The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice

by Gezari, Vanessa M.

  Jack liked this American woman. She was very friendly and kind, equally eager to talk to soldiers, interpreters like him, or Afghans she met on the street. But he didn’t entirely understand what she and her teammates were doing out there. They told everyone they were civilians, not soldiers, and Loyd seemed eager to hand out wheat seed to farmers so they wouldn’t plant opium poppy. Jack thought that Ayala and Cooper were her bodyguards. He had seen her talking to Afghan soldiers and police during meetings at the district governor’s office, and the few times he’d worked with her, he had noticed that she always carried candy, and that kids came running when they saw her. A few days earlier, he had seen some kids swarming around her and spoken up.

  ‘Hey, Paula, this isn’t the United States,’ he’d told her. ‘In this country, it’s very dangerous. Actually, this province is very dangerous. Don’t give candy to the kids.’

  Loyd had stiffened. ‘Jack, you’re the interpreter,’ she had told him. ‘You just interpret what I say. You’re not my boss.’

  ‘Yes,’ he had told her. ‘Okay.’

  He had thought she was angry with him, but back at the base she’d sought him out, made a point of saying hello, asked if he was mad at her. Of course not, he’d told her. Still, those children worried him. She didn’t carry a gun. “The enemy will use different weapons in different ways,” he would say later. “We can’t identify which people is civilian, which people is the Taliban.”

  Jack’s words signaled his mistrust of the situation he’d gotten himself into. He had been raised in Kabul, where young men listened to Bollywood soundtracks, wore tight jeans, and exchanged shy glances with girls. Kandahar was a different story—older, rougher, a universe of men without women—and Maiwand was the countryside. The Afghans he met there were nothing like the people he knew back home. On the rare occasions when Maiwand revealed itself to him, it always managed to remind him how little he knew. The insurgents talked to each other on field radios, and Jack and the other interpreters were given the job of monitoring the conversation and reporting back to the Americans. During patrols, a soldier would hand the interpreters a scanner, and they would listen to insurgents watching them from somewhere nearby. ‘We saw the American forces leave their base,’ an insurgent would say to one of his comrades on the radio. ‘They went through the bazaar. We saw them walking near that small mountain.’ The interpreters couldn’t see the Taliban, but the Taliban could see them. It was eerie, and there was an element of psychological play to it; the insurgents knew the Americans were listening, knew they would be unnerved by the awareness that they were being watched. Whenever the insurgents wanted to convey something really important they would switch to cell phones, which were harder to monitor. Sometimes Jack heard insurgents talking on the radio about planting bombs near the road, and he and the other interpreters would lean in close and try to figure out where they could possibly be talking about so they could tell the Americans in time.

  That morning at the edge of Chehel Gazi, villagers passed the patrol on their way to the bazaar. Jack Bauer stopped a man carrying an armful of bread so that Loyd could ask what he had paid for it. She scribbled something in her notebook. She asked a shopkeeper whether the Afghan police taxed merchants. In a manner of speaking, the man told her. The police sometimes asked for money, or simply took things without paying for them. Cooper stood listening nearby. He watched the soldiers stop a man with a donkey cart and search it thoroughly, carefully, before waving it on.

  A young bearded man walked past them. He was thin and slight, dressed in a blue tunic, baggy pants, and a vest, and carrying a metal jug. He stuck his head into a nearby compound with a green metal door, then stepped inside. Some children were playing near the compound, including a boy of about twelve.

  ‘We don’t know that guy,’ Cooper heard one of the kids say in Pashto. ‘What’s he doing?’ The man with the jug came out and made a sweeping motion with his hand, as if to shoo the children away.

  ‘Hey, Jack, ask that guy if he wants to talk to me,’ Loyd said.

  ‘Hey, my boss wants to talk to you for a few minutes,’ Jack Bauer called out to the man with the jug. ‘Are you ready?’

  The man agreed. He even knew a few words of English, enough to say “hello” and “thank you.” He appreciated the Americans being there, he told them. He shook Cooper’s hand.

