Afterwards, we return to the Map Room, where we sit in a circle of green plastic garden chairs and are served hot tea and a snack of golden raisins and nuts. When Sadiqi learns I am an American journalist, he excuses himself and returns with two English-translated biographies of Massoud, pressing them into my hands. "Please tell people about this great hero," he says. I assure him I will. Then the ceremony, the signing of formal loan papers, the presentation of the check along with a graceful speech by a beaming Lt. Col. Lancaster and an answering speech by the also-beaming Sadiqi, followed by more photos. After this practical gesture of enormous good will, we are taken by the director and the other men on a walking tour of the shrine, accompanied by an explanation of the architect’s plans for large, formal gardens, a library, a guest house, and of course the tomb itself, made of locally quarried marble and gold. For a moment, we stand looking down at Massoud’s famous “land map,” an area of cultivated land in a small valley that so resembles Afghanistan, even its provinces, that Massoud often used it to plan military maneuvers. When we step inside the unfinished shrine, I stand beside the simple tomb of white marble, listening to the director speak of Massoud’s passionate love of music and poetry, especially the Persian Sufi poets Hafiz, Saadi, Bedil, Sanayi Ghaznawi, and Jelaluddin Rumi, whose verses he died reciting.
On the day I leave Panjshir Valley, I give the two biographies to T-Sgt. Allison-Hess as a thank-you gift. Her detailed knowledge of his life in the context of Aghanistan’s military history makes her a more appreciative recipient of these books than I. An educator and self-taught historian, Allison-Hess is a collector of heroic lives, of noble actions inspired by high ideals.
Since everyone on the base gets up before sunrise, in the winter darkness, working long, public hours before retiring early, we end our interview with T-Sgt. Allison-Hess praising the people of Panjshir. “Afghans are an incredibly gracious, hardworking people. They will offer you everything they have, even if they have nothing. I like their conservatism, their traditional beliefs, the fact that their lives revolve around their faith. I’m not even surprised anymore that they are so much like us. But I would love for Miriam and the two female Provincial Council members to use their combined voice to speak up for all the women of Panjshir, to stand up at Provincial Council meetings with an actual list and say, ‘This is what the women want, what they need.’ I want all the young girls here to know the benefits of education, to be able to say, I want to be a doctor, or, I want to be a journalist. And I want to be able to tell the women’s stories here, to say I sought it out, I helped make it happen.”
***
Air Force Major Kimberly Garbett, an Information Operations officer in charge of media and publicity, arrived in January, becoming the newest member of FOB Lion’s PRT team. We are roommates, a sacrifice on her part, as privacy in the military is in short supply. Diminutive but physically strong, sloe-eyed with long, dark-blonde hair, Major Garbett bears an uncanny resemblance to Renée Zellweger. Even her voice is soft, similarly pitched. Although it is mid-January, she keeps a tiny Christmas tree on her cluttered desk, its winking, jewel-colored lights looping around the tree, across the desk and up an otherwise bare wall. On the military-issue desk sits a stack of books (on top: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Islam) and a care package she says she hasn’t had time to open yet. In the center of the wall facing her bed hangs a poster of a leather-clad blonde draped sinuously over a Harley against a black background, which she explains by saying she needed “wall art." She found it somewhere and just pinned it up. No special significance.
I have been given the bottom half of a metal bunk bed across the small room from Major Garbett. Above me, the unoccupied top bunk is heaped with her still-unpacked things. Since we are rooming together, I wrongly assume I’ll have plenty of opportunities to interview her. In fact, most of what I do learn about Major Garbett comes from the one or two nights we lay talking in our beds, the Walgreen’s holiday lights casting a weird glow over the Harley blonde. By then I have caught a cold, and am zonked on the Sudafed mercifully dispensed by Major Trump. Groggy, trying to pay attention, I lay in the dark and listen to Major Garbett’s low-pitched, hypnotic voice. Typically reserved and quiet, she never fails to say unusual, incredibly perceptive things when she does speak. She has a knack for seeing the obvious but overlooked detail in any situation, a writer’s gift for observation. Most nights, if she’s not too tired, she falls asleep reading historical romances set in England. She’s just finishing Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series, and half-dozing, I wake to hear her mentioning that she taught at Portland State University in Corvallis for four years. What did you teach, I ask fuzzily, pondering T-Sgt. Allison-Hess' penchant for Nora Roberts and now Major Garbett’s escape into 19-century romance. As she tells me about her classes—"Aviation history, communication, leadership and national security studies"—I can't stop thinking about these women soldiers, trained for combat with sophisticated weaponry, spending their downtime reading serial and period romances.
Major Garbett, I will discover, has an unnerving but mostly helpful way of sidling up to me during missions to diplomatically murmur timely suggestions in my ear. At the health clinics, she whispers I might ask to interview the midwives. When we visit a Polish NGO-built girls’ high school painted a stomach-turning shade of King Alfred daffodil, she suggests, as we stand in an unheated, dark schoolroom facing a semi-circle of silent, diffident students in deep-cowled white hajibs, that I might ask the principal if I can ask the girls a few questions, perhaps take a photograph. At the same time as I am attending to Maj. Garbett’s dulcet suggestion, I watch as T-Sgt. Allison-Hess reaches inside one of the boxes of school supplies we’d been distributing to remove a Sunday Parade Magazine with a photo of Marilyn Monroe, half-naked, on its cover, crumpling it up before the Muslim girls can see what image their new pencils were wrapped in. The supplies--paper, pens, pencils, crayons, binders--are a donation from a church group somewhere in the US, and before we hauled the cardboard boxes into the school, they had been opened at the base and carefully gone through for any sign of Christian propaganda, as any attempt to convert Muslims to Christianity is technically punishable by beheading. Somehow, Marilyn escaped notice until now, when she is wadded up and crushed to innocuous invisibility among other discarded newspaper wrappings. The principal reluctantly agrees to my asking a few questions, though I may take no photos.
