The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice

by Gezari, Vanessa M.

  Since they’d met in Kansas, Loyd and Gusinov’s relationship had been strained. She seemed to prefer her own company, Gusinov told me, but it was no surprise that his casual mention of his visits to Afghan hookers as a young Soviet soldier appalled her. In Maiwand, they almost never worked together. Gusinov thought it was no place for a woman, that her very presence was liable to outrage locals, though that wasn’t the impression her other teammates got. Moreover, Loyd’s and Gusinov’s philosophies clashed. While she focused on development projects in the firm belief that they could contribute meaningfully to security, Gusinov grew frustrated with the Americans’ unwillingness to play tribes off against each other, a tactic that had served the Soviets well. His attention was drawn to the edges of the district, where insurgents moved freely. In Band-i-Timur, an opium-growing region south of the highway, a small field hospital treated wounded Taliban fighters, and American soldiers found loads of hidden weapons and drug-processing facilities there. In the Garmabak pass, a mountainous cut-through to the north, they discovered mortars and recoilless rifles, medical supplies, a base camp with sleeping quarters, and ID cards from Iraq’s Green Zone and Kandahar Airfield. Gusinov asked the commander pointedly why he wasn’t targeting the areas that were most valuable to the insurgency.

  Part of the Human Terrain Team’s job was to advise the soldiers on culturally acceptable behavior and basic good manners. When the Maiwand District governor quoted from the Koran, Gusinov told the soldiers not to smile. Instead, they should put their right hands on their hearts and say: “Thank you for sharing the wisdom of the Holy Book with us.” Loyd, Ayala, and Cooper accompanied soldiers to an Afghan family compound, where the whole patrol swarmed inside. The soldiers should be more respectful and considerate, the team suggested. Instead of packing the compound, just one or two soldiers should venture inside, and the Americans should watch where they stepped so as not to trample fields and vegetable patches.

  Loyd, Ayala, and Cooper lived together, ate together, prayed before each mission together. Nearly every day that October, they drove out in armored vehicles or walked with a platoon to a nearby village, where they interviewed farmers, merchants, mechanics, and police. Back on base in the afternoons, they would talk about what they had seen before heading to showers and chow. Loyd structured their areas of inquiry. She was the primary interviewer and she and her teammates sat up late writing field reports, which were sent to the battalion commander, his company commanders, the unit’s operations and intelligence officers, and back to the Human Terrain System’s headquarters in Kansas. Eighteen-hour workdays were routine, one day bleeding into another. They were contractors and well paid compared to soldiers. With his hazard differential, Ayala was making nearly a thousand dollars a day; Loyd, Gusinov, and the team leader, Mike Warren, were paid more. Their bases were nascent and rough, the countryside hazardous, and Ayala had never worked this hard. As a bodyguard, he would come back after a day’s mission, hang up his gear, and take a break. In Maiwand, there were no breaks. He and Cooper usually turned in by midnight, but Loyd didn’t even make it to bed some nights. She liked working into the early morning, when the command center on the little firebase was empty. She told her teammates she could concentrate better with no one around to bother her. Ayala worried that she wasn’t getting enough sleep. He ordered her to nap. Some days, she turned in after the team’s 8 a.m. meeting and slept until early afternoon, waking in time to join a 3 p.m. patrol.

  They were getting out so often and writing so many reports that Ayala had no time to enter the information they gathered into the mapping software he had been trained to use back in Kansas. If he’d tried to use it, he would probably have found it a waste of time. The software was cumbersome and couldn’t connect to the rest of the military computer system. Understanding the links between Afghans was also proving much harder than he had expected. People in Maiwand were standoffish, and Ayala and his teammates were never sure who was telling the truth. It would take more time and many repeat visits to get deep, to ask people who their relatives were, who they knew, who they hated, and to believe what they told you. They moved between Comanche and Darkhorse Companies, between the firebase near the center of the district and Ramrod, the desert outpost. If soldiers were raiding a compound to detain insurgents, Ayala would politely decline to join them. But if they were just getting to know a village and stopping to talk to people along the way, he would ask if the team could go along.

