“Zulu Time”, 2/3
Second installment.
Part 1 here
Part II
Now, you might be wondering why we’re so wary in dealing with the press. Here’s a story that may line out some of the issues.
Last year - not giving any unit identifiers here - there were some infantry guys doing their business out in the boonies in Samangan province. Some Taliban forces tried to take them on in a hit-and-run firefight, and it didn’t work out too well for the attackers; we know they took at least a couple of casualties, because those were the bodies they weren’t able to carry away with them. Like I said, this was out away from any cities, not even close to villages; a staging area, not a base or a camp, so nobody knew exactly what to do about the bodies. After a while, a few of the officers decided that there’d be a disease hazard if the bodies just stayed lying out there on the hillside, so they ordered the bodies be burned. Between the decision and carrying it out, though, some soldiers with access to a big speaker truck decided to hit the Taliban in their morale. They wanted to do a loudspeaker broadcast shaming the Taliban fighters for leaving their fallen dead behind, call them ‘sissy-men’ and the like. The Afghan translator working with them? he loved the idea, came up with some serious insults to load into the broadcast to stir up the enemy, because he’d be the one recording the broadcast for playback anyway, and he hated the Taliban a lot more than we do. So, yeah, they ran their personal small-scale psychological warfare operation against the forces they were personally having to deal with, and then they burned the bodies and went on with their operations.
A month or so later, there was an Australian journalist embedded with that unit. He got friendly with them, they got friendly with him, and somebody told him about the incident. Next thing you knew, the Australian press was reporting their version of the story as if it was a war atrocity, desecrating the dead and insulting Islam and whatever other bullshit they could load into it. That unit, and everybody connected to it, had all their operations shut down in the entire country for a solid month while they were run through sensitivity seminars; the guy who’d okayed the broadcast wasn’t exactly court-martialed - they couldn’t do that since he hadn’t actually done anything wrong - but he got a reprimand in his record that essentially meant he could stay in the Army but he could forget about ever getting promoted again.
So that’s what it comes down to: we’re us, and they’re them. We think we’re defending our country against its enemies, and they think we’re enemies, or will be if they don’t ride herd on us every moment. Some of them are genuinely sincere, and genuinely good people …
… but you never trust them. Never. Because every last one of them thinks he has a “higher loyalty”, and they’ll walk over our bodies in a moment if it gives them an opportunity to showcase how virtuous they are. Or just to get a juicy story, even if they have to add the juice.
I liked Vi, I truly did. I knew for damn sure Scott and Tsien liked her. Which, to my mind, meant she was really, really dangerous, or could be without any warning at all.
* * *
The next several days were … I guess ‘vaguely confusing’ would be the best way to put it. At least, it had that effect on me. Scott and Tsien got the notion, I think, that something was just a little off, but they didn’t have enough background to feel it the way I did. Nobody else spent enough sustained time with Vi (or Andrew, for however much that counted) for it to build up on them. The more I heard, though, the more mystified I got, and just a little uneasy in some way I couldn’t explain or justify.
The two civilians circulated. They poked around. They asked questions, got stories from various soldiers in the company. It wasn’t like reporters following a lead, though, more in the nature of familiarizing themselves with the place and the people. The three of us weren’t with them all the time, we had to keep up with our regular duties (vehicle maintenance, guard shifts, CQ runner duty, radio checks, weapon cleaning, the like), but I managed to always have at least one of us with Vi and Andrew while they went here and there and got acquainted and familiarized themselves with their new environment, so I was kept up to date on anything that had come up when I wasn’t around.
Despite my worries, none of the other troops told any anecdotes that an unfriendly press could have used to make us look bad; my bet would be that SFC Hartis had spread the same warning she’d given me. The stories that did get told, though … they weren’t exactly the kind that a reporter generally digs for, but that was what kept coming up when soldiers were talking to Vi. Enough that I began to wonder if that might be what she was deliberately unearthing and following up, though I couldn’t see why and I never got the sense that she was tracing any particular thread.
One of the tales, the teller swore that during his first tour - he was in on the initial invasion of the ’Stan - he’d see locals sometimes who simply didn’t show up in night vision gear; somehow their body temperature matched the ambient temp so exactly that they were effectively invisible to NVGs, though you could see them clearly enough with bare eyes. Then they’d realize they were being watched, and find a way to be elsewhere.
There was the story about the guy who was said to have come in from another branch (Air Force, probably, ’cause it sure didn’t sound like Navy or Marines) who didn’t know any of the marching cadences, so he made up his own. Four verses and an ending chorus, and the people telling the story swear that his invented cadence is still being used some places.
