Authors: Gayle Tzemach Lemmon
But Nadia’s parents knew enough of war to question her idealism. They were furious when she shared her news, and exploded in anger. Neither could believe that after all they had lost and all they had risked—their own lives included—to get to America, their daughter now wanted to go back there. “The Taliban are going to kill you!” her mother cried in Pashto. “They will murder you as soon as they lay eyes on you. And you cannot escape them, because every day there are rockets landing at the bases. If you go there, you are going to die.”
Nadia heard the same thing from nearly everyone in her family, but she ignored their entreaties and pushed ahead with her plans. She landed at Bagram Airfield in the summer of 2009, and three days later started her new job. Colleagues “welcomed” her the same way the commanders had received the CSTs: as if she had been there for years and was ready to hit the ground running without
any breaking-in period or on-site training. Only she had had no training. She began working twelve-hour shifts interpreting at the base at Bagram, translating for the Americans when they brought in high-value detainees who supported the insurgency, and trying to help gain intelligence that would foil future attacks. She told her company she wanted to do more humanitarian work, like distributing food or opening schools, but they told her that unfortunately, this was the only work they had just then. Orange County and the days of mani-pedis couldn’t have felt farther away.
As she encountered Afghans from around the country, Nadia couldn’t believe how her parents’ countrymen were living. She had never seen so much suffering, had never interacted with people for whom food, shoes, and water were luxuries. Her parents had described Afghanistan as a land of plenty, of monster-size watermelons, juicy pomegranates, and newfangled electronic gadgets that people from India and Pakistan flocked across the borders to purchase. But all Nadia saw was insurmountable poverty and the fragility of human life. The only thing she had in common with the Afghans she met was their language.
She vowed she would never tell her parents how bad it really was. Their Afghanistan now existed only in their imaginations, and she wasn’t about to destroy it.
During her first two weeks at Bagram, Nadia struggled to endure each day. She hadn’t adopted her own “combat mindset” yet, and she had been ill-prepared for what she would witness and hear. She remained stoic on the job, but returned to her room after each shift to cry for hours, only to turn around and head back to work. She wondered whether she could keep doing the job, regardless of how much money she was earning. We need to get our troops out of here; these people are from a different century, she thought. We need to leave this place and never look back.
Nadia was equally disgusted by the partying all around her. Civilian contractors and NATO troops on base stayed up all night,
drinking and reveling until dawn. She couldn’t think of anything more inappropriate than dancing in a war zone. How on earth can these people be out all night partying when men and women are dying right outside these gates? she wondered.
Time and war, however, changed Nadia, too, and gradually she became desensitized to the incongruous excesses of her new environment. After three months she stopped crying about her work. She even stopped taking it back to her room with her. And she stopped judging the partyers, though she never joined them. They weren’t bad people, she decided, they were just trying to survive. They are living day by day in their minds, as we all are, because no one knows what the next day will bring, she thought.
By the end of 2009, just before the U.S. troop surge began, the social scene got even more extreme. Many more interpreters came to Afghanistan, including some women Nadia knew from New York and California, and in dismay she watched these new “desert princesses” grab their seats at the “man buffet” they found on the bases. The old joke was a true reflection of life in a war zone: “twos became tens and tens became twenties.” Nadia herself—young, beautiful, and on her own—had an abundance of offers and suitors. “I would work three jobs to support a wife like you,” one told her, but she paid meager attention. This is not the real world, she reminded herself, and in time she and the other young, Afghan-American female terps forged a unique bond given their outsider status. They were civilians on a military base, Afghan-Americans whose loyalties were questioned by both the Afghans and their fellow Americans, and outsiders even to their own families; the elders thought it outrageous that these young women would choose to live there, in the middle of a war fought by men, instead of “having babies at home, where they should be.”
