The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice

by Gezari, Vanessa M.

  Another American soldier started talking fast to the man with the pistol. Mohammad knew a bit of English, but he couldn’t understand what the soldier said, except one word, repeated over and over: ‘Fuck!’ the American was saying to the man with the gun. ‘Fuck! Fuck!’ That must have been Specialist Justin Skotnicki, twenty-two at the time and the only member of his platoon to actually witness the shooting. When I met him several months later, he was still trying to erase it from his memory. “We all know what’s the right thing to do, and shooting an unarmed man in zip cuffs is not right by any stretch of the imagination,” he told me, “It’s one thing when someone’s shooting at you, but an unarmed human being getting shot like that—it’s not right.”

  Amir Mohammad and the other Afghan police wanted to take Salam’s body into the district center, where they knew that his family would come to collect it, but the Americans wouldn’t let them. After a while, the Americans brought the body to the district center themselves and instructed the Afghans to keep it there overnight. They told everyone to stay away from the dead man, even the police.

  Burials are a quick business in Afghanistan, and within a few hours of his death, Salam’s father and brother had arrived with a group of villagers to collect his body. When the Afghans wouldn’t give it to them, Salam’s brother yelled and cursed the police. He tried to grab one of their guns, and a policeman hit him. Salam had been mentally ill, his father and brother told the police. His illness must have caused him to lose his mind and attack the American woman.

  Qala Khan and Sadoo Khan had told us that Salam’s brother was weak in the head. Now Mohammad was suggesting that Salam himself was crazy. Stories told many times have a way of changing like this, almost imperceptibly, but here the difference was crucial. What about Salam’s brother, I asked, the one who had screamed at the police and tried to grab one of their guns—did he seem mentally disturbed? Mohammad thought about it. He agreed that Salam’s brother had gotten in their faces and used bad words when they wouldn’t turn over Salam’s body, but he didn’t think Salam’s brother was insane. “He was fine—normal,” Mohammad told me. When one of the Afghan police struck Salam’s brother for trying to grab the officer’s gun, the police commander rebuked him: ‘Don’t hit him, just take him away. His brother is dead.’

  But there was something else. Salam’s father and brother told the police that Salam had attacked the American woman because of his ‘mental problem and also the emotion of his heart.’ What emotion could that have been? Mohammad now wondered aloud—what about this American woman had so enraged him? Had Salam seen these foreigners before? Had he argued with them, or with this woman in particular? “Were they local people, were they tribes?” Mohammad asked, incredulous. “No. They were strangers.”

  The emotion of his heart. Was Salam really an extremist, an insurgent who had somehow managed to hide this even from his relatives and neighbors? On the day Paula Loyd was attacked, the Taliban had issued a statement saying that children had poured fuel on a female foreign soldier and set her on fire while she was searching homes in Maiwand. “The soldier caught fire immediately after petrol was poured on her and then explosions were set off because of the ammunition on her,” the statement said. “As a result the female soldier was killed instantly and a large number of other foreign soldiers were wounded.”

  The statement was interpreted by many as a Taliban claim of responsibility, yet nowhere in it did the insurgents claim they had committed the attack, and it was impossible not to wonder why. The Afghan insurgency is prone to exaggerating its accomplishments, claiming that it has killed more soldiers and destroyed more tanks than it actually has, taking credit for assaults it wished it had had the foresight to commit. So why didn’t the Taliban quickly and publicly claim responsibility for setting Paula Loyd on fire? Instead, the Taliban statement described a spontaneous children’s uprising against the infidels, the kind of mystical event that fit neatly into the idea of Maiwand as a site of organic Afghan resistance. And it suggested that “children”—simple beings who could not always be reliably controlled—had done something that a bona fide insurgent would not have done, for this was a strange and unmanly way to attack a foreign woman. Unlike her fellow Human Terrain Team members, Loyd had not been wearing a military uniform. A civilian woman traveling with soldiers might always come under attack if the soldiers were targeted, but I had never heard of a civilian in the company of soldiers being singled out for special violence. And if the Taliban were, as some would certainly argue, too brutal to care about such distinctions, if they had carefully planned the attack, why hadn’t they sent a suicide bomber packed with explosives into the bazaar, as they would two months later, to exact the greatest possible damage?

