The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice

by Gezari, Vanessa M.

  She spent her junior and senior years at Choate Rosemary Hall: This description of Loyd is from Rafe Sagarin, interview by author, January 7, 2013, and Johnson, funeral address, San Antonio, 2009.

  Her teachers noted her hunger for ideas and her gentleness: “Choate Grad Paula Loyd ’90 Passes Away,” The News, February 20, 2009. The picture of Loyd with the stone lion captures “everything I remember about Paula,” Sagarin wrote. “Her wry humor is there, but also her desire to get right down on the same level with everything she interacted with—to be wholly a part of it—which I’m sure is what drove her work in Afghanistan. Most importantly, what comes through in this picture is her fierce inner strength. Paula is a lion.”

  At Wellesley, Loyd ran along the Charles River: Johnson, funeral address, San Antonio, 2009, and Johnson, interview by author, June 23, 2010.

  At Wellesley, they rowed crew together: For the crew team waking at 4:30 a.m. to practice, “Varsity Crew,” Legenda: The Wellesley College Yearbook (1995), 68.

  She and Johnson worked together at a student-run coffee shop: Johnson, funeral address, San Antonio, 2009, and Amanda Beals, “Café Hoop Celebrates 100th Anniversary,” The Wellesley News, November 24, 1992.

  For one of her classes, she was assigned to conduct an ethnography: Sally Engle Merry, interviews by author, June 7 and 11, 2010.

  At Wellesley, Loyd championed human rights: Johnson, interview by author, June 23, 2010, and Merry, interview by author, June 7, 2010. “Her own politics were quite left,” Merry told me. “I followed her activism. She liked to get things stirred up.”

  Her much older half brother, Paul Loyd, Jr.: Although Paul Loyd, Jr., described his half-sister as “almost Don Quixote–like,” he explained that dreamer was not the right word to describe someone as grounded as Loyd. “I don’t think she’s just Don Quixote tilting at windmills,” he told me. “I was what I would call a pragmatist, what are the pros and cons of this thing, and literally calculate my odds of success. That’s not what she was about. If the cause is worthy, she’s going to take it on, even if the odds are five percent. I don’t think that way but she does.” Paul Loyd, Jr., interviews by author, February 12 and 15, 2009. For more on Paul Loyd, Jr., see: http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/person.asp?personId=222660&privcapId=3051396&previousCapId=4436226&previous Title=On-TargetSupplies&LogisticsLtd.

  He and others were shocked when, upon graduating from Wellesley, she joined the Army: “I didn’t believe her,” Paul Loyd told me. “I was blown away. I said, ‘You’re doing what?’ ” Paul Loyd, Jr., interview by author, February 15, 2009.

  Loyd’s decision also surprised Johnson: Johnson, interview by author, June 23, 2010.

  before leaving Wellesley, where she had been: Loyd’s thesis adviser, Sally Engle Merry, recalled that only a few students, perhaps three at most, were selected each year to write an honors thesis in anthropology at Wellesley when she taught there. Merry, interview by author, June 11, 2010.

  Her paper clocked in at 181 pages: Including an extensive bibliography.

  Drawing on Marxist and feminist theory, Loyd wrote: Paula Loyd, “Lesbian Resistance in the Bars of San Antonio, Texas” (bachelor’s thesis, Wellesley College, Spring 1995), 10.

  “I have found that subordinate groups”: Ibid., 28.

  Loyd wrote that she was interested in “the numerous gray areas”: Ibid., 31.

  Instead, she enlisted: Patty Ward, interview by author, December 14, 2012; Paul Loyd, Jr., interview by author, February 15, 2009; and Colonel Steve Walker, funeral address, San Antonio, 2009.

  Loyd thrived as an outsider: “People tried to push her in the Army to go into officer’s training, and no doing with her,” Ward told me. “She didn’t want to be in an office, she wanted to be with the people.” Ward, interview by author, February 15, 2009. Said Paul Loyd: “She didn’t want to be an officer. She wanted to get down and learn how people work and what made people tick. She’s always sort of been for the common guy.” Paul Loyd, Jr., interview by author, February 15, 2009.

  Soldiers with this job description fix trucks weighing more than five tons: Loyd’s initial classification in the Army was 63S Heavy, according to an Army officer who served with her. The job specifications mentioned here are available online at http://usarmybasic.com/mos/63s-heavy-wheel-vehicle-mechanic and http://www.apd.army.mil/Home/Links/PDFFiles/MOSBook.pdf, accessed October 6, 2012.

