The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (10 page)

T
he Chinook touched down amid
a swirl of dirt and stones, and Loyd walked down the ramp into the middle of the desert. She wore military-issue body armor, a helmet, and sunglasses, and all around her lay the vast, yellow plain. Forward Operating Base Ramrod wasn’t much then. The Americans were building it from nothing. Afghan contractors had trucked fist-sized rocks into the helicopter landing zone to hold the fine dust in place and stop it from turning to mudslick when the rains came, but the rest of the base remained a powdery moonscape. The soldiers had pitched a few tents and strung desert camo nets to blunt the sun. It got up near 120 degrees some days,
the heat so oppressive that soldiers building the base had been ordered to return to the big airfield in Kandahar every few days to avoid getting sick.
The battalion intelligence section consisted of a single wooden bench.

Loyd’s teammate, Clint Cooper, scanned the horizon: peaks knifing the sky, dun-colored ground. It reminded him of the Indian reservation where he’d lived as a boy. The landscape of Cooper’s childhood held a powerful place in his memory, and in the American imagination.
His family had lived on Navajo Nation land in Arizona, where his father worked as a schoolteacher for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Monument Valley was a favorite backdrop for John Wayne films and, as a boy, Cooper had seen truckloads of uniformed cavalry soldiers on their way to movie sets and watched Westerns on old-style reels at the reservation school where his father taught.
They would set up chairs in the gym and make popcorn, and the Indian kids would cheer on the cavalry that rescued white settlers from their native attackers. Cooper liked playing with his Indian friends, going to their school dances and eating lamb stew and fry bread. His mother headed a Mormon relief society, and she used to take him to visit Navajo families in traditional mud houses with dirt floors, where, while the woman talked, Cooper herded goats and sheep with the Indian boys. But he was one of only a few white kids on the reservation, and it was impossible to forget that he was different. He had chaps, a cap gun, and a wooden stick horse. When they played cowboys and Indians, he always got to be John Wayne.

When Cooper was about fifteen, his father got a job doing administrative work at day-care centers for the children of U.S. service members stationed overseas, and the family moved to a small village in Germany. Cooper learned the language and stayed on for two years after high school to complete a Mormon mission. He returned to Utah, where his family had settled, joined the Army National Guard as a German linguist and counterintelligence specialist, and studied criminal justice at Weber State University. In 2000, he and his wife, Kathy, started a side business buying saltwater taffy in bulk, then repackaging and selling it, and the following year, Cooper left active duty to devote himself full-time to the candy business, keeping only his weekend
commitment to the National Guard. But the economy turned and the taffy enterprise stalled. By September 11, 2001, he was a sergeant first class, one of a small group of noncommissioned officers with foreign language skills and intelligence experience. Instead of Afghanistan, they sent him to Bosnia.

By then,
Bosnia wasn’t much of a war. Cooper and his fellow intelligence officers wore civilian clothes, left the base whenever they chose, and spent hours talking to people in coffee shops, trying to intercept threats to NATO peacekeepers. Along the way, they learned about Islamic militant groups that recruited young Bosnians and funneled fighters from the Middle East through Muslim Bosnia into Europe. They monitored local politics and even helped with war crimes investigations, interviewing victims and locating mass graves. Slobodan Milošević was on trial in The Hague, and Cooper and his teammates passed their findings up the chain of command.

Growing up in Germany, Cooper could walk out behind his house and see craters left over from the aerial bombardments of World War II. In Bosnia, he saw decomposed bodies at mass grave sites, but listening to the stories of war crimes victims was what really got to him.
One man told Cooper he had been forced at gunpoint to rape his daughters.
As Cooper listened, he looked into the man’s eyes and felt himself teetering on the brink of something, as if he, too, were enduring this horror. In an area between Serb and Muslim territory, he lay awake at night listening to land mines explode as the freezing ground tightened around them. He learned not to step off paved roads and well-worn paths. Years later, back home, Cooper’s wife and kids would step down from the porch and walk unthinkingly across the lawn to the family minivan while he took a different route: porch steps, paved walk, driveway. The mines had followed him home.

