Excerpt
Anonymous Male
Balochi ProvinceNovember 2001The road goes through mountains, a maze of switchbacks and talus that has vexed invaders since the time of Alexander. Today it rolls along crowded with donkey carts and brightly colored buses, scooters weaving among jingle trucks as camels dodge over-stacked lorries. The air is thick with diesel smoke and the smell of overworked clutches. Kids chase moms in rose-blue burkas; old men stand with their hands behind their backs for no apparent reason. The ground is scorched silty, a barren landscape punctuated by old fortresses and the skeletons of cars. There are no shrubs or trees, no grass. It has not rained in years.
“Taliban.”
I’m sitting in the back of a Daewoo sedan with a bottle of Johnny Walker from the station in Islamabad and a photographer from GQ magazine. Let’s call him Joe. We’re racing west against the sun, because it is Ramadan, and the driver is hungry, and this place is dangerous enough when you can see the enemy. At night he is everywhere.
“Taliban.”
The driver is a middle-aged man named Rafiullah Orakzai, but we are Americans, so we call him Clark. He is clean-shaven and good-humored, a native Achakzai who speaks passable English and claims to know the road. He says he has a wife and three sons in Spin Bolduc, and he points to photographs taped to the dash, right next to an air freshener that says John Deere. Two separate intelligence services have vouched for him, but he requires almost constant attention. Fixers like Clark are invaluable during times of war, but war is a mercenary trade, and money is always a complication. Clark starts every journey with a price, only to demand more each time we suggest revision—in this case, silence. He loves to chat.
“Bibita, bibita, bibita Taliban.”
“No shit,” Joe mumbles. “How much longer to Kandahar?”
I hear Clark say something about hours, but time seems skewed because I have contracted some form of dysentery, and fever broils my perceptions. All I know is that we are three days late for a meeting with a Baluchi warlord named Raziq who has agreed to guide us to the fighting. We’d be there by now, but I have spent the past seventy-two hours twitching fetal around the toilet hole in a safe house floor. The delirium has scrubbed me of short-term recollection, so I do not remember the flight into Quetta, nor the combat landing, nor much of anything else except dill hallucinations and Joe watching soccer on a black-and-white TV. That and lying naked under a blanket, soaked in cold gray water. A concrete floor.
The good news is that Joe has managed to find me a codeine syrup, something called Paregoric, and pills he claims are a local treatment for TB. The bad news is that Joe is starting to look at me with suspicion. He has known me since I was a sniper on the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, and he wonders if there’s more to this story than simply reporting for a magazine. He has not yet asked why I have ten thousand dollars in my boot. He hasn’t asked how we were the only Western journalists headed north through Malakand into the Swat Valley to sit with radical clerics recruiting for jihad. He hasn’t asked who arranged our fixers or why I take meetings alone at night, hasn’t complained about the stern men who rummage through his bags. He hasn’t mentioned the trunks full of machine guns or the chance meetings with locals who always seem to know my name. He has not complained about the filth, the days without food, the weeks masquerading in local costume, the nights freezing our asses off on pallets in sheds where villagers keep their wood. But he’s starting to wonder.
“No matter what, we’re not getting on our knees,” Joe has stated on at least two occasions. He is fearless, an excellent photographer.
I roll down my window for some air, and he points his camera at a passing truck. Everyone is racing south, away from the fighting, a piecemeal caravan of bearded men, bandaged heads, splinted limbs. Joe tries to record their faces, but they are a beaten lot, too tired and pained for expression. They chug along, with the healthiest men upright, the dying prone. Their look is common to war and this highway, ennui.
“Bibita, bibita, bibita,” Clark says. His English falters when he’s scared.
Sources tell us the Wesh–Chaman crossing is closed, but that means little here. Pashtun tribesmen have used back roads and mountain trails to defend this ground for millennia, fending off Persians, Macedonians, Greeks, White Huns, Turks, the Mongols. These are a warring people, sinter hard and suited to depravation. They have worked the Great Game as an art form, bankrupting East India merchants, massacring Crusaders, expelling Soviet tanks, and now they are bowed up against George W. Bush, because what makes him any different?
