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Crossing the Wire
One Woman’s Journey into the Hidden Dangers of the Afghan War
AnnaMaria Cardinalli, PhD
Dedication
To those who serve,
and to the innocent they protect.
Before Proceeding
A book of this nature requires a few important disclaimers. First, the entire text of this manuscript is unclassified and has been subject to a classification review by U.S. Government authorities.
Second, I am writing simply as a private individual, sharing my personal experiences and memories of war. I am not acting as an employee of or in any official capacity for the U.S. Army Human Terrain System, or for any of the services or agencies with which I have worked. My views and analyses are simply my own.
Third, this book does not generally convey the intent of my specific missions or findings for the Human Terrain System, the United States Marine Corps, the United States Army, or British forces, because these were frequently of operational relevance. While Human Terrain findings are unclassified, I see no reason to unnecessarily publicize sensitive information when it can potentially involve the protection of American and Afghan lives.
Finally, this book would not have been published without the shared convictions of David Farnsworth at Casemate, his editor Steven Smith, and the generous staff there, as well as Jane Friedman, Tina Pohlman, and the professional eBook publishing team at Open Road Media. For the manuscript to arrive in their hands, my agents Peter and Sandra Riva, along with JoAnn Collins, never wavered in their understanding of the import of the tale I had to tell. All these deserve my thanks and appreciation.
Contents
Introduction
Prologue
1 C-130 Rolling Down the Strip
2 Mamma Told Me Not to Come!
3 In the Clutches of the Mullah
4 Bow-Wow, Kuchi Coup
5 “So, What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?”
6 Villages Without Medicines: Stomachs First
7 Latrines and Shower Scenes
8 Huh? What Does It Mean?
9 Boots Don’t Bend
10 “ … Too Damn Cruel”
11 “If They Are Stronger, It Is Theirs for Them to Take.”
12 We Spell Misery M.R.E.
13 Playing I.E.D. Chicken
14 To Walk a Mile for a Camel
15 “If You Go to a Medic, You Had Better be Missing a Limb.”
16 Really? No, Really?
17 Incoming!
18 The First U.S.M.C. Female Engagement Team
19 NATO Soldiers as Objects
20 It Doesn’t End There
21 Afghanistan, Againistan
22 Farewell to Foreign Shores …
23 In from the Cold
Epilogue
Notes
A Biography of AnnaMaria Cardinalli
Introduction
“Crossing the wire” is a phrase that carries deep meaning in the heart of anyone who has fought in a counterinsurgency effort, like that of our long War on Terror. It means a venture past the ambiguous front line and into the chaotic uncertainty of warfare. It is beyond the wire where battle lies. Paradoxically, it is only by crossing the wire that the human complexities that create and underlie conflict become apparent, and it is only in the effort to reveal and untangle them that lie our long-term chances for victory, resolution, and peace.
The venture across the wire is one that only a small number even among our military ever make, and impossibly few among them are women. A strange life journey ultimately placed me—a woman, an opera singer and classical guitarist by profession, a Catholic theologian by education, and an intelligence professional by fierce patriotism—outside the wire in Afghanistan and found me tasked, among many things, with an investigation of the issue of sexuality in the remote Pashtun south of the country, the region from which a great part of the terrorist threat to the Western world originates and is nurtured and harbored. Incredibly, I found the issue of sex to be central to that incubation of violence.
My official government report on the subject for the U.S. Army Human Terrain System, originally intended for a limited military and academic readership, was termed “explosive” and leaked into mainstream American media, where it generated a firestorm of reaction in a variety of major national news outlets. Some of my findings regarding Afghan sexual practices were simply of sociological interest, such as the prevalence of culturally and environmentally influenced homosexual behaviors among men. Other findings, however, were of grave humanitarian concern, such as the cyclical abuse of young boys, perpetuated over countless generations. Because the topic became intensely sensationalized, I was discouraged to see my findings somewhat distorted in the public light—their real meaning often lost in the shock value of the subject and occasionally manipulated to make points that I believed unfounded.
In this book, I take the opportunity to provide the full context of my research in the hope of offering readers a more complete background through which to both understand the reasons for my conclusions and to draw their own. Instead of presenting a further academic account, I here invite you to share personally in the daily experiences and challenges of a woman living and patrolling on the farthest front of the War on Terror, and to witness with me the sometimes surreal difficulties faced and heartening heroism displayed by the men and women—Coalition and Afghan—whose lives protect our own. I hope that by walking with me, you come to experience the ways in which the issue of Afghan sexuality has profound impact on concerns from women’s rights, to Afghanistan’s economic development and security, to the recruitment and development of the terrorist threat to the Western world—a threat, I ultimately argue, we will not be free of without attention to this cycle of violence.
