Walk in My Combat Boots Read online

“We need to think of the larger picture here.”

  The agent doesn’t try to hide his annoyance. “What’re you talking about?”

  “The Afghans are proud that they’ve captured her. Let them have this victory—it’s theirs. It will help our efforts here, what we’re trying to build. Just a little bit of press for the governor, and then he’ll turn her over to your team.”

  What we’re suggesting is a smart move—and the FBI agent knows it. We see our tactical point hit home.

  “Okay,” he says. “In the meantime, we’re going to speak to her.”

  When a small cadre of US Army forces arrive at the Afghan National Police facility in Ghanzi Province, the battalion intelligence officer positions himself in the meeting room, which has a small portion partitioned off by a black curtain. Several Afghan police, two federal agents, a military interpreter, a US Army captain, and a warrants officer file into the room and gather around the table.

  The US team hasn’t been briefed by the Afghan police and doesn’t know that the prisoner is behind the curtain in the meeting room.

  The curtain is suddenly drawn back. We see a dark-skinned, disheveled woman without a burqa or handcuffs holding an M4 rifle. Later, we’ll find out that she got the weapon from someone who leaned his weapon next to the part of the table near the curtain.

  The woman is Aafia Siddiqui. I recognize her face from the picture.

  She lurches forward. Everyone in the room scrambles for cover and reaches for their weapons.

  She aims the M4 at the closest soldier—an intel officer.

  The interpreter standing nearby pushes her as her M4 goes off.

  The round barely misses the intel officer’s head.

  The interpreter is wrestling with her, trying to disarm her, when she fires again. One of the FBI guys returns fire with his 9mm, hits her twice in the midsection. The interpreter manages to disarm her but she’s still struggling, kicking and screaming until she eventually passes out.

  In the following days, while Aafia Siddiqui is recovering from her wounds at a nearby military hospital, I’ll learn more about the infamous woman who wanted to kill me. Things like how she was carrying sodium cyanide and a thumb drive containing manuals on bomb making, documents on how to weaponize Ebola, and thousands of electronic communications between terrorist cells operating in the US.

  But the most unbelievable part, what I keep coming back to over and over again, is her connection to the United States. She left Pakistan and went to Texas on a student visa and attended the University of Houston. Massachusetts Institute of Technology took notice of her and offered her a full scholarship. After she graduated from MIT, she went to Brandeis University and earned a PhD in cognitive neuroscience.

  While our country educated her, she studied ways to destroy America. While she lived in our country, she went to work for Al-Qaeda, first helping operatives renew US travel papers and open post office boxes; graduated to laundering money; and then, following the terrorist attack we would later call 9/11, engaged in assault with firearms on US officers.

  LYNNE O’DONNELL

  Lynne O’Donnell grew up in Melbourne, Australia. When she was sixteen, she received a scholarship to study in Japan. She worked for the Melbourne Sun News Pictorial, then Australia’s biggest newspaper.

  When my phone wakes me up at 9:00 a.m., I’m lying on the top bunk of my sleeper car, traveling on a train going from Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang Province in northwest China, down to an oasis town on the Pakistan border called Kashgar. I’m heading there to cover a story.

  The person on the other end of the line is a woman who works for me at the Australian. I’m the paper’s Beijing correspondent. I cover the entire country of China, as well as North Korea, Mongolia, Hong Kong, and Macau.

  “I’m just calling to say hi,” she says.

  “You never call anyone, anytime, to say hi. What’s going on?”

  “I thought you might like to know what’s going on in the United States.”

  “Yes?”

  “Thirty thousand are dead in New York, and the president is missing.”

  The line goes dead.

  I check my phone. My signal has dropped, which isn’t all that surprising. I’m literally in the middle of nowhere, crossing the Taklimakan Desert, near the China-Pakistan border.

  I put the phone on the table between the bunk beds and then sit there, waiting for the signal to come back. I stare out the window, at the black gravel desert. Every now and then I see what looks like a little old man in a turban riding a donkey.

