During the evening meal, which he ate with the Commander in Blue, the red hill turned slowly orange, like a photo of the surface of Mars.
No, it was really impossible to imagine what it was like in Afghanistan.
Then 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.