“Taliban.”
The N-25 rumbles inchoate with traffic, echoes of arc light to the north. American bombing seems more symbolic than strategic, but anyone who has witnessed an air campaign understands that things have changed. It’s not just mullahs talking shit anymore; this affects everyone. Conversations from Kashmir to the sea revolve around the new alliance of northern poppy barons itching for a fight with the strident Mullah Omar. Average people can tell you the CIA are here and what that might mean in terms of dollars and guns. They talk indignantly about al Qaeda and the 1,700-year-old moral code of Pashtunwali, which prohibits all self-respecting locals from denying shelter to a visitor, no matter the cost. They are quick to remind a journalist that bin Laden was a hero to the U.S. Congress during its proxy war with the Soviets in the 1980s, a tiger of the mujahideen. They have never heard of New York.
“Taliban.”
“Pay him, Whit,” Joe tells me. “Shut him up.”
“Bibita, bibita, Taliban.”
“That truck says United Nations,” I scold our driver. “No Taliban. Don’t be a pussy.”
I try to give Clark a bunch of rupees, but without warning, he yanks the wheel to his right, somehow avoiding a farm tractor and two trucks overtaking. He downshifts with his left hand; the Daewoo bounces on worthless shocks and skids to a stop in a cloud of dust.
“Must toilet.” He nods.
I watch as Clark climbs out of his seat, walks a few steps, hikes up his shalwar kameez, and squats. Seems like a good idea, so I get out, find my own spot, and turn away from traffic. Joe walks to the front of the car and grabs something stuck to one of the wipers. He holds up what appears to be a coaster-size flap of hair.
“Check this out,” he tells me. “It’s part of his head.”
Joe lays the thing on the hood, gauges the light, and snaps a few pics. It’s the guy we hit about an hour ago, an old man on a bicycle whom Clark either did not see or did not appreciate getting in our way. There’s one law around here: Small yields to large. Penalties can be severe.
“No camera!” Clark objects, squatting over a dark puddle in the dirt.
Then Joe steps back and starts to document our surroundings, clouds drifting over mountains, rocky chasms, life rolling by. He uses a 50 mm lens because he believes in getting close to his subjects, tends to walk right into whatever catches his eye. Traffic swerves past him, but he doesn’t care; he’s gone local.
I look around, trying to find my bearings. On a clear day, one can look down from the Khojak Pass, across the Sulaiman range to where the Pishin plains meet the horizon. If the wind is right, you can imagine gun battles between tribes of Afghans, indistinguishable in their clothes and their weapons, at least to me. But today is not a clear day, and fever roils through me, a pervasive mirage. Everything is red: the earth, the mood, the sky. My eyes burn with talcum filth, this vestige of the Silk Road to its horizons a sun-faded brochure of despair.
“Taliban.”
I look off as far as I can, wondering what time it is in Virginia. Then the light changes, and I imagine this view during other campaigns, perhaps a Spetsnaz trooper stopping for a smoke the last time white men passed on their way to war. The Mongols, the Huns.
“Bush no good!” someone yells from a bus. Apparently, I suck at disguise.
An old Bedford Rocket rattles past us painted psychedelic patterns like the hippie buses I grew up around in New Hampshire. Yellows, blues, greens. It lolls along, top-heavy with cargo, the windows open and full of faces: the dark eyes of children, the scowls of indignant men, all traces of women obscured by dupattas.
I remember the sound of the bumper hitting that old man on the bicycle, his face cracking the windshield, tumbling fabric and the wind stealing his hat, the corpse changing shape as it flew. I can see the bike coming apart in pieces, all glimmer and glint, watching the old man land in the road behind us, the flail and the skid. The first couple of trucks lurched as they gathered him up in their tandems, but everything settled down as he flattened. Roadkill is a rare sight here, where there are no animals, nor bushes to spring from. We must have been doing sixty.