In the vein of addressing the human complexities of conflict, I also want to thank you, the reader, as your purchase of this book has already made a real and active difference toward the betterment of individual lives as they directly relate to many of the troublesome concerns this book will address. One portion of the book proceeds will be donated to the Polaris Project (polarispoject.org), one of the largest and most successful efforts in combating human trafficking and child prostitution both internationally and in the U.S. (lest we fail to see and address problems on our own doorstep when we look to identify them elsewhere). A second portion will go to benefit the recovery of heroes in the VA hospital system who bear the typical wounds of our current wars—amputations, head injuries, and severe PTSD—through the Jam for Vets Project (jamforvets.org), which by giving veterans a new voice through music instruction, therapy, and the gift of an instrument, creates a sometimes otherwise inaccessible path to healing and to the restoration of our common humanity (a project after my own heart).
By your interest in learning more about the reality of the Afghan conflict, and your active participation in helping these causes through your purchase, you’ve already fought a significant part of a battle that affects us all. Although this book will come to some hard conclusions, I find hope in the realization that every bit of good is a necessary footstep toward a greater solution. You have my thanks.
A first encounter
Prologue
My Mom always told me to keep a diary, and she was right. There is so much we fail to understand and easily forget from each day to the next. But if our memories are preserved over time, sometimes we can later see a picture that we otherwise would never have imagined was there.
Wh
at I offer here is, in essence, my diary—the faded and battered notebook I carried through a treacherous war. It is repaired of its tears and tatters. I have written out the meaning of the cryptic notes only I understood. I have put into words the poor sketches that reminded me of a person, or a pivotal conversation, or an experience I could not better describe. I have made some sense of the fragmented thoughts that troubled me when I first wrote them.
I have torn out most pages that described only the mundane experience of a sand-colored life in a sand-colored world, but there were so very many. I have likewise eliminated the misguided love notes, the cheerful letters home, and the prayers which were the only place I dared admit my real fear. What is left is simply the path of my bootprints and my thoughts in the bizarre journey they took.
These are not my “field notes,” the academic journals through which I conducted careful and detached analysis for my program and commanders. The result of that work has already been leaked publicly, and it has unfortunately generated more controversy than understanding. It is for that reason that I wish to share my own story—to provide the context in which those findings lay.
They say that a girl is always loath to share her diary, but I offer mine here with the sincere hope that you, the reader, will view the experience of war along with me. By lending you my eyes as I patrolled southern Afghanistan in 2009 as the Senior Social Scientist on a Human Terrain Team (HTT), and sharing with you the unlikely story that led to my participation in this war, I hope that this book makes the issues that arise both more human and concrete.
Chapter 1
C-130 Rolling Down the Strip
Day 1
“C-one-thirty rolling down the strip. HTT’s going to take a little trip.”
The silly old song played through my mind, despite my attempts to think of anything more serious.
“Mission Top Secret, destination unknown. We don’t know if we’re coming home.”
As I sat lodged in the belly of the C-130 aircraft, having found my space between some tank components and a slightly more comfortable shipment of tires, I hummed along to the familiar tune. It had been chanted for generations by members of the U.S. military as they shared a morning run. I smiled to think of the tradition and the fact that, somewhat implausibly, I had found myself a participant. Slowly, it occurred to me that the song raised the questions that lay just below the surface of my awareness.
Everybody inserted the name of their own team or unit into the song, but what did it mean to be a member of HTT—a Human Terrain Team? Our team was flying toward the most remote tribal badlands of Afghanistan, the outermost limits of Western presence. We were the only team attached to the U.S. Marine Corps, and I was enormously proud of the fact. Only a few months before, the Marines had just began to secure the dangerous area, which had been considered untamable for countless generations. I had to wonder what, exactly, a gung-ho but utterly “girly” and almost comically diminutive woman was to accomplish there.
The mission was, in its own way, secret even to me. All I truly knew was that our purpose was to protect American and Afghan lives by uncovering hidden cultural differences that could cause unnecessary conflict—as arose tragically in the early phases of the Iraq war—and by identifying the ways Western forces could best assist the Afghan people. We were to do this by venturing beyond the lines where academic involvement typically ends and the work of warfighting typically begins.
Today was not the first time I found myself on a C-130 that would deliver me spiraling into a war zone. As an Intelligence Analyst for the FBI, I had been attached to the Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq. There, I supported the most forward efforts against terrorism with the intent of preventing attacks on U.S. soil.
I wasn’t the person who rushed out on daring assignments, however. I was the person who worked out the meaning of what was discovered. My experience of war in Afghanistan is bound to be different, as I am now charged with a highly unusual combination of both.
