In My Father's Country: An Afghan Woman Defies Her Fate Read online

  The recruiter phoned a few hours later and volunteered to fill out all my paperwork, including the monstrous SF86 national security form. In three days it was done. I was officially a Category II interpreter, cleared to work for the U.S. Armed Forces in Afghanistan.

  I WAS SCHEDULED to travel to Fairfax, Virginia, for a predeployment orientation before being sent to Afghanistan. The night before I left, Mamai and I had our worst argument yet. I can’t remember how it started, but I remember telling her that I’d gone to the trouble of bringing her here to enjoy the freedoms that I knew America could give her.

  “I wanted you to be able to see a doctor, or go visit your friends or call your sisters whenever you wanted to, without having to ask permission or feel guilty about it. I brought you here to enjoy a good life. I didn’t bring you here to mother me. I’ve been without a mother for over a decade. I’m all grown up now. This isn’t the village. It isn’t Peshawar or Kabul. I need you to adjust to having me as a daughter.” I hated to be so tough on her, but I needed the two of us to live together as two autonomous adults. I also wanted to push her to adjust faster because I knew that if I gave her too much time, if she thought too much about it, she wouldn’t be able to deal with the cultural shock of being in America.

  She looked at me sadly and said what she would say many times in her life: “I don’t know what sins God is punishing me for by giving me a headstrong daughter like you.”

  The next morning, in the dark, Greg took me to the airport and I was gone.

  THE NEW-EMPLOYEE ORIENTATION was held in a large chain hotel that tried to look fancier than it was. I had been hired as a Category II interpreter. CAT IIs, as they’re called, are Afghans who are American citizens with security clearance. CAT I interpreters are either Afghan émigrés who possess a green card or work visa but no citizenship, or local Afghans who live in Afghanistan.

  We spent the first two days filling out reams of paperwork to apply for security clearances. For reasons I didn’t understand, we were also lectured on the basics of Afghan culture. In some of the sessions I was the only woman in a room full of Afghan men, good practice for what lay ahead of me in Afghanistan.

  We took a written test in Pashtu. An older guy who before the week was over would ask me to be his second wife offered to lend me his dictionary. He was short and stocky, with tufts of white hair growing out of his ears.

  “Dictionary!” I exclaimed. “There’s a war going on. You’re not going to have time to whip out your dictionary in the middle of a combat zone.”

  “It’s just to pass the test. They don’t care,” he said.

  “They should care. I care,” I replied righteously.

  On the third day I returned to my hotel room in the evening. I was standing in the middle of my room trying to figure out what to do for dinner, when the phone rang. Everyone I knew called me on my cell. I stared at the hotel phone. Its ring was loud to the point of aggression. I answered it rudely, just to stop it from ringing. It was Greg. Before I could ask why he was calling me on the hotel line he said, “Guess what? I’m in the lobby. I wanted to surprise you, but they won’t give me your room number.”

  “You are?” I was so happy to hear his voice. I had been afraid it was the dictionary lender with the hairy ears who had been calling.

  “I got to thinking. If you go to Afghanistan, you’ll miss our anniversary. So I came here to celebrate it early.”

  Greg was great with a map. That night he took me to an Afghan restaurant I’d heard about. The food wasn’t very good, but it hardly mattered. The company was exactly what I needed. The next afternoon we went to the Smithsonian. We took the Metro into Washington, D.C., the first time in my life I’d ridden on a subway train. The clatter made it too loud to talk, but we had been together long enough for me to know he wasn’t there just to celebrate. This wasn’t any anniversary. When we had first met and he asked me to marry him, I had carelessly told him to come back and ask me in five years. It was nearly five years later.

  While we were looking at the dinosaur skeletons he asked, casually, if I knew how many years we’d been together.

  “These dinosaurs are amazing. I wish Riley could see this someday. Don’t you think he would love this place?” I asked, hoping to distract him.

  “We don’t have to get married immediately. You can go do your Afghanistan thing, and we can just get engaged.”

  “I’m not sure I want to be engaged.”

  “We wouldn’t have to tell anybody. It could just be our little secret.”

  “Now you sound like some old pervert,” I said. Using humor as an escape was an Afghan trait I could always count on. “What’s the purpose of that?” I continued. “Don’t you think I would stay true to us?”

  “I just want to be able to look forward to your return and starting a life with me. The rest is up to you; any way you want it, I want it.”

  “If it’s up to me, I would prefer not to complicate our relationship.”

  I adored Greg. There was no one else in my life. I didn’t want to end our relationship. I wanted to be with him, but I just didn’t want to be married to him. I wasn’t planning on walking away, I just needed to know that I would always have the freedom to do so. I had paid a great price for my independence and never wanted to give it up, ever.

