In My Father's Country (43 page)

“True. Still, you never know what’s going to happen.”

Later, whenever I went on my own missions, I would give Audrey these instructions in case I never came back: My lotions, shampoo, and perfume were to be given to the female soldiers on the FOB. My laptop was to go to our CAT I interpreter. My clothes should be given to any civilian on the FOB who wanted them. Nothing was to be shipped to my mother or my siblings because I didn’t want them to suffer the anguish of going through my belongings after I was gone. Plus, I knew my mom would save all my stuff for as long as she lived, and I didn’t want Khalid and Najiba to have to see my things in the garage every day.

“I’ll give her a call when I get there,” Michael said.

We both knew there were no phones or computers where he was going. I shook his hand. He gave a little salute, then winked at his silliness and climbed into the Humvee after Tom.

The mission to Sabari was a week long. I went about my business, reading reports, attending several meetings every day. I went to the gym and walked on the StairMaster in the evenings. I was anxious for the team to return, to see what they had discovered. Before he left I’d given Michael a list of suggested questions to ask the elders, and he had seemed willing to entertain them.

On one side of the bakery Aziz had built a screened porch, where every day he served a simple lunch. Usually it was okra or eggplant and rice. On days when Audrey and I simply couldn’t face another bite of overcooked steak or corn bread, we’d have lunch at Aziz’s.

We were sitting across from each other on his porch one day, flies
buzzing against the screen, when we heard the blast. At this point we’d learned to read the language of explosions. When it was the result of outgoing fire, we’d feel the earth shake, then hear the sound. This time we heard the sound first, then felt a slight tremor. That meant it was not us causing it. It was them.

Audrey and I looked at each other. She was one of the bravest people I knew, but she looked afraid. “That was close.”

Later, we confessed that we’d both thought of Tom and Michael at that moment.

Still, we were so used to the sounds of warfare, of whistling rockets and the boom of mortars, that we didn’t dwell on it much. We finished our lunch and chatted briefly with Aziz about the difficulty he was having securing good-quality garlic for his garlic bread. We strolled back to the office. The sun was hot on my face, on the part in my hair. The heat plus the good food made me feel sleepy, and I wished I could curl up in a quiet spot and take a nap.

However, a meeting was scheduled at the office. Because the day was so warm the HTT door was open to allow for a breeze. Our purpose in being there was to meet the members of an incoming unit, and Alex, who would be replacing Evan as the team leader.

An hour later, I’d forgotten about the explosion. At war, an explosion was business as usual. I sat facing the open door and saw Tim, the CSM who was Jason’s right-hand man, walking slowly toward the office. The sun was on his face. I couldn’t see his expression—but I suspected that something bad had happened simply by the way he walked, like he dreaded every step he took closer to what he had to do. He entered the room. Tim had always smiled at me easily. Today his face was gray beneath his tan.

He asked Evan to step outside, and when Evan returned, he wore the same ashen expression.

“Two soldiers and Michael have been killed in an IED in Sabari.”

BEFORE MICHAEL’S BODY
was flown from Salerno to BAF, there was a hero’s flight for him and the soldiers who’d been killed with him. By
then I had done three contracts working with the army in Afghanistan, for a total of over three years. I knew many soldiers who had died in that time. As an interpreter, however, I was never aware of what happened to the bodies of these fallen heroes. Interpreters were usually so isolated, but now that I was one of the elite civilians known as the primary staff, working directly for the brigade commander, I got to see the war in a more intimate way, whether I wanted to or not. A hero’s flight was one of the rituals I had never known existed, which upset me beyond measure. How much more had I been left out of as an interpreter? I was fuming at myself, at the army, at the contracting companies for excluding me from so much by making me an interpreter all those years. I was furious that I had wasted more than three years playing puppet at meetings between U.S. soldiers and Afghans. In retrospect, I was probably lashing out at anything or anyone just so I could delay facing my feelings.