  ‘You speak English well,’ Cooper told him. ‘Where did you learn it?’

  ‘In school.’

  ‘What’s in your jug?’ Loyd asked.

  ‘Fuel for my water pump,’ the man said, reverting to his own language.

  He seemed friendly enough, but Cooper thought there was something cocky and tightly wound about him, not dangerous, but not exactly normal, either. The man with the jug reminded him of a particular kind of Afghan who often approached American patrols in Maiwand, striding forward with a sense of purpose, determined to engage the soldiers in a political discussion. These men blamed the Americans for Afghan deaths. Afghans wanted no part of this war, yet they were caught in the middle, driving over bombs and falling under stray gunfire. If the Americans would just go home, the Afghans argued, people could go back to living quietly. When men like this berated the soldiers, Cooper listened patiently, then asked: ‘How come you don’t blame the Taliban when they commit violence, you only blame us?’

  ‘We can’t blame the Taliban,’ the men would tell him. ‘It’s too dangerous.’

  The man with the jug wasn’t talking about politics, nor had he criticized the Americans. But Cooper sensed something polemical about him just the same.

  ‘How much does petrol cost in Maiwand?’ Loyd was asking him.

  ‘It’s very expensive,’ the Afghan told her. His motorcycle was damaged in the bazaar, and he was carrying the gas to refuel it. That was what Jack Bauer heard, and that was what he translated. What about needing fuel for his water pump? No one asked the man to resolve this discrepancy. Loyd asked about his job. He worked for a local school, he told her, and then a bit later, that he was a shopkeeper from Kandahar. The school should be open for children, he told Loyd.

  ‘Would you like some candy?’ she asked him.

  ‘I don’t like candy,’ the man said. He turned to Jack Bauer. ‘Do you smoke?’

  ‘Yes, I smoke,’ Jack told him. The stress of working with the Americans only sharpened his cravings. He carried a pack of cheap Pakistani cigarettes in his uniform pocket that day.

  ‘Do you smoke?’ the man asked again. Again, Jack told him that he did.

  About fifteen minutes passed in this scattershot conversation before the Afghan with the jug of fuel moved away. Cooper has been standing a few feet off, watching and listening, but now he turned to talk to an old man coming from the bazaar. The man had a white beard, and Cooper greeted him with elaborate politeness, asking about his family and where he came from.

  He was vaguely aware that the man with the jug had returned and was talking to Loyd again. For a while, another Afghan came up and stood next to the first man. This second Afghan had a brown beard and friendly eyes. Cooper thought he must live in the compound with the green door a few feet from where they were standing, the one the man with the jug had ducked into before Jack had flagged him down. After a few minutes, the friendly-eyed man turned and walked away. Cooper glanced over and saw that the man with the jug had set it on the ground and was gesticulating with his hands. He had now been talking to Loyd for nearly half an hour. The platoon medic, standing a few feet away, noticed that the Afghan was playing with a plastic lighter, turning it over in his hands.

  About fifteen feet away, a handful of soldiers formed a loose wall shielding their platoon mates and the Human Terrain Team members from the bazaar. They stopped people and checked them for weapons before allowing them past, but now a knot of Afghan men formed around the soldiers, trying to tell them something. The Americans didn’t understand. The closest interpreter was Jack Bauer.

  ‘Hey, Jack!’ a soldier yelled.

  J
ack turned to answer, turned away from Loyd and the man with the jug. Suddenly, he felt a rush of air and a blast of heat and saw a bright plume of flame at the edge of his vision. Cooper was still talking to the old man, his back to Loyd, when he heard a gigantic whoosh. He turned and saw, where she had stood, a column of flame shooting skyward, so large and furious that he had to step back to avoid being engulfed. The heat was like a solid wall forcing him away. He could see the dark outline of her body in the center of the fire, which burned a hot orange. She was small, slender, stumbling, curling inward. Very softly, behind the crackle and hiss of the flames, he heard her calling his name.

