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“What did you decide to tell your mother?” Marjan asked. The bus driver swerved to avoid something in the road, and Marjan,
holding on to a pole, nearly lost her balance.
“Nothing just yet. She thinks I’m going to my regular job,” Soraya said. “But if this works out, I have a plan on how to break
the news to her. I’m going to first tell her that I’m becoming a taxi driver. Then I’ll tell her I’m going to try out for
the men’s cricket team. And finally, I’ll tell her I’m auditioning for a part in a Bollywood movie. She’ll be so horrified
that she’ll be relieved to hear I’ve enlisted in the army.”
Marjan hid a smile. She could hardly believe she’d signed up for this. The advertisement hadn’t provided much description
of the role other than to say the military was looking for women to be part of a special unit. Marjan had never held a firearm.
When she imagined herself holding one, she was surprised at the rush she felt. Her shoulders pulled back instinctively. She
and Soraya were on their way to Camp Scorpion for a weeklong selection process.
“Why do you insist on torturing your mother?”
“It keeps her mind off her arthritis. I’m such a thoughtful daughter.”
“Putting your brothers to shame,” Marjan adds.
Eyes followed them as they got off the bus. Whispers as people wondered what two women were doing at a military stop.
They stepped off the bus and stood on the side of the road for a moment.
“So, we’re really going to do this?” Soraya asked, her confidence dimmed now that they were standing outside the training camp. But Marjan wasn’t having second thoughts.
“I have this feeling . . . I don’t know how to describe it . . .”
“Indigestion? That was a lot of green onions on your lunch.”
“Not indigestion. I feel like . . . like maybe this is where I’m meant to be. And I can’t remember the last time I felt this
way.”
“Well, maybe thank Saboor. We wouldn’t be here without that cowardly poet,” Soraya says with a shrug.
Marjan, with Soraya’s help, had managed to rent a room in the cheapest hotel they could find for a few days. She found a job
in another restaurant, offering to work as much as they needed and more. She cleaned the owner’s home when she wasn’t at the
restaurant. She found a room, nothing more than four walls and a door, that cost less than the hotel. It didn’t matter.
I’ll have to fight for myself, Marjan had realized. Maybe going to battle for oneself was a great love story too. She remembered the advertisement she’d
heard about women soldiers. She had nothing to lose. There was no way she could work and care for Hawa with these temporary
jobs that offered her a fraction of what she needed to survive. She needed a reliable way to support herself and provide for
her daughter. And perhaps she could do a small part to make this country safer for Hawa.
Marjan had been fighting almost all her life. At least she’d finally get paid for it.
Marjan didn’t ask Soraya to join her in interviewing for the military position. But Soraya had been frustrated by the utterly
unexciting job she had, the constant pressure to be a good girl and get married. She’d been intrigued by the advertisement
Marjan had described.
I would wear a uniform and carry a gun? I’m in, Soraya said, already delighting at the vision of herself wearing camouflage.
The Ministry of Defense’s television advertisement hadn’t really prepared them for the selection or training process. They had understood there would be travel and physical activity involved, tests to pass. But it was impossible to understand what that looked or felt like.
Step one was proving to the Ministry of the Interior that they had their family’s permission to apply. Soraya had taken her
younger brother with her to the ministry’s office so that he could sign a form. He’d grumbled about it but finally agreed
when she’d threatened to stop washing his clothes and cooking for him. Marjan, as a widow, had been allowed to grant herself
permission. Anyone thought to have connections to insurgents, who might be trying to infiltrate the platoon for nefarious
reasons, was removed from the process.
They sat at desks and circled answers on a bizarre test of shapes and logic to confirm that they met the intelligence requirements.
Then came the questions Marjan really hadn’t anticipated. Can you maintain a cover story? Do you cry often? Have you ever tried to harm yourself? Do you have any repeated, disturbing dreams of past stressful events?
Marjan had all the wrong answers. But she kept those to herself and gave them the answers they wanted to hear.
