Free The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice by Vanessa M. Gezari Page A

a half.She was sent to Korea, where she lived for a time on a remote outpost ringed withbarbed wire. She was attached to a Patriot missile unit, which had little need for a truck mechanic, so Loyd expected to spend much of her deployment pulling guard duty. She told her half brother these things in a card she sent him, decorated with a cutout in the shape of a dove. It was the kind of card a peacenik would buy, but the scrawl inside belonged to a soldier.
    After four years, she switched to the reserves, moved to Washington, D.C., and began work at Georgetown University on a master’s degree in diplomacy and conflict resolution.In the rarefied atmosphere that nurtures America’s policy-making elite, Loyd and her fellow students discussed the relative influence of coercive military instruments and diplomatic efforts in Bosnia, but she also drove a UPS truck part-time.Then came the attacks of September 11, 2001, and her reserve unit was called up.By now, she had given up fixing trucks in favor of civil affairs, a job that put her at the intersection of military force and humanitarian aid. Civil affairs units are made up of reservists with special skills. Originally part of the Army’s Special Operations Command, they work with psychological operations soldiers to bridge the divide between combat forces and local civilians and governments. They hand out food, water, and blankets, talk to local leaders, and pay local laborers to build bridges and clinics. They are the closest thing the Army has to professional nation builders.
    Kandahar is a desert city: hot days, cool nights, fine dust that coats your skin and sticks in the roots of your hair. A year after the fall of the Taliban, it hung suspended between a violent past and an unimaginable future, alive with political intrigue that remained largely incomprehensible to the American troops stationed there. Old rivals plotted one another’s demise, bearded American Special Forces soldiers rode around in pickups trading cash for dubious information, and the shops in the bazaar sold fat yellow raisins alongside candy with Osama bin Laden’s face on the box.
    Loyd was assigned to the 450th Civil Affairs Battalion, an airborne unit.She had made staff sergeant by then, and she was the noncommissioned officer in charge of a small team. She and her fellow soldiers lived in a rudimentary canvas-and-plywood tent at Kandahar Airfield, where they slept on cots. They spent about eight months there, visiting villages, assessing water and health facilities, asking people what crops they grew, and doling out aid and school supplies. If a school had been damaged by fighting, Loyd and her teammates would try to repair it. Sometimes they got money from the United States Agency for International Development to dig a well, and Loyd would negotiate with local laborers to do the work. Alert to the potential for corruption, she was especially careful to ensure a wide field of bidders, “not just the local friend of the mayor or the governor,” her teammate Mike Rathje told me. She and her fellow soldiers helped repair a radio station in Kandahar and traveled to the Kajaki Dam in Helmand to learn about problems with the power grid.
    Because of her line of work, Loyd was one of only a handful of Americans who spent time listening to Afghans, and she began to get a feel for the place, its people, the way power worked, the structure of tribes. Women were confined to their homes, unable to speak their minds.‘We are screaming into the silence,’ one woman told her. In her Wellesley thesis, Loyd had written about an anthropological study of Bedouin women in Egypt who were simultaneously resisting government efforts to assimilate them and rebelling against the Bedouin men who ran their community.“They banded together to hide information from the men, helped each other resist arranged marriages they did not want,” Loyd wrote. “At the same time, younger women fought against older women to wear