The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice

by Gezari, Vanessa M.

  In late 2004, Loyd got a job with the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. She was assigned to the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Zabul, a southern province between the Pakistani border and the southern desert, and one of the poorest places in Afghanistan. The capital, Qalat, flashes past on the Kabul to Kandahar highway in an eyeblink, a string of dingy bazaar stalls listing in the wind like a clothesline heavy with soiled shirts. Away from the snowbanks and mud pits of town, craggy mountains crest over winding dry riverbeds and men walk the old goat paths known only to locals.

  The Provincial Reconstruction Team in Qalat was housed in a large walled compound built by the Soviets in the 1980s. When I visited four years after Loyd’s stint there, infantrymen slept on cots in crumbling concrete buildings and civilians from the State and Agriculture Departments lived in dormitorylike barracks toward the back of the property, their rooms decorated with cheap rugs and photos from home. It was January, frigid and gloomy, and the soldiers hewed to the routine of each day—shower, chow hall, work, gym, email, Friday Night Lights—as if it were the only thing that kept them in this world.

  Even in a place as battered as Afghanistan, Zabul was a tough case. Poverty, disease, and war had broken the traditional structures of cooperation between villagers, and now fighting was like drought, a regrettable but unavoidable aspect of being alive. Land was valuable and disputes had to be settled some way, slights avenged, crimes atoned for. This was where Loyd had spent a year of her life, working with Afghan officials and American soldiers to bring development to people forgotten by their own government. Zabul was considered so backward that Afghans from other provinces could hardly be persuaded to work there. Teachers and officials brought in from Kabul left again as quickly as they could, and anyone from Zabul who managed to get a decent education immediately headed to a big city where prospects were brighter. The provincial governor, Delbar Arman, was one of President Karzai’s longest-serving officials. He and Loyd became friends during her time there.

  Arman was a muscular man with a neatly trimmed beard and a steady gaze. On the afternoon I met him, he wore a cardigan sweater and a pin-striped blazer over his traditional tunic. In the large, chilly receiving room of his compound near the American base, he sat between a giant Afghan flag and a plastic apple tree shimmering with green leaves and pink fruit. A regal emerald-and-purple jacket hung from his shoulders, but if Arman’s clothes suggested power, his pale, pinched face signaled a lingering anxiety. His wife and children were in Kabul, and he rarely left his compound for fear of being killed. Every day in Zabul tested him. Trained as an engineer, he had fought the Soviets under Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, once an American ally, now one of America’s bitterest enemies. He had battled the Taliban, fled to Pakistan, returned, sparred with a rival commander, been jailed by his former friends. He had helped deliver the eastern provinces for Karzai during the first post-Taliban presidential election. In return, the president had appointed him to the National Security Council and, later, sent him here.

  The job was both an honor and a curse. By the time Arman arrived to govern Zabul in 2004, the insurgents had stitched themselves into the countryside like knots in a rug. The province’s few buildings, roads, and schools were crumbling, and elders covered their faces when they came to meet the governor because they didn’t want the Taliban to recognize them. Arman had met Loyd that first winter, in the cold and snow, on a trip to one of Zabul’s outlying districts. A small group of Americans traveled with him, and Loyd was among them. The governor was busy talking to villagers, leading a shura. At some point, he realized that he hadn’t seen Loyd for a while. Some woman was sick, the villagers told him. The American woman had gone to visit her. Loyd had left the group and walked to an Afghan home more than a kilometer away. The next thing Arman knew, they were bringing the Afghan woman to him on a bed.

  ‘Governor,’ Loyd told him, ‘we want to take her to Qalat so she can get medical care.’

  The woman was pregnant and she might not survive in this faraway village in winter. They loaded her onto a helicopter whose rear door stood open, snow and wind blowing in. Loyd covered the woman with her jacket to keep her warm. She positioned herself between the wind and the woman, kneeling uncomfortably in the middle of the helicopter all the way back to Qalat. The governor watched in amazement. Why did this American woman care so much about his people?

