The Afghan Campaign

  He thinks I’ve gone stupid. He’ll stay with me. Protect me. But he thinks I’ve gone combat-stupid.

  I set off up the hill. The camp squats at the base of Bal Teghrib’s western shoulder. Above it twines a dry watercourse, drainage for the slope, and beyond that, a shantytown. Lanes twist in a labyrinth whose course is dictated by how floodwater sluices off the hill. Every street is deeply rutted. Deserted. The whole town has emptied for the wedding of Alexander and Roxane.

  I labor up the slope. Flag pants at my shoulder. He wants to know where we’re going.

  “I’ll know,” I say, “when I see it.”

  What happens when you get combat-stupid is the simplest tasks become excruciatingly difficult. Sense deserts you. Limbs turn to lead. You have to summon all your resources simply to remain in the present. Hearing changes; you go deaf and dumb. Your mate can be shouting from two feet away, but you can’t hear him. In action sometimes, a man will become possessed with accomplishing some pointless, even deranged task, like evacuating to safety a mate already dead, instead of continuing to support the mission in progress. Such individuals must be taken in hand by their mates or squad leaders. Flag should punch me now, I know it. But he hasn’t the heart.

  I know Shinar is dead. I know the child in my arms has been butchered. But I can’t stop myself from seeking desperately to protect them. A part of me believes, or wishes to, that if I can only exert myself vigorously enough, beseech heaven fervently enough, offer my own life in place of this infant’s, that the gods will hear me and restore animation to this poor bundle in my arms.

  I lead Flag up lanes toward the citadel. The way is a warren of wattle-and-daub shanties and mud-brick hovels. Over my left shoulder rides my cavalry pelta. Beneath this, I shelter my baby. The Macedonian cavalry plate is not a full shield but a smallish wedge of oak and oxhide, faced with bronze. It’s handy. With a rearward toss, you can sling it across your back or, shrugging forward, propel it atop your shoulder and upper arm. In this position, the block protects against lance thrusts and saber blows of right-handed opponents while leaving your left arm free to handle the reins.

  Beneath this, defended by this, I bear my lifeless infant.

  How long do we labor through the shanty quarter? I don’t know. We pass lane after lane, sealed off by security details. We traverse the shoulder of the entire mountain, each forced deflection carrying us farther from the summit. Why do I seek these heights? I have no idea. The instinct for high-lining perhaps.

  Suddenly everything drops into shadow. Behind the fortress, the sun plunges. Great cheers ascend. We can hear drums and cymbals, bells and tambours, celebrating the wedding. The five hundred kites have been loosed; I glimpse their soaring shapes in the gaps above the twisting lanes. Flag hangs on at my shoulder, spent from this lunatic chase upon which I have led him.

  We collapse against a mud-brick wall. Our knees give out. Flag drops across from me. The lane is so narrow that our splayed legs flop atop one another. We are too exhausted to disentangle them.

  I have not lost my senses.

  I understand what has happened.

  I apprehend the fatal inevitability of this hour. Events, it is clear to me, as it has been all along to Shinar, have unfolded as if preordained, from the Macedonian army’s initial invasion of Afghanistan to this moment. We who enacted it—from Baz and Ash and Jenin to me and Flag and Shinar—owned no more freedom of will than planets in their passage or days in a month.

  Wedding kites sail above. They soar in sun; we hunker in shadow. I meet Flag’s eye. Behind him ascends a ragged slat-fence, screening a tributary alley. A puppy and a naked little boy, no more than twelve months old, squat together in the powdery earth. A young mother steps from a door. She sees Flag and me and snatches up her child; in an instant she has vanished. I hear the sound of beating wings.

  Doves.

  White doves.

  Across a shaft of sunlight the brilliant flock streaks, celebrating the union of Alexander and the princess Roxane.

  The war is over.

  EPILOGUE

  God of the Afghans

  57.

  Among the more dolorous rites any soldier must perform is the inventorying of the unclaimed personal effects of a fallen comrade. When the property is that of a woman and a child, for whom he has come to care more than he imagined possible, the chore becomes even more heartbreaking.