  Loyd stood five foot six and weighed 120 pounds at most: Ward, interview by author, February 15, 2009; Barton, interview by author, January 17, 2013; and Walker, funeral address, San Antonio, 2009. “I recall when we took the Army physical fitness test. . . . And Paula gave the men a run for [their] money. . . . There’s a men’s standard and a women’s standard, and I think pretty much she was on the men’s standard,” Walker said.

  Her commanders marveled at the contrast between her flaxen delicacy and her physical toughness: One officer recalled: “Although she was a petite woman probably not more than a hundred pounds, I marveled when I witnessed Paula, although carrying about thirty-five pounds in her rucksack, was among the top finishers among men and women in a ten-kilometer rucksack march. In sum, I saw Paula as an example of how you cannot judge people by their appearance, and that the boundaries are endless if you’re willing to explore them with zest.” Walker, funeral address, San Antonio, 2009.

  She was sent to Korea, where she lived for a time on a remote outpost ringed with barbed wire: Paul Loyd, Jr., interview by author, February 15, 2009, and Paul Loyd, Jr., funeral address, San Antonio, 2009. Loyd’s letter to her half brother read: “My unit is not the greatest place for a mechanic. Since it’s a Patriot Missile unit, anything related to a missile takes priority. It looks like I’m going to spend a lot of my time over here pulling guard duty. . . . I’ll keep you all posted on life here. I live in a two-block area with all the U.S. soldiers, surrounded by barbed wire. People call it a prison camp. . . . After this, I don’t need any more character-building life experiences. I’m going to relax and enjoy life when I get out of the Army.” The message ended with a smiley face.

  After four years, she switched to the reserves: Ward, interviews by author, February 15, 2009, and December 14, 2012.

  In the rarefied atmosphere that nurtures America’s policy-making elite: For her study of Bosnia, Chester Crocker, James R. Schlesinger Professor of Strategic Studies, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, interview by author, June 22, 2010.

  Then came the attacks of September 11, 2001, and her reserve unit was called up: Loyd’s unit was called up in August 2002. Ward, interviews by author, February 15, 2009, and December 14, 2012, and Walker, funeral address, San Antonio, 2009.

  By now, she had given up fixing trucks in favor of civil affairs: Loyd received her airborne certification before deploying to Afghanistan. Ward, interview by author, December 14, 2012, and Walker, funeral address, San Antonio, 2009. For more on civil affairs, see “Careers and Jobs: Civil Affairs Specialist (38B),” http://www.goarmy.com/careers-and-jobs/browse-career-and-job-categories/intelligence-and-combat-support/civil-affairs-specialist.html, and “United States Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (Airborne),” http://www.usar.army.mil/ourstory/commands/USACAPOC/Pages/Overview.aspx, accessed October 6, 2012.

  She had made staff sergeant: Many details about Loyd’s time with the 450th in Afghanistan here and in the paragraphs below are from Mike Rathje, interview by author, January 21, 2013.

  ‘We are screaming into the silence’: Wendy Solomon, “American Women Soldiers Are Opening Afghan Eyes,” The Morning Call, September 2, 2003.

  “They banded together to hide information”: Loyd, “Lesbian Resistance in the Bars of San Antonio, Texas,” 20.

  At ribbon-cuttings for American-funded schools: Ibid., and Rathje, interview by author, January 21, 2013.

  Afghan men sometimes asked Loyd’s translator: ‘They’re usually surprised I’m a woman,’ Loyd told Solomon in 2003. �
�Sometimes I’ll be talking to the men in a village and they’ll turn to the interpreter and say, ‘Is that a man or a woman?’ But I haven’t had any problems with them. They’ve all been very nice.’ Ibid.

  ‘The fact that I’m a woman’: Ibid.

  ‘They take me for who I am’: Loyd was realistic enough to know that many Afghan men treated her respectfully for their own practical reasons. As a civil affairs soldier, she had access to aid and development funds. “She said, ‘Well, mom, I’ve got the money.’ ” Ward, interview by author, December 14, 2012.

  Loyd understood these concerns: For Loyd paying the Afghan police directly, Ward, interview by author, December 14, 2012.

