On the Road Again

Out on a mission the other day, under a bright morning sun, a white pick-up full of Afghan cops and guys in suits starts following our convoy and trying to wave us down. We sort of lost them for a little bit, but they caught back up and managed to get us to stop. The little general and I walked back to talk to them. "We wear suits, so you know we're important," the head guy says to us, "so when we try and wave you down you should really pay attention." One of the cops then pulled out a tangled, softball-sized ball of red & black speaker wire. "This was attached to a bomb set down the road for you. We cut the wire so they couldn't hit you, but would you mind doing something about the bomb?"

 

Under the glaring mid-morning sun, they led us a few miles down the road and pointed out the spot. Nothing obvious, but we stayed way back and stopped traffic. Within minutes, there was a jumble of cars, trucks, motorcycles, wheelbarrows, 3-wheeled taxis, and pedestrians jamming the road, asking questions. "What going on?" "There's a bomb." "Oh. Is it for you?" "Probably." "So, can we pass, then?"

 

After what felt like forever, under a blazing midday sun, the French bomb-squad guys finally showed up and proceeded to precisely and gingerly find the bomb, and then hack it right out of the ground. ("Dude, is that safe?" "They're the pros." "True. I'll be behind that wall over there if you need me.") 

 

We're not bomb-techs, we're people people, so we just kept the sweaty, thirsty, irritated crowd at bay. "You promised this would only take two hours." "No we didn't. And, by the way, it's a frickin bomb." "I got somewhere to be. Why don't you just blow it up?" "We don't like explosions." "I don't think your bomb engineers are very good." "Thanks for the feedback. Now stay back." "I'm late for school." "I think your teacher will understand." "I'm sick." "Did we mention the BOMB?"

 

My favorite though, was the teenage guy, decked out in slick shoes, dressy jeans, and clubby shirt, that strolled past dozens of vehicles and hundreds of people, right up to the cordon, and says in accented but comfortable English, "Hey, man, what's up? My friends and I are late. You mind if we drive on through, buddy?"

 

Jeez.

 

The French guys finally got the thing out of the ground and off to safety, so we, drenched in sweat, sunburned, and exhausted, all climbed back into our trucks. Crisis averted and without a single injury, we continued the mission ("talking to people and looking at stuff" as our medic generically but accurately describes our basic mission). 

 

Actually, one injury. The little general doesn't like water ("It's so blah, it doesn't even taste like anything"), so by the time we got back to base she was so dehydrated we had to drag into our sick bay and stick a couple of IVs in her. Happy to report that she's fine, and back to her usual diet of fried stuff and Coke.  

Radio Silence

This doesn't really fit with the usual image of soldiers at war, but, truth is, I spend a lot of time at my computer. Computers, actually. I have two - one is a classified system (not nearly as cool as that might sound.) Research, analysis, and information management are a big part of my job (just as nerdy as it seems.)

 

Point is, I've been logging some quality hours at my keyboard these days, and when the work is done, I havent had the energy to devote to the blog. Sorry. But, I promise, in the next few days I've got a few good stories to tell. Among them:

 

- our collective thrill at greeting the first of our replacements;

- the sunburnt joy of a day spent calming irrate, stranded Afghan commuters while our French buddies dug up a roadside bomb with our name on it;

- a belated father's day tribute to my dad; and

- rockets in the night.

 

Most days, life here is as mundane as anywhere. But Afghanistan still has a way of slapping you around if it thinks you're not paying attention. 

 

 

Finding My Voice

There were a lot of awful things about my deployment to Iraq a few years back. The terrible leadership. The car bombs. The aimlessness of it all. But the most mundane and maddening thing about it, day after day, was the terrible translation (we had one awesome interpreter, but he was the exception that proved the rule.)

 

Granted, these poor guys (all guys) were in over their heads. Most of our translators were young kids who'd picked up English from bootlegged movies or foul-mouthed GIs. They could tell someone to put their hands up, or to go screw themselves, but that pretty much emptied the English bank. The Army, bless their hearts, tried fixing this by hiring Iraqi-American immigrants to come back and work with military units.

 

The poor guy that got assigned to us, a cab driver in the States, just stared blankly at me the first time we worked together, put on my mission to talk to the about the division between municipal, provincial, and federal public service delivery (defeated, "who pays the garbage man?" I finally asked). Or the time an angry Iraqi civilian decided to give us a big piece of his mind as we walked out of a government building. After several minutes of angry gestures and disgusted looks at me while he spit "Amerika!" the translator looked at me straight-faced and said "ummm...he pretty much is thanking you for kicking out sadam. pretty much." Oh, my.

 

This year's been different, and I owe much of the credit to "the Little General," our Five-Foot-nothing Afghan-American interpreter who throws her weight around like an NFL player, speaks English with a Queens accent, Dari with an Iranian accent and, God love her, knows the Afghan word for "transparency." She's assigned to translate for my boss and me, and I'll be the first to admit we'd be lucky to be half as effective without her.

 

She knows that when we say "hello," in English, what we really mean is "God's peace be upon you. How is your health? How is your family? How I've longed to see you again since last we parted. Are you tired? May you have the energy of a young athlete. etc. etc. etc." She knows how to walk that fine line between lecturing an Afghan official on corruption and actually calling him corrupt. She can turn from butter-you-up sweet to don't-mess-with-me business on a dime. She can entertain 100 Afghan boys on the spot to keep them from overrunning a construction site inspection. The woman can take our blunt, clumsy, culturally ignorant American word bombs and turn them into sharp, effective, respectful Dari. "Fix my words," we often whisper, just before we say something we know is stupid (we often say stupid things.) And she reliably fixes our words while staying to true to our meaning. 

 

My boss and I spend the day between missions giving her hell. "Go home, your husband misses you, spend time with your parents, go back to school. We're here on orders, but you can leave whenever you want." But she knows we'd be lost without her. She's our voice. And our friend.