52 #2
Krista, because of her mother’s drug addiction, had been raised by her grandparents.
Jenna came from a military family and was eager to prove she was just as capable as her brothers.
In fact, all the women were working hard to prove themselves, Marjan realized.
Over two hundred women had applied to become CSTs.
Only half were invited to make it through one hundred hours of hell, tests of their physical and mental endurance.
And only twenty were selected to join an elite team from the military’s top-tier combat regiments.
You think our guys want us here? Jenna had said during a training hike. Not at all. We work as hard as we do because we don’t want to give them the smallest reason to kick us out. If the mission
fails, they’ll be so quick to blame us.
People ask my husband why he allowed me to sign up for this, Georgia added, overhearing their conversation.
Ha! People asked my hubs the same, Krista shouted.
It struck Marjan that Americans talked so much about women’s equality because they were still trying to figure it out themselves.
Before their first mission, Jenna reviewed with them the plan for that night. They would be dropping into a village to locate
a high-value asset, a man thought to have information on where the local Taliban group was engineering improvised explosive
devices, IEDs, that would be used against them.
“First-mission nerves can be bad,” Jenna warned. “Remember your training and take a deep breath before you grab that rope.
You’re ready.”
Soraya had shown up, as she always did, wearing her signature shade on her lips and a blur of sable across her eyelids.
“Can I ask a question?” she asked Krista. They had paired off for some training exercises and had had plenty of long talks,
but still Soraya seemed nervous to ask.
“Yeah, what’s up?” Krista asked.
“Is it true that one American woman . . . on a mission . . . she is killed? Is this true?”
Krista nodded.
“Her name was Ashley,” she said. And she told them the story of a CST she never had the chance to know.
Ashley had signed up to serve God, family, and country, something that made sense to the Afghan women listening intently to her story.
She was just over five feet tall. Her grit and spirit earned her nicknames and instilled confidence in her team.
But Ashley’s strength was no match for the daisy chain of IEDs she stepped on when a mission took her unit to a booby-trapped compound.
The room grew still. They could see it in their minds, the devastation caused by one wrong step. Jenna bent over in her chair
and retied her boot.
“Just remember your training,” she said. “Look out for each other and never let your guard down.”
The hour arrived. The helicopter blades cut through the silent night, whipped the air into a frenzy that mirrored Marjan’s
nerves. She looked over at Jenna, who steadied her with a nod.
You’ve got this, she could almost hear Jenna say, in that peculiar, abbreviated way the Americans communicated.
They descended into a village, approached the isolated home the Americans had identified as the target, and woke its sleeping
inhabitants. Men, women, and children stepped out of their house, bewildered. A little girl rubbed her eyes, as if she might
be dreaming the soldiers standing before her.
They kept the women and children in one area, promised them no male soldiers would be approaching them. Krista took off her
helmet and wrapped a scarf around her head. The American women had taken to doing this so they would look less like soldiers.
“Line up here. We’re going to be doing a search and then I’m going to ask you a few questions,” Marjan said. An elderly woman
spat on the ground near Marjan’s feet.
Jenna signaled for Marjan to follow her. They went around to the side of the home, a secondary structure surrounded by signs
of rural life. Chickens clucked with alarm at their approach. Troughs made of clay held hay for animal feeding. The musky
smell of animal hides and waste intensified. A small goat brayed. Jenna tapped on the door and instructed anyone inside to
come out. Marjan identified herself as military, repeated the instructions.
A moment later, the door slowly started to swing open. Marjan wished her night-vision goggles could help her see through the door. She tightened the grip on her weapon, recalled her training.
You need to be able to go from calm to kill in a flash.
She raised her weapon, aimed it at the widening gap as the door opened.
It was a woman, wisps of tangled hair peeking out from under her headscarf. Her clothes had taken up the pungent scent of
the animals. She raised her downcast eyes and looked from Jenna to Marjan, then past them.
“What are you doing in there at this time of night?” Marjan asked her.
She did not respond.
“We’re not here to harm you. But to keep us all safe, we’re going to search you,” Marjan said. “Do you have any weapons on
or around you?”
The woman shook her head.
“Is there anyone else in there?”
She shook her head again. Marjan patted her down through her clothing, felt the truth of how thin the woman was, how dangerously
close she stood to not existing.
“Why were you in there?” she asked again.
“That is where they tell me to stay,” she said with a resignation that made Marjan think of her dead sister, Parwin. She recognized
in this woman a life she had narrowly escaped.
Jenna looked at Marjan expectantly. She translated the situation.
“Shit,” Jenna muttered. “Bring her around to join the others.”
Marjan led her around to the home, where five women and six children had been gathered, some standing, some sitting. The woman
from the barn kept her distance until one of the women, a middle-aged mother with a red scarf, motioned for her to come closer.
She whispered in her ear, and the woman nodded. Two little children wrinkled their noses at the stench on her clothes.
The women and the premises were searched. Marjan put her training to good use, engaging each woman with tactical questions
meant to slyly uncover identities and relationships, activities and alliances. The woman from the barn was the second wife
to one of the men being questioned by their male counterparts on the other side of the house.
“Why was she with the animals?” she asked the other women.
“She has problems,” one of the women said, pointing vaguely to her head. “Sometimes her husband loses his patience with her.”
Marjan recalled how she had been treated by her husband’s other wives, by his cruel mother. The memories turned her palms
clammy. She owed her survival, in some part, to Jameela, the one wife who had showed her kindness. The one who had quietly
taught her to avoid the matriarch’s ire, helped her care for her newborn son, and made her feel less alone. Without Jameela,
Marjan might have found herself sleeping among the livestock.
Communications came in from the other team. They had found their target and would take him in.
“Time for us to roll,” Jenna said.
“What about . . .” Marjan started to ask but stopped. She knew nothing could be done about the woman made to sleep among the
animals. Saving her wasn’t part of the mission.
Soraya signaled to the women that they could return to their home. The elder woman, the one who had spat on the ground, was
about to disappear through the doorway when Marjan put a hand on her shoulder.
“No woman deserves to be treated like an animal,” Marjan said.
“Who are you to say . . .” she snapped, but Marjan closed the gap and thrust her gun between them. She saw her mother-in-law
in this woman’s eyes, and it unleashed something feral in her.
“If I come back here and find she’s still being mistreated,” Marjan warned in a harsh whisper, “you will pay.”
“Psh,” the old woman scoffed. “I doubt you idiots could find your way back here.”
“The distance is nothing when one has a motive,” she recited, and she saw the elder woman’s brow furrow, the lines on her
face deepen. Marjan smiled sweetly, then turned her back and retreated into the dark.