  I wanted to hear the local Taliban’s account of what had happened, so we asked a Taliban field commander in Maiwand. He went by the name Al Fathy, an Arabic nom de guerre, and he, too, was oddly silent on the subject of organizational responsibility. Salam was “a mujahid and the son of a mujahid,” Al Fathy told us, using the Arabic term for a holy warrior that has been employed for generations in Afghanistan to describe armed men battling foreign occupation. Far from being mentally ill, Al Fathy said, Salam was “normal” and “perfectly well, and he could not tolerate the presence of infidels in the streets of his hometown. Because of his emotions and his Islamic fervor, and by his choice, he carried out that sacrificial act.”

  We asked about the tractor. Had the Taliban taken it and threatened to kill Salam if he didn’t do something on their behalf?

  “The Taliban did not take a tractor from him,” Al Fathy said. “We did not even take a rooster from him. He sacrificed himself for the protection of his land from the infidels.”

  The Maiwand policeman, Amir Mohammad, didn’t believe that Salam was crazy. How could a crazy man arrange such an attack, buying the petrol, throwing and igniting it, then running away? Yet like everyone else we spoke to, Mohammad was at a loss to explain what had motivated Salam. The Afghan police investigation had yielded little of interest about him. No one could remember Salam saying anything against the government or in favor of the Taliban. Mohammad had even heard that Salam had worked a few months earlier for a security firm guarding NATO logistics convoys.

  Mohammad was sorry that Salam had been killed. If he had been handed over to the police, they might have learned what had driven him: “Why is he doing this? Who is behind him?” Mohammad asked. “We could get more information if he was alive.” Salam’s family did own a tractor, and on the morning of our conversation, before Mohammad drove to Kandahar to meet us, he had seen Abdul Salam’s brother driving the tractor along a streambed in Maiwand. But Mohammad had never heard the story the elders had told, about Salam being kidnapped by the Taliban and his tractor held for ransom.

  * * *

  Agents from the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division had arrived in Maiwand the morning after Loyd’s attack. They wanted to see Salam’s body, but it had already been released to his family. About sixty village elders and residents had come to the district center and asked the Afghan police to give it to them, and the American company commander had finally agreed, hoping to “maintain good relations with the officials he dealt with constantly,” the investigators wrote, “and to prevent possible retaliation against US forces for the incident.”

  The investigators asked to see the crime scene. It was a clear, warm, windless day when Lieutenant Pathak took them out there. The ground was charred black where the fire had burned, but the place where Salam died had been raked clean. Where blood had pooled a day earlier, only sand remained. Looking at the investigators’ photographs, you can almost hear the wind in the bamboo and feel the quiet emptiness of the lane, the warmth of the sun, the soft young grass fringing the stream.

  Paula Loyd had possessed a rare kind of personal power. “She had a disproportionate effect on a lot of people,” Lieutenant Colonel Dan Hurlbut, the battalion commander of the 2–2, told me when I visited Maiwand a few
months after her death. For savvy Afghan leaders, her attack had also constituted a political opportunity. The governor of Kandahar went on TV to denounce Salam’s crime, and prominent Afghan leaders began talking about collective punishment. General Abdul Razik Sherzai, the brother of the powerful Barakzai tribal leader and former Kandahar governor Gul Agha Sherzai, offered to “whack” Salam’s entire family, Hurlbut told me. Even Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Afghan president’s brother and the most powerful man in the south, had promised to “get tough.” It would have been comforting to think they were motivated by Loyd’s service to Afghanistan, but Wali Karzai—the man Loyd had refused to meet because she considered him a criminal—was no friend of hers. “She hated that guy,” Hurlbut told me with a chuckle.

