The Afgan Campaign

31

How do you know when a region has been subdued? When its villages have food for you.

All winter, Forward Operations units have been parleying with Afghan villages along the army’s projected routes north, arranging for dumps of provisions to be stockpiled for the advance.

Now when we get there, not one has them.

Entering a village before the main advance, we plead with the elders for their own sake to scrounge up something, anything, for the army. That or flee. The young men of the villages have already made off with every item of value; they have gone to fight for Spitamenes. Only the old remain. They refuse to abandon their homes. What will happen to them?

“Nothing,” says Stephanos, “that hasn’t happened to them before.”

Afghanistan south of the Oxus is ribbed with rugged, ocher-colored mountains, separated by dusty barren ravine country. Each valley contains scores of forts-old clan strongholds, employed by the natives in tribal wars. Mack engineers take these over. Sites that will serve are reconfigured, garrisons installed. Those that won’t are leveled. Our bunch spends two days with an engineer company in one of the high valleys. Their captain shows us how they do it. I have never given much thought to forts. A good one, we learn, is linked by lines of sight to sister strongholds, so its garrison can go to their assistance and be aided in turn by theirs. The blockhouse’s siting must dominate the area, commanding all approaches. The captain shows us how his men lay out linked bastions, above and behind one another, so that if the foe overruns a lower post, he finds himself vulnerable to bombardment and counterattack from its mates above. The science is quite clever and needs nothing more than a few mules, a mason’s plumb, and a stonejack.

Our columns press north, subduing their sectors. There are no roads in this country; trails snake along dry wadis and channels carved in sandstone by the wind. Upon these trek refugees fleeing south. We pass women in columns, muffled to the eyes, balancing their belongings in bundles atop their heads. Their urchins and hounds trail in the dust; they cart their ancients in barrows or drag them on pole-litters behind emaciated asses. Last year the army would have rounded them up and sold them as slaves. This year we don’t even try. Who will buy them? Packed off five hundred miles, the Afghan returns. He is either stupid or stubborn. Narik ta? What difference does it make?

Cresting a ridge, we rein and look back. Smoke ascends from a score of razed settlements. We’ll try to talk the villagers ahead into saving themselves. They won’t listen, either. Their eyes tell you.

Shinar’s eyes are like the eyes of these villagers. When I held her on the floor in Daria’s kitchen, I saw the same look. You see it in the faces of Afghan matrons when we Macks roust them out at midnight, to bind their sons and drag them into the dark-a look of rage but mostly of resignation, of submission to that unknowable power that we call Necessity and they call God. It is a look more fitting to a beast than to a human being, and more proper to a stone than to either. To feel pity for these brutes is folly, for they loathe us in their bones. To seek to remedy their state is arrogance, for in their hearts they are, if not happy in the sense that we of the West understand, then at least at one with their fate. Who are we to instruct them otherwise?

Flag trots alongside me. “You’re thinking again.”

I laugh.

“About your girl, eh?” He has heard about Shinar’s abortion. Everyone has. “Why don’t you marry her?”

“Yes, we’ll make a fine pair.”

“Get yourself a ‘ticket home,’” Flag says. Meaning a crippling wound. “Pack her back to Macedon.”

We trot across a pan so devoid of all that sustains life that neither we nor our horses permit ourselves the luxury of hunger or thirst.

“I did ask her, you know?” I gesture across the waste. “Promised to take her away from all this. I meant it.”

Flag grins. “I always mean it too.”

“No,” I say. “I’m serious.”

He laughs. “I’m serious too.”