An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World (33 page)
Read An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World Online
Authors: William T. Vollmann
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #History, #Military, #Afghan War (2001-), #Literary
No, it was really impossible to imagine what it was like in Afghanistan.
T
hen they were going into battle, over the red hill. But it turned out that there was actually not one red hill but a whole series of them, and they went over them for hours without seeing a
Roos
. Once they had to be very quiet, and tiptoe along the base of a dour red bluff, in a place where the river echoed. There were supposed to be enemy tanks on the other side. But they never heard a sound, except for a faint hum, which was either the Young Man’s imagination or the change in altitude. Going over red hill and red hill with the guerrillas, he looked up at the sky, but never saw a helicopter or even a cloud. Maybe they weren’t in Afghanistan after all. Maybe the
Roos
had long since died of some disease, like Wells’s Martians, and the Mujahideen were having a great time swaggering around their wasteland and firing Chinese candles at each other.
Then he saw his first
alootooka
.
They walked along down the river. After a while, they saw pomegranates and ripe red figs all around, and grapes so good that the village dogs stood up on their hind legs to eat them. Near the town of ————, where the Soviet garrison was, they stopped under the trees, unrolled their mats, and prayed beside their machine guns, each in his time. They kept asking the Young Man how he was. Elias and Suleiman embraced him. Poor Man looked for a long time through binoculars at an ancient clay fort in which nothing moved. They all sat there behind the trees, waiting for the hot daylight to go away. —“Roos,” whispered Suleiman, pointing over the ridge. Elias was praying again on his blanket, his head touching the stock of his Kalashnikov, and the grenade launcher also prayed like a mantis, a single grenade pointing upwards toward the sky, and the other fighters sat patiently. —Now at last the country began to darken, and the men to tense themselves for what was about to come. They prayed again. Poor Man led them into the village, stepping only on the boundary stones of the fields so as not to damage the crop. The village dreamed under wide fig trees. The houses were made of clay. The Mujahideen bowed to the village malik, and he brought them fermented milk and beans cooked in oil. Then they sat there waiting. Presently it was completely dark, and through the sky passed a silent, eerie swarm of winking lights. Planes. They waited. In front of them rose a red hill (now a gentle black solidity in the moonlight). They walked along the edges of the rice fields, trying not to damage the crops. Crickets chirred around them.
“Why are you fighting?”
“I am not fighting for myself; I am not fighting for Afghanistan; I am fighting only for the God.”
Ahead of them, at the summit of the red hill, there was a flash. Poor Man had begun to fire. The boy who carried the rocket launcher ran up to Poor Man, smiling happily. A Soviet shell exploded loudly somewhere near them. The Young Man felt cold. He looked around him. All his companions were happy. Another shell landed, flinging stones. While the boy prepared the rocket launcher, the other Mujahideen began to fire. They shot beyond themselves like the snap of the slide projector in darkness as he advanced the carousel, letting image after image tumble down into the abyss of light (more than ten seconds’ exposure is said to put the transparency at risk of fading, and now it has been eleven years!), and the Mujahideen fired in this long moment that was the reason that I came; I don’t want or need to say much more about it; they were fighting and I was not; they were accomplishing the purpose of their lives in those endless night moments of happiness near death, no fear in them as I honestly believe; they had crossed their river so long ago that I could not really comprehend them as anything except heroes shining like Erica on the far side of the water; they were over the red hill and nothing else mattered.
“What weapons do you most need?”
“Anti-aircraft guns. And if we get anti-air missiles, you will see what a lesson we can give the Soviet invaders!”
“How is the food situation in your part of Afghanistan?”
“Very bad.”
“What will you do if you cannot get what you need?”
“Why, perhaps we will kill ourselves, but we will certainly never surrender.”
*
A manual for soldiers of the British Empire, with such helpful pattern sentences as “Silence!” or “Bring me at once five hundred coolies,” or “You are now under Government rule.” One of the most humiliating things that happened to me on this journey occurred when I was still on the plane and I proudly told the man in the seat beside me that I had studied some Pushtu, and he said something that I could not understand, and I said, “What?” and he said, “I asked you how your Pushtu was.”