  I’m sure a psychologist would have a field day analyzing my aversion to marriage. When I was a child I once heard Mamai tell some friends a story about a thirteen-year-old girl in the village who’d been married to a man much older than she. One evening she cooked his dinner and either oversalted it or undersalted it, I can’t remember which. She placed the food in front of him; he took one taste and was so displeased that he smacked her so hard he broke her neck and she died instantly. What amazed me when I heard them tell the story was not the horror of it happening but the casualness with which this story was shared and discussed. It wasn’t shocking to them, nor was it a lesson not to marry young girls to old men—it was just told as general conversation, a piece of local gossip. When I thought about marriage I could never shake this story, couldn’t file it under Beastly Things That Happen Only in Afghanistan. I couldn’t dismiss from my mind the worry that one day I would get the salt wrong and Greg, who’d never even said an unkind word to me, would break my neck.

  “Greg, you’re not ready for life with me,” I said. “You think you are, but you’re not. You are so sweet, and so kind. I would just make you miserable. In thirty years you’d look back and realize how unhappy you were with me and your life would have been a waste.”

  “How can you even say that I would think that? You mean everything to me, and you know we belong together.”

  We’d found a bench in one of the galleries. I sat there and let him hold my hands. What could I say? That the thought of marriage made me feel like I was suffocating? That I would rather go to Afghanistan than get engaged to him? How could I protect the one person I cared the most about, while still keeping my own liberties, which I cared about even more?

  AT THE END of the weeklong military training I was scheduled to board a military plane to Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, where I would catch a plane to Bagram Airfield (BAF).

  I called Najiba to say good-bye.

  “This is ridiculous,” she said. “Just come back.”

  “I’m going to try it for at least six months,” I said. “That’s the shortest contract they offer.”

  “Saima, you’re talking about Afghanistan. Just because we were born there doesn’t mean we belong there. You’re too Americanized. Don’t you like your life here? Plus, you can’t even get along with the Afghans in your own family here in the States. What do you think is going to happen there? Those people aren’t going to be welcoming you with open arms. Afghanistan is no place for an opinionated and pigheaded woman like you. They stone to death women like you.”

  ELEVEN

  My recurring nightmares were coming true. I was on a plane back to Afghanistan.

  The difference being, it wasn
’t my uncles making their threats a reality—I was returning of my own free will. As the flight crew read through the roll call for the manifest, I realized that the company I had chosen to go with knew exactly what they were doing when they decided to push me through all the paperwork and training within two weeks. If I had being given any more time to think about it, I would have backed out and decided to stay in sleepy Portland.

  What was I thinking? For one thing, I have always thought that the only way to stop fearing something is to be immersed in it. Of course, I can’t seem to make this work when it comes to swimming, but returning to Afghanistan I wanted and could do. So, I thought, I will sign up for the shortest contract—and if I needed to leave before that was over, I would do just that. Feeling in control of the situation and of the timing of my return made it a lot easier to get on that plane.

  I had not been happy in America, not the way I knew I could be if I took care of what I considered unfinished business from my childhood. I had left Afghanistan under the worst possible conditions. All those years later, sitting in Oregon, trying to find satisfaction and happiness in freedom, I would randomly be reminded of one thing or another from my early years in Afghanistan, and it would instantly take me back to the despair of my childhood.

  ATLANTA TO SHANNON to Bishkek to Bagram. On the outside, the plane looked like a commercial jetliner, but inside it had been stripped down to the basics. Wires dangled from the ceiling. There were no overhead bins, no inner shell, no disguising the fact that we were traveling in a tin can with wings. The back of the plane was reserved for cargo—mostly food and ammunition. As I crawled over duffel bags and stretched legs to find a seat, I vowed to never complain about flying coach again.

  The engines were loud enough to warrant earplugs. The soldiers all had them, but no one came down the aisle, offering them. You were meant to have grabbed them from a tray as you boarded, but I hadn’t known that. From this I learned one thing: It’s impossible to doze off while trying to cover your ears with your hands.

  The transport plane landed in the middle of the night at a U.S. Air Force base in Bishkek, in a blizzard. Almost twenty hours of flying to get there had given me plenty of time to doubt my decision to return to this war-ravaged country, where it seemed that there was a price for everything and everything was for sale. For a few dollars, people would sell you anything, even their grandmother—or at least that is what I had been told during orientation by a couple of the guys who had spent time in Afghanistan as interpreters. Would the country my father sacrificed his life for be a country where the very values—friendship, loyalty, family—he gave his life to were for sale? On that long flight to my motherland, I made two promises to myself: one, that if ever I saw that Afghanistan had become a country my father would be ashamed of, I would leave that same day. The second was inspired by my paranoia, a true American quality, that I would be stranded without my American passport, which guaranteed my rights and gave me freedom of movement: I would guard my American passport with my life. I feared that the men of Afghanistan would suck me back into a life with no rights, a life that I thought I had escaped—the shackles that so many Afghan women accept as their fate.

  Did I expect to come out of it alive? Was this a rational decision? Or had I been guided by a greater force? Had it been my destiny from the beginning to be an Afghan woman in Afghanistan, one that I had only postponed by going to America? Is it foolish to try to run away from your fate?

  I had not slept for hours, with these answerless questions racing through my head as I sat in that loud cabin, surrounded by very young American men in uniform who had the ability to fall asleep before the plane had even lifted off. Did they not worry about what lay ahead of them? How I envied their acceptance of whatever was coming their way. Later, I would find out that, in reality, most of them didn’t know what was coming their way.

