In My Father's Country (45 page)

“Here is Osama,” the first boy said, pushing the sleepy child toward me.

The rest of the boys, and the soldiers, burst out laughing.

I didn’t remember being able to tease adults like that when I was their age. Things must have changed a lot, I thought, but of course, I was laughing, too.

One of the young soldiers, with an easy smile, pretended to grab the little Osama and walk to the nearest Humvee, causing the rest of the boys to scream with panic, “No, no, don’t take him! He isn’t the real Osama! Really!”

On that first mission, I went into many villages, and after the first couple of villages, they started looking the same. As I was going about collecting data, I was also showing the lieutenant the best way to engage the locals. Upon entering the village, we would look for a group of men; we’d most often find one by the bazaar or right outside the mosque. I would ask the men if we could hang out in their village for a bit and talk to them. Asking permission was not necessary, and most American soldiers forgot to ask, but it showed respect in a culture that values reverence for ownership. The village belonged to the people who lived there, not us; I would tell this to our soldiers a hundred times over the months. Above all, these men were Pashtun, and prided themselves on their famous hospitality. When asked, they were almost always gracious and would most often offer us tea. When I approached the men’s gathering I didn’t wear my helmet because I wanted them to see that I was female. They may have hated me for that, but they were curious. Before I’d left Portland I had the brilliant idea to put auburn highlights in my black hair. There is so much bleach in the water at the FOB that within days my highlights had turned orange. I carried a notebook and a pen so that I would appear even more harmless. I can’t imagine what these men must have thought, seeing me walking toward them without a scarf, armed with two weapons, a pen, and a notebook, with my orange hair blazing in the sun.

The formula of behavior was the same. First I would sit down with the elders. Even though the Zadran are ferocious, they are Pashtun and thus extremely hospitable. We would drink tea in the blazing sun and just talk. They wanted to know if I was married, and sometimes the answer was yes, sometimes no. They would want to know where I was from. Sometimes I would say Kandahar, other times, Jalalabad, but never did I tell the truth.

After a while I would introduce them to some of the soldiers. I urged the soldiers to talk about what they missed about home, what their fears were, what their dreams were for their lives and their children. I advised them to show pictures of their kids, but not of wives. We weren’t just there to educate Americans about Afghan culture; learning was a two-way street in Afghanistan. Dehumanizing American soldiers is one of the insurgency’s best tricks. So we made it clear that we were people with families we loved, children we adored, homes we missed. And no, back in America, we didn’t eat little Muslim children for dinner.

One time an elder wanted to know whether it was true that Americans married their sisters. The troops laughed. “Heck no! But we heard that you guys marry your cousins. We don’t even do
that
in America.” They razzed one another, but they shared a few laughs and there was a sense of good feelings being established. The hoped-for outcome would be that the elders would spread the word among the village that the American kids weren’t so bad. Likewise, the troops would return to their base and tell their fellow soldiers that they’d talked to some cool old Afghan guys that day.

Although most days I felt successful, physically exhausted but emotionally exuberant, some missions just broke my heart. I would come back to the MRAP and just cry, thinking of the suffering of the Afghan people, the hard lives ahead for their children. I remembered how it felt to be running for my life as a child and wanted to protect the sweet, shoeless, often pantless children I saw. At first, the soldiers didn’t know what to do when they would see me quietly crying, looking out the window. After a few times, they let me cry in peace, silently offering
me water or snacks. Surprisingly I felt no shame doing that in front of them.

Part of the road project involved paving smaller access roads between villages that led to the K-G Pass road. One day we were driving along one of these roads and I saw a bunch of kids between the ages of nine and twelve working on it. It was morning, but it was also summer, and the temperature was scalp-burning hot, and here were these skinny, sweaty little boys breaking up rocks.

I asked Tom, the battalion commander, if we could stop the convoy. I started walking toward the children while the soldiers were still setting security perimeters, which was not protocol, but I was too disturbed. I asked the kids what they were doing, and they said they’d been working on the road since 6:00
A.M
. It turned out they were orphans from the surrounding villages. USAID had hired a Farsiban from Kabul to put together a road crew. He’d simply gone to the school and recruited orphans, who viewed it as a chance to make money. The kids were primarily the oldest boys in their family, and this was the only way they could feed their younger brothers and sisters. This was another example of the well-meaning United States thinking we were helping but in reality taking children away from education, as well as creating another opportunity for insurgency recruitment.

The insurgents are masters of psychological manipulation. They know all the Afghan buttons to push. They would track down the elders of the village in which these children lived and say, “Americans claim to care so much about your kids, but look what they’re doing. Taking them out of school to work on the roads. And who will benefit from the roads? It is the Americans who are using these roads to get their supplies. You don’t even have cars. Why do you need roads?”

ONE DAY AT
the gym at Camp Salerno, I was working out when I noticed one of the laborers staring at me as he folded the towels. Being stared at happened a lot. Most likely because I was stressed about one thing or another, that day it really upset me. I was a Pashtun female. He
was a Pashtun male. Why was he disrespecting me by staring at me? I knew that I was not acting like a typical Pashtun woman by being in the gym, but still, I felt harassed.

I went up to him and asked him to use the other counter, which was facing a different direction. He moved, but then would turn around every few minutes and even started singing to me at one point. I blew up. I got his supervisor and told him that his laborer was harassing me and I did not feel comfortable in the gym. To make a long story short, as a result, he got fired. Because he was a laborer from around the village, some of the elders came to Salerno to find out why this had happened, as he had told them that it was for no reason. I felt strongly enough about it that I asked the battalion commander if he would let me handle it and talk to the elders. He agreed. On the day of the meeting, we prepared tea, cookies, and juices, in the Pashtun style.