  In the end I keep only two tokens of Shinar: her shoes (the ragged pashin in which she crossed the Hindu Kush) and the letter she sent me from Bactra City, written out by a scribe in the marketplace, in Greek that was far inferior to her own.

  I come to Maracanda. Ghilla’s son is born. The soldiers kill Daria for your brother. I bring your pay. If you find a new woman, I make my own way.

  I will have other women if I live. Perhaps memory of Shinar will fade with time. But I doubt it. She was braver than I, stronger and wiser. It was my folly that brought about her end, which she foresaw so clearly, while I, blind and unheeding, hauled her forward to our doom.

  As for Shinar’s brother, I cannot hate him. I can’t condemn even the code under whose compulsion he took her life. We were three. The empire holds thirty million. Show me one whose heart has not been riven by the pitiless harrow of war.

  When the divisions march out for India in the spring, it chances that our company parades alongside that Afghan contingent of which Shinar’s brother and cousins had been part. I see faces from the jurga. These men will form, now, one element of the garrison force under Alexander’s banner, to hold Afghanistan in his name. What monument shall we erect to this achievement, that these men serve the same warlord they served before, in the same place, to the same profit, only salaried now in Macedonian tender?

  I have sold my mare, Snow. She was not lucky for me.

  I decided not to take my discharge. I re-upped instead. To the infantry. Signed for two more bumps. The corps gave me a promotion. I hold Flag’s old rank now.

  He did indeed go home, my mate and mentor. It is I, now, who instruct the raw scuffs who trek in with the latest train of replacements. They are dumb as puppies. I ride them hard. You have to, to keep them alive.

  Stephanos and I remain together. We “bumped over” in the same patch. He wants to see India. He’s a captain now; princes of Old Macedon are not as rich as he. He sends it all home, keeping only enough to replace weapons and armor. “The soldier,” he says, “needs no more than that.”

  We part that final morning, Flag and I, on the Plain of Sorrows. He digs into my pack, comes up with Tollo’s boars’-tusk cap. He works it onto my skull.

  “There,” he says. “That’s better.”

  Ghilla stands at my shoulder. I have taken her and her son, little Lucas, under my protection. I will raise the child as my own.

  “As a soldier?” asks Flag.

  We laugh. The lad will grow into that, no doubt, no matter what I say.

  Earlier this morning, as the mule trains were forming in the dark, my brother had cantered along the column on his way to his march post. Philip will ride out to India too. He is all-business still, or pretends to be. He dismounts. Inspects my kit. “You break my heart, Matthias.”

  He weeps.

  “Finding you here,” he says, “all my worst fears have been realized.”

  The column groans into motion up ahead. When the army of Macedon deploys to a new theater of war, it does so by divisions in order of seniority. Mine, the taxis of Coenus, is number two behind Alexander’s elite brigades.

  Philip remounts, stretches down his hand. I take it. “Keep off the high line,” he says.

  “Don’t outgallop your cover.”

  He tugs his reins over; his spurs dig. With a start, his mount bolts away down the line.

  The plain over which the camp sprawls is a welter of dismantled field kitchens and struck sixteen-man tents. These will not accompany the marching army. They’ll follow with the heavy baggage. On the trek, the troops will bonze under goatskin bi
chees and dine on mooch and hurry bread. The trail will be the same one we descended from the Khawak Pass three springs ago. This time the column will take lower, easier passes. We’ll lay over for training in the Kabul Valley until the worst of the summer heat has passed, then descend with autumn to the Punjab.

  My mother writes:

  Have I lost you, child? Will my arms never hold you again?

  It would comfort this dear lady to understand why I can’t come home. How can I explain it? What would I become there except another sad old man, a fractured veteran good neither to my family, my country, or myself?

  I wished once to become a soldier. I have become that. Just not the way I thought I would.

  The motion of the column at last reaches our station. The first day’s trek is never far. In case you forget something important, you need to be able to send a man back.

