Very learned women are to be found in the same manner as female warriors.
—VOLTAIRE
ZABUL, AFGHANISTAN, JUNE 2011—Major Maria Rodriguez jumped to the ground from the back of the armored vehicle.
The rocky soil that surrounded the truck made a light crunching noise under the weight of her desert boots, but even that smallest of sounds made her cringe. As her feet hit the ground, Rodriguez’s knees buckled slightly under the weight of the forty-pound rucksack on the back of her petite frame. It was pitch black on the streets of Afghanistan. Rodriguez pulled night-vision goggles from the top of her Kevlar helmet over her eyes. She waited a few seconds for her pupils to adjust to the hazy green that tinted everything around her, then held her M4 rifle at the ready, her forefinger grazing the trigger. Quietly, briskly, Rodriguez crossed the dirt road to approach the family home of the wanted terrorist.
She and her team of three women were helping C Company of the 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment find the suspect, and every move they made had been calculated, mapped out, and discussed in detail only days before. The entire unit reviewed the mission again in the morning hours before they left on the mission. They stood at attention, Rodriguez’s team of four women making up a skimpy squad behind the group of about fifteen men, as the convoy commander walked back and forth relaying the plan one last time. He closed the briefing by warning that timing was everything, that it was imperative they not be heard, and that safety was their first priority. So by the time Rodriguez was standing beside her vehicle in this small village in Zabul, she knew, in a very cold, detached way, exactly what to expect: she would follow the men of the 24th out of the vehicle and across the street (even though she outranked most of them, men always entered homes first during a mission). Then she would wait for the okay and push her way into the building, her team members in tow, to inspect the Afghan women. They would catalog everything they found and tag it for military intelligence.
It was her first cordon and search mission—one that would leave some of her soldiers guarding the street and place her and others on searches inside the home. But none of that training—not the days of planning, or the week of morning meetings that she, as the officer in charge of police operations in the brigade battle space in Afghanistan, was required to attend, or the afternoon briefings that she participated in as head of the all-female team needed for this mission—had readied her for what she was about to see.
The brigade had been monitoring the house—a small, mud, cave-like structure with an open courtyard behind it—since receiving intelligence that a suspected member of the Taliban, who was part of a cell specializing in making IEDs, had been living there. The two-room mud cave also had a cache of weapons, according to intelligence reports, and was surrounded by four similar dwellings, all built behind the mud walls of a housing compound.
The night of the mission the engines of the six military vehicles across the street from the compound had been turned off as soon as the unit arrived so their invasion could take place in silence. Within moments of dismounting the armored vehicle Rodriguez stood against the outside of the compound wall. She watched the green-tinted shadows of men quickly disappear behind it—the first wave of soldiers to run into the home. “Hands up!” she heard one of the American soldiers yell. It sounded as if the family had been startled from sleep to action. Chaos unfolded.
A baby wailed, and what sounded like an older Afghan man yelled for the soldiers to leave. A woman screamed hysterically for Allah through violent sobs. Toddlers and young children cried for their mothers. She heard several teenage girls and young women trying to corral and quiet the children. But she didn’t dare move until she got the all-clear.
After about fifteen minutes she saw another shadowy figure, a young private, take two steps out of the compound, turn to her, and signal for her to enter. The men in the home had been checked for weapons, and the home was safe enough for her crew to enter.
She turned to her three female charges and signaled for them to follow.
Once inside she lowered her M4, raised her night-vision goggles, and got to work. The only furniture inside the two-room dwelling aside from a wood-burning stove and a table were a few blankets used as mattresses strewn across the dirt floor. An older man with a gray beard was sitting with his legs crossed on one of them. He was eye level to an M9 handgun. His hands were behind his head. Though he wasn’t, he looked like he was begging for his life. Beside him stood a small group of Afghan men surrounded by American soldiers with their weapons drawn. The soldiers were questioning the men. One of the men looked the soldier guarding him straight in the eyes and kept asking why he was in their home, spit flying with each question.
Rodriguez and her soldiers walked past them to a group of women and children huddled together near the back of the home. The children were shaking, their eyes wide and full of tears, their faces red. She started searching the women first.
Rodriguez loved her job and fought to get female members of the American military the chance to have an impact on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. What she and her female engagement team were doing, she knew, was vital. But she struggled with the idea of forcefully entering someone’s home and, more than that, violating someone’s personal space.
Rodriguez put on her plastic gloves, which all soldiers used when patting down a potential threat. She described in detail to the woman each step of what she was doing before she began. “I’m going to start by touching your arms.” Her translator repeated the phrase in Pashtu and then asked the woman to hold her arms out to her sides. Rodriguez started by feeling the woman’s left wrist. During the inspection the youngest member of the FET stood beside Rodriguez, plastic baggie in hand, ready to seal and tag each item Rodriguez found. Each piece of evidence would be bagged separately, and the female soldier, who got special permission to leave her job to go on the mission, would carefully label each bag using a black magic marker: “June 2011, Zabul Cordon and Search.”
