The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice (28 page)

The elders had one more piece of information to impart. Salam had a brother, they said, who was mentally unstable. “His brain is not working,” one of the elders explained. Salam, on the other hand, had been “a very wise person, a smart person,” Qala Khan said. “I never saw him with an AK, a Kalashnikov gun.”

*  *  *

Amir Mohammad worked
as a police officer in Maiwand. He was off duty the day we met him at the reconciliation commission, and instead of his uniform, he wore a gray T-shirt, a tunic, a pin-striped vest, and a red and silver skullcap. He said he was about twenty-one and that his family came from Kandahar. He had thick dark hair, hazel eyes, and a steadiness that made me trust him.

Mohammad had been stationed in the district center the morning that Salam attacked Loyd. He hadn’t actually witnessed it, but a fellow officer watching from the roof had seen it and cried out, and Mohammad and four other policemen had run into the street. They saw the American woman lying on the ground, smoke still rising from her body. She moaned softly, a low sound that followed the slope of her breathing. From this Mohammad knew she was alive.

Farther down the path, Abdul Salam lay on his stomach in the dirt, and Mohammad recalled that an American soldier was holding the Afghan’s hands behind his back. The Americans were shouting to each other up and down the path, while Salam shook on the ground and rolled his head back and forth “just like a crazy person.” Mohammad heard him utter the words “
Allah-ho-Akbar
”—God is great. “It looked like he had lost his mind,” Mohammad said. Another policeman heard Salam murmur: ‘Leave me, I want to go to my mother.’

What had Salam told the interpreters?
I’m crazy. Sometimes I’m walking naked in the night.
He had also said something about having epilepsy, the Afghan interpreter known as Tom Cruise later told Army investigators. Epilepsy. In this part of the world, where mental health treatment means bringing the patient to a shrine to banish the djinns,
“epilepsy” is what they call it when the spirits seize you.

Amir Mohammad watched a uniformed American walk close to
where Salam lay. The American raised his gun. He walked around Salam’s body and stood in front of him, aimed, pulled the trigger. Salam’s face turned in the dirt. The young policeman was astonished. “What we were expecting was that they would hand Salam over to the law,” he told me. “The law might execute him, might sentence him. Otherwise, if he is going to be killed on the spot, maybe the woman should have killed him. The woman was still alive at that time.”

Another American soldier started talking fast to the man with the pistol. Mohammad knew a bit of English, but he couldn’t understand what the soldier said, except one word, repeated over and over: ‘Fuck!’ the American was saying to the man with the gun. ‘Fuck! Fuck!’ That must have been Specialist Justin Skotnicki, twenty-two at the time and the only member of his platoon to actually witness the shooting. When I met him several months later,
he was still trying to erase it from his memory. “We all know what’s the right thing to do, and shooting an unarmed man in zip cuffs is not right by any stretch of the imagination,” he told me, “It’s one thing when someone’s shooting at you, but an unarmed human being getting shot like that—it’s not right.”

Amir Mohammad and the other Afghan police wanted to take Salam’s body into the district center, where they knew that his family would come to collect it, but the Americans wouldn’t let them. After a while, the Americans brought the body to the district center themselves and instructed the Afghans to keep it there overnight. They told everyone to stay away from the dead man, even the police.

Burials are a quick business in Afghanistan, and within a few hours of his death,
Salam’s father and brother had arrived with a group of villagers to collect his body. When the Afghans wouldn’t give it to them,
Salam’s brother yelled and cursed the police. He tried to grab one of their guns, and a policeman hit him. Salam had been mentally ill, his father and brother told the police. His illness must have caused him to lose his mind and attack the American woman.

Qala Khan and Sadoo Khan had told us that Salam’s brother was weak in the head. Now Mohammad was suggesting that Salam himself was crazy. Stories told many times have a way of changing like this, almost imperceptibly, but here the difference was crucial. What about Salam’s brother, I asked, the one who had screamed at the police and tried to grab one of their guns—did he seem mentally disturbed? Mohammad thought about it. He agreed that Salam’s brother had gotten in their faces and used bad words when they wouldn’t turn over Salam’s body, but he didn’t think Salam’s brother was insane. “He was fine—normal,” Mohammad told me. When one of the Afghan police struck Salam’s brother for trying to grab the officer’s gun, the police commander rebuked him: ‘Don’t hit him, just take him away. His brother is dead.’