S
ix months into the job, Nadia realized that the shallow, label-conscious Afghan-American girl she once was had disappeared, and
in her place was a steely professional with a front-row seat to the war in Afghanistan. Her work put her in direct contact with combatants and she—the spoiled girl from Orange County—was now part of the effort to stop attacks and learn where the insurgency’s leaders and their supporters were hiding. Nadia had by now met countless individuals who wanted nothing other than to kill her, and she had communicated with dozens of regular Afghan citizens who were destitute, uneducated, and now fully ensnared in a war much larger than they could comprehend. She could no longer bear to hear from friends back home about boyfriend issues or Botox woes. People are dying every day, all that is just so meaningless, she thought. But she never expressed any of this out loud; she just kept herself focused on her work. Gradually she became more confident in her own abilities, and developed a fine-tuned instinct for when someone was lying. She also found her own voice and stopped hesitating when she had an insight to offer military personnel for whom she translated. If she believed they were following a dead end, she would say so, even though some of the American leaders didn’t want to hear her views. She was only an interpreter; “just tell them exactly what I am saying,” they would tell her, oblivious to the fact that some of the words they used didn’t even exist in Pashto. But with time, many came to trust Nadia, and regard her as a partner who could offer insights into dangerous situations at high-stakes moments.
In spring of 2011, her bosses recruited her for a special assignment: a new mission that would take place out in the villages, not in the relative safety of Bagram. It was a new type of job for female terps: they would be assigned to American female soldiers who were out on raids searching and questioning Afghan women and children in insurgency strongholds. There was a color-coded shorthand for the special operations task forces. Nadia’s male colleagues now ribbed her for joining this new one they jokingly called “Pink Team.”
She didn’t want to take the assignment at first. She had planned to return home to California by 2012 and move on with her life: she
wanted to do that long-postponed humanitarian work and maybe go back to school. But her bosses were even more desperate than usual for her to take the job; there were precious few Afghan-American females willing, daring, and fit enough to do the assignment. And she knew that if she didn’t go, the responsibility would fall to her teammates, some of whom were older women hardly athletic enough to go out on missions and others who were younger and had small children back home in the States. She felt it was her duty both to her country and to her colleagues to do what she knew she could. She would sign up for “Pink.”
Overnight, she went from the relative luxury of life at Bagram to a tent on an Army base in a province where cell phone networks stop functioning after 6 p.m. because insurgents use them to blow things up. On her first night out with the Rangers she feared her mother had been right all along: she might not make it home. Her stomach tossed in terror as she realized she had had no training for helicopter rides through pitch-black skies, or rough landings on fields of sand that kicked up a storm of dust and made breathing impossible. Nor had she trained for the miles-long treks through unknown territory. She wore a baggy Army uniform and carried a night-vision monocular, a device that has just one eyepiece and therefore a drastically reduced view of the objective. She had been trained for just a few hours to use it by a CST. It put an eerie green haze over half the landscape, making things even more terrifying. Running for her life alongside the Rangers, Nadia wondered what the hell she had agreed to. On her first night she choked on sand and threw up as soon as they neared the intended compound. “We have to keep going!” a Ranger yelled back at her as they ran. “No stopping, pick up the pace!” Eventually she did.
Nadia felt like an outsider once again. Even some of the CSTs were impatient with her, insisting that she work faster in the field. She wanted to answer, “Girl, do you understand I am from Orange County and have never done this kind of job before and have zero training for it?” But she said nothing, and just worked harder.
Mistrust between the U.S. soldiers and the Afghan forces they were there to train abounded. The grim threat of insider attacks frightened the Americans; an Afghan border guard had recently killed two NATO service members in the northern province of Faryab, and no one was sure who, exactly, was collaborating with the Taliban to pull off such acts. In the dining facility one day Nadia overheard a fellow American, a soldier, say he didn’t want to eat with the Afghan forces because he could be seen as a disloyal “defector” who might be working with the Taliban. She added this to her list of worries: that she, too, would be seen as someone with ambivalent loyalties simply because she dined or spoke with the Afghan forces to whom they would soon hand over security responsibilities. Men in the Afghan army shared with her their dreams of moving to America, and how those dreams collided with their genuine mistrust of American motives. Nadia tried to convince them that the Americans really did want to help the Afghans, and how hard the immigrant life in California had been for her family and so many others. She tried to build bridges between the Afghan men and the American soldiers who led the missions, but she found few takers. It was a cultural gap that felt nearly impossible to overcome.
