Outside Heaven: An Afghanistan Experience

By S. C. McIntyre

After a decade of working in conflict zones, McIntyre finds herself in personal crisis. Compelled to act following the survival of her son from the 89th floor of the World Trade Towers on 9/11, she goes to Afghanistan in January 2002. The American military has just begun its invasion. Her job is to lead the humanitarian response for America as she struggles to reconcile her own internal turmoil. Follow her journey of personal healing as she provides lifesaving assistance to Afghan civilians caught in war. Experience with McIntyre as she finds a poet in a warlord, known as “the butcher of the north.” Learn how she deals with village elders who won’t sit with her. Read how collapsing tunnels, fishnet dresses and pink princess phones make for surprising Afghan days. This book provides a unique window into America’s early months in Afghanistan from the perspective of a woman and a humanitarian.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781663226389

S. C. McIntyre

S.C. McIntyre began her international work after raising three children and having a successful career as a physical therapist. She turns to bringing humanitarian assistance to people in desperate need. She is the mother of a 9/11 survivor and is determined to find a way for herself to emerge without hate from the ruins of the World Trade Center. Facing fears and challenges, McIntyre goes to Afghanistan as the U.S. Government’s team leader in disaster response and succeeds in returning stronger than when she left. She has 30 years of international experience with 20 of them in the U.S. Government specializing in disaster relief. She has a B. Sc. degree from Boston University and a M. Ed. degree from the University of North Carolina. She is now retired and living in Washington, N.C.

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Copyright © 2021 Susan C. McIntyre.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-2636-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-2637-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-2638-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021914846

iUniverse rev. date: 09/29/2021

To my mother, who anchored me

in a hostile environment, and to my

husband, who nurtured me and gave me wings. I have loved you both.

"If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion,

and avoid the people, you might better stay home."

James Michener

Contents

Acknowledgments

Acronyms

Prologue

Chapter 1 My Beginning in International Work, 1991

Chapter 2 Internal Struggles

Chapter 3 Getting to Kabul

Chapter 4 First Thoughts on Arriving

Chapter 5 The American Embassy in Kabul

Chapter 6 No Room in Heaven

Chapter 7 Living in Islamabad and a Bombing at Church

Chapter 8 My Look-Alike

Chapter 9 Emergency at Home

Chapter 10 Living at the Embassy

Chapter 11 Mystique of the Burqa

Chapter 12 The Camel and the Tunnel

Chapter 13 Living with the US Marines

Chapter 14 Attacks on the American Embassy

Chapter 15 A Day of Travel with the American Ambassador

Chapter 16 The Black Fishnet Dress

Chapter 17 More Meetings

Chapter 18 The Blue Mosque

Chapter 19 The Women and Children of Kabul

Chapter 20 Alone

Chapter 21 Meetings in Kabul

Chapter 22 A Challenge: Working with the US Military

Chapter 23 Personal Visit with a General

Chapter 24 Shopping on Chicken Street

Chapter 25 Legs for Sale and Sniffer Dogs

Chapter 26 The Wedding

Chapter 27 Outside Heaven

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

A special thanks goes to so many who supported me in this effort to record my thoughts and experiences in Afghanistan when the war was new and we were newly there. For my friends who have faithfully and gently encouraged me to continue writing, even when I was easily distracted, especially my Sistas group—Janee Crotts, Marty Johnson, and Cheri Lacock. To my Tuesday morning WriteTogether Group for getting me unstuck and cheering me on through the tedious process of writing and rewriting this book, thank you! To my editors, who painstakingly read and reread my manuscript and did what they could to improve it. Any remaining flaws are my own. And with special appreciation for Al Lacock, who even while gravely sick gave my book its first reader’s overview, thank you my dear friend. You caught many of those little editing things that can so annoy readers. And to my family: my children, Eric, Jason, and Rachel for being patient with a mother who needed to roam for so many years but always loved and cherished you. To my grandchildren, Lexie, Kate, Mitchell, and Clare—this manuscript is for you to know who your grandmother was and get a peek at what I did. And to Mike, my light, my life, my love—thank you from the bottom of my heart for being patient with me and for always being faithful to me in my need to travel far and wide. You have kept me grounded. You have kept me sane. You have made me happy. I love you.