But there was something else. Salam’s father and brother told the police that Salam had attacked the American woman because of his ‘mental problem and also the emotion of his heart.’ What emotion could that have been? Mohammad now wondered aloud—what about this American woman had so enraged him? Had Salam seen these foreigners before? Had he argued with them, or with this woman in particular? “Were they local people, were they tribes?” Mohammad asked, incredulous. “No. They were strangers.”

The emotion of his heart.
Was Salam really an extremist, an insurgent who had somehow managed to hide this even from his relatives and neighbors? On the day Paula Loyd was attacked,
the Taliban had issued a statement saying that children had poured fuel on a female foreign soldier and set her on fire while she was searching homes in Maiwand. “The soldier caught fire immediately after petrol was poured on her and then explosions were set off because of the ammunition on her,” the statement said. “As a result the female soldier was killed instantly and a large number of other foreign soldiers were wounded.”

The statement was interpreted by many as a Taliban claim of
responsibility, yet nowhere in it did the insurgents claim they had committed the attack, and it was impossible not to wonder why. The Afghan insurgency is prone to exaggerating its accomplishments, claiming that it has killed more soldiers and destroyed more tanks than it actually has, taking credit for assaults it wished it had had the foresight to commit. So why
didn’t
the Taliban quickly and publicly claim responsibility for setting Paula Loyd on fire? Instead, the Taliban statement described a spontaneous children’s uprising against the infidels, the kind of mystical event that fit neatly into the idea of Maiwand as a site of organic Afghan resistance. And it suggested that “children”—simple beings who could not always be reliably controlled—had done something that a bona fide insurgent would not have done, for this was a strange and unmanly way to attack a foreign woman. Unlike her fellow Human Terrain Team members, Loyd had not been wearing a military uniform. A civilian woman traveling with soldiers might always come under attack if the soldiers were targeted, but I had never heard of a civilian in the company of soldiers being singled out for special violence. And if the Taliban were, as some would certainly argue, too brutal to care about such distinctions, if they
had
carefully planned the attack, why hadn’t they sent a suicide bomber packed with explosives into the bazaar, as they would two months later, to exact the greatest possible damage?

I wanted to hear the local Taliban’s account of what had happened, so we asked a Taliban field commander in Maiwand.
He went by the name Al Fathy, an Arabic nom de guerre, and he, too, was oddly silent on the subject of organizational responsibility. Salam was “a mujahid and the son of a mujahid,” Al Fathy told us, using the Arabic term for a holy warrior that has been employed for generations in Afghanistan to describe armed men battling foreign occupation. Far from being mentally ill, Al Fathy said, Salam was “normal” and “perfectly well, and he could not tolerate the presence of infidels in the streets of his
hometown. Because of his emotions and his Islamic fervor, and by his choice, he carried out that sacrificial act.”

We asked about the tractor. Had the Taliban taken it and threatened to kill Salam if he didn’t do something on their behalf?

“The Taliban did not take a tractor from him,” Al Fathy said. “We did not even take a rooster from him. He sacrificed himself for the protection of his land from the infidels.”

The Maiwand policeman,
Amir Mohammad, didn’t believe that Salam was crazy. How could a crazy man arrange such an attack, buying the petrol, throwing and igniting it, then running away? Yet like everyone else we spoke to, Mohammad was at a loss to explain what had motivated Salam.
The Afghan police investigation had yielded little of interest about him. No one could remember Salam saying anything against the government or in favor of the Taliban. Mohammad had even heard that Salam had worked a few months earlier for a security firm guarding NATO logistics convoys.

Mohammad was sorry that Salam had been killed. If he had been handed over to the police, they might have learned what had driven him: “Why is he doing this? Who is behind him?” Mohammad asked. “We could get more information if he was alive.” Salam’s family did own a tractor, and on the morning of our conversation, before Mohammad drove to Kandahar to meet us, he had seen Abdul Salam’s brother driving the tractor along a streambed in Maiwand. But Mohammad had never heard the story the elders had told, about Salam being kidnapped by the Taliban and his tractor held for ransom.