There was an ‘I knew a guy who knew a guy who …’ about a soldier they called the Prince of Darkness, said to stay indoors during the day without any light whatsoever, so he’d build up his retinal purple for night ops. How that story kept going around, I couldn’t say, because it butts up against things every grunt knows: that there are too many assigned duties for anybody to sequester himself like that, and that modern night-vision gear would outstrip anything a man could do for himself by such means. I guess it just sounds so cool, the story has probably been told since Caesar went into Gaul.
One in particular, I’d heard a version of it myself, years before, because it was from clear back in the late ’90s, during the U.S. military presence with NATO in Bosnia. Some of the local Serbs had tried to infiltrate a raiding party through the area being guarded, oh-dark-thirty or so, and got spotted by a ’Nam vet who was only around because he’d been called up from the Reserves to fill a slot. Lots of noise and warnings and full alert, but the Serbs withdrew without shots being fired … The thing is, the guy couldn’t explain how he’d spotted the bogies, he wasn’t even supposed be on duty then, he just kept mumbling something about ‘trick or treat’ and then stopped talking altogether, and then the next day he claimed he couldn’t remember anything about the previous night’s activities.
(For some reason, the stories about that incident always stress that this guy, when he was in a hurry, would say something about ‘triage’ when what he actually meant was along the lines of Make a priority decision, NOW. Don’t know why that detail keeps being included, but it’s always there.)
Things like that. Off the wall, a little off-kilter, not even the type of stories you generally hear from soldiers (and certainly not the ones they tell each other). The point is that the kind of questions Vi asked - light, low-key, very casual - weren’t the questions news crews had always gone for. Everything about her made it clear that all this was new to her.
And yet, she never asked the one question that people who don’t know anything about what it means to be a soldier, always ask: “Have you ever shot anybody?”
Maybe I’m going off track here, or maybe I’m providing valid info about our mindset that you can use. Since I don’t know yet, I’ll just go ahead.
The first thing you need to understand about our reaction to that question is that we’re surrounded by other soldiers. And we hear them talk, and we learn from what we hear them say, and one of the things we learn is that the ones who talk the most are the ones least worth listening to. (While my unit was staging to go into Iraq, clear back in ’03, I overheard one soldier in the phone center telling his girlfriend about all the jihadis he’d killed … and we were still in Kuwait, hadn’t even crossed the border yet.) Hearing that kind of puffing-up, and seeing the way other soldiers react to it, makes us self-conscious about saying anything that might sound like empty bragging.
The second thing is that every one of us knows there’s no way to answer the question that will communicate the reality, because - unless it’s somebody who’s lived the same events and faced the same choices - they won’t understand what we’re saying. There’s a whole foundation of context and circumstance that has to be there before the whole picture comes across, and civilians don’t have that foundation.
The last thing on that question: there are plenty of circumstances where you don’t really know the answer. A lot of the times we take fire, we don’t actually see anybody, they’re firing from cover if they have any sense. You shoot back anyhow, because putting a lot of metal into the air will usually get them to keep their heads down and you try to send it in their direction if you know what that direction is, and if the firing dies down, did they leave because things were getting too hot or did they leave because you killed a few? If it’s night, you can at least shoot at the muzzle flashes, but the same problem applies: you don’t get to see the bullets hit. If it’s one of those rare occasions when an enemy is in the open and shooting at you … well, you shoot back, and you see him go down, but guess what? everybody else was shooting at him, too, so you might not ever know if you hit him at all or if you did hit him but half a dozen other bullets killed him first.
Mostly, we just don’t like talking about that with people who aren’t us. Because we have enough issues with our own feelings about it, and we don’t need to be getting judgment from somebody else.
So, yes, we liked Vi. That didn’t change that she was a civilian, an outsider, someone who couldn’t be counted on to understand our lives, our duties, our decisions. At the end of the day, she just didn’t get it.
And, if she ever learned better, it wouldn’t be us who educated her. That wasn’t our job, and there were too many ways it could go wrong if we tried.
* * *
I kept the Hardass up to date on all this, because she wanted the details, just as curious about what Vi was doing as my guys and I were, and maybe a little more on edge about it. In fact, there was an uptick of tension everywhere, it was small but you get a sense of these things, and everybody was just the slightest bit tense and consequently that much more watchful. Hardass saw me notice her focus, and ignored it - that’s what NCOs do, unless it’s something they think you need to know, and they’re the ones whose job it is to make that call - but when it kept happening, she loosened up enough to say, “We’re getting weird little background reports from here and there. Not close, not in our AO, but some people think it might be drifting in our direction.”
