What I saw 14 years ago in early April shook me and my faith in our mission in Afghanistan.
My squad drove to the hospital in Farah with our medics and Saima Wahab, our female, civilian, Afghan-American interpreter. We didn’t know much about the mission beyond handling security. While the others stayed outside to guard our Humvees, I escorted our medics and interpreter and was interested to see inside the hospital.
The old, concrete building had green, pockmarked walls and worn, wooden doors. Soon we reached the women’s ward. The open windows had no screens, and flies buzzed everywhere. A single flyspecked light bulb dangled from the ceiling on a wire. The odor in the room reminded me of the sour-sweet stench of the meatpacking plant where I’d worked when I was in high school.
In the corner, an Afghan girl of about 14 rested on a stained mattress atop a rickety, old, metal bed frame.
She wore a pink and purple, long-sleeved, flower dress. I thought how impressive these Afghan girls were, making their own clothes. But in the next instant, my brain reconciled what I saw with what I did not wish to believe.
The girl wasn’t wearing a dress.
She had burns all over her body. There were purple-pink clumps of charred flesh and hot-pink skin where her outer layers had been singed away. Her open burns had no ointment or bandages, just a white gauze pad over her scorched breasts.
For a moment she met my horrified gaze as if asking me what I thought.
The girl’s mother explained Shaista had been in a cooking accident, but Saima learned she was married to a man in his mid-40s who had been unable to produce children with his first wife. The blame for infertility customarily falls on women, and the man had taken Shaista as a second wife.
Lying on the bed in pain, Shaista begged, through Saima, “Let me die.” We offered pain medication and an IV and planned to transport Shaista to a better hospital. That was all we could do that night.
When we emerged from the hot, filthy hospital into the cool night, I took a deep breath, trying to calm down.
Saima was furious. She screamed in Shaista’s utterly untroubled husband’s face, telling him Islam prohibited an older man from marrying one so young. Women and men from different Afghan families do not mix, and Afghan women never yelled at men that way. He shook with anger.
Suddenly I remembered my duty to protect Saima, and I stepped closer, making sure he could see my rifle at the ready.
Anger coursed through me as well. I hated the man and what had happened to Shaista. I was furious at the injustice and wanted someone to pay.
I’ve told this story before, but never admitted this awful truth. I wanted that man to try to hit Saima. I wanted an excuse to shoot him. The horror I’d seen within the hospital had so enraged me that I wanted to kill that man. May God forgive me for saying so.
We returned to base without further incident. The mission was over. Shaista would remain in agony, later flown by U.N. helicopter to a better hospital, until her husband took her away after few days against medical advice. She eventually died of infection.
I cursed Afghanistan and abandoned hope in our mission. Why bother with a place where something so horrible could happen to a girl like Shaista?
My team leader said nothing, but the next day he sent me with a different squad to give toys to Afghan children.
He understood what I needed. The kids, so happy and grateful for the toys, reminded me that, overall, Afghans were great people and they needed and deserved help making their country better.
I embraced the mission and vowed never to forget that burned Afghan girl. She was a real person who deserved to be remembered.
Her name was Shaista — in her language, “beautiful.”
Trent Reedy served as a combat engineer in the Iowa Army National Guard from 1999 to 2005, including a year’s tour of duty in Afghanistan.
