As we talk with her, she responds to a knock at the door, admitting three veiled women in blue burqas who file silently in and sit along a wooden window ledge. Within moments of sitting down, one woman, followed by the others, rolls her veil back from her face with a practiced, almost impatient gesture. All three are dark haired and brown-eyed. Two of the women might be in their thirties, and the youngest-looking bears scars along her cheeks of leishmaniasis, a common disfiguring skin disease caused by sand flies. All three have handsome, strong-featured faces, tempered and defined by hardship. The youngest, perhaps in her early twenties, has come to see the midwife because she desperately wants a second child and is unable to get pregnant. Related by marriage, the women live together in the same mud and straw compound with the rest of their families. Reserved, they answer questions first from the midwife, then from us. They are hesitant, less shy than extremely guarded. When we learn that the young woman who cannot get pregnant has a husband, presumably American, living in the United States, Major Trump drily observes that it might prove hard to conceive if the husband is half a world away. Ziya translates, and all of the women in the room laugh.
There's a second knock, and another woman makes her way into the room. The other three make room for her to sit beside them, and with a quick movement, she lifts the veil from her face. This woman looks older, exhausted, perhaps in her mid-forties. She tells the midwife she is nine months pregnant, has five other children, and has just walked a long distance by herself along icy paths and drifts of snow. Beneath the burqa, her floral patterned dress, made of thin, polyester-like material, falls to the tops of her black shoes. I am wearing military issue winter underwear, a heavy fleece jacket, insulated socks and boots, and I am still shivering in the unheated room.
Quietly, one of the soldiers relates a story she just heard about an Afghan woman without any female relatives who, when it came time for her to give birth, was locked in a room by her husband. The woman went through her labor alone, with no medication, food or water, delivering the baby herself. The majority of Afghan women still give birth at home, though most have women relatives and a midwife to assist them. When these four women are asked, they say, of course, they would prefer to give birth in a clinic with medical assistance. When I ask the midwife what she most needs, what equipment she would like if she could ask for anything, she speaks at increasingly passionate length about all that she wishes she had. Her frustration at the lack of basic necessities is very clear, as is her courage. She has no assistant, no equipment aside from her tin funnel and torn gurney. The problem with nonexistent supplies seems to have to do with numerous government protocols, logical in concept but maddening in practice, that have to be followed when requesting equipment and medicines.
As the women converse with us, I try not to stare at their dully gleaming blue burqas. They remind me, in shape at least, of nuns’ habits, so I wonder if I am unconsciously assigning vague spiritual attributes to these rural Tajik wives and mothers. Major Trump will tell me she has already tried and failed to buy a burqa, though she hasn’t given up. She wants to experience the world as these women see it: through the three inch-wide mesh grille covering their eyes, blocking peripheral vision. To feel the weight of yards and yards of fabric pulling down from an embroidered cap fitted tightly to the skull. Along the same lines, she suggests I might understand women soldiers more if I tried on her gear one day: the bulky, genderless khaki and green clothing, the heavy boots, the body armor, the sixty-plus pound weight of a backpack, and the weapons, an M4 Carbine, a PAK II, and for personal protection, an M9 Beretta pistol.Major Trump’s second husband is a retired Air Force B-52 pilot. While she is deployed in Afghanistan, he takes care of their daughter and volunteers at hospitals and in food lines at their home in Las Vegas, where she is stationed at Nellis AFB. She joined the Army out of high school. As a medic, she was stationed in Washington, DC, where she joined the Air Force Reserves and has been on active duty since 1995. In 2003, she worked in a Jordanian hospital supplying Special Forces, helping build a base there with “Aussies and Brits.”