I thought about it for a moment. She hadn’t given me any Don’t even ask looks, and I had my own men to think about, so “Anything to worry about?”
She shook her head, looking annoyed (as usual, by the situation rather than at me). “Night raids,” she said. “Local-on-local stuff, so far, but the ANA are starting to sound spooked, and won’t really say why.”
I could have pushed for details, but Hardass had been pretty patient and I didn’t want to test my luck. Unless it did start to get close, we had enough on our minds.
The forced departure from our normal duties, along with the accompanying disruption, had also given me the opportunity to take care of other things, and I’d spent the last few days working (when I could) on my men’s promotion records; the first-level NCO has quite a bit to say about that, and you don’t want to short-change your guys by putting it off or doing a sloppy job. Scott and Tsien had kept me informed on what Vi (and Andrew) were doing, seeing, visiting, and asking, but after my most recent meeting with Hardass I started making myself more available for direct interface.
I was either just in time for a switch in focus, or Vi had been saving this for when she could talk with me at more length. We took a lunch together in the chow hall, just the two of us at a table, and she asked, “How do you feel about being over here?” Then, realizing more specifics might help, she elaborated, “I mean, your opinion about the overall strategy. I know the official statements, but how does it look from the ground guys’ perspective?”
I thought about it for a moment, gave her an eyebrow. “Just between us? Never going on the record?”
She smiled. “Just for background. Your team has been really nice, I don’t want to cause you any trouble.”
Okay. It was still a chance, but I’d got enough sense of her to believe that, even if she did something I didn’t like, she wouldn’t do it by breaking her word. “All right,” I told her. “This is stuff I’ve come to think from what I’ve seen, nothing from the Army’s position, just my own opinion.” She nodded understanding, and I went on. “I think we had more good reason to come here than to go into Iraq … but I think we have better reason to stay in Iraq than we have any business staying here.”
She tilted her head to study me, assessing. “Why do you think that?”
“Well, it was al-Qaeda that hit the Twin Towers, and it was the Taliban that let them operate here. Hitting back, here, it would have been stupid for us not to do that.” I sighed. “Iraq, though … I’m not saying I didn’t agree with us going in there, but if the President had decided not to, I’d have been fine with that, too. I mean, I figure there must have been reasons, but I don’t know what they were and I don’t really care, but I know exactly why we came into Afghanistan.”
“But once it was done,” Vi answered, “what’s the difference now?”
“Iraq is a modern country,” I explained. “This may not be a great comparison, but I think of it like Mexico: maybe not in the first rank, but better than Third World and ready to move up if they have a chance. Us being there just plain matters more than our being in Afghanistan … and once we got there, and settled in, well, all of a sudden Saudi Arabia realized we didn’t depend as much on our bases in their country, and started being more polite. Iran, too, they’re using the opportunity to sponsor attacks on our guys in Iraq, but you’d better believe they’re noticing we’re close enough to go after them if they get too annoying.” I didn’t say that a lot of the time I wished we’d invaded Iran instead, given that they’d been chanting ‘Death to America!’ ever since the moment the Islamic Republic there came into existence; Vi had turned out to be more sensible than expected, but she still might see that as pure bloodthirstiness or evidence of ‘the military mind-set’, and I didn’t need the hassle. “Afghanistan … frankly, they don’t have anything we want. Now that al-Qaeda is on the run, I personally don’t think this place is worth the effort of keeping up so much as a guard shack.”
She smiled at that, but mostly she seemed … I don’t know, thoughtful? “And the overall idea of turning the country into a functioning democracy?”
I wasn’t sure if she genuinely wanted my opinion, or if she was giving me the cue that would let me betray my knee-jerk jingoism; the latter wasn’t how she’d been going up to now, but I reminded myself that she came from what amounted to another world, and that I couldn’t rule it out. All the same, I could be honest on this one. “I don’t know if that’s possible at all. I’m pretty much positive it can’t be done the way they’re going about it.”
Her expression might have been surprise, but was definitely interested. “No? Why not?”
“Well, to begin with, democracy isn’t exactly in the cultural DNA of the Middle East. The saying is, ‘one man, one vote, one time’, meaning if there’s an election, they vote in a theocracy that controls everything from there on out … or maybe just a dictator who uses religion as a foundation or an excuse, but either way it always seems to go for authoritarianism of one kind or another.
“But that’s not really the main problem,” I went on. “The main problem is, Afghanistan isn’t a country.”
She was nodding, but that might have been yeah, yeah, go on rather than agreement. “So what is it?”
