When S left for Afghanistan eight months ago I asked him to buy me a burkha. A bluebird-blue burkha like those worn by the amorphous shadow-women I thought of when I thought of our sisters in Afghanistan. In March he obliged me. I wore it around the house for a few moments -- I honestly couldn't stand it for more than that -- then stuffed it up on one of our closet's top shelves to sit next to the other cultural relics he's sent me, like the water-logged-sand-wool hat the men wear and a blood red velvet coat with frilly gold trim from what S calls "used to be Russia" Kyrzykstan. The burkha's symbolic power is undeniable: to those of us in the non- fundamentalist- Muslim "west", it represents all the pain and suffering some Afghan women live with every day, suffering that is imposed on them by the men in their lives. This may not be an accurate view (hopefully the women of Afghanistan will one day write their own burkha stories), but it is the one most of us have when we see photographs of those women-turned-feather-blue ghosts.

During our feverish fifteen days together a month ago when S filled my mind with stories about Afghanistan, he told me over and over how he had no real idea what it was like for women in Afghanistan because he so rarely saw any of them. When he did they were in their burkhas, usually in groups of two or more. One time he saw a group of women being herded through the streets of a village near Asadabad by an old man and his switch, his whipping stick, in a manner you might see a herder herding a group of belligerent cows. Another time he saw a woman in a burkha kick the crap out of a young boy. He said she was like one of those kung-fu heroes who transforms from a crotchety monk to a killer in seconds. S didn't see what happened the moments before the beating, so he had no idea what brought it about though it seemed to him like a reasonable response from a woman forced to wear a mummy shroud whenever she left the house.

To buy the burkha, S had to go into town and explore some of the markets. He'd been studying Dari since he purchased tapes after we'd been woken up by that early morning phone call that changed our lives in an instant. Not that it was easy to find Dari language instruction tapes or books. Farsi? Easy to find. Arabic? Everywhere. But the languages of Afghanistan, Dari, Pashto, were nowhere to be found in bookstores or the web. It took a serious search to find an academic series put out by the University of Nebraska that included pronunciation tapes. I don't remember exactly how much it cost, but I know it was around a hundred dollars and that didn't include the rushed shipping we required since it took us so long to find them. The same was true for books about our war. The "Current Affairs," "US Military History," and "World History" sections of every bookstore we visited were filled shelf by shelf with books about Iraq but there was very little to find about Afghanistan, and what there was tended to be about the Russian occupation and the Taliban terror that followed. Since he wasn't able to get the tapes until just days before he left for Ft. Hood, he wasn't able to study as much as he would have liked, but he still landed in Afghanistan with enough basic Dari to be cordial and count numbers. As it turns out most of the ANA troops he's worked with speak more Pashto than Dari, but his studies have helped him. He reads some Arabic now (the alphabet is the same) and he can ask enough questions not to get lost. And enough to buy a burkha.

The man who sold it to him was ecstatic to hear S was buying it for his wife. That is, until S told him that I had no intention of wearing it around town. The burkha he sent me is the standard issue pleated burkha. No fancy adornments, shiny polyester fabric. I suspect some are more beautiful than others, with the differentiations of class expressed in their stitching (hand- rather than machine-stitching) and the quality of the fabric. It is the only outward expression a woman's allowed, and though Afghanistan is the world's poorest country, surely their women are as interested in appearances as their men are, who hang tin dangles from their garden-tinted jingle trucks, and decorate their rifles with hand-painted flowers and swirly cues. When S came home for his visit, he brought back a couple of presents from the troops he trained, including a large box of green tea and a handmade sling shot, its handle adorned by colorful Czech-style beads.

Ambrose Bierce said "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography," but then he died in Mexico during the run up to the First World War and therefore didn't get to see how little geography we learn today even when we're waging two wars at once. When S went to Ft. Hood for his "train-up" in December, he was "briefed" after a month of non-training (he and his Ranger buddies worked out on their own; the national guard leadership had no interest in anything other than eating chicken at Popeye's) by a soldier who had just returned from Iraq. When S and his friend questioned this, asking why they weren't being briefed by a soldier who had served in Afghanistan, the briefer said "What's the difference? They're all in the Middle East." S pointed out that no, Afghanistan isn't in the Middle East, it's in Asia, and then the briefer said incredulously, "Well they're all Arabs, aren't they?!" No surprise, then, that S was the only soldier in his entire group who had studied any Dari at all. In fact, he was the only one who knew Afghans spoke Dari, not Farsi, not Arabic. He was stuck in Ft. Hood for nearly two agonizing months.

I took out the burkha today and took a few pictures from the view inside. I was thinking about how quickly the change came in Afghanistan, how in an historical instant the women became shrouded. The Taliban took over with their medieval politics and 21st century hyper-fast violence, and then, then. Imagine: women had been teaching in universities, performing surgeries in hospitals, running restaurants and shops and negotiating deals, and then suddenly nothing. Not allowed to take a breath outside unless hidden from view, and even then running the risk of being beaten, or worse, executed. It's the image of those women in the center of the soccer stadium, their beautiful bodies turned into sky-blue mountains then reduced to blue rubble when the shots were fired, that I see when I look at my burkha.

I wonder if the women of Afghanistan were stunned into submission, if it all happened so swiftly it gave them no chance to save themselves, to change the course of events. We weren't engaged in our war, hadn't learned any geography yet let alone the words for "sorrow" and "outrage" and "injustice" in Dari, so though we knew they had been transformed from women into shadows we didn't truly notice them and therefore we did nothing. Most of the women of Afghanistan are still hidden from view behind mud-brick walls and blue polyester shrouds. Laura Bush lauds the "freedom" of Afghan women now that "democracy" has come to their country. She offers up empty rhetoric to fill the dead space around her husband's morally bankrupt presidency. I wonder, will we be just as stunned when our rights are taken away from us? I ask because it seems we're at one of those moments now, a moment when things could change drastically if we don't prevent it. And once the change happens, it takes more than translated abstract nouns to change it back.


Looking at my back door from inside the burkha.