Soldiers of God

Epilogue to the Original Edition Something I Only Imagined

IT WAS THE WORST possible place to get a flat tire: in broad daylight on the undulating stretch of desert directly under the flight path between the Shindand and Kandahar air bases. Again the driver built a wobbly tower of rocks under the jack and was able to change the tire in just a few minutes. Nobody talked or worried about the driver under the car. Each of us knew what the other was thinking. I felt fear leave my gut as we climbed back into the Land Cruiser.

After fifteen minutes’ more driving, the smooth, American-laid asphalt of the Kandahar…Kabul road appeared on the open desert. At the same moment that we saw a spiraling pillar of black smoke rise from a burning truck on the road to our left, we heard the whining boom of two helicopter gunships swinging sideways and upward, away from us in the southern sky. The driver speeded up and over the other side of the road and zigzagged into the Arghastan desert, heedless of mines. But the gunships were already winging their way home to Kandahar air base.

Our flat tire had saved us. Had we arrived at the road crossing a few minutes earlier than we did, our fate might have been the same as that of the burning truck and its driver.

The rain came down in sheets, driven by the wind against the ranks of lonely tents on the muddy hillside. The mud was like glue and splattered all over my army surplus jacket, inside which I shivered. It was February 1988. A few miles outside the Northwest Frontier town of Miram Shah, near the Afghan border, a few hundred Afghan men, women, and children had just stampeded over the border to escape the fighting in Paktia province. They were the newest of over five million Afghans in refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran… more than five times the number of Palestinians in refugee camps. Stranded on the freezing mud, the UN-supplied tents were all these Afghans possessed. The children had no patous (blankets); against the wind, rain, and low temperatures all they had to wear were cotton shalwar kameezes. Several of them coughed and shivered.

With two other journalists I drove into Miram Shah and, for the equivalent of a few dollars in Pakistani rupees, bought several dozen old sweaters and pairs of pants to distribute to the children. A UN group or some other relief organization would have gotten around to distributing warm clothes to the children eventually. But for the moment, no one else was even thinking about them.

Away from Pakistan and Afghanistan, I could barely speak about the war. When I told people where I had been, their blank expressions indicated I might as well have been on the moon. Of the few who were truly interested in what I had to say, the retort that often greeted me was: “Really? Well then, how come we read so little about it in the newspapers?” The conversation would shift abruptly to another subject. It was nothing they needed to think or concern themselves about. It was happening so far away, to a people unrelated to them or to anybody they knew. Most listened to me only out of politeness, as though the stories I had brought back from central Asia were just that… stories, something I had only imagined.

American conservatives claimed that the media deliberately avoided Afghanistan because of a double standard regarding the Soviets. It was worse than that. Afghanistan, which on the scale of human suffering vastly overshadowed any other military conflict of the 1980s, was, quite simply, almost unconsciously ignored.