Open Skies Read online

  Copyright © 2021 by Niloofar Rahmani and Adam Sikes

  All rights reserved

  Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, Illinois 60610

  ISBN 978-1-64160-337-9

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2021934716

  Typesetting: Nord Compo

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

  For all the women of Afghanistan who dream

  CONTENTS

  Author's Note

  Preface

  1 My Father

  2 The Soviets

  3 Courtship

  4 Civil War

  5 Escape

  6 The Refugee Camp

  7 Karachi

  8 Our Return

  9 Life Under the Taliban

  10 September 11, 2001

  11 Invasion and Freedom

  12 School

  13 Not Everything Changes

  14 Dreams Form

  15 University

  16 A Commercial

  17 Recruitment

  18 Basic Training

  19 Friends, Reflection, and Graduation

  20 Joining the Air Force

  21 Medical Test and More Tests

  22 English Is a Requirement

  23 Move West

  24 Flight Training

  25 First Flight

  26 Things Change

  27 Up Where I Belong

  28 Outed

  29 Graduation

  30 The Squadron

  31 Flying Operations

  32 The Threats Come

  33 India and AWOL

  34 Back in the Air

  35 Contacts

  36 The United States

  37 My Return

  38 Everything Crumbles

  39 Opportunity

  40 Back in Training

  41 Asylum

  42 What's Next

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  Everything in this book is true to the best of the author’s recollection. Some conversations have been re-created from memory, and certain names have been changed for privacy and/or security reasons. All fictional names are indicated by the use of SMALL CAPS on first mention. Any similarity between the fictionalized names and the names of real people is strictly coincidental.

  Preface

  I was five years old the first time my father told me about our homeland. We were living in Karachi, Pakistan, having recently left one of the refugee camps that lined the border. It was 1996, and my family had escaped from Afghanistan and the rise of the Taliban just a few years before.

  My father used to say he grew up in Paris. Not Paris, France, of course, but Kabul—the “Paris of Central Asia”—during Afghanistan’s golden era that lasted from 1919 to 1979.

  I wish I could have experienced this period in Afghanistan’s history—the culture, the energy, the freedom—but I was born long after that Afghanistan had been wiped from the face of the earth. The Soviets and the Taliban, with all their brutality, made sure of that.

  Still, when my father talks about his childhood and what it was like growing up in Kabul in the 1960s and ’70s, I can see it all, like I’m right there beside him—touching, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling. I’m in the bazaar sipping green tea mixed with cinnamon, cardamom, saffron, and sugar, with the heavy scent of incense wafting out from the cafés. Men in suits and women in skirts are discussing Greek philosophy and business, sharing a plate of spiced kebab. A university student taps his thumb on the steering wheel while a Beatles tune blares out of the car radio. When I close my eyes and listen to my father tell these stories, nothing is more real.

  This land was and still is my home, my country, and a place I was willing to die for.

  Ironically, it’s also a place I would eventually flee because the very people I’d sworn to defend and fight alongside would come to threaten my life and those closest to me. They hated me, my family, and everything we represented.

  As an Afghan woman, I dared to dream, and there were some who believed I should be punished for it, perhaps even killed. But I didn’t let them stop me. I became Afghanistan’s first female fixed-wing pilot and a captain in the Afghan Air Force.

  My name is Niloofar Rahmani, and this is the story of my father, my family, and me.

  * * *

  My first memories of having a roof over my head are from Karachi. We lived in a modest apartment with a single room for the five of us—my parents, my older brother and sister, and me; my two younger siblings hadn’t been born yet.

  The place wasn’t much to speak of, but it had four walls, two windows with real glass, a door with a lock, electricity sometimes, shelter from the wind, and a bed that wasn’t on the sandy, gritty earth. Compared to the camps where we’d lived for the past four years, crowded among hundreds of thousands of other refugees, with only a tent on the hard ground, this place was luxurious. It was a whole new world for me, with all new sights and sounds and people—and there was a playground outside.

  The day we arrived in Karachi, I bubbled up inside when I saw the swings and the other children playing. They had huge grins on their faces, some with missing front teeth, and they were shouting with joy and laughing. I don’t think anyone can help but smile when they hear children giggling or see them with smiles stretched from ear to ear or watch them running in circles chasing the wind and each other. I could barely contain myself and began hopping up and down and squirming—everything you’d expect from a typical five-year-old with too much energy.

  Once my mother had had enough and finally released me, I charged outside, laughing and yelling, with my older brother and sister in tow. We wove in and around the other children, over the rocks and across the sandy lot, racing toward a big, beautiful, amazing swing that we knew would take us soaring into the sky. The sun was shining, there was a cool breeze, and laughter echoed against the surrounding apartment buildings. We were safe and free here.

