Ashley's War (30 page)

Tonight the opposite had happened, with disastrous consequences.

As she stood with her team awaiting the helicopter that would carry them back to base, Kate kept thinking about the men on the stretcher and whether there was anything she could have done to protect them, and keep them alive. She respected their courage, their commitment to serving their country. And now one of them was dead.

At last she heard the
whoosh
of the arriving helicopter, an almost spiritual sound as the whirring rotors pierced the twilight’s silence. In that moment of landing, they were all vulnerable to rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire, and right on the verge of the adrenaline rush that came with running onto the bird as quickly as possible through a nearly blinding cyclone of kicked-up dust and dirt. In an instant she took off with Angel right behind her.

Kate didn’t want to think every woman she met was covering for a hidden shooter. But she would never forget that night’s lesson and the life it had cost.

III

Last Roll Call

14

The First Death

* * *

H
ey, Nadia,” Ashley said into her cell phone, “can you be back here in twenty minutes?”

Nadia was at a NATO-sponsored barbecue on the other side of Kandahar Airfield base and had been on the verge of biting into a juicy chicken kabob when the phone rang. It was around 10 p.m. and she was enjoying a lovely evening under sparkling stars, practicing her Spanish with an American soldier from New York over a traditional Afghan meal of rice, naan bread, and meat kebabs. It was a rare night off for her, and on such evenings she always took the opportunity to visit with the other interpreters or meet soldiers from another culture. She much preferred going out and talking with interesting people to sitting in her bunk and watching
How I Met Your Mother
or
The Office
on a laptop with the other girls. While Ashley and her teammates ate, slept, and dreamt their work, rarely leaving their section of the base, Nadia loved to explore the global village of men and women who had converged on Kandahar from every corner of the world.

“Um,” she paused for a moment, “you know I am not actually cleared by the doctor to go out yet, right?”

Even as she said it Nadia wondered why she had bothered to object. If Ashley needed her to go, she knew she would make it work. After all, she had been working with Ashley the night she hurt her wrist a few weeks earlier. They had run off the helicopter just as they
did each night, but a brownout had blinded them as dirt from the helicopter rotors proved more intense than usual. They couldn’t see a thing ahead of them or behind. Just as they were sprinting away from the bird Nadia fell right into a ditch and landed on her right hand. She felt the searing pain before noticing that her entire hand was now facing backward. Ashley helped her get up and quickly return to formation; they still had several kilometers to walk. Tears of pain ran down Nadia’s cheeks, but she set her jaw and didn’t make a sound. She felt grateful that no one could see her in the pitch-black Kandahar night. It was bad enough that Ashley had stopped and helped her to her feet; she didn’t want a soldier to catch her crying.

Once they reached their destination Ashley insisted that Nadia see the unit’s medic. Only after he had given her a strong dose of Tylenol and a makeshift sling for her busted arm would Ashley let Nadia begin the night’s searching and questioning. There had been a lot of women at the compound that evening and Ashley took notes for both of them as Nadia did the translation. Once it was all over, Nadia returned to base respecting Ashley even more than she already did.

Another girl would have been like,
forget it, carry on, when we get back to base we’ll deal with your little injury
, she thought. The Afghan-American translators often said that the soldiers they worked with treated them like prostitutes, as if they had to get their money’s worth every night. Ashley and her group were different. When it turned out the following day that Nadia had broken her wrist and would need to stay back and rest it for a while, neither Ashley nor Anne complained or gave her a hard time for taking the spill that removed her from action. But still, they were eager to get their terp back into circulation. She was one of the best—a coveted female translator fit enough to keep up with the CSTs and the Rangers—and it always helped to have her there. Nadia’s competence and comfort in the local culture made them all feel safer.

Tonight, it looked like Nadia was going to get back to work, even if her cast had come off only a few days before and the doctor
hadn’t yet given her the official go-ahead. When Ashley asked her to meet her in twenty minutes, Nadia knew that without a doctor’s sign-off no one would have questioned her had she said no. But Nadia was ready to do whatever she could for the CSTs, and especially Ashley, one of the most decent people she’d ever known. Heck, for Ashley I’d probably go out on crutches, she thought.

“Okay; no problem. It’s fine, I can make it work,” Nadia said into the battered cell phone she carried whenever she left the barracks. The war had created a boomlet in Afghanistan’s mobile phone industry and phones were easy to get and cheap to use. “See you soon.”

Ashley sounded glad to hear her answer. “It should be pretty routine, so don’t worry.” She explained that the helicopter would most likely land close to the objective that night. No five-mile marches, so no risk to Nadia’s wrist. “It doesn’t sound like it’ll be a long one—we’ll be back in no time.”

Nadia ended the call, bid her new friends goodbye, and hurried back to her room, balancing a paper plate stacked with chicken kabobs she would share with Ashley and Anne once they got back. She brought enough leftovers to feed some of the guys, too. Surely everyone would be famished by the time they returned to base.

She ran into the ready room and in less than five minutes greeted Ashley, changed into her uniform, and headed out to the bird. Months into her new assignment, Nadia had long since shed her fashion scruples. Her hand-me-down gear hardly helped. Lane often commented on Nadia’s lousy equipment—how it looked like it came straight from the landing at Normandy. “Your gear sucks, Nadia,” Lane told her the first night they went out. “Let’s try to get you some better stuff.” The CSTs pitched in where they could: Ashley loaned Nadia a Crye combat top, which had the dual benefit of a snug fit and breathable fabric that helps wick away sweat. Of course, they still hadn’t solved her night-vision goggle issue. After she finally got rid of the monocle she had been given a set of night optical devices, or NODs, to attach to her helmet. But the helmet was so old the
NODs wouldn’t firmly clip onto it. “I guess your helmet is too ancient to have considered the possibility of night vision,” Lane joked weeks earlier. While the nearly state-of-the-art NODs that Ashley and Anne wore attached solidly to their helmets, Nadia’s jiggled and wiggled around on her head, which made her fiddle with them endlessly. She was still messing with them that night when Ashley met her near the barracks for the walk to an aging bus that would take them to the tarmac.