The girls, who look to be between thirteen and seventeen, are unsettlingly deferential, ducking their heads and covering their faces when spoken to, until Ziya introduces me as an American journalist who would like to know if the girls have any questions for her. A few are instantly eager and raise their hands. Are you married? No. Do you have children? Yes, two daughters. In a Muslim setting, my answers conflict blasphemously. Perhaps they’ll conclude I am a widow. To deflect other potentially embarrassing questions, I jump into talking about fiction writing, my books, my classes back home. I wish, I tell them, that I could hold a writing class for them. They ask me to stay, to teach them—how long will I be in Panjshir? I have to leave for Kabul, I tell them, the very next day.
Major Garbett routinely gets up in the cold, pre-dawn darkness and dresses for the gym. She works late, catching up, at the main office, so I am often asleep by the time she comes in and miss the opportunity to formally interview her. When I email a few questions from home, she answers that she has just been transferred to PRT Paktya, a high-threat area near the Pakistan border and will answer when she can. Her last email mentions that on “movie night” at FOB Gardez, they had just watched The Celestine Prophecy—had I ever seen it or read the book? The book, she said, had a huge impact on her when she read it years ago. She signs her emails, “Aloha, Kim.”
Growing up in Hawaii, Major Garbett spent her childhood watching jets take off from Hickham AFB. Her boyfriend of seven years—she’s reluctant, she says, to marry—is a commercial pilot. Raised by divorced parents, she has little interest in repeating her parents’ turbulent marital history. One night, she showed me an old photo of her four brothers, big, stocky. genial-looking men in matching Hawaiian shirts, with Kim, tiny, athletic and blonde, in their midst, and I can’t know then how that image will return to me later, during the ISAF aid drop, when Major Garbett, mobbed and overwhelmed, temporarily, alarmingly, disappears from my view.
***
Up until now, I've not seen much of Army Sergeant Amanda Cutler, twenty-four years old, five-two or five-three, with thick, short cropped brown hair, large hazel eyes, and an unusually brusque manner for one so young. Yet as we sit talking, a more vulnerable side of her emerges: She tells me she has been at FOB Lion for three months, and among her duties is working with Miriam Panjshiri and the other two women members of Panjshir’s Provincial Council, Mohamadi, a doctor and pharmacist, and Daqiq, a school principal. She meets with these women every two weeks or so to “help them focus on their goals” of progress for the women of Panjshir Province, assisting with money-earning projects while staying within the bounds of conservative Muslim life. Sgt. Cutler has held one shura in Basraq, during which the Afghan women requested clean drinking water and more sewing and chicken-raising projects like the successful one in Anaba Province: 150 families, two roosters and thirteen hens each, then three months of training. The women have also found they earn more money selling their eggs in Pansjhir than in further away Kabul. Because of Anaba’s success, additional chicken projects are planned in Khenj and Dara, and similar projects with cows are in development. Also planned for this spring in Basraq, is “a women’s garden,” which Sgt. Cutler says will be a "place where women can meet together, not have to wear their burqas, talk, exchange ideas, sell goods to one another.”
Sgt. Cutler is clearly committed to helping Afghan women achieve gains through profitable enterprises, but her immediate project is an ISAF-sponsored humanitarian aid drop to 150 Afghan women selected on the basis of greatest need. Supplies of goods and food have been donated by ISAF, and the burden of equitable distribution is in Sgt. Cutler’s hands. She talks about the details of the aid drop confidently, assuredly, and though she is not a demonstrative person, her eager anticipation of this project is evident.
Growing up in the small town of Santa Fe, Texas, near the Houston/Galveston area, Amanda Cutler joined the Army Reserves in 2003, partly for the opportunity of free college tuition. Her parents and one grandfather all served in the Air Force, her second grandfather in the Army, plus she has two uncles with over twenty years in the Marines as well as a cousin in the Armed Services. After finishing basic training, she was deployed to Najaf, Iraq, a hot zone, and for two years helped build schools and a USAID-funded orphanage for girls there. In December 2004, she went on leave, returned to college for two years, took a third year off, then went back into the Army. She is earning a degree in biochemistry, intending to go into forensics and eventually become an Army warrant officer in the Criminal Investigation Department.
She tells me her parents were divorced, and her stepfather was “not the nicest person.” There was deliberate understatement in those four words, followed by a moment’s wistfulness as she mentions winning a poetry contest in the fourth grade and wondering if after that, her creative gifts had been cut off somehow because of her stepfather. As she struggles to make a connection between having “shut off” her creative side while coping with a “difficult home situation,” I glimpse an almost unbearable vulnerability. When I ask about the difference between her deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, she instantly mentions the peacefulness. “It’s practically considered a vacation area here, the place upper command ask to see so they can come here and get away a bit—it’s so laid back.”