  In Qalat, the woman did not get better. ‘I want to take her to Kandahar,’ Loyd told the governor, ‘where there is a better hospital.’

  Loyd left with the woman and a day and a night passed. The next morning, before dawn, the governor woke to a knock at his door. He was alarmed: who could be knocking at this hour, the sun not even up? He opened the door and Loyd was standing there in the shadows.

  ‘I came back, governor,’ she told him. ‘I am very happy. That woman is healed and she had her baby.’

  Arman took Loyd’s hand and told her: ‘You are my sister.’

  He noticed that she was delicate and thin. He learned that she was a vegetarian, and this struck him as funny. Vegetarians are almost unheard-of in Afghanistan. He thought she must be weak, but he saw how hard she worked. Ten hours, twelve hours a day. He began to invite her regularly to dinner, instructing his cooks to find vegetables in the market for her. During one of these visits, the American soldiers escorting her realized they hadn’t seen her in a while. They tore the building apart, only to find Loyd napping comfortably on a couch in the governor’s office.

  During her year in Zabul, Loyd established a women’s tree-planting cooperative and coordinated the delivery of rice and other aid to snowed-in Afghans in the mountains. She helped return the bodies of development contractors killed in Taliban attacks to their families. When townspeople showed up at the American base to report strange women moving around the province without male escorts, it was Loyd who helped track down the group of clueless female Korean missionaries. She invited them to spend the night at the American compound, joined them for Bible study, and spirited them out of the province the next morning under police guard.

  In 2005, Loyd took a job in Kabul with the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, helping international military forces and nongovernmental organizations work together for the good of Afghans. The tension between these two groups was palpable, and led to all kinds of squabbling. Nongovernmental organizations grew outraged when military forces drove vehicles painted white, which aid workers considered a safe, neutral color and claimed as their own. Soldiers, meanwhile, argued that white was the stock color of some armored SUVs—nothing they could do about it. Loyd was a “very good moderator,” a friend who worked with her recalled. She planned conferences for soldiers and civilians working together in PRTs, trained incoming Americans from the State Department and USAID, and traveled to Germany and Norway to prep NATO soldiers headed for Afghanistan.

  She loved the job, but life in Kabul had grown risky. Drinking Heineken on the roof of her house at 2 a.m., she and a friend watched tracer fire in the distance. One day, Loyd was in a downtown building when a large bomb exploded nearby, shattering windows and knocking her down. Shaken, she called Muggeo in Baghdad. She had always known Afghanistan could be dangerous, but this was the first time its violence had touched her directly. She took comfort in her wide group of friends and in her work. Her concerns were fundamentally humanitarian, but military officers liked and trusted her because she was knowledgeable and she spoke their language. An Air Force officer who took command of the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Zabul after Loyd left found that she was one of the few people in Afghanistan with whom he could talk openly. He knew a lot about blowing things up from forty thousand feet, but now he had to charm local Afghan leaders and craft a meaningful development strategy. Loyd had no problem telling him he was full of shit, but she was also adamantly in his corner. During a visit to the Afghan capital, he asked her to accompany him and another officer to a lavish brunch at one of Kabul’s elegant new hotels. The
men were armed, but the hotel forbade weapons. Before they reached the door, Loyd buried their guns in her purse and breezed past the metal detectors, flashing the Afghan guards a wide, innocent smile.

  In 2006, Loyd spoke on a panel at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., about challenges to military and civilian cooperation in war and crisis zones. The moderator noted that this debate was often polarized, with the military and those who supported them on one side and aid workers claiming neutrality on the other. But in Afghanistan, Loyd told the audience, military forces, the United Nations, nongovernmental organizations, and aid workers had transcended traditional divides. The old polarities no longer accurately described a battlefield where soldiers spent more time meeting with elders than shooting insurgents, and where Afghan and foreign aid workers were routinely kidnapped and executed. “We have realized that we have to cooperate,” Loyd said. “It could be because people are dying on all sides. Maybe in some ways that brings us all together.”

