My Guantanamo Diary by Mahvish Khan Page B

lawyers I was with left the room. I suppose that because I spoke Pashto, they thought of me as an Afghan just like them, one of the tribe, so to speak. So, they wanted to talk to me about things they didn’t always bring up with lawyers sitting in front of them. But I was struck by Taj’s “us versus them” attitude and his inability to place me on either side. Or perhaps he had placed me on both.
    “What are you talking about?” I replied. “He doesn’t work for the military, and he’s not an interrogator.”
    Taj looked at me with suspicion.
    “There are people in America who think all of this is very wrong,” I informed him. “He’s a lawyer. Trust me, I wouldn’t lie to you.”
    He thought for a minute. “Well, is he a good lawyer, or are there better lawyers I could have?” he asked finally.
    “He’s a good lawyer.”
    Taj was satisfied. Then, he asked me the question that I’d come to expect from all the detainees: “Are you married?”
    Afghans are far more inquisitive about personal matters than Americans are. And the Afghans at Gitmo, or a few of themanyway, are shamelessly so. They’ll ask lawyers their salaries, how much they have in savings, why they don’t accept Islam, or whether they slept with their wives before marriage. Usually, when they directed personal questions at me, they asked me for permission to do so first, afraid that I might be offended. It’s not proper to ask a girl in Afghanistan anything personal without her consent. Most of the detainees immediately asked about my family, where I was brought up, whether my parents were alive, and what they did for a living. They also often had an opinion about all of it.
    When I said I wasn’t married, Taj had the typical reaction. “Well, why not?” he asked. “I know someone just right for you in Kunar.”
    I rolled my eyes.
    His wife, he told me, was fourteen when they got married.
    “That’s an eighth grader!” I exclaimed. “How old were you at the time?”
    “Eighteen.”
    “That’s very young,” I said. He asked me how old I was.
    “Twenty-seven.”
    “You’d better get married while you’re young,” he said. “If you wait till you’re old, what good is that?”
    At least he thought I was still young.

    At 4:25 PM, a short young woman in tan fatigues and desert boots knocked on the door and stuck her head in. Her hair was pulled tight under her hat.
    “You have five minutes remaining,” she said in a high-pitched voice.
    As soon as she closed the door, Taj started mimicking her in English.
    “You have five minutes re-maii-ning,” he said. “What has the world come to? In Afghanistan, I didn’t listen to anyone. No one could tell me what to do. Now I have to take orders from a woman.” He shook his head.
    By our third meeting, however, he had softened his views a bit.
    “I’ve decided that I want to marry an American woman,” he said. “I want you to find me the right one.”
    “I have some cute friends,” I said, going along.
    “No, I’m serious, and I don’t care about cute. Good looks are not as important as intelligence. I want a smart woman.”
    “One of my good friends is a lawyer and cute,” I said, smiling.
    “That’s the type of woman I need,” he said.
    “What is she going to do while you’re on the mountain looking after goats?”
    “I’m serious. When I get out, you find me an American woman I can marry.”
    I wondered what he would say to his wife if I did.

    When I saw Taj two months later, he was wearing tan, the color indicating noncompliance. After some prodding, he sheepishly said that a female medic had accused him of trying to touch her lips. He denied it, of course.
    A few weeks before, on June 10, 2006, the Department of Defense had reported that three detainees had committed suicide by hanging themselves in their Camp 1 cells using clothing and bedsheets. Each had also reportedly left a suicide note in Arabic.
    These were the first suicides at Guantánamo since