Is This Your First War? (11 page)

“It is true that the Quran says we are allowed four wives. But only if the first wife is satisfied.”

He paused to sip from his mate straw and looked up from beneath bushy eyebrows to make sure those around him were paying attention before continuing.

“And she's never satisfied.”

Dr. Awwad smiled. It was an old joke. But his expression changed as I approached.

“You don't look well,” he said.

“I'm not.”

I took Dr. Awwad aside and told him everything. He gave me some pills, Ciprofloxacin, I think, and took me to a Doctors Without Borders outpost, where a French doctor gave me more. I felt stronger within a couple of days.

Soon Zaid and I were back on horses, splashing through the Kocha River as we passed beneath the Hellenic ruins of Ai-Khanoum and beyond the relative safety of the back end of the Northern Alliance's front lines. The whistle of shells, the whoosh of rockets, the sharp hammer of small arms, and the sound of explosions as these munitions found or missed their targets were by now familiar. They no longer provided a thrill, only a profound and constant irritation. A mosquito in a bedroom at night. Swarming wasps. I flinched a lot.

Our destination that day was a place locals called Chagatay Hill, although perhaps they only gave the hill the same moniker as the now-deserted village beneath it when pressed by reporters. It wouldn't normally have warranted a name. There were dozens of hills just like it rolling in either direction — green, yet barren of trees or cover. It was possible to get closer to Taliban lines here than anywhere else on the front. The two sides had dug webs of trenches that sometimes came within twenty metres of each other. Most of the time, though, the soldiers hung farther back — close enough to see their opponents, but too far to be easily shot.

The Americans bombed Taliban lines on the nearest hill a lot, and soon after we arrived they were at it again. More fearful anticipation, curling up in a ball in the bottom of a trench. More earth-shaking explosions and retaliatory barrages from the Taliban. They couldn't do anything about the American bombers ten kilometres above them, but they had a chance of hitting their Afghan enemies a few hundred metres away. And how they tried, shooting at us with mortars, rockets, and rifles. It was easy to imagine their rage. They had faced off across this same stretch of no man's land for months, trading barrages, sniping, launching nighttime raids. And now, because of events in New York that few of them could fully understand, jet bombers that didn't even touch down near this country, that flew so high they were barely visible, were blowing them to shit.

Eventually the Taliban's fury burned itself out. They stopped shooting and presumably began treating their wounded and collecting their dead.

I asked one of soldiers near me in the trench what his life was like at the front. “I can never sleep here,” he said.

The B-52s made a slow, lazy turn above us and headed back to their base in Diego Garcia. When their wings weren't angled to reflect the sun, all we saw of them were long, curling vapour trails. Rain had followed the sandstorm and seemed to have cleansed the sky. It was a brilliant shade of blue. I wondered what the pilots flying those planes could make of us so far below them.

We retraced our steps back through the too-shallow communication trenches, down the hill, and into deserted Chagatay village, with its roofless, shell-blasted homes that now housed soldiers, its open fires with tea kettles bubbling above them, a mortar team, and, a little farther back, a rocket battery. Our horses were tied up nearby. Old leather saddles were tied on woollen blankets. No stirrups. Bridles made from sticks of wood and nylon rope. Mine was an enormous chestnut mare. I had picked her out from among the dozens that the jostling wranglers on the shores of the Kocha River had urged on me. Now I trudged beside her. Even though we purposely walked in a dried riverbed with banks that provided some protection, we were still close to the front, and the uneven hills held by the Taliban meant we were periodically exposed. The odd shell whistled above our heads. I held the frayed yellow rope attached to the horse's bridle and kept her between the Taliban guns and myself.

We were passing the first inhabited houses a kilometre or so away when I felt a sharp pain beneath my ribs and yelped. A bee had stung me. The Afghans sharing the road with us thought I had been shot and ducked. They hooted and laughed with relief when they saw the bee. I felt foolish. Minutes later an Afghan man carrying a doctor's bag and wearing a stethoscope ran from one of the nearby houses. While shells exploded nearby, he very solemnly checked my breathing and heart rate.

