Is This Your First War? (10 page)

“
Salam alaikum.
”

There was much nodding and smiling as we shook hands. All the soldiers touched their heart with their right hand and leaned forward slightly after greeting us. The bunker was two by four metres and too low to stand up in. The mud walls had been reinforced with wood and were painted white. The odd nail driven into the wall supported ammunition clips and, here and there, clothes. There was one bed in the bunker for its commander, Abdul Rahim, who was twenty-one. The only decoration on the walls was a poster of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the assassinated Northern Alliance commander, his eyes hooded and sad. Rahim said he washed it when the walls got dusty. He ordered one of his men to boil us tea.

Rahim's story was typical. He lived in Taloqan, was jailed when the Taliban took the city, and fled north when he was released. “My parents don't know if I am alive or dead, but I know they're praying for me to be alive,” he said. “It's difficult here, but I would rather live here than under the control of the Taliban.”

Rahim said there hadn't been any casualties at his position for a month or so, since the Taliban had crept across the field at night and attacked them. Most of the time it was quiet. The Taliban soldiers opposite kept their heads down, too, and they were really too far to hit with anything but a lucky shot and a lot of wasted bullets. Instead of shooting, his men called out to their enemies across the field on walkie-talkies.

“You say you are Taliban, religious students,” twenty-year-old Mohammad Naeem said into a crackling radio that was tuned to the frequency used by the Taliban opposite us. “So why are you fighting against us? Why are you fighting with the Chechens, Arabs, Uzbeks, and Pakistanis? You should hand them over to us.”

There was no response. Naeem turned to me. “We do this all the time,” he said. “Sometimes we greet each other. Sometimes we abuse each other. I tell them they should come over to the Northern Alliance. They ask us to embrace them.”

A hissing sound came from the radio handset and then voices.

“We have no Arabs or Chechens with us,” said the Talib, speaking through the walkie-talkie. “We want to bring Islamic law to you because you are not Muslims.”

“
We
are not Muslims? You are the ones who are not real Muslims. You shelter terrorists. You should be ashamed. Submit to us.”

The conversation continued like this, back and forth. It emerged that the Talib across the field was from Khodja Bahuddin, the very town where I slept and where some of the local Northern Alliance fighters grew up. It was a glimpse into the fraternal intimacy of civil war.

It was also bad television. While we were talking, a Russian television crew had beaten its way up the path to the two bunkers where we were sipping tea. The crew's producer evidently decided he hadn't come this close to enemy lines to film teenagers gossiping on radios and an empty expanse of grass. I watched as he handed a thick wad of Afghan currency to a Northern Alliance machine gunner who was dug in behind sandbags and some brush above the two bunkers. The producer's cameraman positioned himself just below the gunner so he'd have a dramatic shot of the shell casings as they were ejected from the gun and silhouetted against the sky. The soldier shoved the bills into his breast pocket and smiled. He swung the barrel toward the Taliban bunkers in the woods on the other side of the field and let loose.

A young Northern Alliance soldier near the front.

Within seconds we were under return fire. Zaid was caught exposed on the path outside the bunker when it happened. He bolted a short distance away, his body rigidly upright and his hands at his thighs, while his legs pumped furiously beneath him. His face looked panicked and embarrassed all at once. When there was a pause in the firing, he darted back into the bunker. Everyone calmed down. The gunfire tapered off. We finished our tea and got ready to leave. I gave Abdul Rashid, the commander, a postcard. Prairie grain elevators. He stuck it on the wall next to his photograph of Massoud.

Another pleasure of reporting from Afghanistan — one that I think makes war reporting addictive for many journalists — was the reductive simplicity of it. There were only three things I recall worrying about most days. The first was staying safe, or at least not getting killed. I worried about it, but there wasn't much I could do about it. I didn't want to stay away from the front lines, and once there danger could erupt so unexpectedly that there was little sense planning to avoid it. A firefight might break out. American bombers could appear overhead. There might be a moment or two of terror, but when it was over there was only deep, enveloping relief. And you'd be back again the next day. Sickness was another matter. You could at least try to avoid that by boiling or purifying your water. But usually you were too tired or careless or worried about giving offence to bother. And it would inevitably get you anyway.

I also put more time and effort than you might imagine into finding food. Typically, the Northern Alliance provided flatbread and tea in the morning. I'd usually be miles away by midday and ate nothing. At night there would be rice, usually fortified with beans, sometimes with meat. This meant that there were mornings when, instead of interviewing a local warlord about troop movements from another section of the front, I'd be in the market shopping for carrots. Another journalist had found or made a rough stove that he heated with diesel fuel. Thick, toxic smoke bellowed out when we lit it, but it could boil water and therefore cook the soup we made by dumping everything we could find at the market into the pot. I also paid one of the boys who hung around the compound to scrounge for me. One morning he found eggs. I wanted to kiss him.

Finally, there was the journalism — writing a story to send back to the newspaper. I list this last for a reason. Writing was what I did when everything else was taken care of. It would be late at night. Any danger I might have dealt with earlier in the day was past. I would sit outside, or in my Red Crescent Society tent, or in one of the buildings where I eventually secured a place on the floor to sleep, and I would squint at my notes by candlelight and type on the knockoff laptop I had bought in Moscow. When I was finished I would walk out to a place far from any other buildings or trees and point the antenna of my satellite phone at the sky. Clear nights were the best, but even then the reception was poor. Usually, though, I could reach somebody in the
Citizen
newsroom. They'd typically patch me through to a guy whose regular job was fielding calls from the public. I'd dictate my story, and he'd type. Slowly.