  I reached the swing first and flashed a big smile at my brother and sister, delighted at my victory. Even at a young age, I was very fast, and I’d beaten them once again. I jumped onto the swing and started pumping my legs forward and backward. I strained and leaned as hard as I could, but I was only five, and my expectations of instantly launching up toward the clouds with great speed didn’t exactly pan out as I’d hoped. There was a lot of struggling and kicking with very little actual swinging. Still, I was determined.

  Then a boy who was about seven years old approached me. I didn’t know him, but I smiled anyway. This was a wonderful place and a beautiful day, and I thought he wanted to play with me.

  There were lots of children playing together; at the time, I thought there must have been over a hundred boys and girls on the playground, though in reality there were probably only twenty or so. The playground wasn’t all that big, just a small scrap of earth wedged between windbeaten brown and gray concrete buildings with the usual amount of trash, standing water, and broken glass common in Karachi’s poorer neighborhoods. When you’re just a child and you’ve only ever seen a playground once or twice before, even the simplest of play areas is a glorious sight.

  This boy who came up to me, however, didn’t want to play. Instead, he started yelling at me. I didn’t understand what he was saying, perhaps because he was shouting or maybe because I didn’t know the language he was speaking. I don’t know and it doesn’t matter; the look he gave me said it all. His eyes were full of spite, and he had a scowl on his face that frightened me. I remember wondering if I’d done something wrong.

  Without warning, the boy pushed me off the swing.
His bony hands hit my shoulders and back, and I fell. My hands and knees scraped the rocky ground, and I started bleeding. I began to cry, shocked at what this boy had done—a boy with so much anger and malice in his eyes.

  While still on the ground, I heard my brother’s voice. Through my tears, I looked up and watched him confront the boy. They were both yelling, their arms waving in the air and in each other’s faces. I still didn’t understand what the boy was saying, until the end when I heard him spit, “Go away, dirty Afghans. This is not your place.”

  At five years old, I didn’t know what he meant by that, but I absolutely understood something was terribly wrong and we were not wanted here. The boy was jabbing his finger at the air and telling us to go away, over and over again.

  This hurt more than the cuts on my hands and knees. This place where I thought we’d have so much fun struck me now as foreign and strange, and it scared me. My chest tightened and I wanted to run—I wanted my father.

  I felt my brother’s and my sister’s hands pick me up, and they walked me off the playground toward our apartment, but as we neared our building I pushed them off and ran. I scampered up the stairs and burst through the front door, tears streaming down my face, with dirt and blood smeared on my skin and clothes. My father was standing on the other side of the room, and I rushed into his arms.

  Through my sobs I kept repeating, “Baba Jan, Baba Jan,” which means “my dear father.” I asked him: Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where is our country and our home? Why are these people mean to us? I was just a little girl and too young to know what hate and xenophobia really were and what it meant to be a refugee, but the scowl on that boy’s face haunted me. I wanted answers.

  Then, finally succumbing to the warmth of my father’s embrace, I looked up at him as he wiped my tears. I’ve always considered my father a handsome man, with his brown eyes and brown hair, rectangular face and square jaw, and keen stare. Wrapped in the strength of his arms and calloused hands, I always felt truly safe. When he saw the hurt in my eyes, he held me tight against his chest. I could feel his presence protecting every part of me, like a shield behind which nothing could hurt me, including that boy.

  He sat me down, took my tiny hands in his, and asked what happened. I told him what the boy had said, and I repeated my questions. Why did he say that? Where is our home? I knew we had just moved, but there had to be more to why that boy said we didn’t belong here.

  My father looked at me with hurt in his eyes, though it wasn’t just the hurt that a parent feels when their child cries over a skinned knee; it was something deeper. I saw intense pain and loss, and a sense of helplessness in his face that I’d never seen before. But instead of revealing this deep sense to me, he forced a smile.

  He told me to forget that boy—he was a bully, my father said—and that we came from a beautiful country. Our home was Afghanistan, a place full of culture and life. It had learning, music, movies, football, kites, food, fashion, a history dating back thousands of years, and freedom.

  He dazzled me with descriptions of a bustling city where men and women from around the world would meet, work, sit, smoke, and drink tea. There were bazaars and markets where you could haggle over the price of fresh fruits and vegetables, fabric for clothing, handmade carpets, or meticulously crafted ornaments. He told me about a place where all children—boys and girls—went to school, and where the women were as free as the men. It was a place for family, a place where we had cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. Spread across the region were homes filled with warm laughter and enough food for everyone to eat their fill.

  When I heard my father describe these things, I imagined a magical place and wanted to know more, and I wanted to know why we had left. It sounded perfect.

  My ears were too young to hear the full story of what had happened to our country with the wars and the Taliban regime, so my father simply smiled. The pain that I’d seen in his eyes was gone, replaced by joyful memories. Still, I pressed him until he told me about his life and our home.

  I didn’t know it at the time, but I think this was the moment when my dreams of flying, serving my country, and fighting for the rights and freedom of others took root.