The U.S. has truly realized that subtle and variable local cultural differences cannot be discovered in a book or from a purported expert. Instead, they have to be learned directly from the Afghan people. This can only be accomplished by putting those charged with investigating these matters up front, at times ahead of the major body of U.S. forces, to learn the nuances of the local culture by interacting with and interviewing the communities themselves. The HTT program hires highly motivated, ideologically driven, and slightly reckless civilian Ph.D.-level researchers, just like me, to lead the studies.
It was also true, in a way, that our destination was unknown. In the academic sense, we can never know in advance where our research might lead us or what unanticipated turns it might take. Neither do we know what our personal fate or that of our team might be.
Being among the first to collect information means that HTT members never know who they might be encountering. On initial meeting, we are warned, one can never quite tell an angry insurgent bent on violence from a friendly and innocent villager, as the former often pose as the latter. This confusion opens a wide door for those who wish to do us harm to approach closely and attack almost unopposed.
This thought weighed on me with unusual poignancy and not a small amount of carefully suppressed terror. Just before deploying, my team and I attended the memorial service of another female HTT researcher—Paula Loyd. I never knew Paula, but I know that her unimaginable bravery and dedication to the assistance of the Afghan people should be remembered always. A “prayer card” from her service was tucked in a corner of my rucksack, and in my Catholic schoolgirl way, I was sure she would be praying for the teams still on the ground.
Paula, of course, was not the only HTT member recently killed in service. For such a small new program, we seem to have seen a disproportionate number of casualties. However, Paula’s tale haunted me in an uncomfortable number of ways. The stories I heard about her work seemed to say something troubling about the Afghan communities that I am so enthusiastic to encounter and hopeful to assist.
Paula, as I learned, had been absolutely impossible to deter in her efforts to help the Afghan people—particularly Afghan women—though she often faced the opposition of the very individuals she sought to aid. While some of this opposition was undoubtedly unwitting, some of it seemed troublingly willful. There are iconic stories about Paula’s efforts that have circulated to almost legendary proportions.
Friends in the program tell me that when Paula was working for an aid organization before joining HTT, she assisted a village in developing a sustainable (non-narcotic) income source by planting an apricot orchard. Unlike many other fruit trees, these apricot trees would mature and bear a saleable and highly profitable crop in four years—a fantastically reasonable amount of time. In those four years, Paula devoted tireless efforts to both the cultivation of the young and fledgling orchard and to sustaining the village’s various other needs.
The women of the village were empowered by assisting in the cultivation. They were helping to build their families’ futures. This was one of Paula’s most important goals.
As the story goes, Paula visited the U.S. to celebrate Christmas with her family just before the spring of the fourth year. When she returned, she found the orchard cut down and the trees used for firewood. Dismayed, she asked why the just-matured trees had been burned when plenty of fuel had already been provided and sat unused. The response she received from the town’s kingpin was, “Yes, there was fuel, but none of it smelled as sweet as the apricot when it burned.”
Later, after joining HTT, Paula stopped to visit with a vendor at a small bazaar and discuss the price of kerosene. Engaging with a local resident about a topic like this was a typical daily task for an HTT member. The vendor’s warm response and kind smile invited her to continue in conversation.
HTT members seldom miss an opportunity to chat. Simple, friendly conversation is the best means of absorbing cultural nuance. The availability of kerosene was an important an
d relevant topic in the daily life of a village, and Paula was keen to know more. The remarkably pleasant vendor expressed his appreciation for Paula’s interest and invited her closer.
Casually, the vendor picked up a container of his kerosene with the apparent intent, like that of most bazaar vendors, of showing off its quality. The vendor then, in an incredibly deft motion, doused Paula with the liquid and set a flame to her. Her body lit instantaneously. This thought alone sickens me with fear, but Paula’s ordeal did not end there.
The vendor ran away, having accidentally set his own hands on fire. A nearby teammate of Paula’s, unaware of the circumstances, aided the man by rolling on top of him to extinguish the flames. It was a heroic attempt on his part to show American dedication to protect Afghan lives.
However, Paula’s teammate quickly learned the truth of the situation after seeing Paula and witnessing the vendor’s prompt arrest by local authorities. Horrified, Paula’s teammate shot the attacker, point-blank, in the head. Shooting a detained man was a crime that would change the teammate’s life forever, but it ensured the vendor would not enter the undeveloped Afghan justice system, where he, like other terrorists, would be released within a matter of days.
In the meantime, the rest of the team had run to Paula’s aid. In a desperate attempt to douse the flames, they threw her into the nearest water source available—the local stream. It, like that of most villages, was heavy with sewage.
Paula wasn’t lucky enough to meet a quick death, but one of tortuous endurance over several months. The treatment for full-body burns—consisting of constant “debridement”—is almost barbaric in its brutality. We were updated constantly about her condition throughout our HTT training and told how she handled the pain with all the grace imaginable. She very well might have lived had her body had not become completely infected by the waste-infested water of the village.
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