  Passing down the camps of the trailing divisions, I spy a familiar white beard.

  Ash wrangles a train of two dozen. The mules’ loads are roped up and balanced, but sit now on the ground, so their weight won’t wear out the beasts prematurely. Ash has taught me that—and how to shave a pack animal’s back so the hairs of his coat don’t get twisted into burrs that chafe beneath his load.

  “I told you, Meckie, that we would drive you out.”

  Indeed he did.

  I stop and take the old bandit’s hand.

  “I’m sorry for your girl, Matthias.”

  I quote his proverb:

  Though blind, God sees; though deaf, He hears.

  I rejoin the column. “See you in India.”

  “May I starve first!”

  The beauty of Afghanistan lies in its distances and its light. The massif of the Hindu Kush, a hundred miles off, looks close enough to touch. But before we get there, hailstones big as sling bullets will ring off our bronze and iron; floods will carry off men and horses we love; the sun will bake us like the bricks of this country’s ten thousand villages. We are as overjoyed to be quit of this place as it is to see us go.

  I scoffed, once, at Ash’s god. But he has beaten us. Mute, pitiless, remote, Afghanistan’s deity gives up nothing. One appeals to him in vain. Yet he sustains those who call themselves his children, who wring a living from this stony and sterile land.

  I have come to fear this god of the Afghans. And that has made me a fighting man, as they are.

  GLOSSARY OF SLANG

  BAZ = any Afghan male

  BHANG = opium

  BLINKERED = pregnant

  BLOW-OUT/BLOW-OFF = party, celebration

  BONE = complaint, problem

  BONZE = sleep

  BOOGER = walk, shuffle

  BOZZLE = alcoholic spirits

  BRISKETS-DOWN = dead

  BUMP = eighteen-month term of enlistment for the Macedonian army

  BUMP OVER = to re-up; reenlist

  CAULK = kill

  CHAPPED = irritated, angry; pissed off

  CHOP = march, trek

  COOCH = women; sex in general

  CURE = kill

  DUST = discard, throw away; also kill

  FIG = female genitalia; women in general

  IN THE BOOKS = dead

  JUTE = Afghan narcotic

  MACK = Macedonian

  MOOCH = barley meal; or, in broader usage, any type of food

  NAZZ = naswar, cheap Afghan opiate

  NOISE = rumor, news

  PANK (AND JACK) = cheap rotgut booze

  SCUFF = soldier

  SEND HOME = kill

  SHINE = gold, money, cash of any kind

  SKIP = a discharge from the army

  SPIKE = noun: involuntarily extended enlistment; verb: to extend troops’ enlistment without their permission; “We got spiked.”

  STEAM = women

  STITCH = kill

  STUNT = an allowance, above and beyond wages, given to cavalry and mounted infantry to cover expenses for grooms and feed

  WAX SCRATCHER = writer, war correspondent

  SPECIAL THANKS

  To Richard Silverman and Jody Hotchkiss for their astute reading of the text and their many helpful suggestions. To Captain David J. Danelo, for the invaluable perspective he provided as a writer, a combat Marine, and a veteran of the Iraq war. And to Dr. Charles Salas and Dr. Thomas Crow of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, for including me among their company of Resident Scholars.

  Turn the page to read an excerpt from

  The Profession

  1

  A BROTHER

  MY MOST ANCIENT MEMORY is of a battlefield. I don’t know where. Asia maybe. North Africa. A plain between the hills and the sea.

  The hour was dusk; the fight, which had gone on all day, was over. I was alive. I was looking for my brother. Already I knew he was dead. If he were among the living, he would have found me. I would not have had to look for him.

  Across the field, which stretched for thousands of yards in every direction, you could see the elevations of ground where clashes had concentrated. Men stood and lay upon these. The dying and the dead sprawled across the lower ground, the depressions and the sunken traces. Carrion birds were coming down with the night—crows and ravens from the hills, gulls from the sea.