  1

  My Father

  My father was born March 8, 1965, to my grandfather Abdul Jamil Rahmani and my grandmother Bebe Gol at Rabia Balkhi Hospital in Kabul. They named their son Abdolwakil, but from the beginning they called him Nooragha, meaning “bright man.”

  Allegedly, my father was the perfect little boy. I say “allegedly” because I suspect most parents think they have a perfect child when he or she spends time awake smiling and cooing, and sleeps peacefully. Nevertheless, having personally observed my father’s disposition over the decades, I’m not surprised they described him that way. He’s a gentle soul, yet stronger than anyone I know.

  My father was the firstborn of seven children, five boys and two girls, and they lived in a humble family dwelling with two rooms in the Dih Qalander area of Kabul. Although Kabul was a thriving city with free education and a developing economy, many people were destitute. Most families had between four and seven children (family planning in the Western sense was nonexistent), and as the families grew in numbers, food and basic necessities often became scarce.

  My father’s early years were no different. My grandparents weren’t rich. They were uneducated and barely middle class, and they struggled for everything they had. If the house needed a repair, my grandfather and his sons would do it, often cobbling together the fix from whatever they could scrounge. If clothes ripped or wore through, my grandmother would mend them. The little amount of food they had was strictly portioned, and there were many nights my father and his siblings went to bed hungry.

  Being the eldest, my father was keenly aware of the pain and discomfort his younger brothers and sisters felt. A child’s cries from an empty stomach are some of the most heart-wrenching sounds one can hear, and in situations where there isn’t anything more to eat, the cries don’t stop.

  My father couldn’t resign himself to watching his siblings start the day on empty stomachs. When he was ten he began working to bring in whatever additional money he could. It still amazes me that as a ten-year-old he considered it his responsibility to go out and work. He didn’t ask others to work harder; he took the burden upon himself and chose to better his family’s situation through his own labors. Rather than coming home after school to play football—soccer—or fly kites, my father walked three miles to my grandfather’s woodshop and worked into the evening. It was hard, physical work laboring next to grown men, but he did it well for many years.

  At the end of each day, father and son would walk home together, but instead of going to bed for a good night’s rest to be ready for school the next day, my father would venture out into the kiln yards on the city’s edge to make bricks by hand. He’d knead the clay and water with his tiny fingers, packing the gritty mix into wooden molds, which he’d carry over to the drying beds to bake in the next day’s sun. My ten-year-old father toiled hunched over or on his hands and knees, while the previous day’s bricks were fired in massive kilns that sent black soot into the air, soot that filled his every breath. He’d do this every night until he reached his quota of more than one hundred bricks.

  Afghan nights can be bitterly cold, and for anyone subjected to these conditions, it’s hard, skin-cracking work. Sometimes my father would fall asleep standing up or kneeling at his work station, and one of his friends, another boy about his age, would slap him to wake him up. A hard whack to the shoulder or back of the head usually sufficed, and my father was grateful for these jolts. He had a family to help provide for, and he couldn’t waste time or get fired for laziness.

  This was not a carefree childhood, but my father worked hard, earned a small amount of money to help the family, and felt proud to do it. And despite these challenges, my father grew up in a loving household and had lofty dreams. During this period of Afghanistan’s histor
y, men and women—even the poorest among them—had many opportunities. Kabul truly was the Paris of Central Asia.

  * * *

  Between 1933 and 1973, the country was united under a king, Mohammed Zahir Shah. He was nineteen years old when he took the throne after his father, Mohammed Nadir Shah, was assassinated in 1933. Afghanistan had been a sovereign and independent state since 1919, after the conclusion of the Third Anglo-Afghan War, and the various rulers who preceded Zahir Shah had set the country on a course for modernization that he dutifully continued.

  Afghanistan established diplomatic relations with the world powers, joined the League of Nations, and encouraged foreign investment and tourism. The government made elementary education compulsory for all children, and the authorities abolished the medieval burka. Women were seen as equal to men in many ways, and even were able to vote a year before women in the United States. The various ethnic groups that composed Afghanistan’s dispersed population—Pashtuns, Hazaras, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and others—also began to assume a national identity.

  Of course, there were growing pains. Some tribal leaders were less than enthusiastic about the changes emanating from the capital, but no one could deny that this landlocked country, which had a wild and proud history dating all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Alexander the Great, was moving steadily and confidently through the twentieth century.

  By the mid-1970s, my father had grown into a tall, broad-shouldered boy who liked wearing blue jeans and T-shirts, and who on occasion took his mother and siblings to the cinema to see the latest flick out of Bombay (now Mumbai). He’d also scraped and saved to buy himself notebooks for school and dresses for his mother and sisters.

  My father looked to his future, and with his inclination toward math and his experience working as a carpenter with my grandfather, he aspired to attend Kabul Polytechnic University and earn a degree in construction engineering. He also wanted a family of his own, a wife and children.