He returned from Bosnia in 2003, as the Army was mobilizing for Iraq.
The National Security Agency was looking for linguists who spoke
Pashto and Dari, Afghanistan’s two main languages, and Cooper signed up. They sent him to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, where he and his classmates pored over a Pashto dictionary written by a nineteenth-century British cavalry officer and listened to local-language radio broadcasts on the BBC and Voice of America. That year, doing push-ups at the gym, he fell violently ill. Doctors found a tumor on one of his auditory nerves. The Army medically discharged him. It was 2004, and with a military intelligence background, a security clearance, and a year of intensive Pashto behind him, Cooper was a defense contractor’s dream. Lockheed Martin hired him to work as an interrogator for the U.S. military in a secret facility attached to Kandahar Airfield. He would spend fourteen months there questioning prisoners, mainly Afghans brought in by the American Special Forces.

Paula Loyd had inhabited the same geography early in the Afghan war, but her work had been different. She had gotten to know the area around Kandahar well enough to understand what development projects Afghans needed most, what kind of humanitarian aid would best contribute to their security—in short, how the U.S. military could use money and persuasion instead of bullets to fight the insurgency. But if Loyd’s work in Afghanistan told one strand of the story of American involvement there, Cooper’s told another. Loyd had worked on the soft side of the war, while Cooper had lived along its hard edge. He was not a trigger puller, but he pried intelligence from detainees and suspected militants who, having no recourse to a working justice system, were generally desperate to free themselves any way they could.

Cooper and the other interrogators lived in a mud-walled compound at the edge of Kandahar Airfield and worked in a wooden shed. The prisoners lived within the compound walls in open-air barbed-wire structures with tentlike roofs. In winter, the pens were enclosed in plastic and heat was piped in. High-profile and underaged detainees were
separated from the rest and kept in an old maintenance hangar known as the Barn. When Cooper arrived, the Kandahar facility housed several hundred prisoners, but partway through his deployment, the military decided that all detainees would be moved to Bagram Air Base in the north, where the military had recently doubled the size of its detention facility. This changed the nature of Cooper’s job. In his first months in Kandahar, he had interrogated the same detainee as many as a dozen times over an extended period. In the latter half of his deployment, the Kandahar facility never housed more than ten or twenty prisoners at a time, each one staying only a couple of days at most. Instead of getting to know a small handful of captives, Cooper quickly assessed them, trying to figure out whether they should be released or sent to Bagram for further investigation. At his desk, beneath a whiteboard listing the names and numbers of detainees, a small, tan mouse emerged from the wall every morning and tried to steal his breakfast. Cooper began leaving it a piece of cake every day. He took pictures of the mouse and emailed them to his kids.

His language skills were more than sufficient to exchange greetings and elicit biographical information, and they improved with near-constant questioning. But he still worked often with an interpreter to make sure he wasn’t missing something important. The stakes were high, and he didn’t want to mess with people’s lives. As in Bosnia, he felt something for Afghans, something troubling and hard to articulate that blurred the line between him and them. Most of the detainees were low-level Taliban: Afghan Pashtuns, lots of Pakistanis, a couple of Chechens.
“And honestly, a lot of them weren’t Taliban,” he would tell me later.
With the Taliban out of power and Afghanistan relatively stable, waves of Afghan refugees were returning from Pakistan and Iran. Land disputes broke out between new arrivals and squatters who had taken up residence in their absence. Afghans had few ways to settle such
arguments. One of the most effective was to call the Americans and tell them that the person occupying your land—or the person who wanted to reclaim it—was Taliban.