  I found my brother’s body, broken beneath the wheels of a battle wagon. Three stone columns stood above it on an eminence—a shrine or gate of some kind. The vehicle’s frame had been hacked through by axes and beaten apart by the blows of clubs; the traces were still on fire. All that remained aboveground of my brother was his left arm and hand, which still clutched the battle-axe by which I recognized him. Two village women approached, seeking plunder. “Touch this man,” I told them, “and I will cut your hearts out.”

  I stripped my cloak and wrapped my brother’s body in it. The dames helped me settle him in the earth. As I scraped black dirt over my brother’s bones, the eldest caught my arm. “Pray first,” she said.

  We did. I stood at the foot of my brother’s open grave. I don’t know what I expected to feel: grief maybe, despair. Instead what ascended from that aperture to hell were such waves of love as I have never known in this life or any other. Do not tell me death is real. It is not. I have sustained my heart for ages with the love my brother passed on to me, dead as he was.

  While I prayed, a commander passed on horseback. “Soldier,” he asked, “whom do you bury?” I told him. He reined in, he and his lieutenants, and bared his head. Who was he? Did I know him? When the last spadeful of earth had been mounded atop my brother’s grave, the general’s eyes met mine. He said nothing, yet I knew he had felt what I had, and it had moved him.

  I am a warrior. What I narrate in these pages is between me and other warriors. I will say things that only they will credit and only they understand.

  A warrior, once he reckons his calling and endures its initiation, seeks three things.

  First, a field of conflict. This sphere must be worthy. It must own honor. It must merit the blood he will donate to it.

  Second, a warrior seeks comrades. Brothers-in-arms, with whom he willingly undergoes the trial of death. Such men he recognizes at once and infallibly, by signs others cannot know.

  Last, a warrior seeks a leader. A leader defines the cause for which the warrior offers sacrifice. Nor is this dumb obedience, as of a beast or a slave, but the knowing heart’s pursuit of vision and significance. The greatest commanders never issue orders. Rather, they compel by their own acts and virtue the emulation of those they command. The great champions throw leadership back on you. They make you answer: Who am I? What do I seek? What is the meaning of my existence in this life?

  I fight for money. Why? Because gold purges vanity and self-importance from the fight. Shall we lay down our lives, you and I, for a flag, a tribe, a notion of the Almighty? I did, once. No more. My gods now are Ares and Eris. Strife. I fight for the fight itself. Pay me. Pay my brother.

  I served once beneath a great commander who asked in council one night, of me and my co
mrades, if we believed our calling to be a species of penance—a hell or purgatory through which we must pass, again and again, in expurgation of some crime committed eons gone.

  “I do,” he said. He offered us as recompense for this passage “an unmarked grave on a hill with no name, for a cause we cannot understand, in the service of those who hate us.”

  Not one of us hesitated to embrace this.

  BOOK

  ONE

  EUPHRATES

  2

  ESPRESSO STREET

  NINETY MILES SOUTH OF Nazirabad, we sight a convoy of six vehicles speeding west and flying the black-and-yellow death’s-head pennant of CounterArmor. The date is 15 August 2032. In that country, when you run into other Americans, you don’t ask who they’re working for, where they’re from, or what they’re up to. You help them.

  We brake beside the CounterArmor vehicles in the lee of a thirty-foot sand berm. The team is pipeline security. Their chief is a black dude, about forty, with a Chicago accent. “The whole goddam city’s gone over!”

  “Over to who?” I ask. A gale is shrieking, the last shreds of a sandstorm that has knocked out satellite and VHF comms for the past two and a half hours.

  “Whoever the hell wants it!”

  The CounterArmor commander’s vehicle is a desert-tan Chevy Simoom with a reinforced-steel X-frame and a .50-caliber mounted topside. My own team is six men in three vehicles—two Lada Neva up-armors and one RT-7, an Iraq-era 7-ton truck configured for air defense. The outfit is part of Force Insertion, the largest private military force in the world and the one to whom all of western Iran has been contracted. I’m in command of the group, which is a standard MRT, Mobile Response Team. The overall contract is with ExxonMobil and BP.