  My phone rings two hours later. The caller is a friend of mine, an American who lives in Beijing. He’s able to fill me in on what’s going on in the US. Three thousand people, not thirty thousand, have died, and the president isn’t missing.

  “I saw the second plane go into the tower,” he says.

  Oh, my God. This is Al-Qaeda.

  And I’m traveling on a train taking me to Kashgar, an ancient Silk Road trading town and one of China’s biggest and most contentious Muslim cities.

  It’s September 11, 2001.

  When I arrive, I head straight to a café. The TV is on, but the Chinese state propaganda machine is in full swing, so I can’t see any news or footage of what’s happening in the US.

  The Muslim people of Kashgar are very worried because riots have broken out in the streets of the Pakistani towns just over the China border. Everyone I speak to seems to know the hunt is on for the Muslim Islamist perpetrators of the US attacks.

  I’m a front-page reporter. The big story I came down here for is no longer a big story, no longer front-page material. Now I’ve got to find a way to work myself into what is going to be the biggest story in the world.

  The border crossing into Pakistan is still open. I can get a visa at the border, but no one at the paper has time for me because the news is now focused on the United States and the reaction to the attacks. I was in the middle of nowhere geographically and professionally. I’d gone from covering the biggest story in the world, China, to…nowhere.

  I go back to Beijing and talk my editors into putting me on the story. I get on a plane and travel to Tashkent, in Uzbekistan. There I make my way down to this tiny and hard border town called Termez, where I’ll wait for the Uzbeks to allow me over the border, into Afghanistan, in time for the invasion.

  The only other reporter there is a Moscow-based guy for the Associated Press. The only place where foreigners are allowed to stay is this sad little horrid hotel. My bed is a Russian cot. That night, when I wake up to use the loo, I push the door open and feel something fall on my arm. I turn on the light and find the door covered in cockroaches.

  Over the course of the next two weeks, the number of journalists showing up at the hotel keeps growing and growing. People play football in the courtyard, and we drink a beer called #9 because it comes in different strengths—nine being the strongest, I think. The hotel runs out of food. The conditions are so bad many people get sick.

  The Uzbek authorities show up dressed in uniforms and set up a visa table by the port. As they issue us exit visas, they warn us that we have exactly one week. If we’re not back by then, they won’t allow us back into the country.

  We’re put on a barge carrying grain, freight, and some other stuff. The barge will take us down the Amu Darya, the river that forms the border between Afghanistan and the central Asian states, and into Mazar-i-Sharif. Two days before 9/11, Al-Qaeda sent people disguised as television journalists into Mazar-i-Sharif to kill Ahmad Shah Massoud, the general for the Northern Alliance, the anti-Taliban group.

  From the barge, I see what appears to be an elderly man standing with his arms behind his back on the banks of the river. When he looks in my direction, I wave to him.

  He puts a hand up and waves back at me, this woman with red hair, as if he’s saying Welcome. As if seeing people like me is a sign that things are finally going to change for him in Afghanistan.

  It’s a really moving moment.


  We arrive at Mazar-i-Sharif just in time for the siege and my baptism into war reporting.

  The Qala-i-Jangi fort is the base for Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum. It’s made of mud and surrounded by high crenelated walls; it looks positively medieval. The fort is fifteen kilometers away from the hotel. I can see it from the north-facing floor-length windows in my room, this big old mud fort from the nineteenth century that, as I arrived in Mazar, was being taken over by Taliban prisoners. And they can stay there for a hundred years and never run out of weapons or ammunition because Rashid Dostum has turned the fort’s basement into his personal arms cache.

  Like Afghanistan, the hotel, once nice, has gone through tough times because of the Taliban. The Russian military–style cots in the room—every movement makes me feel as though I’m bouncing around on a rough ocean. I take my mattress off the bed and put it on the floor.