  As the engines were turned off, I still had the buzzing in my ears that would persist for a couple of days. I lugged my duffel bags across the icy tarmac to a Kmart-sized tent where I joined the other soldiers and civilians waiting for a flight to Afghanistan. I sat in a cold metal chair. Three televisions broadcast the same football game. There was no sound. I thought the volume of the TVs was just turned down, then a soldier offered me a bottle of water and I was forced to read his lips. I was temporarily deaf from the roar of the engines. At least I hoped it was temporary.

  I sat and waited. Morning came. The day passed. If there is one thing that Pashtuns excel at, it’s waiting. All around me soldiers slouched in chairs, watching TV, listening to their iPods. Some slept with their heads thrown back, snoring as if they were in their own beds at home, and I’m sure in their dreams they were.

  The tent was overheated to compensate for the frigid temperature outside, but a burst of cold air came in every time one of the soldiers entered or exited. I slept on one of the hard sofas in my turtleneck, my arms wrapped around myself. On the morning of the third day I wondered if I’d been forgotten. Was it possible? Would someone have noticed if I’d boarded the military transport in Atlanta and had never arrived at Bagram Airfield? I could have asked someone, but I was too intimidated. I’d spent all my time in the United States in Oregon, a state with no major military installations. The only experience I’d had with people in uniforms was signing for packages from the cute UPS man who’d come to my office every day. The young soldiers with their brush cuts, desert fatigues, and weapons made me nervous. Had they used those oiled black guns, which they strapped to themselves so casually, to kill an enemy? Could they tell I was an Afghan? Would they consider me an outsider? An enemy? Would they hate me because my people were the reason they were so far away from their families? I have always been too afraid to ask my soldier friends this question because I knew I would resent leaving my family if the boot was on the other foot, so to speak. How might I react to their resentment? Would I be insulted by their attitude? How would I avenge their insult? I was so busy with these incessant, one-way conversations in my head that it was three days before I even thought about going up to the window and asking if they had my name on any list.

  Eventually, in the early afternoon of the fourth day, a guy with a clipboard called out the last four digits of my social security number. I boarded a plane that had a row of seats running along the cabin sides and two Land Cruisers strapped down in the center. They looked like beasts that had been captured and were being taken to a faraway zoo. Once more the engines were loud enough to make your joints hurt. But this time I had remembered to grab a pair of earplugs as I boarded.

  “So, what are you?” the soldier sitting next to me yelled. He nodded at my civilian outfit, my gray down jacket, Express jeans, and the same turtleneck I’d been wearing now for half a week.

  “An interpreter,” I said. “A Pashtu turjuman.” It sounded strange to me to be introducing myself as an interpreter. It was an alien title.

  “Awesome. Can you come with me and my soldiers?” His grin conveyed the easy charm that I would later see in almost every soldier I met out there.

  I opened my mouth and laughter probably spilled out, but I couldn’t hear it. “I think you’ll have to ask my site manager!”

  “I’m working on my Pashtu.” He unzipped one of the many pockets on the arm of his uniform and showed me a small Pashtu dictionary with a tattered pale-blue cover.

  “Ah! I know that dictionary! It’s put out by Pakistani Pashtu speakers.” I recognized it, having seen one in a bookstore in Portland when I was looking for a Pashtu dictionary.

  “Is it good?” He flipped through it. I could see dog-eared pages and words underlined. “I want to be able to say a few things in Pashtu to Afghans I meet on patrols,” he shouted.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. I couldn’t possibly explain over the noise that, like everything else in Afghanistan, the language issue is maddeningly complicated. Ahmed had told me that the army routinely sent Farsiban interpreters who spoke only Dari, as Afghan Farsi is called, into Pashtun vill
ages. While a lot of Pashtuns might understand Dari, they dislike speaking it because of the historical ethnic tensions between the two main groups of Afghans. The Pashtuns have their own language, Pashtu, which is the language they expected the U.S. Army to speak if the Americans wanted their support in the fight against terrorism. Otherwise, the army would be wasting the Pashtun men’s time, and if the Afghans were to agree on anything, it would have been that the Pashtuns were running out of time.

  THERE ARE 60 million Pashtu speakers worldwide (although hard data hasn’t been collected to confirm this number), most of whom live in Afghanistan and Pakistan. According to The CIA World Factbook, Pashtuns comprise over 40 percent of the population of Afghanistan, the other five or six major ethnic groups making up the rest. I have asked Pashtuns in remote villages about how many Pashtuns they think are in Afghanistan, and their response is millions. For as long as I can remember, and long before then, Farsiban and Pashtuns have been throwing around percentages and numbers to claim majority, but due to the insecurity and inability of anyone to go door-to-door, no one has solid data. In my experience, having worked all over remote Afghanistan, I find it safe to say that more people speak Pashtu than Dari, the other official language. For the last three hundred years, whenever Afghanistan has had a king, he’s been Pashtun, and the national anthem of Afghanistan is sung in Pashtu; still, Dari has traditionally been the language of business and higher education, which accounts for the often arrogant and condescending attitude of Farsiban people toward Pashtuns. Dari was the lone official language until 1936, when Pashtu was added by royal decree.