“You go slow-slow,” Poor Man told him. “What takes us fifteen minutes takes you ten days, ten years.”
The Young Man apologized.
“Ah, Ouilliam, Ouilliam!” they said indulgently, and carried his heaviest camera for him.b
They took him past a deserted village and a bombed-out village. An old woman in black came hobbling through the ruins, shaking her fist at him, but he said, “Ameriki!” and then she smiled.
[NOTE: I saw on this journey a very ingenious procedure employed by the Mujahideen for dealing with the mines, but will not reveal it here for fear that it might possibly be of aid to those who have dropped them. These mines are quite diabolical. They are small and hard to see, especially at night. They can blow an arm or leg off. When detonated, they leave behind a little twisted lump of green or blue plastic. It is said that some are made to resemble pens or toys, so that people will pick them up. I saw a little toy hashish pipe lying on a rock once. The commander I was with told me that it was a mine. I did not see it detonated, so I cannot confirm this (we went very carefully around it), but no detail of the Soviets’ foreign policy in Afghanistan would surprise me.]
“The day we killed the Russian general, it was the next day. They are very reluctant to use this chemical warfare, or they don’t do it with the winds, but that day, it was the next day the general was killed. They attacked us. They used this gas about thirty yards away from where we were. When the battle is on, these birds, on account of the sound, get frightened and they fly. We saw the pigeons being killed. They came down; we saw them coming down, so we thought probably the enemy has used this gas. They fired the rocket, and it hit the ground. It didn’t make much noise. After thirty, forty seconds, a streak went up — a white streak. Up to forty feet it spread, on all sides. Then the wind took it from one side to the other, and whatever came in the way of that gas had got killed. All the animals. And we lost in the process only three. Three from my band, they got killed in the process. The gas passed over there, or near them, and they died.
“The [first] two died spontaneously. When we discovered them, to see if they were hit by the gas or otherwise, we took their clothes off to check to see if they were hit by a bullet. We saw no — nothing, no injury, nothing at all … The third one, who was slightly poisoned, he lived for a day or two; we did our best for him, with the medicine and so on, but nothing happened, and he also died.”
“If I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think: all the same, his feelings are hidden from me.”d
So they came into Afghanistan with its chalky ridge-shoulders from which shade trees grew like miracles, leaf-crowned, fruit-crowned, with great dark root-knees for tired men to sit upon, but they scarcely ever sat, being anxious now to get home to war, so, steady in baggy pants, with bulging canvas sacks slung over their backs, they descended into steep green valleys whose terraces of fields were cool and wet; they followed the river down to the lower mountains. — His thoughts rolled down ahead of him like the men with guns winding down the trail between rock heaps and purple sand ridges and rust-red ground whose barrenness left the widespread grass clumps pale. Here and there you might see a shade bush, but the farther down into Afghanistan you went, the drier it seemed to become. What was he going to see? What would he find? But after a while he was too weary to ask anything.
He made himself a refreshing drink of water and sour grape squeezings, only he had forgotten how bad the water tasted (it came from the muddy ditch) and how much worse it tasted in that corroded, dirty tin cup, to say nothing of the fact that the grapes actually weren’t so good, either.
As they walked along the mountain trail, butterflies settled and rose in the sand, fanning their wings like helicopters. The guerrilla beside the Young Man took his hand, the palm of it, the soft flesh of it, between two fingers, pinching it and working it. — “Why … like this?” he said. “You not strong.” —The Afghan’s hand was dark and hard, like a new walking shoe that hadn’t been broken in. — The Young Man was not ashamed. “I do different things in America,” he said. “I read, write, push buttons. You dig, plow, shoot.” —The guerrilla said nothing.
Seizing the charred stump of a rocket bomb, a Mujahid raised it high above his head and turned to face the Young Man, his eyes shining fiercely as if to say: This is why you came! Now look, look! Your business here is to see! See this, and understand it; never forget it! and the Young Man stood looking at the man’s leathery reddish-brown face, the cheeks drawn up in effort as he held the bomb high, the parted lips, the even white teeth, the graying hairline just below the double-lipped prayer cap, the shadow of the bomb falling from shoulder to shoulder, those upraised arms in which the bomb casing lay khaki and black and orange-rusted, rusted through in places so that the Young Man could see the skeleton grid beneath the shell (it must have been a dud), and the bomb hung eternally in the air and the Mujahid’s cotton shirt hung down and the river flowed clear and shallow behind him, leaving undisturbed the white rocks that lined it, and the hills were tan with dry grass, green-spotted here and there with a bush or a tree, and the other Mujahideen had also turned and were staring at the Young Man as the bomb stared at him and he stared back and said to himself: Whether or not I can do anything useful, at least I will remember.
In so many frames of my Afghanistan Picture Show I see the men in wildly various caps grinning at their guns and cradling them, uplifting them among the tree-pocked mountains, loving them, pointing them, holding them like guitars, the bullets long and gold and heavy together in cartridge belts sweeping down shoulder and chest; each laughing at the sight the others made, each looking at his Kalashnikov or Lee-Enfield or Springfield with shy fondness because the weapon was a dream like a son was a dream;e the weapon was a dream of revenge.
And I also see those Pakistanis and Afghans leaning forward into the tape recorder, talking and talking emphatically, some hoping, some desperate, some without expectations, just helping me to understand. — What a daunting thing RECOGNITION is.
It rained there every day at a little past twelve. The result was to raise more dust. It always stank of dust there, a metallic, choking, dirty taste in the throat like you might expect to get after kissing someone who’d worked for twenty years in a tombstone company or a cement factory. Everybody coughed all the time. It was no wonder, the Young Man thought, that Pushtu speech has so many t’s and s’s and kh’s; if you are going to hack, why not make use of it? Maybe people with the same disease ought to get together to communicate with their spots.
Every time it rained the rooster crowed.
The men sat around in their baggy white shirts and trousers, spitting.