have the luxury of worrying about the gender of your savior.

The medic and I followed the woman to her tent. Inside, her daughter,
who was perhaps eleven, lay curled on a rug. The sharp, yeasty smell of infection made my eyes water. The girl was listless. Her eyes glittered with fever. She’d been this way almost two days, the woman said.

The medic asked the girl to lift her head, but she couldn’t. Instead, she turned it slightly, and in the dim light we could see frothy yellow pus running from her ear. The medic thought she had an ear infection that had gone septic. Her mother was right: She would die in days if she didn’t get treated soon.

The medic and I went back to the convoy. I asked him if we could take her to the PRT, but he said he didn’t have any resources to treat her there. He could call the BAF hospital and make sure she was admitted without having to wait for the normal screening at the ECP there, but there wasn’t anything to be done for her in Farah. There was no hope for the girl unless she was admitted to the hospital at BAF within the next forty-eight hours. But BAF was on the other side of the country. How would she get there in time? There were few roads in Farah in 2005, and the rough and unpaved journey would be torturous for her. I remembered how long it had taken me to get to Farah on a plane. And, anyway, the medic said she couldn’t be airlifted because of the ear infection. I asked the mother if she could get a taxi and get her daughter to BAF. She said she didn’t even have money to buy her Iranian medicine in the local bazaar, much less to get a taxi.

When soldiers are posted on PRTs far from BAF, they don’t have ready access to their money. The finance department tries to fly out to these sites, bringing cash, but because of the flight restrictions and difficulties, that money source is not regular and can’t be counted on. The soldiers are allowed to take out only a couple of hundred dollars a month from their accounts for incidentals—sodas, cigarettes, and chew. They tend to be very careful with how they spend money because no one knows how long it will be until the finance people are able to come back to their installations. I can’t remember whose idea it was, but when the soldiers in the convoy heard the story, every one of them emptied his pockets, donating whatever was on him, to get this girl to BAF as soon
as possible. I pressed the cash—almost two hundred dollars—into the old woman’s hands and told her to get a taxi to drive her daughter to BAF immediately.

This selfless act of the American soldiers, most of whom were young adults, touched me even more than it could have touched that woman. She was of course grateful but probably believed that the soldiers had endless bags of money at their disposal. I had always felt bad about loving being an American more than being an Afghan, but seeing the goodness of these soldiers made me feel better about being more American than Afghan. Over the years I would see how cruel many Afghans are to one another, calling it ethnic politics, or religious preference, or just plain fighting for survival. I remembered all the nasty, hurtful things my uncles in Oregon had said about me. I had experienced Afghan cruelty firsthand, from my own blood, and that had made me fear what other Afghans would be capable of doing to me, if given a chance. The spontaneous generosity of these American soldiers on behalf of an Afghan woman and her daughter began to restore my faith in the choices I had made over the years.

There was a chance, of course, that the woman would have allowed her daughter to die and fed herself and the rest of her children with the soldiers’ money, but a few weeks later she showed up at the PRT to tell me that her daughter had been treated in BAF and had recovered, and that every day she prayed for a safe return to America for every American soldier in Afghanistan.

S
IXTEEN

T
he winter of 2005 had been one of the snowiest in a decade. March 2005 brought record rainfall. By April, the western deserts were experiencing massive flooding. Since Afghan village dwellings are built of mud, the water swept away thousands of homes, entire herds of livestock, and many children. We had our hands full carrying out day missions delivering rice and beans, tents, tarps, buckets, and shovels. We flew as much as we could, but sometimes there was no way around it: We had to drive the Humvees over the muddy, unpaved roads studded with huge potholes.

If there is one vehicle impossible to dig out of the mud, it’s a Humvee. Fully armored, it weighs about three tons. We’d leave the wire, and sometimes within a half mile of the front gate we’d get stuck in mud. We’d spend the whole day trying to dig it out. Then we’d do the same thing the next day. The locals in whichever area we were stuck in would bring out some green tea and their little cups and say, “Don’t worry, relax, have some tea, we’ll dig you out.” For a while they’d stand there and make fun of us for getting stuck in the first place, then one of them would fetch an ancient tractor to drag us out. Not surprisingly, some genuine friendships were formed this way. Here we were in our huge, expensive vehicles to help the Afghans rebuild their nation—and it was their puny, ill-maintained tractors that rescued us. The irony was not lost
on any of us. The effort was cooperative, which made our relationship with the local people seem more equal. The locals were able to hold their heads high and extend the hand of famous Pashtun friendship, without which foreigners can’t expect to live for long in Afghanistan.

Spring turned to summer and my six-month contract was winding down. Eric was also nearing the end of his tour. The knowledge weighed heavily on both of us. I was still struggling with so many conflicting emotions when it came to him. Eric had hinted several times that he wanted the two of us to come back to help Afghans as a married couple. I couldn’t deny how tempting this was to me. In the way I typically deal with issues I haven’t decided on, I ignored his comments. I was worried that things would explode when I went back to Portland and announced that I was going to marry Eric. I wasn’t sure that he and I were committed enough to each other to face the centuries-old opposition to this union of a Pashtun woman to a white, Catholic, U.S. Army soldier. But even though I had never believed that it was my fate as a Pashtun woman to find happiness with a man, I didn’t want to give up on the idea so quickly. I took to going off alone to sit on my bench to read and ponder the future.

One day I was sitting in the sun, reading a book, and I heard fast footsteps on the small gravel behind me. I turned around to see Eric approaching me with that look of single-minded determination that had made me fall for him. He sat on the other end of the bench—to the rest of the world, we still pretended there was nothing personal going on between us.

He said he’d thought about it and decided we should get engaged before we left Afghanistan. This was the first time Eric had put me on the spot about marriage. Up until then, I had been able to joke about his asking my family for my hand, leaving me out of the equation like a good Pashtun daughter.

“What happened to doing this the Afghan way and asking my family for my hand in marriage?” I teased, putting my finger between the pages to mark my spot.

“We can just get engaged, and get married once we tell your family,” he said, undeterred.

“You know there is no such thing as an engagement in Pashtun culture,” I said. “Families arrange the marriage and tell the bride and the groom when to show up. The families get a mullah and do the ceremony. You want your family to go talk to mine in Oregon?”

“I’d be happy to call your mother and ask her for your hand,” he said.

“I won’t be your interpreter for that conversation. And I know you can’t ask Omar to do it, since he would then confirm all the gossip around the FOB.”

He knew he had a dilemma, but Eric was nothing if not resourceful. He decided to go about it in a different manner. “You know, Saima, you’re nothing like any of these Pashtun women. You should decide for yourself, and right now. Don’t you want to be married to me and live with me happily ever after?”

I admired his technique, trying to appeal to my independent spirit, but I was not going to fall for it. “You have a point, Eric. I’m not like the rest of the women here or maybe anywhere, but I still have a brother, sister, and mother that I care a lot about, and who I would be pissed at if they ever did something this big without talking to me. You know the American in me wants to jump up and hug you and accept the proposal with teary eyes, but the practical Pashtun in me wants to know if I’m ready to fight my extended family, all two hundred of them, for you. You have to convince me that we’re going to be together forever because I am causing this type of drama just once, and then never again in my life. More than that, I have to convince myself I can be with you for the rest of my time on earth. I am only doing this once, and it has to be worth it.”

Eric told me that he loved that I wanted those in my family who were close to me to stay close to me forever. He wanted that relationship with my family, too, and would try to be patient. But he also wanted some compromise, which he reminded me would be great practice for marriage because according to him, a successful marriage is all about compromise.