Acronyms

ASO – Afghan Support Office

DART – Disaster Assistance Response Team, the initial US government humanitarian team that enters a disaster zone

NGO – nongovernment organization

OFDA – Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance

UN – United Nations

UNHAS – United Nations Humanitarian Air Service

UNMAG – United Nations Mine Action Group

USAID – United States Agency for International Development

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Prologue

Marietta, Georgia; Seattle, Washington; and Washington, DC

Dobbins Air Reserve Base, Marietta, Georgia — I was hiding again. I was at a special training course for US government civilian response to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive (CBRNE) attack for my assignment in Afghanistan during the year of 2002. I had chosen to hide, curled into a fetal position under a tank and, during the training, started thinking about when I was a kid. Then, like now, hiding was my survival skill. Ironically, I found myself training for a job in which hiding was a skill I might need. At this particular time, the hiding was practice for incoming missiles that were expected to be a part of my days on my new assignment in Afghanistan. As I laid there, I was thinking of how much of my world had shattered. My safety was always in the world, away from home and father. And now, I’d learned, not only was my home not safe, the world was not safe. This was a major loss for me. I’d always counted on finding safety when I left my house. No one threatened me or screamed at me or cursed at me when I was away from home. How was I to deal with this new knowledge and frightening revelation?

When I was little, I always knew that to survive, I had to be invisible. When there was chaos at my house, my immediate reaction was to run and hide. If I hung around, I knew that it was only a matter of time before my father, on seeing me, would start cursing at me. He would scream, God dammit, don’t you sit around looking at me like that! If I start hitting you, I won’t stop until I kill you! I was little, five or six years old, when I first remember hearing this, and while I didn’t understand it, I knew that he meant it. I didn’t know why he said it, but why seemed unimportant at the time. It didn’t matter whether I had done anything to cause his anger; he just seemed to end every rant focused on me. I was one of four children and the only one who my father seemed to hate. The sun rose and set over my two brothers, and my one sister who was deaf. This disability seemed to engender in him a soft spot hidden from the rest of us. I was the lone healthy, smart girl. I seemed to irritate him just by my very existence. I used to pretend that I was not really his daughter well before I understood what that would have meant for my mother. But in reality, there was no denying I was his; my older brother and I looked like twins. My father would shout at my mother and occasionally push her down. I don’t remember him ever striking her, but that was not something I stuck around to see. Like a coward, and the frightened little girl that I was, I would run and hide. That instinct was well developed in me.

I was shocked to find myself in the same position now as I trained to go into a war zone. On an intellectual level I knew the whole world was not safe, even if I had emotionally embraced this image of the world. I needed there to be someplace where I could be safe. On the whole, my gut feeling was of being safer outside my house than inside. Therefore, my senses and my psyche were shaken by witnessing the massive number of events of inhumanity in the world. After working in international humanitarian work in country after country, with all kinds of people, and witnessing humans’ inhumanity toward others, I was feeling adrift. I had no firm footing in my emotional life. And this is where I was emotionally when the attacks occurred on 9/11.

I had been working successfully in international relief work for ten years, but on September 11, 2001, I was in the middle of a personal crisis. I was trying to deal with the horrors that I had seen over the past decade in war zone after war zone in Africa, in the Caucasus region of the former Soviet Union, and in the Balkan wars. The sum of my international work was wrapped up in one story after another of ordinary people who suffered unspeakable trauma at the hands of ruthless men. By the summer of 2001, I had decided that I could no longer deal with the ongoing ugliness. I needed a break.

I made the decision to stay in the United States and work in support of international relief from a headquarters position. I got a new job as the worldwide Emergency Response and Disaster Manager for World Vision, a large nongovernmental organization (NGO), in August of 2001. I had, of course, no idea that the impending crisis of 9/11 would turn me around and take hold of my life. My planned sabbatical inside the United States, safely distanced from the tragedies of the world, was about to come crashing down around me. My escape from trauma followed me home and, literally and figuratively, landed on my doorstep.