Another FET member, the oldest and most experienced of the three women in Rodriguez’s charge, stood guard over the women and children left huddled in the corner of the cave. She held her rifle waist high and pointed it toward the middle of the group in case one of the women attacked or revealed a weapon that had gone undetected. The fourth member, the most outgoing member of the FET, was about thirty feet behind Rodriquez. She was crouched on the floor, her M4 strapped across her back, repeating the words “calm down” in Pashtu. She had been instructed to quiet the woman who had been yelling for “allahu” and crying the entire time the military unit had been in the home. The tiny woman was kneeling on a blanket in the middle of the room. Her constant swaying was punctuated by moments when she would go silent, look up at the cave’s ceiling and raise her arms in prayer. Tears ran from the corners of her eyes and down her cheeks, falling onto the blanket near her knees. The strength of her movement seemed in direct contrast to her tiny frame. Her flailing arms had pushed her headscarf away from her face, revealing sun-damaged skin and deep-set wrinkles around her mouth and eyes and across her forehead. She looked sixty but, as the FET would later learn from their translator, was only forty-two. The women in areas hardest hit by the Taliban and, as a consequence, by the American military, often looked tired, worn by life, much older than their years.
By the time Rodriguez approached the last woman to be searched, all was quiet. The women and children watched as Rodriguez pulled the young mother out of the group, off to the side, and slightly out of view. Again she turned to her translator and nodded, “I’m going to start by touching your arms.”
The man they were looking for, the member of the Taliban, had been tipped off at the last minute about the mission. Either that or he had seen the convoy drive up across the road, figured they were coming for him, and fled. In either case, Rodriguez could tell from the interrogations that had been going on with the men at the front of the house that the man they had been looking for had left in a hurry, potentially leaving important documents behind. She had been briefed about members of the Taliban using their wives, daughters, and children as holding pens to stash incriminating evidence while they escaped potential arrest. The women were left holding the proof and hiding it in intimate places. The Taliban wrongly assumed that their women wouldn’t be questioned or frisked. At one point in the course of the war they would have been right.
The woman avoided eye contact as Rodriguez started her search, patting every inch of the woman’s right arm, then her left. Near the woman’s left shoulder, tucked under her dingy brown tunic dress, Rodriguez felt a stiff piece of paper. The woman’s gaze remained to the right of Rodriguez’s face, focused on one of two windows in the room. Rodriguez shifted her gaze to meet the woman’s and tugged at the document, which was covered in Pashtu script. In the squiggly lines of foreign writing, Rodriguez recognized bits of American English text: a few street names and numbers and what appeared to be Anglo-Saxon surnames. She bagged the evidence.
Rodriguez placed her hands on the woman’s waist, “I’m going to pat down your midsection now,” she said. The woman nodded as the translator explained. Rodriguez dragged her hands along the woman’s waist and felt a small plastic tube on the left side of her lanky frame. The woman’s mouth was twisted in an awkward frown. Her eyes briefly locked with Rodriguez’s, then darted away. Tucked in the waistband of the woman’s underwear were two rolls of film. Rodriguez removed both of them.
She felt under the woman’s breasts to make sure that nothing was hidden in the crevice where the underside of her breasts met the top of her ribcage. She swiped the inside of the young woman’s buttocks. The search revealed another hidden piece of evidence, a cell phone SIM card.
After she was done, Rodriguez removed her gloves. “Please put your burqa on,” she instructed.
After the woman slipped the burqa over her head, Rodriguez told the woman what would happen next. Her name would be noted—Rodriguez turned to the translator to make sure she was keeping up with the instruction—and the information would be turned over to the provincial governor and police chief. Even with this much evidence, the unit was not authorized to arrest or apprehend Afghan women. If a woman is arrested by the American military and returned to her village, her life could be in danger—if not at the hands of her family (who might think she’s been violated somehow) then at the hands of the Taliban.
Rodriguez searched the children next. With her interpreter she knelt down in front of a six-year-old boy. She gently pushed his dark hair off his damp forehead and out of his eyes. Rodriguez had a seven-year-old boy at home in California waiting for her to come back to him. She could relate to the child’s fear. She wanted to say something comforting. She whispered, “Don’t worry. Everything is going to be okay. We’re going to check your clothes to make sure you don’t have anything we need.” The boy listened to the translator, then turned back to Rodriguez and shook his head to show her that he understood.
He was calm as she started at the top of his head and moved her hands in slow, gentle strokes around his ears and down his neck. Then she worked her way down to his legs, feeling the cuff of his left leg and then slowly felt his right. Without being too invasive, in the cold, dank corner of the musty cave, with the boy’s mother watching, she felt for any information that could be passed along to intelligence. She found nothing.
In the adjoining room, a soldier instructed one of the Afghan men to put his hands behind his back. The suspected operative was handcuffed. Blackout goggles were slipped over the man’s eyes and thick headphones were placed over his ears so that he couldn’t hear or see the route back to the forward operating base. The suspect would be taken in for questioning.
As Rodriguez moved her team out the door, she looked back and caught a glimpse of the six-year-old boy. He looked back at her, his eyes blank and unflinching, his mouth closed so tight that wrinkles formed over his thin lips, his fists clenched as if ready to strike. For a flash he again reminded her of her little boy waiting in California for her return. Yet something about him looked different to her now. He appeared cold, angry, no longer innocent, no longer trusting—a six-year-old hardened to the ways of an unforgiving world. She fought back tears as the prisoner was guided to the military vehicle parked just across the street.