  While the soldiers worked, Ayala, Cooper, and Loyd interviewed villagers. Sometimes Loyd asked Cooper to tell people that he was her husband, a nod to the area’s conservative sensibilities. But Afghans were generally eager to talk to her. A woman gave Loyd her baby to hold, and children followed her around. Sometimes the kids were useful. On one mission, Loyd asked a man his name, and when he gave it, a small girl standing next to him said: ‘That’s not your name.’ The man told the girl to get lost. It was one more indication of how much remained hidden.

  Nevertheless, Loyd and her teammates learned quite a bit about Maiwand in their first few weeks. Afghan police stationed along the highway were shaking down motorists, charging as much as fifty Afghanis, about a dollar, for a passenger car or pickup, and up to eight hundred Afghanis, or sixteen dollars, for a heavy truck with cargo. One day in October, Ayala and Cooper visited an Afghan police station. While Ayala and the soldiers talked to the police chief’s assistant, Cooper wandered off to find some of his men, who told him they hadn’t been paid in months and rarely left their headquarters. The chief’s assistant told the Americans that locals supported them, but the Human Terrain Team members knew that the opposite was true. Their interviews in seven villages in Maiwand had shown that Afghans viewed the cops primarily as thieves. The chief’s assistant named a local Taliban leader and mentioned the village from which he operated. Ayala wrote this down: the Taliban commander’s name and the name of the village.

  ‘What is the plan to get the Taliban out of the villages?’ a lieutenant asked.

  ‘Too many Taliban to arrest,’ the chief’s assistant replied.

  Ayala and his teammates were not supposed to be gathering intelligence about the enemy, but reading their reports it becomes clear how difficult, even impossible, it was to separate traditional threat-centered intelligence from anything else. Sometimes they could see it coming. When Loyd’s interpreter overheard a man say that he had seen Taliban fighters at a local restaurant, it was the platoon leader who interviewed him to get more information. But much of the time, the enemy slipped into the Human Terrain Team’s interviews like water between rocks. Afghans knew what the Americans were after, even these other Americans who wore camouflage body armor but said they were not soldiers; who talked about helping people and understanding people and then climbed into vehicles with the rest of the soldiers and drove away. A widow told Loyd how much she hated ‘the motherfucking Taliban.’ ‘They have informers everywhere,’ the woman said. She was so worried about the insurgents that she woke up two or three times each night and climbed onto her roof to see if anyone was around. The woman told Loyd about one of her neighbors, who had tried to stop the insurgents from planting a bomb in the road nearby. The fighters threatened to kill the man’s whole family if he didn’t cooperate. The woman’s sons were farm laborers and she needed food. She offered to work with the Americans. Loyd wrote all this down, noting that the woman and other “targets of opportunity/people in need of assistance” should be given flour, beans, oil, and sugar.

  Loyd paid close attention to the tribal tensions that inflected life in Maiwand. She suggested mapping tribal affiliations down to individual compounds to better understand the human and political landscape. When people told her about their time as refugees in Pakistan, she proposed gathering more information about refugees to shed light on the mix of tribes in the area. When a group of men offered fresh bread to soldiers, she noted that discreet return visits from the Americans would help strengthen their relationship with the Afghans and “encourage t
he family to share information.” “Requests to share information should be presented delicately and with an acknowledgement that it was dangerous for the family to share this kind of information with U.S. Forces,” she wrote.

