The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice

by Gezari, Vanessa M.

  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 A
merican. 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.”

  For a kid raised on cowboys and Indians, Kandahar was a letdown of existential proportions. Cooper returned from Afghanistan a changed man. Once gentle and uncommonly patient, he was now distant and quick to anger. He raged when a cop pulled him over, dressed down his boss, caught himself mentally preparing to destroy his adversary in an argument. His wife, Kathy, felt as if she had been married to two different men: Clint before and Clint after. They moved to Sierra Vista, Arizona, at the edge of Fort Huachuca, where Cooper had been hired to train teams collecting HUMINT, or human intelligence. Coyotes howled at night, rattlesnakes slid into their son’s sandbox, and migrants sneaking across the border died by the hundreds, littering the Sonoran desert with sweat-stained clothes and empty water jugs. Cooper turned inward until he had no friends outside work and Kathy. He didn’t want to know people and he didn’t want them to know him. Panic attacks seized him in church. He would sweat, his hands would shake, he would weep. He started seeing a counselor, who suggested that revisiting the scene of his earlier trauma in a different capacity and replacing bad memories with good ones could help him heal.

  Good experiences, good memories—that was what Cooper had been looking for when he applied to join the Human Terrain System. He was convinced there was more to Afghanistan than the filthy, bruised men he’d questioned. There were good people, too, and the Army wasn’t reaching them. Once during his time in Kandahar, he had accompanied the Special Forces to a village, where soldiers herded the men into a shallow streambed and kept them there all day for a security screening. The soldiers’ behavior wasn’t criminal, but it wasn’t smart, either, and it certainly wasn’t in keeping with the elaborate social customs of Afghans. The next day, the soldiers returned to the village and handed out coloring books and pencils. Man, Cooper thought, we’re just clueless. The Human Terrain System was designed to address the stupidities that made Afghans hate the Americans who were trying to help them. Sometime early in 2008, he read a news article about it and applied. The project hired him immediately.

  Seven months later, he was in Afghanistan, sweating beneath a field pack and body armor, fine dust scouring his regulation sunglasses. He and his teammates stumbled over stones and through shifting sand toward the Tactical Operations Center at the heart of the base. Someone directed them to a tent with a few cots, where Loyd curled up in her dust-covered clothes, stuffed a sleeping bag under her head, and fell asleep. Don Ayala threw down his gear and went outside to look around.

  Ayala had missed this place. He had lived the war’s early optimism, back before so much went wrong, and he remembered the thrill he’d felt flying to Kabul for the first time in 2002. At home, his life had grown comfortably routine. He had worked in telecommunications, occasionally moonlighting as a private bodyguard to earn extra money. After a shattering divorce, he had started a promising new relationship; he and his girlfriend, Andi Santwier, had recently bought a house together in a Los Angeles suburb. But the September 11 attacks had stirred an old restlessness. When a friend had urged him to send his résumé to the State Department, he’d quickly complied. A few weeks later, he’d been hired as part of an elite bodyguard team protecting Hamid Karzai, the new Afghan president, on whose survival the success of America’s Afghan campaign depended. For a longtime soldier committed to his country, there was no more important job.

  Ayala and the other bodyguards lived in tents on the grounds of the presidential palace. It was winter and cold, snow and mud thick on the ground, and they burned wood in stoves at night. There were no showers or permanent toilets, but they had their own cooks and cleaning crew and Ayala was paid sixteen thousand dollars a month, more than three times what he’d made at home. Back then, Kabul was so quiet that Ayala and the other Americans didn’t even wear body armor. Maybe a bulletproof vest if they were going to Ghazni or Gardez, but nothing around the capital. Fighters loyal to the Afghan militia leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar occasionally fired rockets at the palace, but they always landed outside its walls. The Taliban had mostly fled. As far as Ayala could tell, the main threat to Karzai in those days came from within, from ethnic Tajiks in his government and their loyalists, who resented the president’s rapid rise.