  It’s strange what you think about at moments like this. Cooper thought about the kids who had been standing around—where were they? He saw that they had disappeared, and he felt relieved that they didn’t have to see this. Then he saw the Afghan who had been talking to Loyd, the man with the jug, running away down the lane, flames leaping from his clothes, his metal pitcher bouncing away into the stream. Cooper considered shooting him, but he could see dim shapes farther down. More soldiers waited there, he knew, on the footbridge, where Ayala sat. The man with the jug was running straight toward them. Cooper turned back to Loyd.

  From then on, his only thought was how to get to her and put the fire out. He thought, Stop, drop, and roll. He wanted to yell these words, and maybe he did, a simple and memorable childhood lesson about what to do in case you catch fire, a phrase he had taught his own kids. He thought he would take off his shirt and throw it over her to smother the flames, so he hurled down his gun and tore off his helmet and body armor, but he had forgotten that he wasn’t wearing the regular uniform blouse, big and loose and made of thick fireproof material. The tight-fitting military-issue shirt he had on that day would be useless against the flames.

  The platoon leader, a twenty-six-year-old lieutenant named Matthew Pathak, yelled for the soldiers to get Loyd into the stream, but he quickly realized the flames were too high for anyone to get near her, so he filled his helmet with water and shouted at the others to help. Jack Bauer was already standing in the water. When he’d seen the flames, his first thought had been that he was on fire, so he’d run and jumped into the little stream. Now he and Cooper and the soldiers knelt and scooped helmets full of water toward Loyd. They tossed handfuls of dirt and sand to quell the flames. She had been standing hunched over like a bending branch and now she fell. The medic was saying something, drawing closer, reaching for her ankle. Cooper grasped her other leg. With Jack Bauer and another interpreter, the men pulled her across the dirt toward the stream and lowered her into the water. When the flames were extinguished, they lifted her out and gently laid her on the sand.

  She was shaking. They cut off her body armor and what was left of her clothes, and she lay there in her underwear in the dirt, small and frail and shockingly exposed. She looked so tiny, Cooper thought. He pulled her watch off her wrist and the melting rubber stretched hot and elastic like Silly Putty. He would remember this later, physical evidence of how fast and completely the world had changed, how things were normal until suddenly they weren’t, so that one minute your friend was standing there smiling and talking, and then she was on fire and no one could get to her, and then you had to dip her in a gutter to put the fire out, and now she was lying almost naked in a place where you hardly ever saw a woman outdoors, let alone unclothed. Cooper felt an immense tenderness for her and a growing, directionless rage. Jack Bauer, shocked by her nakedness, unwound his cotton scarf and began to lay it over her body, but the platoon medic told him to stop. Her skin was too hot. The fabric would stick to her. A few feet away, the ground was still burning.

  The medic quickly went to work. When they’d pulled her out of the water, he had thought she was dead. Her body had started to freeze up, but now she was telling him she couldn’t feel anything in her arms. Cooper was afraid to look at her.

  ‘I’m cold,’ she said. ‘I’m cold.’ And then: ‘You guys got the flame out really quick. Does it look bad?’

  ‘It just looks like a bad sunburn,’ Cooper told her. He was lying. The only parts of her that weren’t burned were her ankles and feet, where her boots had covered her skin. Her face and thighs were a deep reddish pink, and there was faint gray charring on her cheeks, as if someone had rubbed her skin with coal. Maybe it isn’t that serious, he thought, God, I hope it isn’t. Gently, he lifted off her helmet and found her hair wet and dirty but otherwise untouched. Loyd took meticulous care of her hair, lugging footlockers of products into the desert and brushing it until it shone.

  ‘Your hair looks perfect,’ he told her. ‘You’re about to go through a very difficult struggle. You can ask God for help.’ Cooper was a lifelong Mormon, but Loyd had told him she wasn’t sure she believed in God.

  ‘I was mad at Don,’ she murmured with the ghost of a smile. ‘I hope it didn’t ruin our prayer.’