  The people of Maiwand lived in peril. The Taliban were a permanent condition there, as unavoidable as the sun or the absence of rain. They were everywhere; they saw and heard everything. Some Afghans privately supported the Karzai government, but they knew the government was too weak to protect them, that even perceived loyalty to the government could get them killed. That October, insurgents stopped a bus on the highway in Maiwand. After a purported Taliban trial, a half dozen bodies were found mutilated and beheaded in the sand near the road. The insurgents claimed the passengers were Afghan soldiers on their way to fight in Helmand; local officials said they were poor civilians headed to Iran to find work. As it turned out, the insurgents were closer to the truth. The men on the bus were Afghan police recruits bound for Herat. An Afghan told the Human Terrain Team that buried bombs were the biggest problem for people in his village. The road was so dangerous that no one walked far, and they couldn’t send their children to school or to the clinic in the bazaar. The man seemed eager to talk, but he didn’t own a cell phone and had no way of quietly contacting the Americans, so the Human Terrain Team advised the soldiers to set up a joint checkpoint with Afghan security forces. The Taliban might punish a villager for walking to the American base, but not for being stopped at a checkpoint.

  Insurgents taxed villagers and common bandits waited at a known holdup point along the highway, where they kidnapped drivers and threatened to kill them if their families didn’t pay. The Human Terrain Team met a family whose fifteen-year-old son had been kidnapped, who’d had to sell their car and tractor to raise the six-thousand-dollar ransom. Corrupt cops and thieving private security gangs didn’t help, and Afghans were scared of the Americans, too. A man begged the soldiers not to shoot at his sons on their way home from work. A local mullah told them that he didn’t use his kerosene lamp at night because he worried that American planes would bomb his house. People needed fuel for generators to irrigate their fields, and the Human Terrain Team recommended installing a hand pump for drinking water, solar lights, a windmill to generate power. They encouraged soldiers to build trust with locals, urging them to “remember we are competing against the Taliban and they had a head start.” Villagers in Maiwand were poor and would accept help from anybody, the Human Terrain Team members pointed out. In reality, though, the Americans seemed woefully ill-equipped to confront the degree of damage that Afghans had endured. When a man who had lost his foot to a land mine complained to the soldiers, a medic gave him aspirin.

  That October, Loyd was working on a document that sought to spell out the difference between the village malik, whom she described as “a wealthy landowner,” and the mesheran, or elders. She sketched the relations between two large tribes in the area, the Noorzai and the Achekzai. In one draft, she included an injunction to the Americans against choosing a single “go to guy.” “Patrols should keep in mind that Afghans have a collective decision making process,” she wrote. While Americans liked to rely on a single trusted informant, this could be misleading in a place where every story had a dozen competing versions. Like the interpreters Loyd had watched years earlier in Zabul, who had translated everything through the lens of their own tribal and political allegiances, Afghans in Maiwand knew that whoever controlled the narrative would benefit. Part of her job was to make the Americans understand that stories in Afghanistan were not simple collections of facts but tools in an old and well-developed game of one-upmanship. Often, they were the only tools Afghans had. Stories could deflect attention from weakness or guilt. They could be told for money, to take a life or to spare one. Perhaps most important, they were a defense mechanism, a way of preserving cultural cohesion against the damaging influence of the outside world.

  The soldiers didn’t listen, and neither did the rest of the Human Terrain Team. Over Loyd’s protests, her teammates organized a meeting between the battalion commander and America’s main “go to guy” in the south, Ahmed Wali Karzai. Ahmed Wali was President Hamid Karzai’s half brother, and he ruled Kandahar like a king. He was said to be on the CIA’s payroll and suspected of links to the drug trade, but he had real and deep-rooted power in Kandahar, and when the Americans wanted something, he obliged. Ayala, Gusinov, and Mike Warren, the team leader, saw the meeting with Karzai as a coup, but Loyd refused to go along. She thought Wali Karzai was “ ‘basically . . . a criminal,’ ” Cooper would tell me later. The president’s brother had killed someone she knew, Loyd told Cooper, and she adamantly opposed the Human Terrain Team supporting or acknowledging him in any way. “She was a little bit idealistic about that,” Gusinov would tell me later. “She forgot the principle: ‘He’s a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.’ ”

  At the heart of Maiwand stood the bazaar, a collection of stalls lining the highway. It was the main shopping center between Kandahar city and Sangin, across the Helmand border, and it buzzed with frenetic energy. The bazaar was dangerous, but it was also a trove of information about local politics, economics, and corruption. Loyd and Cooper learned about a shopkeepers’ organization, a sort of guild that provided informal security to merchants. They were intrigued, of course—what drove Afghans to band together and come up with their own security arrangements? Could the Americans nurture something similar elsewhere? The bazaar might be risky, but it was too important to avoid.