In Panjshir only two months, Major Trump is “elated to be helping advance the lifestyle of these people, especially the women." She says, "I can’t even sleep sometimes, thinking of how to say things without sounding condescending or superior, how to ask for the things I need from, say, the Ministry of Public Health.” She pauses. “This isn’t what I went to school for,” then admits to both experiencing and noting a kind of loneliness on the base. “It’s such a small community. How do you deal with being sad? There are no psychologists or counselors, there is no one to turn to. You wrestle with down time, you have too much time to think. There is depression here, among the men, especially.”
Back home, Major Trump runs in marathons, but admits the basic training she recently went through to come here was a strain. Even though she is extremely fit, she thinks she may be getting too old for that level of exertion. More than the other women, Major Trump talks about the Afghan children. Perhaps because she is a mother herself, she speaks often about how much she likes seeing them when they come out to the road, giving thumbs-up gestures, waving to the passing convoy. She notices that some of the kids have red or blonde hair and blue eyes, and she’s seen Disney dresses on some of the little girls. “I constantly wave and smile, especially to the children,” she says. “They are the ones we want to influence the most–the next generation.”
As for her personal goals here, she wants to see that all the people have clean water and good nutrition. The PRT has established eighteen water purifiers, and set up a system of motorcycle “vaccinators,” delivering vaccinations to 15 different remote villages in the valley. Diagnoses here are all presumptive because there are no tests to back them up. All they can do is treat for symptoms and hope for the best.
One night, Major Trump invites me into her surprisingly warm, spacious room in the oversized trailer that serves as the main women’s quarters. Besides the ultra-clean, color-coded Martha Stewart rule of order, what I immediately notice is a large poster of Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean as well as an over-sized decorator pillow also decorated with a photo-transfer image of the kohl-eyed swashbuckler. “My husband sent them to me," she comments, then directs me to a framed photograph of her ten-year-old daughter, LeeAnn, as well as examples of her daughter's artwork. Major Trump is tremendously sensitive to her position on the small base as the senior medical person. She keeps strict confidentiality about who is depressed, who is having a hard time, who is sick and with what. Keeping that confidentiality is its own burden. And yet here is a whimsical witness to Major Trump’s sleepless worries is a minor guardian angel, this androgynous pirate named Jack.
***
Air Force Technical Sergeant Dawn Allison-Hess, my official contact person, wastes no time volunteering a torrent of information and handing me a daily grid-schedule. Effusive and intelligent, she has a frequent, lilting giggle that sounds strangely incongruous within the context of war. On the first day, after our two-hour drive by convoy from Bagram to FOB Lion, she invites me into her room, across from Major Trump’s room and next door to the room I am to share with Major Garbett. I'm sneezing, feverish, fighting off a cold, so T-Sgt. Allison-Hess plunges into her enormous stash of boxed, flavored teas, Godiva and Dove chocolate bars, hot cocoa packets and other snacks to offer me a selection of herbal tea remedies. Her room, a cozy dishevelment, exudes a pleasantly portable domesticity. Beside her bed, a tall, sturdy shelf, haphazardly jammed with paperbacks, includes a profusion of novels with fat spines and glittering, lavishly lettered titles by her favorite author, Nora Roberts.
Half Irish, half Cherokee, T-Sgt. Allison-Hess keeps her long, straight chestnut brown hair bunned up, librarian-style. Thirty years old and on her second marriage, she's a rapid-fire talker with a garrulous disposition. As we talk, she opens a narrow metal wardrobe, and begins pulling out her considerable collection of hajibs, Muslim headscarves she and the other women soldiers are required to wear off base. I don’t have one, so she makes a gift of one of her favorites, a soft, fringed, tobacco-colored scarf. Her room is an almost girlish hodgepodge of books, snacks, and stuffed animal “pets,” including two plush monkeys and dozens of famed photos of her two dogs and pet turtle. “I’m just a nature girl,” she quips, showing off her collection of heart-shaped rocks from Panjshir, dozens of which cover her desk. “Everywhere I go, they find me," she says, then tells me she can remember where each rock came from. She designs jewelry, so she shows me her custom-designed wedding ring, then a box of pink sapphires she plans to make into a bracelet for a young cousin back home in Texas. She is an enthusiast, a tireless collector and sorter of the world’s objects, facts, and statistics. As she sits cross-legged on her bed, nestled in by cheerful, colored pillows and stuffed animals, I sit on a desk chair and ask about her family’s military history.