  Karzai was a royalist from Kandahar, the son of a tribal leader and former Afghan parliamentarian. A relentless diplomat who had been trying for years to broker truces between his country’s fractious militia leaders, he had risen to the presidency in no small part through his assiduously cultivated contacts in Washington. Karzai embraced the cooperative, multiethnic vision that prevailed after the Taliban’s fall, but he had a long and complex history with the Tajiks in his government, especially his defense minister, Mohammad Fahim. In the 1990s, after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, Karzai had served as deputy foreign minister in the Kabul government led by Burhanuddin Rabbani and dominated by the famed Panjshiri militia leader Ahmed Shah Massoud. Fahim had been Massoud’s security chief, and in 1994, Fahim had heard that Karzai was working for Pakistani intelligence. He’d had Karzai arrested and roughly interrogated. Karzai had escaped, but the incident sent him into exile in Pakistan and convinced him to back the Taliban, whose commanders he knew from his days fighting the Soviets. Karzai donated fifty thousand dollars to the conservative student militia and supplied them with weapons. A few years later, a critical event reordered his loyalties. In 1999, appalled by the brutal consequences of Taliban rule, Karzai tried to organize a traditional tribal council and invited the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar. Instead of agreeing to talk, the Taliban assassinated Karzai’s father as he walked home from a mosque in Quetta, Pakistan. After that, Karzai reached out to Massoud, but it was too late. Arab bombers posing as journalists assassinated Afghanistan’s most celebrated resistance leader two days before the September 11 attacks. By early 2002, Karzai and Fahim were working together, but Faulkner’s famous observation was nowhere truer than in Afghanistan. The past wasn’t dead. It wasn’t even past.

  The men on the Karzai Protective Detail believed in the president; they wanted him to succeed. It didn’t hurt that the United States government lionized him as if he were some kind of philosopher king, but for Ayala the key thing was the way Karzai treated Afghans. He noticed how kindly the president spoke to everyone, especially women and children, and he saw firsthand what this leader was doing for his country. Ayala accompanied the president as he celebrated the openings of girls’ schools and watched a game of Buzkashi, a wild, ancient sport played on horseback with the carcass of a headless goat. He went with Karzai to inaugurate medical clinics and mosques, and to visit the Salang Tunnel connecting Kabul to the north. At a school, he and the president watched students raise kites that snapped in the wind and fluttered like birds’ wings against the sky, a tangible expression of the hope everyone seemed to feel. On Christmas, Karzai served his bodyguards dinner in the palace and thanked them for leaving their families to protect him. Ayala would sit outside the president’s office, guarding his door during days of endles
s meetings. American military commanders and Afghan officials streamed in; Karzai’s chief of staff, diplomats from countries whose support he couldn’t do without, journalists and visiting celebrities who had no idea what he was up against. Karzai greeted them all graciously. Sometimes, between meetings, the president would ask for a few minutes alone. He would sit by himself, staring out the window. Ayala thought about what must be going on in his head. Nearly every evening, he and other bodyguards would escort the president past a garden of carefully tended rosebushes to visit the old Afghan king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, a dignified man in his eighties who lived in a small palace inside the presidential compound.

  Eventually, Ayala would lead one of two close protection teams guarding Karzai. A natural mentor, he counseled the president’s Afghan bodyguards and bonded with the other Americans, many of whom were ex–Special Forces like him. But Ayala wasn’t your typical heavy. He painted, for one thing. He and Santwier would soon move to New Orleans, where Ayala hoped to open an art gallery with the money he was saving. He wrote poetry on his bedroom wall in Kabul, and the other bodyguards made good-natured fun of him. They called him “Don Juan” because when they drank together after work, he would listen selflessly while female friends talked about their lives. He listened as if he were some kind of shrink, and this amazed his fellow bodyguards, who talked to women in bars for the same reason most men talk to women in bars. They called him the “Minister of Hugs and Kisses” because he was the only one among them who would put his antipathy to male-on-male affection aside long enough to engage in the Afghan male practice of embracing and cheek kissing on meeting. When a friend back home offered to send him a care package, he asked for pens and notebooks to hand out to kids.