“Is he a doctor?” I asked Zaid.

Zaid paused and raised his palms. “Maybe he is like a doctor,” he said.

The man handed me a glass of water and a pill. I don't know what it was. He was smiling broadly. I swallowed the pill and drank the water. I thanked him profusely. There were handshakes and formal bows with hands held on hearts. Graham, the British photographer I was travelling with, snapped a picture. “The first Western casualty of the war,” he said. We laughed. No journalists had yet been killed in Afghanistan. Eight would die within three weeks.

It was the middle of November. Dr. Awwad and Arvind were gone. Winter was fast approaching, and despite the American bombing and reports of Western operatives on the ground, the war seemed to me to be stuck in a stalemate that would last for months. I had recovered from the amoebic dysentery that had knocked me down during the sandstorm, but I was exhausted. I fingered the bills left in my money belt. There was about $600 — enough for a translator and a driver for three days. More, if I stretched it and shared costs, but there was no way around the fact that I was running out of resources. And as bizarre as it was to worry about employment in the midst of a war, in another month my internship with the
Citizen
would end and I'd be out of a job. If it sounds like I'm making excuses, it's because I am. What happened next might have saved my life, but I still don't feel good about it.

I never actually asked to leave. But that night I spoke to Scott Anderson for the first time since leaving Canada. I told him I was running out of cash, and for that matter wouldn't be working for him much longer. I suspect I was rambling. I'm sure he could hear the stress in my voice.

“Mike, you should come back,” he said. Scott never called me by my first name. It was always Petrou, or Mr. Petrou.

“I'm not saying I want to leave. I can stay here. I can go to Dushanbe for a few days. I'll sort out my visas. You can wire me some more money. It's not a problem.”

“Come home,” he said. “You've done a good job.”

I found Zaid at the shop in town where he slept. As usual, he had trimmed his beard and carefully brushed his hair. Zaid's friend had slaughtered a sheep that morning. The animal's bloody head, hide, and hooves were piled on scraps of cardboard in the corner next to mounds of raw meat and fat. Every few minutes a beggar approached. Zaid or his friend gave him a handful of the meat, which the beggars accepted after bringing both palms to their faces in a gesture of thanks. “It's charity,” Zaid said. “It's like giving alms to the poor.”

Zaid wasn't expecting my departure, and he grew agitated when I told him about it. He hadn't prepared a gift to give me. It bothered him.

“It's okay, Zaid,” I said, a little embarrassed. But already he was standing up from the pile of mutton and wiping his hands on the front of his shalwar kamiz.

He unwrapped a bundle of silk scarves and began folding them and pressing them into my hands. They were green and yellow and brown. One had a braided fringe. “This one is for your sister. Do you have more sisters? This one is for your mother. Do you have a girlfriend? This one is for her.”

I gave Zaid an English dictionary and told him he could use it when he was able to teach again. That made him smile. I tried to give him my warmest sweaters. He wouldn't take them, hugging me instead.

“Will you come back?” he asked.

“I hope so.”

I re-crossed the Amu Darya River in daylight. There was the same flimsy barge as before, though this time I could watch the hills held by the Taliban as I stood beside my backpack and floated across. The Tajik soldiers on the other side radioed someone they knew, and soon, with dusk falling, a car arrived to take me to Dushanbe. There were the familiar delays: roadblocks and sand. My driver stopped frequently to speak to locals and other drivers. He spoke little English, but from what I could understand he seemed to be saying that the Taliban lines were collapsing. I started to panic.

I called the
Citizen
on my satellite phone and reached Bruce Garvey, the foreign editor, a dour, white-haired Brit who has since died. I told him I needed money wired to Dushanbe so I could turn around and go back into Afghanistan. Garvey drank and smoked a lot. When he spoke he sounded like he was growling.

“You can't,” Garvey said. “Levon almost bought it. We're pulling everybody out.”