Cooper learned that the insurgents moved in groups, depending on locals to supply and shelter them. Villagers helped the militants, bound triply by their code of hospitality, their fear of marauding gunmen, and their conservative religious and political sensibilities. The U.S. military viewed these people as Taliban supporters, but that was an oversimplification. Even the fighters were more complex than they looked. During Cooper’s time there, he visited a village where a boy of about twelve had fired at a coalition helicopter. The helicopter’s 30 mm cannon had decimated the insurgents below, and when Cooper and the soldiers arrived, the boy’s legs had been blown off. Cooper talked to him as he lay on a stretcher. He questioned the boy and everyone else in the hope of saving soldiers’ lives.
But as he looked at the child lying there wounded, he felt acutely the strain of occupying two contradictory positions at once. He was an American trying to protect his comrades, but he was also a father with protective instincts for a kid who had been indoctrinated, given an AK-47, and told to shoot at helicopters. Cooper spoke the language and had begun to understand how the war looked to Afghans.
The longer he stayed, the harder it became not to empathize with both sides.

As an interrogator, Cooper worked subtly. By his account, he wasn’t a screamer; he didn’t rage or pound his fists on the table. Instead, he used what he knew about Afghan culture to come in close. Once, the Special Forces had captured a Taliban commander, a big man with money and power. The insurgent had lunged at his captors and they had beaten him into submission; now he sat at one end of a cargo container and Cooper stood at the other end, poised to step out if the captive got wild again. That must have been devastating for a man of your stature, Cooper told the Afghan in Pashto, to be humiliated when you
were captured like that, in front of your family, your friends. He started talking about the man’s daughters, and the commander burst into tears and began to tell Cooper what he wanted to know. “You do things—not torture, but you play with people,” Cooper would tell me later.
He didn’t doubt the worthiness of his mission, but he was emotionally astute enough to feel unsettled about this kind of button pushing, about using language and culture, the signposts of fellow feeling, to snoop around inside people’s heads and hearts.

His most complicated experiences as an interrogator often involved children, maybe because he missed his own kids. Years later, he would tell me about a boy of ten or eleven whom the Special Forces had found in a known Taliban hideout up in the mountains. Cooper guessed that the insurgents had abandoned him in their rush to escape. The boy was emaciated, and an interpreter judged by his accent that he came from a southern coastal region of Pakistan. When Cooper asked the boy about his family, he reeled off the names of Indian movie stars. Although they offered him a latrine, he would defecate in the corner of his cell. He was slow, they realized, perhaps mentally handicapped. When Cooper asked what he had eaten in the mountains, the boy replied: ‘Semen.’ It occurred to them that he might have been kept as a sex slave. It was the middle of winter, and the boy was so weak that Cooper feared he would die of malnourishment and cold if they released him. If they kept him, he would be branded an insurgent, but he would get medicine and food. After a few months, he might be strong enough to make his way home. So they declared him Taliban and held him in Kandahar in the hope that he would survive.

During his time as an interrogator, Cooper worked with a female lieutenant. She was a public relations officer, and one day she went out to a village to hand out coloring books. On the way back, her Humvee hit a buried bomb. Afterward, Cooper went to look at what was left. The Humvee’s front seat was gone. The lieutenant had been sitting behind
the driver. He saw the book she had been reading, a bookmark where she’d left off, her half-empty can of Diet Coke. Afghan police caught the guy who had planted the bomb and beat him until he was bloody and blue, his buttocks and legs covered with bruises. He lay shaking and crying in the corner of his cell. Cooper went in to question him. The dead lieutenant had been beautiful and brave and American. Her remains would now be shipped home to her family in a box. Yet Cooper was horrified to find that he also empathized with her attacker, a man he would have preferred to dismiss as scum. This quivering heap of flesh had been paid two hundred dollars to put the bomb in the ground. He said he had done it to support his family. He didn’t care where the money came from—he would probably have taken two hundred dollars from the Americans to inform on insurgents planting IEDs. Where was the radical Taliban they were always hearing about, the bloodthirsty enemy who lurked behind these pathetic henchmen? “These are the Taliban,” Cooper would tell me, shaking his head. “These are the religious radicals. They’re just a bunch of opportunists is what they are.” Cooper believed absolutely that some people needed to die, but which people, and for what crimes? The war’s ideological groundwork was beginning to give way. “The percentage of bad Taliban, what is that? Five, ten percent maybe? The rest were just trying to survive,” he would tell me later. “Where is the evil? This war is just crazy. There’s no good or bad.”