  She was talking about the surprise of the patrol, her tiredness, and her momentary frustration with Ayala, and she was teasing, Cooper realized. She was still there. But she started shaking again. She could smell gasoline, she told him. She couldn’t get the taste of it out of her mouth.

  ‘I’m cold,’ she said. ‘I’m freezing.’

  ‘Don’t worry. You’re always cold.’

  * * *

  Down the lane, Ayala saw a bright flash, but he didn’t see much else. He was too far off, and the trees edging the stream and the uneven line of compound walls blocked his view. The kids who had gathered around him screamed and ran, dropping the candy he had given them. A young soldier named Justin Skotnicki heard cries from down the path, and then the smell hit him. He had been to the scene of roadside bombings, and he instantly recognized it: the smell of someone burning.

  Ayala ran. He pulled out his pistol. It must have been a suicide attack, he thought. He hadn’t heard an explosion, but he had been through this before, and he assumed the silence was auditory exclusion, a stress response that causes momentary hearing loss. As he moved along the lane between the stream and the compound walls, a man fell toward him, the sleeves of his tunic on fire. The man was striking his flaming clothes with his hands and running fast and haphazardly down the lane, his eyes wild with fear.

  Ayala thought the man was a victim, a bystander, perhaps, caught up in the attack. Then he heard someone yell: ‘Stop him! Shoot him!’

  Ayala gripped his pistol, raised it. He looked up and saw people moving. He knew Cooper and Loyd were back there. He saw flames up ahead, saw a dark shape rolling inside the fire. He didn’t know who or what it was. He didn’t shoot. Instead, he stuck out his arm and clotheslined the running man. His fist hit the Afghan in the throat and the Afghan dropped to the ground.

  Ayala knelt and grabbed hold of him, pinning him down. He was close now, close enough to notice the man’s long shirt, light beard, and cropped hair, the tattoos on his arms. He looked to be in his mid-twenties and he couldn’t have weighed more than 160 pounds, but he was wiry and he struggled like he was pumped with adrenaline or high on drugs, kicking, shoving, writhing, his eyes desperate. Two soldiers helped pin him down, one of them grabbing his legs. The Afghan kicked and bit and grabbed the muzzle of a private’s gun. It took three of them to subdue him. Finally, Ayala raised his pistol and the Afghan subsided. Ayala could feel the captive’s warm, skinny body against his own. He smelled the other man’s sweat.

  ‘Get the flex cuffs!’ Ayala yelled. ‘Cuff this guy!’

  A sergeant came up and helped one of the soldiers slip a plastic tie around the man’s wrists and pull it tight. Ayala squatted next to the detainee, his knee on the Afghan’s throat. He ran his hands over the man’s body, feeling for weapons. He scanned the path for more attackers.

  He thought that only a few minutes passed there on the path, but it might have been longer. Time was elastic, impossible to measure. He heard shots and didn’t know where they were coming from, didn’t know who stood at the end of the lane, who was watching through the trees. Someon
e shouted at the soldiers to get in position and men dashed past, but Ayala stayed where he was, guarding the captive. He wanted to see what was happening to Loyd and Cooper, but no one else was around to take his place. Pathak, the platoon leader, came over to talk to the staff sergeant who had supplied the flex cuffs. They were discussing what to do with the prisoner. Ayala heard them say something about handing him over to the local police.

  He still didn’t know what had happened, but now he was starting to panic. Something deeply fucked-up had occurred and he was stuck here, away from his teammates, too far from the action to be of any use. The cuffed Afghan half lay, half sat against the mud wall of one of the compounds edging the stream, his legs extended across the path, writhing and kicking though his hands were bound. The man was not his responsibility, Ayala thought. The soldiers should have been watching him. But Ayala was the biggest man on hand, and the platoon leader knew he wouldn’t let the Afghan escape.

  Just then, an Afghan in a military uniform ran up. It was Jack Bauer. ‘You motherfucker!’ Jack was yelling at the man on the ground in sharply accented English. ‘Motherfucker!’