  Loyd was two days shy of her thirty-fourth birthday. She wore grown-up clothes—white blouse, dark blazer, pearls—but there was something girlish about the rhythms of her speech, her heavy bangs, and the long bright ponytail hanging down her back. She was not opposed to the war, but neither was she blind to the shortcomings of the U.S. military. She described an unplanned visit by American soldiers to a U.S.-funded school construction site, a visit that the local organization building the school had pleaded with its American partners not to make. “They came in with Humvees, they blocked up the streets, they engendered some ill will among the community,” she said. The organization building the school started getting death threats and had to slow down its work. This cultural tone deafness showed up elsewhere, too. Every American unit and every national force in NATO wanted to show that it had accomplished something, even when building a new school or government office wasn’t what Afghans most needed. Those projects looked good on paper, Loyd told the audience. They carried your flag and commanders liked them, but in the end, they didn’t help. Even more troubling, the U.S. military had shown itself incapable of sustaining long-term relationships with local officials and tribal leaders. Those connections, carefully nurtured over months, were continually broken when one group of soldiers left and another arrived. Patterns of behavior, information about arguments between families, the way a village economy functioned—all of it was lost because no one had come up with a way to capture and preserve it. The outgoing unit told new soldiers where they were most likely to get blown up, but failed to pass on important details about local leaders, who could stop the insurgents from planting bombs in the first place.

  “Military forces don’t always have a good understanding of the tribal politics of the area in which they work,” Loyd told the audience at the Wilson Center. “Sometimes they can inadvertently worsen the situation by supporting one tribal group versus another.” During her time in Zabul, she had worked with an American Special Forces unit that drew all its interpreters from a single tribe. Those translators brought their worldview, shaped by their tribal affiliation, to every meeting, every conversation. The soldiers started arresting Afghans based on tribal disputes, not because they were insurgents or terrorists. But advising soldiers otherwise produced uneven results. “Sometimes they listen to us,” Loyd said. “Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes their short-term objectives mean that they’re not really interested in this.”

  As the panel drew to a close, a State Department official in the audience posed a question about America’s civil-military coordination efforts: “How long will this take?”

  “For Afghanistan, the current wisdom is fifteen to twenty years,” Loyd told him, smiling sweetly. “And I think that if we draw down too many troops, and if we cut the budget too much, or if we don’t spend it in a wise way, then we’re going to have to go back in, twenty or thirty years from now, again.”

  Millions of Afghans had returned to Kabul since the American invasion, choking it with traffic that generated clouds of smog, and Loyd’s lungs had begun to bother her. She reluctantly moved back to the States in 2007 to recover her health, planning to return to Afghanistan as soon as she could. She had been offered a good job at Research Triangle Institute International, a nonprofit in Raleigh, North Carolina, that advises businesses and governments. She bought a house, fenced in half the yard for the Afghan dogs she had adopted, and reconnected with Muggeo, the Special Forces officer she’d gotten to know in Kabul. They’d dated on and off, but work had kept them apart. Now she visited him at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he headed the Army Marksmanship Unit. When they spent weekends together, he rose early and made coffee. ‘I know you wanted some alone time,’ she would tell him when she woke several hours later. He was a committed carnivore, but for her sake he devoted half his grill to portobello mushrooms. He took her riding on his Harley and they talked about the future. They were good together, but she wanted kids and he didn’t. At the end of one visit, they decided to split up. Loyd flew back to North Carolina. Weeks passed. Then a text message appeared on his phone: ‘Can we talk?’ After that, they were together even when they were apart.

  Still, Loyd was restless. Her life in North Carolina felt so ordinary, too ordinary. She traveled to Pakistan and Beirut for work, but spent most days in a clean, modern office. One night, she complained about it to her mother.

  ‘You’d rather be sitting on a rug talking to elders and drinking tea, wouldn’t you?’ her mother asked.

  A few months later, Loyd was on a military helicopter thundering over southern Afghanistan.

  4. MAIWAND

  The 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 Arm
y 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.