The hero’s flight took place in the middle of the night. The Afghan moon was like a light fixture in the sky. There were nights, like that one, when you could easily read by the moonlight. For safety reasons, planes were no longer flown in the bright moon. They would be too visible to the missiles of the insurgents.

At 11:45
P.M
. there was an announcement over the loudspeaker. The bodies had been kept in the hospital until the time came to load them onto the plane. The night was still, no mortars outgoing, no pickup basketball games or heavy metal issuing from the random B-hut. You could hear coyotes in the distance. The sky was splattered with stars. The absence of the wind was not the only cause of silence—there was no sound coming from anywhere. There must have been hundreds of soldiers all around me, and not a sound was made as they stood at ease.

There was no hiding from my guilt in the silence of the night and the light of the moon. I felt guilty for every uncharitable thought I’d ever had about Michael, every harsh word I’d uttered. Audrey and I were there first; we had stayed in our room until the loudspeaker had told us it was time. Evan and the rest of the team came and found us at the front and stood next to us in silence. The thousands of soldiers and few civilians
present all stood in silence, alone with their own thoughts. I will never forget the looks on the faces of the soldiers at a fallen hero’s flight. The raw emotions were so stark that it took my breath away, and I couldn’t look any of them in the eyes. This was one of the rare times when I desperately wanted to not be known as an Afghan. When I wanted to explain my association with
them
, and tell these soldiers that I myself would never forgive the Afghans for each American life lost in that country. Not when I knew firsthand the lives of those soldiers, and had witnessed the goodwill of most of them even when they thought no one but their God was watching.

As part of the tradition, the fallen soldier’s team carries the body to the terminal and loads it onto the plane. It could be seven people, ten people. Two people could carry it, but that’s not the point. Our team was Audrey, Billy, Evan, and Alex, as well as Farhad and Ehsan, our CAT I interpreters, and I.

We stood in the cold at the entrance to the emergency room, waiting for Michael’s body. On a night like this in Khost, you could feel the altitude. My lungs were struggling to draw each breath, and it hurt even more knowing Michael would never breathe again.

Civilians generally don’t receive a hero’s flight, but the brigade commander had made the decision to treat Michael the same way he would the soldiers. Michael had died in the line of duty and deserved the same honor.

A hospital worker brought Michael’s body out in a small truck. It was wrapped tightly in an American flag. We could clearly see its outline. We picked him up. I was by his right leg on the stretcher. As we passed the crowd, soldiers saluted. I knew I wasn’t the only one with tears streaming down my face. I swallowed hard to keep myself from making any sound, knowing that once I started I would not be able to stop.

As I carried his body with my team, my hand touched his leg. It was cold through the fabric. I hated that this was how I would remember him. Instead of Michael smiling, laughing, fighting, singing, teasing, it would be this, the feel of a lifeless leg wrapped in the flag. I wished I had broken my own rule about hugging. It had been easy enough to give him
heaps of criticism, assuming that he would be around and we could hash out our differences, but I had withheld that final hug.

I felt wretched for his parents, who’d been against his coming to Afghanistan. Michael hadn’t listened to them, just as I hadn’t listened to my family, but I knew it upset him that he didn’t have their support. He had wanted to show them that what he was doing was a great service, one that mattered, and I think his inability to convey the importance of his work to them frustrated him. He had tried to do an outstanding job, not just because he was that kind of person but because on some level he wanted to show them, too. I couldn’t imagine how horrible it must have been for his mother to receive the news of his death. For her sake, I hoped that her faith would be strong enough for her to handle the cruel reality that would end her life as she knew it. I longed for her to know that Michael died doing what he loved, and more than that, I wished that God would dull her pain and treat her kindly in the next life, because to go through the death of a child has to be the hardest thing on earth.

My regrets gathered in my heart. I hoped he’d written me off as a nutty Pashtun, and hadn’t listened when I’d accused him of using Afghanistan to further his academic career, or of making a thesis out of the Afghan people. I realized, then, that I had criticized Michael for not being more understanding, and yet I had made no effort to understand him.