†
The General told me that ammunition was hard to get, and when it was in good supply, the Peshawar-based organizations distributed it stingily, so as to keep the individual bands from becoming too independent. So it was like everything else. If their parties helped them too much they hurt themselves. So Commissioner Abdullah had thought, not wanting to give vocational training to the refugees because that took work away from Pakistanis, so he left them as beggars, as a burden. So our C.I.A. might have thought—why should they be in a hurry for this embarrassment to the Soviets to come to an end? So the Young Man undoubtedly thought; otherwise he would have given away all his money and let them feed upon his flesh.
‡
Five.
§
Probably they didn’t.
‖
Why should I give the enemy anything?
a
In April 1987, I read with great pleasure that Pakistan had shot down a plane of the “Afghan” Air Force over this terrain, not far, said the paper, from Parachinar. The plane had violated Pakistani airspace a day or two after two other bombings by “Afghan” planes which had killed about a hundred people.
b
“Then we have the problem of the journalists going inside Afghanistan. Even if they can smuggle [themselves] out the Pakistan checkpoints, it is difficult for them to walk for several days and weeks in the mountain terrain of the country. Moreover, danger awaits them in every step they take. Very few exceptional journalists can work under such conditions. Most of those who go inside limit their trips to areas near the border and write superficial reports.” —
Mirror of Jehad: The Voice of the Afghan Mujahideen
(Jamiat-i-Islami publication), January–February 1982.
c
This portion of Poor Man’s statement was translated by a different person than the other, which explains the syntactical differences. For more information on the use of C.B.W. agents in Afghanistan, see the Haig Report cited in the Sources section at the end of this book.
d
Philosophical Investigations
, IIxi, p. 223e.
e
And here I see the slide of the boy who stood on a high green Afghan hillside, pointing at the sun the wooden toy gun that his father had carved for him (had he already crossed the river also, so young?), and his little sister’s hair was falling out in patches from some disease but she wore a necklace of heavy squares of pure silver carved with signs, gladdened with jewels or colored glass beads (how would I ever know which?).
f
Airplane.
g
Small sweet apricot.
h
This may sound like propaganda. It is not. Never have I seen people so serene, yet so full of a great considered purpose.
i
The Qur’an in fact states that sick people, travelers and warriors on jihad may break their fast and make it up later. Suleiman, therefore, would have been triply justified in taking the medicine.
j
Mr. William is an unbeliever, not a Muslim.
ON THE TRAIN
(1982)
Hail Red Army in Afghanistan! Down with Islamic reaction! No to the veil! Extend gains of October Revolution to the Afghan peoples!
S
PARTACIST CAMPAIGN
LEAFLET
, U.S.A.
A
t the end of his voyage he took the Khyber Mail back to Karachi—second class this time, for financial reasons (cost: about Rs. 103). It brought back to mind his nightmares of the Karachi railway station, City and Cantt:—the wild-eyed woman holding out a hand and bringing it slowly to her mouth, then stretching it out again, saying, “Give me only for food—only for food!”; the soft, persistent “Hello, mister? Hello? Hey, mister!” gradually increasing in volume as the Young Man walked past until it became a desperate shout, the faces of the red-uniformed coolies contorting with rage when he clung to his pack, and always people staring, staring at him, moving in like flies if he so much as slackened his step, old men bellowing offers of hotels and rides and hashish, filthy kids standing there with waiting palms, and all of them crying out to him to help them, until for frustration he could have killed them.