  Every morning at five, I break curfew and go to the roof to get a signal on my Uzbek-based mobile phone so I can call in my copy to the typist waiting to file my story in Sydney. Through a male Afghan interpreter I have with me, I’ve been talking to a lot of locals about what it’s been like living under the Taliban and what they hope for now. I talk to women who believe that they may finally be able to go back to work and send their daughters to school. I report back on everything I do, see, and hear in order to build a picture of what’s happening in Afghanistan.

  I’m a one-woman news and photography team. It’s just me, my camera, my notebooks and pens, and a pair of Soviet military field glasses I picked up in a market.

  Every day is a learning experience—and a steep learning curve.

  On the morning of my third day in Mazar-i-Sharif, I awake at dawn and sit upright. From the north-facing windows I can see a mushroom-shaped cloud rising above Dostum’s fort.

  The Americans, I discover, fired an ICBM from the Gulf into the middle of the fort to stop the siege.

  “It’s over,” the Afghans tell me. “It’s all cleared.”

  The man running the hotel urges me not to go down there. He also reminds me, again, to cover my hair. Again I don’t. Dressed in my jeans and boots, I head down on foot to the fort. My interpreter accompanies me.

  Half a mile from the fort, shots start coming in our direction.

  We hide behind a low-rise mud wall while bullets fly over our heads. I’m afraid but I don’t move, thinking that would be a stupid thing to do.

  Fear, I believe, is a sign of intelligent life. As a military friend of mine once told me, “Fear keeps you alive.”

  I chain-smoke cigarettes with my Afghan companion, waiting for the firing to stop.

  It takes two hours.

  Enough time for journalists, Afghans, and members of the Northern Alliance to gather. I see a bunch of heavily armed Afghans sitting in the back of a truck, RPGs on their backs, bandoliers packed with ammunition slung across their chests. It looks Wild West picturesque, and I want to capture it. I raise my camera.

  One of the armed men stands up, looking at me.

  Oh, shit. He doesn’t want his picture taken.

  He raises his automatic weapon. I think for a heart-stopping second that he is going to shoot me. Then he strikes a pose, himself with his weapon. Very dashing.

  My time spent war reporting in Afghanistan got under my skin. I enjoyed the raw nature of the reporting—I decided where I went, who I talked to, what I did—as well as doing the analysis. I start planning how to get to Iraq. At the end of 2002, I move from Beijing to Istanbul. Turkey shares a small border with Iraq, where I believe the US is going to lead an invasion.

  I’m not alone in my thinking. Very senior-level newspaper and media executives across the world were being told as early as September 13 that the endgame is Iraq.

  I go to Iraq and get to know the physical landscape and all the players. The week before the actual invasion, I travel to Tehran to do some reporting. Two days before the invasion, I go over the border, into Iraqi Kurdistan, and find out the Americans and the Allies are trying to talk Turkey, a NATO member, into allowing them to use their bases near the border. The Turkish government polls their people. Roughly 98 percent won’t support an American military presence on Turkish soil, so the government denies the US’s request.

  I go to Mosul. I’m one of the first people there to see the chaos as it unfolds in real time.

  The Iraqi military left, and now there’s a void. People are terrified. Banks are on fire, and no one knows what’s going to happen to their money. Businesses and government offices are being looted.

  The Americans arrive and take over the airport.

  I’m standing with thousands of people around the quadrangle of crossroads around the governor’s office when I see the American soldiers. Boots crunching over gravel and glass, I follow them, watch as they head straight to the governor’s office to set up their headquarters.

  We start taking fire from snipers on the roofs of nearby buildings.

  As the war continues, I’ll find myself lying in a hole in the ground with missiles flying over my head. Years later, from 2009 to 2016, when I wind up back in Afghanistan with the Associated Press in Kabul, with forty Afghan men working for me—some of whom are extremely anti-foreigner and anti-woman—I’ll receive death threats signed by ISIS that are traced to people inside my news bureau. I reluctantly decide to leave because I’m a sitting duck to be seriously injured or, because I’m worth money, kidnapped, sold to a Taliban gang, and thrown in some hole in the ground in Pakistan.