*  *  *

Agents from the
Army’s Criminal Investigation Division had arrived in Maiwand the morning after Loyd’s attack. They wanted to see Salam’s body, but it had already been released to his family. About sixty
village elders and residents had come to the district center and asked the Afghan police to give it to them, and the American company commander had finally agreed, hoping to
“maintain good relations with the officials he dealt with constantly,” the investigators wrote, “and to prevent possible retaliation against US forces for the incident.”

The investigators asked to see the crime scene.
It was a clear, warm, windless day when Lieutenant Pathak took them out there. The ground was charred black where the fire had burned, but the place where Salam died had been raked clean. Where blood had pooled a day earlier, only sand remained. Looking at the investigators’ photographs, you can almost hear the wind in the bamboo and feel the quiet emptiness of the lane, the warmth of the sun, the soft young grass fringing the stream.

Paula Loyd had possessed a rare kind of personal power.
“She had a disproportionate effect on a lot of people,” Lieutenant Colonel Dan Hurlbut, the battalion commander of the 2–2, told me when I visited Maiwand a few months after her death. For savvy Afghan leaders, her attack had also constituted a political opportunity. The governor of Kandahar went on TV to denounce Salam’s crime, and prominent Afghan leaders began talking about collective punishment. General Abdul Razik Sherzai, the brother of the powerful Barakzai tribal leader and former Kandahar governor Gul Agha Sherzai, offered to “whack” Salam’s entire family, Hurlbut told me. Even Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Afghan president’s brother and the most powerful man in the south, had promised to “get tough.” It would have been comforting to think they were motivated by Loyd’s service to Afghanistan, but Wali Karzai—the man Loyd had refused to meet because she considered him a criminal—was no friend of hers. “She hated that guy,” Hurlbut told me with a chuckle.

The promises to avenge Loyd’s burning also indicated something else: that it wasn’t an ordinary Taliban hit. People like Sherzai and Wali Karzai didn’t generally promise to exact revenge on an insurgent’s
family—if they could have done that, the Taliban would have been much easier to defeat. Salam was a local man. People knew how to find his relatives. Indeed, the Maiwand shura elders were concerned that his family would be punished for what Salam had done. The elders were contrite, and they had only one request for the Americans.
“They asked us, ‘Please don’t kill the family,’ ” Hurlbut recalled.

Salam was not a hard-core militant, but someone who “had been mentally challenged for a long time,” Hurlbut told me. The insurgents might have planted the idea in his head. They might have drugged him, but even this was unclear. After the attack, Hurlbut’s soldiers had overheard insurgents talking about the assault on the radio. ‘We did this to him,’ they said. ‘We got him ready and we told him to attack that person.’ But Mike Warren, Loyd’s team leader, was skeptical of Taliban involvement.
Salam, he told me, had been known around Chehel Gazi as “the village wacko.”

“He didn’t have Taliban connections,” Warren told me. “He was really a guy who had some drug and mental health issues. The local police had had trouble with him before for, basically, erratic behavior.” When Afghan leaders asked if the Americans wanted Salam’s family dead, Warren told me, “it was like, ‘No, this is a tragic accident.’ ”

“So you saw it as an accident?”

“Do I think it was a preplanned, premeditated attack on Paula? No,” Warren said. “For twenty minutes they were having a great conversation, and something flipped in the guy’s mind. I think it was the act of an irrational man, who for one reason or the other, something went wrong in his mental psyche and he attacked Paula. He tried to kill her.”

I would hear a similar story later from Hajji Ehsan, the Maiwand district representative on the Kandahar Provincial Council. Salam was well known to everyone in Maiwand, Ehsan told us. He sometimes showed up at community meetings and shuras, but people tried to keep
him away because he could be disruptive, so he often sat outside.
“People were just making a joke of him because he was an abnormal person,” Ehsan said. Sometimes they would ask him questions just to see what he would say: ‘Salam
jan,
how are you? What did you see and what did you hear?’ Salam would say something and people would laugh. He must have been convinced to set the foreign woman on fire without even understanding what he was doing. As Ehsan put it: “Salam was the kind of person who, if someone told him to throw this petrol at the Taliban, he would do that also.”