My husband and I were living in the Crystal City neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia, just a couple of blocks from the Pentagon when it was hit. The burning building could be seen directly from our eleventh-floor balcony. The smoke permeated our apartment, and use of the balcony was not possible for many weeks. But much more important by far was that my second son, Jason, was in one of the World Trade Center towers the morning of the 9/11 attack in New York City.

Jason was on the eighty-ninth floor of the South Tower. His office wasn’t there, but he had gone to the towers that morning for a meeting planned to start at 9:00 a.m. As he checked in to the building, as was required, with ID and photo, his name was pulled up on a roster saved from previous visits. He was impressed and expressed his admiration for the security system, saying to the guard, Boy, you guys are really on top of things here.

Yeah, we check everyone entering, the guard proudly replied. After the attack in 1993, we tightened up ground control. No one wanders in. How quickly those words would be rendered meaningless when planes attacked from the sky within a matter of minutes.

Once Jason was cleared through security, he went up the elevators to his meeting. He had just arrived in the office and was standing at a window overlooking the courtyard, and the North Tower, making a phone call prior to the start of his meeting. That meeting never happened. The first plane slammed into the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. My son watched in stunned amazement as the American Airlines jet flew straight into the massive structure directly in front of him. It was almost exactly at eye level, and he could see the pilot’s and passengers’ faces through the plane’s windows. He later described it as watching a horror movie unfold in slow motion. When the plane hit the building, there was complete silence—a testament to the soundproofing in each tower. His colleagues at the conference table, with their backs to the windows, heard nothing. Their only awareness was of a slight shaking, and they thought that an earthquake had occurred. Jason turned and exclaimed, Holy shit! A plane just flew into the North Tower! Apparently, others’ first thought was that he meant a small, privately piloted plane had hit the tower. They immediately saw that this was not the case, as evidenced by the explosion of flames. Jason said, We have to get out of here.

Several of the older men, all of whom had offices in the building, responded, No, just sit down, and we’ll wait for emergency instructions. That’s the protocol.

Jason grabbed his briefcase and said, No, I’m out of here. I’m not staying in a neighborhood where planes are flying into buildings. He was unaware of how prophetic his words were to become.

Seventeen minutes later, at 9:03 a.m., the second plane hit the South Tower at the fifty-first-floor level. I have lived those seventeen minutes over and over in my mind. I equate that length of time to the time that many of my daily activities of life require. I timed myself during a fire drill in my office building, where I had to exit from the eighth floor—only the eighth floor. It took longer than seventeen minutes to get out. I could be standing in line for a cup of coffee at a coffee shop. It often took close to seventeen minutes to get my cup of coffee and get on my way. I carried my laundry down the stairs to the washers and dryers in the basement from my eleventh floor apartment. Again, the seventeen-minute limit was approached. And then I think of my son during his time of exiting the towers and those critical first thirty-nine flights that had to be descended to get below the impact of the second plane on the fifty-first floor. My breath always catches as I think of him racing against time. I remember each encounter on that fateful decent as he recounted for me. He took time to speak to his colleagues at the meeting, resulting in a brief discussion of the merits of waiting for emergency instructions or not. Then Jason ran through the hallways telling others who were out of sight of windows about the attack. He was encouraging people to leave immediately. When he got to the bank of elevators, a crowd was already forming, so he and two other brave, young men began shepherding the younger, healthier people toward the stairs and assisting the less strong, older ones onto the elevators. When the elevators were full, they knew it would take some time before they came back up to get them. And so they too began to run down the stairs from eighty-nine floors up. It is miraculous that he made it below the fifty-first floor level before the second plane hit. I think of my handsome son, who in my mind’s eye becomes my adorable three-year-old, caught up in a crisis beyond imagining. What mother would not instantly think of her child as the little one she had sheltered and cared for? But on 9/11, he was well out of my reach at that life-or-death moment. I was remembering and reliving those moments of impotency that later drove me to go to Afghanistan. It was my way of doing something in response to that trauma on that awful day.