  At least three times, Loyd, Ayala, and Cooper wandered amid the close stalls in the company of soldiers, buying small rugs and brooms. They bought sugar and tea, dried apricots, roasted peanuts, corn chips, sweetened almonds, white radishes, and fresh bread to supplement their field rations. Cooper bought two sickles, an excuse to talk to the man who sold them. Later, he would take a picture of himself holding the sickles and load it onto Loyd’s laptop so that the first thing she saw when she opened her computer was Cooper grimacing like a madman behind crossed blades. Kids in the bazaar sometimes threw rocks at the soldiers, and Ayala was the one to notice when the crowd around Loyd grew uncomfortably large. He could feel something radiating from people as the Americans passed, hostility edging into hatred. No one wanted to talk to them, at least not in public, but Ayala was determined to break through. Once, when he didn’t like the way a shopkeeper was looking at him, he walked over and shook the man’s hand. The Afghan challenged Ayala to arm-wrestle. He was bigger than Ayala, but Ayala beat him. Let’s try again, the Afghan suggested. By the time it was over, the Afghan was smiling. Shoppers complained that wheat flour and other staples were exorbitant in Maiwand. People were struggling to get enough to eat. A local official charged every shopkeeper 150 Afghanis a month, about three dollars, but look, the merchants said, the sewers are not cleaned out, the school is closed. Loyd and Cooper wondered where the money was going.

  Loyd’s field notes were infused with the doubt of someone well acquainted with Afghanistan. “He said there were no other elders (did he just not want to name them?),” she wrote that fall. “The Malik system seem [sic] to be working in his village (bears further investigation—probably force of personality to some extent). There is no single Noorzai leader in Maiwand; each village chooses a Malik (Does Malik vary from tribe to tribe?).” Loyd understood the nature of covert rebellion as well as anyone; it worked the same way whether Afghans were opposing the Taliban or the Americans. People might be “very cautious about expressing their resistance openly when they perceive the power of the dominant group to be very strong,” Loyd had written in her Wellesley thesis years earlier. But “[a]way from public scrutiny, when they are among their own, the peasants carry on an entirely different dialogue.” Between what people said and what they really thought lay a category of behavior that Loyd had described as “partially veiled and partially open.” This type of activity unfolded in public, but took “disguised or anonymous forms,” its revolutionary inten
t “veiled within multiple levels of meaning.” People talked in jokes, metaphors, folktales, songs, and codes. “In this way,” Loyd had written, “subversive meanings may be denied if necessary.”

  One Human Terrain draft report that fall recorded a conversation between the team and a group of Afghans. The Taliban planted mines at night, the Afghans said, but the village elders didn’t know who was actually laying the bombs in the roads. They welcomed the Americans to their village, as long as they came to talk and didn’t kick down doors.

  ‘How do you define security?’ Cooper asked.

  ‘Peace, so the children can grow up without war,’ one of the Afghans said. ‘There has been too much war.’

  “We felt these people would have talked a lot more given more time,” Loyd wrote. “They were just starting to open up.”

  5. THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF US AND THEM

  For a very long time, war and anthropological fieldwork have been intertwined. T. E. Lawrence’s success during the Arab Revolt is legendary, and it is easy to see why. He had studied history at Oxford, hiked across the deserts and mountains of the Middle East, spent years on an archeological dig in Syria, and served with the British Army in Cairo, and he used everything he knew about Arab culture to influence the Hejaz in Britain’s interest. “The beginning and ending of the secret of handling Arabs is unremitting study of them,” the man known as Lawrence of Arabia wrote in 1917.