The Khyber Mail, anyhow, was packed even worse than usual, it being the Eid holiday at the close of Ramazan. Second class was just wooden benches. Men slept braced between seat tops and the luggage rack, the rest of their bodies entirely in space; or piled on the floor, pushing at each other in their sleep. To go to the latrine you had to step on heads or fingers. (There was no toilet paper; the doorknob was slippery with shit.) If you were lucky enough to be sitting on a bench, two or three heads were heavy against your ankles like cannonballs; someone else casually slung his legs up on your shoulders; a third had his head on your thigh—and stretched full-length on the bench was another sleeper, anyhow, so that everyone else on it, including you, had to sit an inch from the edge. When the Young Man couldn’t stand it anymore he got down on the floor with the others. A man pressed up against him fiercely in sleep, pushing him at a slant against the faces of
other sleepers. He slept for half an hour. Then finally when he couldn’t stand it anymore there, either, he sat up on the floor. Above him, in the little space where he had been sitting, was a stack of feet originating from all directions—five or six pairs of feet, each on top of the others.
An acquaintance invited him into an upper berth. He accepted with alacrity, for there were little army-green fans up there, on the ceiling. He discovered immediately, however, that they did nothing. When he put his hand right against the grille he could barely feel any disturbance in the air.
“Are you married?” his companion asked shyly.
“Soon,” he said.
This evidently excited the fellow, for the Young Man felt his hand poking slyly in his ribs. It was 3:00 a.m. He reached out to push the hand away and found it to be the foot of another aerial slumberer.
The instant he had gotten on the train (the General’s son Zahid had driven him to the station and found his coach for him), sweat began to run down his face, as with everyone else’s, so humid with bodies it was in there. During the two nights of the journey it only got worse. Every time the train stopped, the fans stopped and the lights faded to red-eyed bulbs. It was an express train, so, unlike the Yugoslavian trains of that appellation, it didn’t stop at every single station—it stopped at every station but two. He got desperately thirsty. Few pleasures of beauty or love, or any other, are as wonderful as the satisfaction of thirst; few needs are more tormenting. At those midnight stops, sometimes he’d see (in the larger towns of the Punjab) a man presiding like a bartender over Fanta and Coca-Cola, the bottles not even cold the way they were in the daytime when musclebound old men with sad faces walked up and down the trains, carrying buckets filled with drinks in ice and crying:—“
Bottali! Bottali! Soda! Yaukh!”
*
(
“bottali”
sounding to him like beetles or insects)—no, now there was just the filthy, hazy, soggy night as they trundled on and on through the farmland province, and the man seated behind the counter with his bottles would refuse to come to the train window—and there was no predicting how long
they might stay at any one station—fifteen minutes? half a minute?—so climbing out the window was very risky and he never did it.
On his trip back to the base from the raid, the Young Man traveled with four friends who had given up their jihad for his sake. (In every respect, it seemed, he was a burden.) The way was very steep for the last two hours; it was
der möskel
, very difficult. When he began to fall behind, he told them to go on; presently he was all alone, and walking among unfamiliar hills. He thought: Oh, God, I’m lost in Afghanistan, and with no water. But he kept on walking; and after a while he recognized a landmark, a view he’d stared at through his telephoto for days as he looked toward the tanks, so he kept going until the angle of vision was right, and he saw the beginning of the forested mountains and knew that he had made it.
—China, china
, he kept saying to himself, licking his lips: —Spring, spring.
Suddenly he saw two of his companions a hundred feet below him. It was almost sunset.
—“Asalamu alaykum,”
he said. They had been wandering all over the hills looking for him. —“Ouilliam, Ouilliam,” they sighed tolerantly. —He expressed his apologies. —One of his friends helped him down the last hill with his strong hand. The Young Man was in an agony of thirst. He kissed the Mujahid’s hand with his bloody lips. At the
china
he drank a quart of
obuh
, then settled back for serious and attentive consumption. As he walked the last hundred yards to the spring, he had kept thinking: I’m so happy, I’m so happy, I’m so happy.
Now on the train he was not as thirsty as that, but still he was thirsty, and it was hard to think of anything else in the world. They stopped at a little station, and a banana seller came by. The Young Man hissed, the way the Pakistanis did.