  The promises to avenge Loyd’s burning also indicated something else: that it wasn’t an ordinary Taliban hit. People like Sherzai and Wali Karzai didn’t generally promise to exact revenge on an insurgent’s family—if they could have done that, the Taliban would have been much easier to defeat. Salam was a local man. People knew how to find his relatives. Indeed, the Maiwand shura elders were concerned that his family would be punished for what Salam had done. The elders were contrite, and they had only one request for the Americans. “They asked us, ‘Please don’t kill the family,’ ” Hurlbut recalled.

  Salam was not a hard-core militant, but someone who “had been mentally challenged for a long time,” Hurlbut told me. The insurgents might have planted the idea in his head. They might have drugged him, but even this was unclear. After the attack, Hurlbut’s soldiers had overheard insurgents talking about the assault on the radio. ‘We did this to him,’ they said. ‘We got him ready and we told him to attack that person.’ But Mike Warren, Loyd’s team leader, was skeptical of Taliban involvement. Salam, he told me, had been known around Chehel Gazi as “the village wacko.”

  “He didn’t have Taliban connections,” Warren told me. “He was really a guy who had some drug and mental health issues. The local police had had trouble with him before for, basically, erratic behavior.” When Afghan leaders asked if the Americans wanted Salam’s family dead, Warren told me, “it was like, ‘No, this is a tragic accident.’ ”

  “So you saw it as an accident?”

  “Do I think it was a preplanned, premeditated attack on Paula? No,” Warren said. “For twenty minutes they were having a great conversation, and something flipped in the guy’s mind. I think it was the act of an irrational man, who for one reason or the other, something went wrong in his mental psyche and he attacked Paula. He tried to kill her.”

  I would hear a similar story later from Hajji Ehsan, the Maiwand district representative on the Kandahar Provincial Council. Salam was well known to everyone in Maiwand, Ehsan told us. He sometimes showed up at community meetings and shuras, but people tried to keep him away because he could be disruptive, so he often sat outside. “People were just making a joke of him because he was an abnormal person,” Ehsan said. Sometimes they would ask him questions just to see what he would say: ‘Salam jan, how are you? What did you see and what did you hear?’ Salam would say something and people would laugh. He must have been convinced to set the foreign woman on fire without even understanding what he was doing. As Ehsan put it: “Salam was the kind of person who, if someone told him to throw this petrol at the Taliban, he would do that also.”

  * * *

  Hajji Sadoo Khan, the Maiwand elder, had begged Salam’s father and brother to come to Kandahar to meet us, but they refused. The father, Mohammad Umar, was old, weak, and terrified. Was it us the old man feared, foreigners who might lure him into a trap? Or was he scared of what the Taliban might do if anyone learned that he and his son had talked to a foreign journalist?

  Through intermediaries, we found a cell phone number for Salam’s brother. We reached him briefly, but the brother refused to talk. At last, we got through to Salam’s father by phone. Muhib asked the questions, taking notes as he listened.

  Abdul Salam had been about twenty-five years old, his father said. He was married with one child. He worked with his brother, driving a tractor on construction jobs and delivering crushed stone to the district center. And since childhood, he had suffered from a mental disorder that seized him occasionally, maybe twice or three times a year.

  During those spells, Salam lost control. He had a history of arson. The previous year, in the crowded Maiwand bazaar, he had set fire to his motorbike and then pushed it into the water, likely the same stream where the soldiers had dunked Loyd. When Mohammad Umar asked why he’d done it, Salam had told his father: ‘I did not understand what I was doing.’

  “What he did with that American lady, I did not like that,” Mohammad Umar said. “She did not have any kind of hostility with him, and I have never seen any kind of sign from him that he will do such bad things. But what he did, he was not in a normal condition. A normal person won’t do such things. My son did not want to do those things, but the time came that he was not in control. He had changed from normal condition to abnormal.”