Their heights and weights were recorded. A doctor listened to their heartbeats and asked about their medical histories. They
urinated into cups. They were introduced to burpees and ordered to do pushups. They trekked twenty kilometers over rough terrain,
carrying a full load of gear to prove they had the physical strength to undergo the next phase—basic training.
There was no time to celebrate passing any of these tests.
They woke early and started with weapons training, loading and cleaning weapons, learning the proper positions from which to fire a gun.
From eight to nine o’clock in the morning, they ran a rigorous course around the base.
From ten to noon, they underwent more skills and endurance training.
They would pick up weapons from large, numbered metal containers with rusted hinges then ride tan jeeps to the practice area where they would shoot from crouched and standing positions.
Weekly hikes across mountainous terrain carrying thirty-five pounds of gear in blazing heat.
Climbing, hiking, fast roping, securing a building for entry.
Lunch was a time to recharge, fill their stomachs.
There was more physical and tactical training in the afternoons, sessions diagramming their roles in the missions ahead and learning why they were needed for missions in the first place.
And if they stumbled in their training, Elaha would have them run holding their rifles over their heads.
The Americans had realized that their soldiers entering villages faced barriers. They couldn’t talk to Afghan women, which
meant they were gathering only half the intel they could be, establishing half the relationships. That was how the Cultural
Support Team came to be, a small and exclusive unit of extraordinarily capable women soldiers who would support the military’s
special operations combat forces. Jenna, Krista, and the others could engage Afghan women without crossing cultural redlines.
They could go where men couldn’t to build rapport and ask questions.
But there were still language and cultural barriers, and so they needed an Afghan counterpart to the CST. The Afghan military
leaders began recruiting for the Female Tactical Platoon, a combat unit of specially trained women who would work alongside
the Americans to conduct night missions, gather intel on local insurgent activity, and track down targets. They learned what
to look for in a search—guns, munitions, passports, SIM cards, memory drives, ID cards.
Marjan and Soraya were the latest additions to the FTP.
Most of the women stayed on the base four days out of the week. Some came and went, which was fine by the higher-ups so long
as they were on time. Tardiness was not tolerated. Marjan nervously asked their commander, Elaha, for permission to stay on
the base without home breaks. She explained that her relatives were in the provinces, that her daughter was in an orphanage,
and that she could not afford to rent a room for herself just yet.
Elaha managed to get her approval to stay on the base.
“Use your time wisely,” she advised, and Marjan promised that she would.
Every day she jogged, lifted weights, and, after a couple of weeks of leg-flailing exertions, she managed to do a pull-up.
She woke up stiff and sore, but it wasn’t pain that she felt.
It was a satisfying ache, an awakening of her body, and a realization that she was capable of far more than she’d ever known.
She felt new tightness in her arms and legs, a solidity of her form even when she was going from sitting to standing and a vigor in her steps that was entirely new.
She didn’t spend all her time in the gym, though. She ventured into the city to browse at a bookstore she’d discovered, to
flip through the pages of books she couldn’t afford. She recognized faces and names and covers, realized how much she had
absorbed while she sat in Parliament, even in her precarious state. There were books about world leaders: Barack Obama, Saddam
Hussein, Hillary Clinton. There were books on English grammar and Afghan history and guides to help pass tests Marjan had
never heard of. There was a book about a girl named Malala, a Pakistani girl who had been shot in the face by the Taliban
simply because she wanted to go to school.
Back at the base, Marjan sometimes picked up her worn copy of Pride and Prejudice, but she was too restless to get through more than a few pages at a time. The language could be exhausting and required so
much attention. But there were also concise, powerful sentences, and those Marjan underlined with a blue pen. The distance is nothing when one has a motive. Her English was improving at a rapid clip, thanks to all the time they were spending with their American counterparts.
Marjan was gearing up for her first mission two months later.
By this time, her initial impressions of the American women had evolved. They’d struck her, at first, as intimidating. Friendly
but rigid. Before Marjan and Soraya threw themselves into training, they wondered if these American women were built of some
other substance. They were rugged and strong, both physically and in the way they spoke. As they spent more time together,
Marjan came to know them as individuals, to understand that they had hard stories too.