In the summer of 2011, after her first round of CST missions, she agreed to be transferred to Kandahar. She knew it was full of IEDs and the site of constant firefights, but she now trusted the special ops guys with her life. Besides, their first interpreter there had broken her wrist; she hadn’t lasted more than a few weeks in the job. And there was no one else to do it. But first, Nadia would return to California for a family wedding.
The trip home turned out to be a disaster: Nadia found herself feeling as isolated as she had during those early days at Bagram. No one in Southern California acted like there was a war going on; it simply never came up in conversation. “Why are you so down?” her family and friends kept asking. “You seem so bitter.” But Nadia simply felt disconnected—from her family and her “real” life. I’ve just
been bitch-slapped by reality, she thought as she watched the bride and her friends dancing carefree and full of joy in the wedding hall. They haven’t got a clue.
She may have been a civilian in the conflict, but war had changed Nadia, and when she left California for Afghanistan she wondered if she would ever again feel connected to people who hadn’t seen combat.
By midsummer she was settling in in Kandahar, and the new crew had arrived: Ashley, Lane, and Anne. Nadia was nervous; building rapport was important in a job that demanded they spend so many hours together preparing for, flying to, and, most important, placing their lives on the line during the mission. She found herself anxiously wondering what sort of women these soldiers would be. Nadia found her answer in the ladies’ room, of all places.
The four women—Ashley, Anne, Lane, and Nadia—were in the washroom getting ready for the first meeting of the day when Anne and Lane broke out their traveling cosmetic kits. It was a small gesture, but for Nadia, it spoke volumes.
During her years overseas she had been around a lot of military females who frankly frightened her. They conveyed the impression that any sign of femininity would be perceived as weakness. But here, in this tiny bathroom, were three incredibly fit, Army-uniformed, down-to-earth gals who could embrace being female and being a soldier in a war zone. She found it refreshing—and inspiring.
“Oh my God, you wear makeup!” she burst out.
Anne laughed as she put the final touches on an abbreviated makeup regimen.
“Oh, yes, always have to have mascara on,” she replied. “I am blond and look like I have no eyelashes. I don’t want to scare people!”
“Me, too,” Nadia answered, relieved in a way she hadn’t felt in months. “I mean, I obviously have brown hair, but I always have to do my eyeliner and fill in my eyebrows. Anything else, I don’t care, but those two things absolutely have to happen for me to be ready to face the day.”
Then the soldiers and their terp headed to the briefing room. This is the dream team, Nadia thought. They are confident, they love the work, they are tough, and they know how to put on eyeliner. They love the guys they work with and want to help; they aren’t scared or intimidated, just ready to go out. Meeting them helped convince Nadia to stick with the job. I can totally do this, she thought. I want to see these girls succeed, and I am going to stick it out and do it for them. Already she had sprained her ankle while out on mission and gotten more than a few scrapes and bruises. She worried she would get her face banged up or much worse one of these times, but she was going to stay at least until the following March, when her contract ended once more.
Over the next few weeks Nadia regularly went out on mission with Ashley and became one of her regular interpreters. She admired Ashley’s resilience in the face of difficulty, as when she struggled one evening with the faulty batteries in her night-vision goggles, and took in stride the fact that her warning light had been on toward the end of the mission despite fresh batteries. She saw Ashley was determined to improve her work, and had no ego barriers to overcome. The feeling was mutual, and it wasn’t long before Ashley trusted and felt comfortable asking her more experienced interpreter for advice about effectively talking with the Afghan women and children.