It took less than five minutes to deliver the body to the waiting C-16. It seemed as if during those minutes I felt more emotions than I had ever imagined humanly possible. It wasn’t just that insufferable guilt. I was sad beyond measure because any loss of life is sad, but of course it resonates on a deeper level when it’s someone with whom you’ve shared many hours, someone who has teased you about the guys who might have tried to flirt with you, who has challenged your way of thinking, and who had the potential of being a true friend. There was also the heaviness of relief—which I knew was wrong—the gratitude that it hadn’t been me in that Humvee.

I wished I had never known about hero’s flight, but at the same time
I knew that there would be many more, and that I would never miss another one. These fallen heroes gave the ultimate sacrifice. The least I could do was to never send one off in the middle of the night all alone.

As we reached the C-16 we passed a row of saluting soldiers with tears running down their faces. The children they’d once been had reemerged. I had lived among soldiers for years, known them to be nothing less than stoic, resolute in carrying out their duty. They could be squirrelly on the base, goofing off in the gym or during their endless pickup games of basketball, but outside the wire they were strong, well trained, and—above all—they had one another’s backs. The bond that these soldiers formed was one that no outsider could understand. When a fellow soldier was hit in a firefight and they couldn’t save him, they brought back the body, as that bond required. Sadness never slowed them down in the line of fire. But once they loaded their friend onto that plane, briefly their emotions took over. Now they were just young guys who’d lost not just a friend but someone who understood their lives like no other. This was the ugliest part of the war for me, watching these young men sob. I have to imagine that they were also grieving for themselves, knowing that they could be next, and that their families could easily be at the receiving end of a hero’s flight. I know I was.

After the hero’s flight we walked back to the HTT office. It was close to 1:00
A.M.
, but none of us wanted to be alone with our thoughts yet. The eastern sky was pale with the dawn when we finally made it to bed.

The next morning we hung Michael’s picture next to Karzai’s in our office and started working on the next mission.

For those at war, grief is a luxury they can’t afford.

THE UPROAR IN
the media was immediate and long-lasting. Editorials appeared in newspapers and on websites saying that Michael, a civilian, was outside the wire hunting for bad guys, who then murdered him in retaliation. That this couldn’t be further from the truth made no difference. Tom, whose contract was almost up, and who had been riding in the same convoy, escorted Michael’s body back to the United States, overnight, and the HTT at Salerno was reduced to Audrey and me. Evan,
who was waiting to turn his post officially over to Alex, mostly stayed in his office.

We did not leave the wire for months after Michael’s death. To keep from falling into depression, we did all we could to stay busy. On any given day, we had access to hundreds of local laborers on the base, so we decided that if we couldn’t leave to engage with the Afghans beyond the wire, we would talk to the ones coming to us inside the wire every day. We designed our own research studies and the questions to ask the laborers. We cleared it with whichever authority was in charge of the group of locals to whom we wanted to talk, and most Afghans were happy to take a break and chat with us.

I spent a week visiting the FOB’s main gate, the Entry Control Point. Afterward, at the end of the week, I would brief the commander on my findings and recommendations. Every day more than a thousand locals passed through on their way to work. They worked at the laundry, the chow house, and the MWR. They built buildings and handed out towels at the gym.

The local laborers’ biggest complaint was the length of time it took to be processed through the gate every day. I stood at the gate and watched them come in and out for a week to see if there was anything we could do to make the process faster and their experience more positive. This wasn’t easy, as security needed to remain the top priority. Any morning a worker might bring a bomb onto the base because an insurgent had kidnapped his son and threatened to kill him if he didn’t take the package onto the FOB.

Also, the guards at the gate had never received any sort of cultural briefing, though they had more contact with the locals than anyone else on the base. They’d become lax when they took their breaks; rather than leaving their post, they stood around and smoked, giving the impression that they were still at work and simply ignoring the long line of locals waiting to get in. The locals, of course, felt ignored and disrespected. This problem was easily fixed: The commander erected a break room out of plywood and ordered the soldiers to take their downtime there.