“My grandparents actually met at Pearl Harbor. When my grandfather got wounded, my grandmother was his nurse. My dad and his twin brothers all served in Vietnam. One of my cousins is in the Marine Corps, another is in the Army, serving in Kandahar.”
When I ask why she chose the military aside from family history, she describes her instant love, as a child, for the Air Force and Army bases in her hometown in Texas. “When I was 16 and saw my first F-117s, I knew I wanted to work with them," she says, then relates a slightly more chilling reason for her interest in the military: “During Desert Storm, when I was about 12 years old, I was watching TV one night, and saw a bomb go through a window and into this room where a man was smoking a cigarette. I watched as the man tried to escape from the bomb but didn’t, and remember thinking that is so cool, I want to do that when I grow up.”
T-Sgt. Dawn Allison-Hess has served in the military ten and a half years, chiefly as an intelligence analyst working with a fighter squadron in long-term strategic planning, then as an electronics and avionics instructor for students coming out of basic training. “I’ve completely surprised myself here, since I’m used to fighting wars at 20,000 feet up. I never imagined wearing a gun and a flak jacket, working side by side with the Army. And as part of a group of five women here, I have to say none of us is a Miss Priss like I’ve sometimes definitely seen when there’s, say, one woman among twenty-eight men, using her position to manipulate. I’m proud to say none of us does that here.”
With each of these female soldiers, there is a dramatic contrast between her private expressions of femininity and her trained battle mentality, her fierce loyalty to the concept and goal of winning this war. “The re-insurgence is a nightmare," says T-Sgt. Allison-Hess. "Are we going to win the war? I don’t know. We chose this lifestyle though, and when we die, we know we are dying for something. For hope. For these people. I have no doubt Panjshir will survive. The Tajiks are strong people, they take good care of what we give them, and all the Mujahideen leaders here, who fought under General Massoud, are trying to carry out his vision.”
Ahmad Shah Massoud, the “Lion of Panjshir,” is a name evoked often in this valley where he once lived. A martyred, noble hero of the people of Afghanistan, his image is everywhere, and he is a towering, personally important figure to T-Sgt. Allison-Hess. Another of her heroes is Miriam Pansjhiri, Director of Women’s Affairs in Panjshir Province, a Tajik woman who spent years imprisoned for her political beliefs, held first by the Russians, then by the Taliban. “She supported Massoud’s people and the Mujahideen, and she’s a powerful woman in a place where women are undervalued,” says T-Sgt. Allison-Hess. “Standing by your beliefs with your actions is what makes you a great person, and she is someone who has power with presence.”
T-Sgt. Allison-Hess’ reverence for Massoud and her extensive knowledge of the valley’s recent military history becomes evident on the afternoon our group of women soldiers drives out to meet with Sadiqi, the director of the Panjshir Valley Massoud Foundation, at the site of a shrine to Massoud, still under construction. We are attending a signing ceremony where Lt. Col. Steve Lancaster, chief of Civil Affairs, will present Sadiqi with a check for $25,000, a micro-loan to be used at the director’s discretion.
Prior to this ceremony, Sadiqi, a middle-aged man in traditional Afghan men’s dress, invites us on a very rare tour of Massoud’s Map Room, hung with huge sepia wall maps seized from the Russians and successfully used by the general in his campaigns against them (and later against the Taliban). In another building, we are shown Massoud’s private office, untouched since his assassination on September 9, 2002. With the director and other members of the Foundation, we pose for photographs, flanking either side of a huge circle wreath of artificial greenery, scarlet and purple flowers, the by-now familiar image of Massoud’s lean, charismatic face at its center.