  People always ask me what it’s like being in a war zone. The only thing I can say is “Intense.” Then they ask why the people in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to live in a war zone. The idea is shocking to us but normal for them.

  What choice do they have? When a huge bomb goes off in the busy center of Kabul, the whole city will go quiet for a couple of hours, and then life resumes. People have to buy food and pick up their kids from school. They’re completely and utterly traumatized every second of the day, but they don’t have a choice.

  Now we’ve got this ridiculous situation where the Americans are leading an effort to negotiate a surrender so that they pull out and leave an ungoverned space again to the Taliban. I think it’s absolutely shameful. It’s not being covered enough because reporters and TV news editors favor the bangs and the bombs and military failures over showing what the country of Afghanistan is really about. All the metrics there—education, health, mortality, media, women’s rights—are in positive territory compared to before 2001, under the Taliban.

  If we pull out now and surrender, all these positive gains for the Afghan people could and probably will be lost. Life will go back to the way it was because the Taliban think they have impunity. If that happens, it will be South Vietnam all over again.

  TORIE

  Torie started her military career in the Army, in 2003, as a 31 Romero—a multichannel transmission operator/installer/maintainer. She left the active Army and then, in 2007, joined the New Jersey National Guard and became a crew chief.

  Good news,” the rear detachment first sergeant tells me. “You’re going to deploy to Iraq.”

  I keep the fear from reaching my face. “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  I knew we were at war when I joined the Army. I had already made the decision to join in high school, well before 9/11. When that happened, I knew I’d be heading off to either Iraq or Afghanistan, and I went ahead with enlisting—was excited about it.

  Still, I’m frightened hearing the rear detachment first sergeant say the words out loud.

  I head out and exercise my right to drink as an eighteen-year-old. Across the street from the US base in Germany is a bar. The guys deploying with me tomorrow and I buy as much liquor as we can because come tomorrow morning, we’re going to war.

  I think I want to go to Iraq. Every soldier wants to deploy. My job will be setting up line-of-sight antennas and maintaining communications, so I shouldn’t be seeing much, if any, co
mbat. But I can’t wrap my mind around the reality of the danger I’ll be facing.

  I get drunk, and the reality that I’m leaving, the fear—everything hits me. I leave the bar and go back to the barracks to use a pay phone.

  My dad, who was in the Army, is a hard-core military man. As a kid, my punishments would be things like push-ups and chopping wood. On major military holidays, he would ask me if I knew the significance of the day, and if I didn’t know he would send me off to go read until I figured it out. He was very gung ho about me joining the Army because the Army could give me a future.

  He gave me a lot of pep talks right before I left for basic training, drilled in me the importance of never giving up. There are going to be moments when everything sucks—when you think you can’t do that last push-up or run that last mile, he told me. But you have to do that last push-up and run that last mile, or you’ll be a failure. You have to push through it because success is right around the corner.

  And I did. I made it through basic.

  I call my dad and tell him the truth.

  “I don’t want to go,” I say, and start crying.

  “You don’t have anything to worry about. You’re a woman,” he says. “You’re not gonna be on the front lines.”

  When my dad served, women were all in support operations. Now, in 2004, there are no front lines. Women are exposed to combat regardless of their job.

  The next morning, we take a commercial flight to Kuwait. We’re in full battle rattle, holding our weapons. I’ve gotten it into my head that the moment we land we’re going to have to run off the plane. It will be like the first scene in Saving Private Ryan, the enemy shooting at us, everyone dying.

  When we land, the flight attendant welcomes everyone to Kuwait and tells us to enjoy our stay.

  When my training in Kuwait comes to an end, they start telling everyone what individual companies they’ll be joining. I’m heading to Alpha Company.