  Soon she was in Kabul, working for a nongovernmental group: Ward, interview by author, December 14, 2012.

  One winter day, she attended a briefing on the upcoming expansion of NATO forces: Frank Muggeo, interviews by author, February 2009 and October 18, 2012.

  In late 2004, Loyd got a job with the United States Agency for International Development: She worked for USAID from December 2004 through December 2005. Ward, interview by author, December 14, 2012.

  The provincial governor, Delbar Arman: Information about Arman here and below, Delbar Arman, interview by author, January 14, 2009.

  elders covered their faces when they came to meet the governor: Ibid.

  Some woman was sick: This account of Loyd’s evacuation of a pregnant Afghan woman is from ibid.

  They tore the building apart: This story is from U.S. Air Force Colonel Kevin P. McGlaughlin, who got to know Loyd and Arman when he headed the Zabul PRT between 2006 and 2007. McGlaughlin, interview by author, February 20, 2009.

  During her year in Zabul, Loyd established a women’s tree-planting cooperative: Ward, interview by author, December 14, 2012. Loyd received a USAID award for her work in Zabul.

  She helped return the bodies of development contractors: Remarks of Paula Loyd, “Stabilization and Reconstruction Operations in Post-Conflict and Crisis Zones: The Challenges of Military and Civilian Cooperation,” Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Panel, June 7, 2006. For more on the killings of Chemonics workers in Zabul and Helmand, Golnaz Esfandiari, “Afghanistan: Killings Raise Concerns for Aid Workers’ Safety,” Radio Free Europe, March 20, 2005.

  strange women moving around the province: Walker, funeral address, San Antonio, 2009. “Though the missionaries probably didn’t know what she had done, she was their guardian angel that day,” a military officer who worked with her recalled.

  In 2005, Loyd took a job in Kabul: For details about Loyd’s work with the United Nations, Stacy Crevello, interview by author, December 17, 2012.

  she was one of the few people in Afghanistan with whom he could talk openly: “Paula was very smart, easy to talk to. She spoke military because she’d been in the military. . . . [F]or a guy in my position, she was as close to a peer as I was going to have. . . . I could talk to her normally as opposed to, say, my NCOs and other officers.” McGlaughlin, interview by author, February 20, 2009.

  Loyd had no problem telling him he was full of shit: “She was soft and fuzzy but she could be cold and prickly if she wanted to be,” McGlaughlin told me. “She was more than happy to say . . . ‘You’re full of shit, this is why you’re wrong.’ She could do what we did because she’d been there, done that, got her T-shirt, but she also saw the bigger picture.” Ibid.

  Loyd buried their guns in her purse: “Paula’s got this bag the size of Texas, so we deposit our sidearms in the bag, and we blow through the metal detectors and she goes around the metal detectors. There was no way they were going to stop her with that big old smile and blond hair, there was no way they were going to touch her. There we were eating breakfast, armed to the teeth,” McGlaughlin recalled. Ibid.

  In 2006, Loyd spoke on a panel at the Woodrow Wilson Center: Remarks of Paula Loyd, “Stabilization and Reconstruction Operations in Post-Conflict and Crisis Zones: The Challenges of Military and Civilian Cooperation.”

  She was not opposed to the war: “We need fighting to be done,” Loyd said at the Wilson Center. “So when a PRT can work in coordination with an infantry unit to stabilize an area, I think it’s really useful.” Ibid.

  Every American unit and every national force in NATO: “Every rotation that comes in has to show that they’ve done something, so they want to put their stamp on something,” Loyd said at the Wilson Center. “Sometimes that can be counterproductive to working with the local governments, and working with the national government. They want to put . . . their flag on the project.” Ibid.

  the U.S. military had shown itself incapable of sustaining long-term relationships: “The lack of institutional memory is a serious problem,” Loyd said. Ibid.

  During her time in Zabul: “When I was in Zabul with USAID at a PRT, I worked with two different Special Forces units,” Loyd told the Wilson Center audience. “I found that one was excellent, one was not so excellent. One of the reasons that the group that was not so excellent had some problems is because all of their interpreters were from one tribe. That means that all of their information came from that one tribe. Then we started having problems of certain people getting arrested, that maybe were for more tribal reasons than because they were with the Taliban or al Qaeda . . .” Ibid.