Levon Sevunts was one of the reporters the Southam newspaper chain had sent into Afghanistan. He got there nine days after I did, along with another reporter named Mike Blanchfield. Levon wrote for the
Montreal Gazette
. Mike wrote for the
Ottawa Citizen
. Today Mike and Levon are my close friends, and although we've never said as much, I think that stems from the fact that we shared similar experiences during a war and can therefore understand each other in a way that those who weren't there can't. While in Afghanistan, though I enjoyed their company, I usually avoided them. I didn't want to cover the same ground as my colleagues, and I couldn't help but see them as rivals for space on the front page.

I was also convinced — and still am — that the best journalism happens when a reporter goes where other reporters are not and talks to people no one else has heard from. The opposite of this, in political journalism, occurs when a scrum of reporters — more accurately described as a flock — mobs politicians outside Parliament, where they all get the exact same, usually pre-rehearsed, quotes. “Catching spit,” a friend of mine calls it. Press conferences are about equally as useless.

Foreign reporting in conflict and disaster zones is a little different, but the dynamics can be similar. In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, after the earthquake, for example, the grounds of the Canadian embassy constantly swarmed with reporters, many of whom also slept there. Afghanistan in November 2001 was a more remote and freewheeling place, but it could still get crowded. When necessary, I split the cost of hiring a driver and a jeep with another journalist, provided they didn't work for a news organization that could be considered a competitor. But I kept my distance from other Canadians, and especially my colleagues and future friends, Mike and Levon.

“What do you mean Levon almost bought it?” I said to Garvey. “I saw him this morning.”

“He just about died. You've got to get out of there.”

Garvey didn't give me any details, and I was sure he was mistaken. It wasn't until days later that I discovered what had happened.

Levon, along with several other journalists, had visited the same section of the front behind the deserted village of Chagatay where I had been the previous day. The commander there, Mohammad Bashir, had attacked Taliban positions with mortars, rockets, and three of the few Northern Alliance tanks. Then he sent in Russian-made armoured personnel carriers filled with troops to engage the Taliban at close range. The vehicles rolled, rattling, screeching and kicking up mud, across no man's land as dusk fell. Taliban shelling ceased, and soon a voice from one of Bashir's commanders on the radio announced that they had captured five Taliban bunkers and driven the enemy another kilometre back. Bashir wanted to see for himself and ordered one of the carriers to come back for him. When it did, Levon and several other journalists asked Bashir if they could go with him. He agreed. They climbed onto the carrier. Night had fallen completely. There was little sign of fighting, save the odd glowing tracer bullet that flew overhead. It seemed as though the Taliban really had retreated.

They hadn't. As the armoured personnel carrier's driver tried to navigate his way around a large bomb crater from an earlier American air strike, Taliban fighters with at least one heavy machine gun and several AK-47s opened up from about thirty metres away. Bullets ricocheted off the armour, and several journalists and soldiers jumped from the carrier as it swerved and accelerated, its driver looking for shelter amid the gullies and depressions in the undulating ground. Levon, a former soldier, feared mines below and hung on, clinging to the armoured personnel carrier's cannon. A rocket-propelled grenade hit the vehicle but didn't pierce its steel shell. The driver found temporary safety in a hollow, and some of the soldiers and journalists who had fallen or jumped from the carrier while it was under fire rejoined the group. Northern Alliance scouts on foot guided them back to friendly lines along the base of a small ravine.

Three Western journalists and two Afghan guides were missing. The body of Johanne Sutton, a reporter with Radio France International, was found in Taliban trenches that night. Northern Alliance soldiers attacked to retrieve it. The bodies of Pierre Billaud, a reporter with Radio Luxembourg, and Volker Handoik, a writer for the German magazine
Stern
, were found early the next morning. Levon cradled Johanne's lifeless body in his lap atop an armoured personnel carrier as it returned to the Northern Alliance compound in Khodja Bahuddin. He must have called the news desk back home, too, which is why Bruce Garvey knew what had happened when I reached him by satellite phone. I later heard that the newspaper chain hadn't taken out life insurance for the other reporters it dispatched to Afghanistan, either. Managers there now realized how close they had come to a crippling lawsuit had Levon been killed, and ordered all of us out of the country.