During the actual attacks on 9/11, I was in Seattle, starting a new job with World Vision. I was staying at a hotel and woke early to go to an all-night megastore. I needed to buy something to wear to the office. As fate would have it, my luggage had been lost on my flight the day before, and I didn’t have anything fresh or professional to wear to the office. I didn’t feel comfortable presenting myself on my first day of work in my travel jeans, so I left my hotel room about 5:30 a.m. Pacific Time, exactly twenty-six minutes prior to the first attack that would occur three thousand miles away in New York City. It took me about one hour to shop and get back to my hotel. Once I was back in my room and as I was getting ready for work, I turned on the television to see the news of the day—and there were the attacks. I watched in stunned disbelief as I saw a plane crash into the North Tower and burst into flames. Within seconds, the news footage shifted and showed the second plane crash into the South Tower. I froze in front of the television. How could this be happening? My first thoughts were of my son, who worked nearby on Wall Street. I called his office immediately only to get the news that he had gone to a meeting that morning in the World Trade Center. Agony! I was stunned. I turned to look again at the TV screen repeatedly showing the planes crashing into the towers. As new footage was collected, I saw it all from different angles. I was alone in my hotel room and frightened. My stomach went into knots, and I immediately felt nauseated. I remember turning around in circles trying to decide what I should do, what I could do. It was shortly after six thirty that morning—nine thirty in New York—when I collapsed on the side of the bed and cried. I sat paralyzed for some minutes, assimilating the fact that my son was somewhere in the towers. In my panic and confusion, I could only look at the television. My dread grew as I feared that I had lost my son forever. My first thoughts were to call him. I tried but there was no getting through the crammed telephone lines into New York City. I tried to call my other children and my husband in Washington, DC, and then saw the attack on the Pentagon. Now my panic knew no bounds. My entire family was on the East Coast, two of them right in the line of attack. I was frantic about my family’s safety. I continued trying to get in touch with them to no avail.

I decided to go into the World Vision office, where I could be with others. It seemed a better option than staying in the hotel alone. I knew I wouldn’t be worth much once in the office, but it passed the time and people were kind to me. As the hours passed, I realized there would be no easy way to get home. Nothing had prepared me for how I felt being isolated from everyone I knew and loved as I watched the towers burst into flames and collapse into rubble. It was four interminable hours before I heard from Jason. He finally got a call out to me. I’ll never forget hearing his voice after fearing he had been caught and killed in the towers. I listened to him tell me that he was unhurt, had made it out, and would tell me more when he saw me. After that, I immediately began working on a plan to get home. It took me seven days to organize a realistic way to travel. In that time, Jason had driven down to our apartment in Crystal City. He was in shock and needed to be close to family, and Mike was there for him. I later learned that he was the only one to make it out alive from the group in his meeting. Those very people who tried to convince Jason to wait for emergency instructions had perished.

This is not a story of about Jason’s path to healing and reentry to his normal life but of my response and resulting experiences as I made the decision to put my professional skills to use in some manner. I didn’t immediately know how or what form that would take but felt pulled to respond. Though my many years of work in war-torn countries had taken a toll on me, my first response was to go back in the field. Given the initial news from Washington and the government, I knew that there would be some military response. And having been in other countries in crisis, I understood the suffering that was to come to the innocent people in Afghanistan if there was an attack on their soil as was being discussed. The United States seemed committed to retaliating for these horrific attacks. The news reports were full of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, soldiers and their safe havens in Afghanistan. The Taliban, as the governing body in Afghanistan at the time, refused to allow America access to the terrorist. I knew if they didn’t, it would mean war with Afghanistan. I had seen how war, any war, was most traumatic on innocent civilians, who always suffered behind the scenes.

My specialty was working in such war zones. If I was to go, as I felt I needed to do, I would have to convince my husband and family. My husband was, of course, worried about me going into another war zone, and I wondered if my son might need me at home. I decided to talk to him about this as soon as I could. I didn’t know how