“It’s …” I tried to find the words for something I really did believe but had never had reason to express before. “It’s a negative space. Afghanistan doesn’t even have borders; other countries have borders with Afghanistan, and the territory on this side of those borders is a no-man’s-land of tribes, clans, and stretched-out family relationships we can’t come close to understanding. None of them see Afghanistan as a country, or feel any loyalty to it, it’s just the place where they and their kinsmen compete against everybody else … and a lot of the time, maybe even most of it, that competition is active banditry or straight-up war.”
Vi was frowning a little now. “You don’t seem to think much of the people here.”
“They’re what they are,” I answered. “Which is NOT what the whiz kids in Washington think they are, or at least pretend to think. These people …” I shrugged. “They’re brave. Tougher than you can believe. Smart, a lot of them, even if that operates inside a culture that carries them in directions that don’t make sense to us. But that’s the real answer there: they see things in a way we don’t, and we’re not going to turn them into America-lite by building schools and digging wells and putting up cheerful posters.”
The frown had been increasing as I spoke, either she was losing some comforting illusions or she’d hoped to have pessimistic suspicions refuted and found them confirmed instead. After a minute of silence, Vi said, “And what about the women here? What’s your opinion on that?”
If she was trying to draw me out on something that could be used against me, or just to the disadvantage of the Army or of the general government effort, then I needed to backpedal and say something noncommittal. I couldn’t dismiss the possibility - however much I had come to like her, she was still a newschick - but I didn’t want to stonewall her without good reason. So I asked, “What do you know so far about the way things are over here?”
She shook her head slowly. “I know … Well, okay. I know that in America, it was the 1920s before as many people lived in cities as in the rural areas, and it’s more like 85% now, but in Afghanistan that’s reversed, at least 70% of the population is rural. I know that people in America who don’t live in cities, think the cities aren’t near as important as city folks believe they are, and that in Afghanistan the city-country disconnect is even bigger. I know that, outside the cities, things haven’t changed that much since Alexander’s armies came through -”
(Stone Age with cell phones and AK47s was how I’d heard it described, but Vi was right, Bronze Age was closer. And at least half the population still lived in mud huts, probably a lot more than that.)
“- and social attitudes are really conservative, really limited, and not exactly what we’d call enlightened. So no, I don’t have any ideals about Afghan women being better off here than in America. I just wanted to get your take on … on how far it goes.”
Fair enough. “I’m no fan of the old Soviet Union - they screwed up the world for way too long as far as I’m concerned - but one of the big reasons the Afghan locals revolted against the Russians in the first place was because Communist policy was for universal education; meaning, girls got the same schooling as boys. This was, well, very very unwelcome in the rural areas.” I shrugged. “People are people, and some people are more decent than others and some are worse than others, but overall we’re looking at a culture that sees nothing wrong with bride price, forced child marriages, gender seclusion pretty much everywhere except inside the home … and, yeah, we’re still getting girls having acid thrown in their faces for the crime of wanting to go to school. For that matter, a woman who isn’t being chaperoned by a male member of her family can be killed for just being seen in the company of a non-family male … and most of the time, it would be her own family doing the killing, to preserve what they think of as ‘honor’.” I managed to keep the sneer off my face, but it was a conscious choice. “It’s their culture, and I guess if you’re used to it, you can have a full and even rewarding life, but to us it just comes across as a total horror show.”
Vi was looking glum but not surprised. “It’s really that bad? just from what you’ve seen?”
I just looked back at her with what I knew was a flat expression. “Every now and then we still hand out toys to the local kids. We learned quick to never give a girl any toy except a doll, because otherwise a boy would punch her or hit her in the head with a rock and take that toy away. For this culture, it’s normal behavior. Yeah, it’s that bad.”
Her eyes were somewhere else. “I’ve … seen the same kind of thing other places. Not always this extreme, but it’s not exactly news to me.” She sighed. “With what I … well, I knew how it might be, but I hoped for better.”
I was getting maybe a whisper that might have pointed to her having something specific on her mind, so I asked innocently, “Why?”
She looked back at me, and just as guilelessly she said, “Oh, no reason in particular.”
The remainder of the meal passed with nothing more than a little minor chit-chat. I got back to my men and ordered, “Give me your best impression of what’s going on with Vi and Andrew.”
“I’d say, nothing,” Tsien said, and grinned. “Now, if Vi was a guy, Andrew might be interested -”
“I’m not joking, damn it!” I glared at both of them. “Just tell me what you think, I’ll decide if there’s anything to it.”