  Loyd’s lungs had begun to bother her: Ward, interview by author, December 14, 2012.

  They’d dated on and off, but work had kept them apart: Frank Muggeo, interviews by author, February 2009 and October 18, 2012.

  ‘You’d rather be sitting on a rug talking to elders’: Ward, interviews by author, February 15, 2009, and December 14, 2012. Loyd wanted to get a PhD in Afghan studies, Ward told me, but she needed to work on her language skills, and she knew going back to Afghanistan was the best way to do that.

  Chapter 4: Maiwand

  The Chinook touched down amid a swirl of dirt and stones: Visual details here and below come from photographs taken by Loyd’s teammates, Clint Cooper and Don Ayala, and from interviews with Ayala, Cooper, and the soldiers and officers of the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Regiment, 1st Infantry Division, known as the 2–2.

  It got up near 120 degrees, the heat so oppressive: For the temperature range, see Ali A. Jalali and Lester W. Grau, “Expeditionary Forces: Superior Technology Defeated—The Battle of Maiwand,” Military Review, May–June 2001. According to the 2–2’s executive officer, Major Cale Brown, who arrived with the first soldiers on August 15, 2008: “It was just bare desert. It was roughing it. It’s very hot out here in the summer. It was guys hunkering down underneath the camouflage nets and drinking a whole lot of water, letting the engineers work putting up the initial walls. . . . The sort of rectangular [perimeter of] Hescos, that was the first thing they put up, and then they just pushed up sort of piles of dirt in a triangle around it and that was home sweet home for the first three months.” Major Cale Brown, interview by author, March 22, 2009. According to Captain Michael Soyka: “When we first got here it was pretty rough. . . . It was no rocks. We wished there was rocks. It was just sand. We had to bring all that rock in. It was pretty austere. When they first showed up all they did was dig a fighting position, with a shovel, and man their fighting positions and the ground was ours.” Soyka, interview by author, March 20, 2009. Captain Trevor Voelkel told me: “[O]ur first time out here was about August 18 of [2008]. . . . Ramrod was in the dust, in the dirt, and that was that.” Voelkel, interview by author, March 24, 2009.

  The battalion intelligence section consisted: Cooper, interview by author, April 22, 2010.

  Loyd’s teammate, Clint Cooper: Biographical information about Cooper in the first several pages of this chapter comes primarily from my interviews with Cooper, April 20–23, 2010.

  His family had lived on Navajo Nation land: Cooper’s father spoke Spanish, having done a Mormon mission in Uruguay and Paraguay. His work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs was an extension of this outreach, but it also connected him to a long and controversial traditio
n of American ethnography among native peoples. The time Cooper spent on the reservation was formative. Along with his later travels in Germany and elsewhere, his experience among the Navajo was “what got me interested in culture and language,” he told me.

  They would set up chairs in the gym: Navajo Lucy Toledo, who attended a boarding school in California in the 1950s, recalled something similar: “Saturday night we had a movie. . . . Do you know what the movie was about? Cowboys and Indians. Cowboys and Indians. Here we’re getting all our people killed, and that’s the kind of stuff they showed us.” Charla Bear, “American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many,” NPR, May 12, 2008, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16516865, accessed August 17, 2012.

  Bosnia wasn’t much of a war: The Bosnian War officially ended with the Dayton Accords in 1995; by the time Cooper arrived, a NATO peacekeeping mission had been in place for seven years.

  One man told Cooper he had been forced at gunpoint: The man refused. “They said, ‘Either you rape your daughter or we’re going to kill her or we’re going to kill you.’ And he knew in his mind that regardless of what he did, his daughter would probably, you know . . . and he didn’t do it. And in fact, his daughters disappeared. He never saw them again.” Cooper, interview by author, April 20, 2010.

  As Cooper listened, he looked into the man’s eyes: “I mean, just watching that kind of pain and suffering in his eyes, you relate to that and you share a little bit of what’s going on,” Cooper told me. “It’s just horrible some of the things that we’d hear.” Cooper, interview by author, April 20, 2010.

  The National Security Agency was looking for linguists who spoke Pashto and Dari: Pashto is mainly spoken in Afghanistan’s south and east by Pashtuns, members of Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group. Dari, which dominates in the north, west, and center of the country, is a cousin of Farsi, or Persian. It has historically been the language of Afghanistan’s ruling elite.