“The soldier's name was Hussein,” I'd yell into the receiver. “H-U-S-S-E-I-N. No, not Huffein. Hussein. S — like Sam.” It could be frustrating. But when the dictation was finished, I'd hang up content. I was alive. I had food in my stomach. And I had filed another story. Nothing else seemed to matter.

Of course, most of us had lives outside Afghanistan. And those don't disappear, even when they seem insignificant compared to the suffering and violence of war. The difficulty of reconciling these two lives is one of the reasons why journalists who cover war can often be such lousy husbands and fathers.

I recall watching Dr. Awwad talking with his wife by satellite phone. He was trying to help her figure out who could pick one of their children up from school. Dr. Awwad seemed to possess limitless patience, and in the same soft voice he used to calm me down when we were barred from sleeping inside the night we arrived, he discussed with his wife her various options for navigating the tasks she had that day, never showing any anger or agitation. But my nerves frayed just listening to him as I imagined being in the same situation.
Hire them a cab. Take the day off work. I'm so sick I black out when I stand up, and I got shot at again today. I don't care who picks up the goddamn kids
.

I was fortunate for many reasons to have Janyce at that time, one of which being that, in part because she is a journalist, she understood what I was doing in Afghanistan and why I wanted to be there. But I could still hear the strain in her voice as the weeks went by during our infrequent satellite phone calls. Because I wanted to spend as little as possible of the
Citizen
's money, these three-dollar-a-minute calls would only occur every few days. I'd call late at night. The time difference meant I'd usually reach Janyce in the middle of her working day, at her desk in a busy newsroom surrounded by colleagues. Janyce is full of Presbyterian reserve at the best of times, and even more so when everything she says is overheard by half a dozen people. I had to shout my own words two or three times over static and dead air. It made for restrained and often businesslike conversation.

“Hello?”

“Hi. It's me.”

“Hold on. I'm in a story meeting … okay. Is everything alright?”

“Yes. I'm fine.”

“Where are you?”

“What?”

“Where are you?”

“Khodja Bahuddin.”

“Can you spell it?”

“What?”

“Spell it.”

“I don't know. How it sounds.”

“… I'm just trying to keep track of where you are.”

“I know. I'm sorry.”

“I love you.”

“What? This phone's crap. I can barely hear you.”

“I said you're doing good work.”

“…”

“You're breaking up again. Are you still there?”

“Yeah. I should go.”

“Okay. Call when you can.”

Janyce checked the paper for my byline every morning. If she saw it, she'd know I was alive, at least as of the night before. If not, she'd call the
Citizen
. One of the newsroom receptionists, Stephanie, would let her know I was okay and tell her where I was. This meant more to Janyce than I think Stephanie ever understood. Then Janyce would call my mother, whom I contacted even less frequently than her.

That's one of the reasons, I think, why it is more difficult to have someone you love in a war zone than to be there yourself. It's an obvious point but an important one: I always knew I was alive. Janyce didn't. Later, after I had come back to Ottawa, she told me about a morning she spent cleaning her apartment. The radio was on, and a news story announced that Western journalists had been killed in northern Afghanistan. Janyce hadn't heard from me in a couple of days. She dry-heaved into her bathtub.

I awoke during the final hours of the night. My head felt like water and my gut was in knots. I had been in Afghanistan for weeks, and many of the reporters who arrived when I did had left. One had sold me his sleeping bag. I kicked it off and tried to stand up. Dizziness. More nausea. I was sleeping inside now, on a mat on the floor of one of the buildings in the Northern Alliance compound. I stumbled and heard the candles I had used to provide light while I was writing the previous evening fall over. There was a strange sound outside, a faint and muffled roar, and a tinny patter against the plastic covering the rectangular hole in the building's mud wall. It seemed darker than it should have been. I doubled over again. This was bad. I felt my way along the wall to the door and pushed it open. Blackness, wind, and my eyes and mouth were full of grit. A sandstorm had blown in. I couldn't see a thing until I felt in my backpack for a flashlight and turned it on. It revealed a cone of light filled with tiny particles, like in a snowstorm, but finer and denser.

The latrine in the Northern Alliance compound — really just a wooden board with a hole cut into it and placed over a pit — had not been designed for the number of people who had descended on this place when the war began and was close to overflowing. A few days earlier, I had been sitting with Justin Huggler, a British reporter, drinking the whiskey he had smuggled into the country and pretentiously feeling like veterans, when a freshly-arrived journalist approached us. “Have you seen our latrine?” Justin had asked, affecting an accent that was plummier than his natural manner of speaking. “We call it hell.” I had laughed then but now gagged as I kicked open the door and bent over as my gut convulsed and emptied.

This went on for two nights, long after there was anything left inside me to expel. All the while, the sandstorm didn't abate. Even during the day, I would have to feel my way along buildings to the latrine and back. I grew weaker. I ate nothing. I tried to drink, because I knew I was losing a lot of water. By the second morning the skies had cleared. Someone had dumped fresh ashes on the normally filthy latrine floor. I squatted and had to close my eyes to stop swaying. When I looked down there was blood splattered beneath me.

I walked slowly back toward the part of the compound where several journalists sat around a white plastic table. Dr. Awwad was there, drinking
mate
, a hot, caffeinated beverage made from the brewed leaves of a plant native to South America. The drink has become popular in Syria. It is consumed by drinking the liquid out of a decorated hollow gourd through a metal straw with a sieve on the end that keeps out the leaves. Dr. Awwad was in good spirits. I caught the punch line of the story he was telling.