Tsien was always watching for the next punchline he could deliver, and I was getting tired of it (again), but Scott was looking pensive. “You know, I’ve been kind of getting a feeling …” He shook his head. “Nothing you could name, but you asked for impressions, and I’ve been thinking that, well, it just seemed that they were looking for something, without ever saying so. Only by now it feels more like … like they’re waiting for something.”
I let that settle for a minute. “And you still don’t have any idea what.”
He shook his head, no. Wonderful. While I was trying to work out if there was any other way I could go, or if I needed to, Tsien offered, “I did hear something.”
I turned back to him. “Go.”
“It was just a couple of seconds, but the other day I caught the tail end of something: as I came up, Andrew was saying, ‘Fereeta? You’re better than she is.’ And Vi said, ‘Maybe, but at least she can speak the language. If she wasn’t already stuck in that thing in -’ Then they saw me, and from there we were back on our usual.”
I felt my mouth tightening. Might not mean anything, but … Language. ‘Farideh’ was a woman’s name in Arabic and Persian Farsi, and one of the common languages in Afghanistan is a variant of Farsi called Dari. Was Vi in contact, or maybe competition, with a local national? Or was this just a passing comment that had nothing to do with us?
The good news is, we were inside the wire, dealing with a close-in issue. I didn’t have to make any kind of urgent decision, just pass it on to Hardass and wait to see if anything else came up.
All the same, I would be really glad when we were past this mess (or potential mess) and Vi was back to the civilian world. Some things, however pleasant in the moment, were just not worth the headache.
That was the theory, anyhow.
Would have been nice if it had worked out that way.
* * *
I made my report to Hardass, and she took it with the same grimness I had seen growing in her since Vi’s arrival. I got back to my men, and went through the routine I’d worked up to keep them sharp. Quick weapons cleaning, taking turns so we weren’t all temporarily disarmed at the same time (we did a comprehensive cleaning twice a week, but something every day). Review of the equipment layout in the standard Humvee, it’s a unit requirement to pack every vehicle exactly the same way so every soldier knows where to find anything if he has to switch trucks or even grab something in a firefight; we’d been exempted while keeping up with Vi and Andrew, but I meant to keep our awareness refreshed, so we took turns reciting the layout to one another. Checkoff on the placement of gear pouches on our body armor and load-bearing harnesses, also standardized and only took a minute to go through but we did that every day. Abbreviated workout: push-ups, crunches, jumping jacks, we’d learned on previous deployments that it was way too easy to spend a year in-theater doing the job and getting awards for performance, then come home to discover we’d lost fitness in the things the Army measures for the record, so that was another thing we went through every day. (Scott did individual weight training most days, and a couple of times a week Tsien would load an eighty-pound ruck and do his own march around the perimeter in full gear, including weapon and body armor. Me, I mixed cardio and kettle-bell training when I got the spare time.) Once-over on cleaning the hootch and getting our gear stowed according to spec. Following the routine, staying sharp.
During evening report, I paid more than usual attention to what was being said at the various levels; not being out on the regular patrols, I wanted to make sure I was keeping up with the feel of the overall operational tempo. Tsien and Scott had gone to evening chow with Vi and Andrew while I was thus occupied, and on my return I got my own chow and then back to the hootch.
I’d been running over the general impressions I got from the unit briefing, and I told the guys, “Tomorrow we’re going to the armorer. Tsien, I’m checking out Buford’s 203 for you -” (Actually, an M-16 with the M-203 grenade launcher mounted under the barrel.) “- and Scott, you’ll be getting Bircher’s SAW.” (Squad automatic weapon, a light machine gun that could also be pintle-mounted in the turret of a Humvee; same 5.56mm caliber as the M-16, but belt-fed, and helpful for covering fire. Better if it was a 240-Bravo - those are 7.62mm - but we didn’t have a 240 on my team.) Our M-4s had been sufficient while we were on lighter duty with half the team on leave, but I found myself wanting us to have more firepower available.
Scott and Tsien both got wary expressions, but Scott was the one who spoke. “Trouble coming?”
I shook my head. “No reason I can name to think so,” I said. “Just seems like a good idea at the moment.” Which was the entire truth, I didn’t really have anything I could cite as cause for my new watchfulness. I was taking these measures all the same, and if we wound up not needing the extra, all it would cost me was a little paperwork.
They accepted that, but still looked troubled; I understood the feeling, even if I didn’t let it show. If things started getting busy, I wanted us to have enough rest at the beginning of it, so I called an early bedtime for us all.
Whatever might be coming, I meant to have us as ready as I could make us.
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