  Mental health care in Maiwand is nonexistent, but even a peasant like Salam’s father knew this was not the case everywhere. “The Americans are not mentally ill,” the old man said. “They are wiser than us. If someone blames my son for what he did, that is right. I agree with that. But I can prove that my son was mentally ill. Was the American who killed my son mentally ill, too? I blame him. He must not do that. I would bring him into the court.”

  Mohammad Umar likely meant something more like “judgment”—he would have liked to bring Ayala before a council of elders, before the shura. “They did not give a chance to my son to express his views, why he did such a bad deed,” the old man said. He started to cry. “It would be better if they kept him alive in prison, or at least they could hand him over to the Afghan police. They would bring him to court. They did not do that. They killed him.”

  Salam was not an insurgent, his father said. He was not even a Taliban supporter. “These are all lies,” he said. “I am working with the government, Abdul Salam was working with the government, and my son, Abdul Salam’s brother, is working with the government. Even today, he is busy with his tractor and working for the government.”

  What about the story of the kidnapping and the stolen tractor? Had Salam been put up to the attack by the Taliban on the condition of getting his tractor back?

  “What you were told, these are lies,” Mohammad Umar said. “The truth is that the tractor was captured by the Taliban a year before this attack on the foreign woman.” The Taliban had taken the tractor because the family was working for the government, bringing gravel to the district center, where it would be used to level lots and pave roads. Mohammad Umar and his sons had appealed to a local contractor to help them get the tractor back, and eventually the Taliban had handed it over. Abdul Salam and his brother had returned to work. “I wanted my son to help me and live with his young wife and help raise his children,” Mohammad Umar said. “That was his ambition, too.”

  It was unlikely that anyone in the Maiwand shura would have seen fit to punish Ayala for killing Salam, but Mohammad Umar felt differently. He viewed his son’s shooting in much the same way the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the American judicial system did.

  “That American did an illegal deed,” Mohammad Umar said. “When my son was handcuffed, he killed him.”

  EPILOGUE

  In October 2010, nearly two years after the attack on Paula Loyd, I returned to Maiwand. I landed at Forward Operating Base Ramrod amid news that a group of soldiers recently stationed there had been accused of killing Afghan civilians for sport. They had snapped pictures of themselves with the corpses, and cut off the dead men’s fingers as trophies. Things had changed since Loyd, Cooper, and Ayala had arrived there, full of hope for what the Americans could achieve.

  In conversation with a young American officer that fall, Abdul Salam’s name came up. The Afghan police had recently told the Americans that Salam’s brother
was planting deadly homemade bombs around the district. The Americans and Afghans were planning to raid his home and arrest him.

  The Afghan police commander who had told the Americans about this was named Hajji Ahmadullah, but everyone called him Hajji Lala. He was built like a troll, brief and squat with a black beard, a gold watch, and rough hair sprouting from his toes. Lala was a powerful man in Maiwand. He was in charge of the police post at the district center, and the Americans held him in high regard.

  Abdul Salam’s brother was named Omar Bank, Hajji Lala told me. Bank was a committed insurgent, just like Salam. In fact, by Lala’s lights, the whole family was a bunch of radical jihadis. Lala had learned of Bank’s insurgent activities some time back, when the Americans had seen someone planting a bomb and radioed him to investigate. He had driven to the site and when he got out of his truck, he saw a man running. The police fired at the man, but he got away. They questioned some children who had been standing around. One of the boys identified the fugitive as Bank and said that Bank had given him ten Afghanis, about twenty cents, to go to a shop and buy himself corn chips for a snack. Lala surmised that Bank wanted to get rid of the kids so they wouldn’t see him planting the bomb.

  The allegation that Bank was Abdul Salam’s brother weighed heavily against him. Abdul Salam had been “a Talib,” Lala told us without hesitation—“a big person of the Taliban.” He entirely rejected the notion that Abdul Salam had been mentally ill, but his argument was a self-fulfilling loop: Abdul Salam was an insurgent because his family were insurgents, and his family had to be insurgents because Salam had been one. “Is his brother also mentally sick?” Lala asked. “Then why does he love bombs and things like that?”