“Let’s go,” Ashley said. She smiled her familiar, reassuring grin. “You look nice!” Nadia still had her makeup on from the barbecue—eyeliner and a strongly defined eyebrow. There had been no time to remove it before heading out. Ashley walked her through the mission plan and briefed her on the intel so they could get what they needed as quickly and effectively as possible once they landed. Then the women boarded the helicopter as usual with the team’s leaders, taking their seats toward the front. Nadia psyched herself up for her return to action following her injury, reminding herself how many successful missions she already had behind her. She had been vaguely reassured by Ashley’s description of the objective back at the base, and also by the fact that the Rangers hadn’t prayed as a team before they left. Nadia had observed that a group prayer always came on nights when the men believed they were facing an especially dangerous task. Otherwise, she knew that most of them prayed as she did, quietly and in their own way, as they headed out on the helicopter.

I hope we come back with something, she said to herself. She may have been a civilian, but she was committed to her part in the fight. On nights when they came up empty and failed to find the insurgents they sought, her ego suffered—she had let her team down. But on successful missions where she played a part in stopping someone before he hurt American soldiers and innocent Afghans, she felt like maybe it was all for a reason.

Her mother never accepted Nadia’s desire to serve and remained miserable about her new job from the moment she learned about it
to the day her daughter left for Kandahar. “The people are crazy there—even the insects are crazy,” she had said, referring to the scorpions she vividly remembered from her childhood. “Don’t go, I beg you.” But Nadia went anyway. It wasn’t long before Afghan women were cursing and spitting at her for working with the Americans, and Nadia realized that her mother might have been right. But she was there, and all she could do was work as hard as she could to do her part in stopping the insurgency. To resentful Afghans who cursed her with their ancient black magic, she simply suggested that their ill wishes would only come back at them. “You have to wish good for people,” she would say, and that motto is what she tried to live up to. She always brought along money to help the neediest people she encountered, though she never felt she had brought enough, given the number of children all these women seemed to have. Nadia may have hardened a great deal since arriving in Afghanistan, but she knew she would never be able to forget the wretched poverty and the children who had so few opportunities. Later, when she got back to the humanitarian work she had originally planned on doing in Afghanistan, she would try to do her part to help build schools and maybe clinics. But for now she was on a helicopter preparing to land and begin another mission. She prayed silently for all of her teammates to stay safe.

A few moments later, with the helicopter safely landed, they were on a short run to the compound where a Taliban weapons maker was known to live. Nadia was right behind her CST. She hadn’t noticed until that moment just how cut her teammate had become. Ashley and Anne sometimes asked Nadia if she wanted to join them in the gym and practice fast-roping, to which she would routinely smile and politely answer, “Heck, no.” But she had been impressed by the gusto with which these soldiers attacked their workouts, and she saw now in Ashley’s transformation that the dedication was clearly paying off. Nadia made a mental note to tell Ashley that she looked like G.I. Jane out there. Ashley may have been too modest to
talk about herself, but Nadia didn’t know a woman in the world who didn’t want to hear how great she looked. Even if she was wearing Gore-Tex boots and body armor.

As Ashley had promised, the run hadn’t been far, and Nadia was relieved it was over. But all of a sudden she saw the Rangers moving around quickly, not with their usual methodical precision. She stayed close to Ashley, as was their practice, and moved nearer to ask what was going on; Ashley was intently listening to her radio, something translators don’t carry. Nadia waited in the tense darkness and watched as the men around her seemed to be moving in fast-forward.

She and Ashley stood on the side of the compound, close to one of the outer walls. The two moved closer to a footbridge that led to the house, then Ashley stopped to speak to Kristoffer Domeij, one of the senior Ranger leaders. His presence on the bird had also reassured Nadia; she knew from seeing him with his team around base, and Ashley said he was much loved by his guys, respected for what he’d seen and done over countless deployments. He was known for his competence and professionalism, but also for his sense of humor, smarts, and big heart. Nadia found his humanity reassuring. Ashley’s roommate, artillery officer Tracey Mack, had learned a great deal from Domeij, who was always generous about sharing insights into the job of Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC). His role as a JTAC was to direct combat aircraft that supported Ranger operations, from surveillance to lethal engagement. Kris was now on his fourteenth deployment, a number that filled Ashley with awe and had shocked Nadia when she first heard it. While Ashley stood next to him in quiet but animated conversation, Nadia began to grow antsy in the darkness.

Good Lord, let’s pick up the pace, she thought. She felt uncharacteristically impatient; she knew that sometimes missions get jammed up in the fog of a fight and it can take a moment to get everyone back in formation. But there was too much talking already.
Just then all she wanted was to get the night’s work done and to get back to her kabob.

She decided to use the time productively and turned around to look for more even ground so she could adjust her NODs and try to get a firm fit. They’ll tell us where we need to be in a second, she figured.

Nadia walked a couple of feet toward a patch of grass. It had initially seemed close by, but when she reached the end of a gravelly pathway she realized she had misjudged the distance and the grass was a bit farther away than she had estimated. She turned back to check on Ashley and saw she was in the same place, still talking to the Ranger. She expected she’d be walking toward her in a moment, once they finished conferring about the mission details, so she decided not to stray far. What if she can’t find me? Nadia thought. Let me just wait for her here.