The room was a good fifteen-minute walk from the TOC, so the commander had sent a couple of his soldiers to drive the villagers to the meeting. I greeted them at the front of the meeting room in my jeans and T-shirt, but to show respect and cover my bare arms I wrapped a shawl around my shoulders. Their shock at my addressing them in Pashtu was the usual reaction. They wouldn’t have been so surprised had I spoken to them in Farsi because by then there were quite a few Farsiban women working in places like Salerno. After the initial standard questions—Where was I from? Where did I learn English? How long would I be there?—were covered, I brought up the reason they were there. I asked them if the young man had told them what had happened. They answered that he’d told them he was just working and his supervisor, who apparently never liked him, came up and fired him.

The commander had decided to step back and let me handle the situation by myself, and so he wasn’t present. I had asked a couple of the Civil Affairs soldiers to sit with me—just so the elders’ cultural sensitivities would not be insulted by being alone with me in a closed room—but had asked them not to bring an interpreter. I didn’t want the elders to be embarrassed by what I said to them, and I would get away with saying a lot more if the conversation stayed between the Afghans. I
had a lot of grievances with the Pashtun men, and as a fellow Pashtun, even as a female, I could criticize them more openly. This is a side of
Pashtunwali
most outsiders don’t know about. There is another
Pashtunwali
rule: You have to protect the pride of any other Pashtuns in front of non-Pashtuns, regardless of how you feel about one another. There is a saying among Pashtuns: “Me against my brother. My brother and I against my cousin. My brother, cousin, and I against the rest of the world.”

I addressed them as Baba, because they were my grandfather’s age, and because I wanted to remind them that I was one of them. I told them that regardless of how I was dressed in front of them then, regardless of what I was doing for a living, I spoke to them as a native. As a Pashtun female, I had ancient-born rights, and one of them was that I not be harassed by men of my community. This young man had violated my ancient rights, and I was holding them, the elders, responsible for his behavior because, as we all knew, they were supposed to teach young Pashtun men how to treat other Pashtuns.

This is among the complexities of Pashtuns that make it so hard for outsiders to understand their rules of behavior. On the one hand, women are not to be heard from or seen in public, but on the other hand, I, a female of pure Pashtun blood, could stand in front of these men and reprimand them for how they were raising their young men, and how they were losing their customs. I was not breaking any rules because a long, long time ago, when there was peace and stability, women were allowed to call out men in public arenas when they felt threatened or harassed. I was using Pashtun history, which had not been written anywhere, and depended on society’s memory for passage to the next generation. How do you explain this to the soldiers sitting with me, as they watched me speak with these men in a language they didn’t understand, though they could clearly see the elders’ hung heads and read the apologetic tone of their response? This was among the most defining moments in my life, when I felt most Pashtun, and I couldn’t even explain the
why
to these soldiers. This was the first time I felt fully accepted as a Pashtun by my father’s people, and I became acutely aware of the Pashtun blood running
through my veins. It took the two cultures I loved, combined, to give me these feelings of total belonging: The Pashtun in me gave me that nearly genetic knowledge of my people’s history, and the American in me gave me the courage to stand up to these elders and claim my hereditary right to protect myself from harrassment.

The elders admitted that it was their responsibility to make sure our traditions were better upheld, and that the young man would be punished and would learn his lesson the hard way. They asked for my forgiveness, which I, of course, gave immediately and freely. I told them it was hard to keep an ancient culture alive and I was trying to hold on to bits and pieces myself, even in America.

I walked the elders to the truck, and the soldiers drove them back to the gate, where they all walked to the village, and I hoped had a
shura
. I knew the young man was going to be hearing from the whole village and didn’t envy him that attention. A couple of days later at the gym, a group of the other laborers, also from the same village, came up to my elliptical and stood a little ways back, looking down at their feet. When I removed my headphones, they told me that the elders had sent me a message: The issue had been taken care of and I would never feel harassed by any of the young men in their village. The elders only said men in
their
village. This meant I could still expect harassment from the men in surrounding villages. One village at a time. I thanked the young men and resumed my workout.

T
HIRTY-TWO

E
verywhere we went the village elders asked whether I was married. The soldiers were confused. Hadn’t I lectured them endlessly about not talking to Afghans about women and wives? Then how did these absolute strangers excuse such rude behavior, poking into my personal life this way? Were they hitting on me? Should the soldiers intervene? If they didn’t, would the elders assume they didn’t care about my honor? It was so confusing.

I tried to explain that even though the elders spoke to me so freely, I was still a woman in Afghanistan, where the most relevant thing about me was my marital status. I altered my answer depending on whom I was talking to. If I felt the elder respected me, as did the man who reminded me of my Baba, I would tell the truth. No, I was not married. But if we were in a conservative village, I would say that I was married to a nice Afghan man who had given me permission to come back and help our people. In some crowds, I could even joke: “Why would I ever get married? Look at the women in your country. All they do is take care of you men. Why would I want that?” They would protest, “But our women are happy! Go ask them. They have new clothes. They have jewelry.” Once in a while, I’d say that my husband had died.

These meetings all took place in the open, beneath the biggest shade
trees in the village or wherever people tended to congregate. We had never been invited inside anyone’s home.

Then one day we did an assessment at a bazaar on the border of Khost and Paktya. When shopkeepers saw us coming they closed down their stores and hid, even more skittish than usual. I spotted an old man wearing a white turban and carrying a cane, trying to look busy picking up little rocks and placing them on a wall being built for a new store. I approached him from the street, calling out,
“Asalaam alaikum, Baba.”
He didn’t turn around. Assuming he was hard of hearing, I said it again, louder. By this time, I was standing right next to him. When he turned to me, I will never forget the look of naked fear on his face. I took a step back, realizing he was afraid of
me
.