AFGHANISTAN, THE FIRST TIME 1

PROLOGUE “The town is little more than an overgrown village, with ramshackle
buildings huddled along dirt streets. Yet the road to Khost (pop. 15,000) was the scene last
week of some of the most furious fighting in the Soviet Union’s eight-year drive to crush the
Muslim rebels in Afghanistan. Although accounts of the battle differed, all reports indicated
that Soviet and Afghan forces had mounted a desperate attempt to break the latest guerilla
siege of Khost. Supported by Soviet Sukhoi-25 attack jets, an estimated 15,000 troops
repeatedly struck rebel positions along the 50-mile highway that connects Khost with the
provincial capital of Gardez. In a rare Moscow briefing on the Afghan conflict, Foreign
Minister spokesman Gennadi Gerasomov said last Tuesday that government forces broke
the siege and killed or wounded 1500 rebels. Insurgent leaders in Pakistan called the
statement a “bluff” and a “blatant lie”.
- ’Fighting for the road to Khost’-- Time, January 11, 1988

The Time Magazine article was quite interesting since in that very week in 1988, I
and Jim, my British medic friend, happened to be with the ‘insurgents’ in the ‘rebel
positions’ overlooking the Gardez-Khost road and we watched the ‘Sukhoi-25
attack jets’ bombing and strafing and even treated a number of the allegedly ‘1500
rebels killed and wounded’ and I think Jim would agree with me that the ‘insurgent
leaders’ were right, i.e., Comrade Gerasomov was indeed a bluffer and a liar,
because I and Jim can bear witness to the fact that the Soviets did not break the siege
and did not open the road to Khost, due in some very small part to the efforts of
both of us.

NUTSHELL HISTORY FOR THE YOUNG

Russian military forces ‘invaded’ Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, 1979, at the
‘request’ of the ‘legitimate government’ and stayed for the next ten years ‘assisting’
that government to ‘maintain peace’ but at the cost of vast amounts of blood and
treasure on both sides. Almost immediately, Afghan resistance forces sprang up and
in a fashion true to their tribal origins, eventually separated themselves into a few
main groups, among them the two Hezbi-i-Islami groups led by Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar and Younis Khalis, the self-contained Jamiat group under Ahmed Shah
Masood and the most ‘Westernized’ group, Mohaz-melli-Islami, the National
Islamic Front for Afghanistan (NIFA), under Per Sayed Gailani, who commanded
not from ‘inside’ his homeland but from more civilized accommodations ‘inside’
London.
During the ten years of Russian ‘occupation’, at least as far as most were aware,
the role of the United States was only a diplomatic one and it would be years before
the world would learn how our country had brought down the Russian bear by
channeling arms and materiel to the highly-motivated and resourceful mujahidin—
‘warriors of God’ as they called themselves but ‘rebels’ as the Russians, the New
York Times and Time Magazine called them. But in the end, to no surprise of
students of history, Russia learned what the British had a century earlier and
Alexander the Great many centuries before them: “One can occupy Afghanistan,
 AFGHANISTAN, THE FIRST TIME 2

but one cannot vanquish her” and with more than 30,000 KIA’s, numerous
wounded and maimed, Afghanistan would come to be known as ‘Russia’s
Vietnam’.

WHY AFGHANISTAN?
The newspaper article that fall of 1987 featured a picture of a earnest-looking
young Afghan physician from Alameda, California who was soliciting money and
medical supplies to assist NIFA in dealing with the vast numbers of refugees from
the fighting in his native country. When I called the number given and told the
doctor I wished to supply a little money and medical supplies and also wished to
accompany him ‘inside’, he accepted my offers immediately. I bought my tickets,
arranged for another physician to cover my practice and then faced the toughest
part—telling my wife. But to her great credit, she only shrugged off my harebrained
scheme with: “You won’t be happy ‘til you get killed. I hope the insurance is paid”,
words born not out of hostility but of despair and frustration at my running off
willy-nilly to strange hot places such as El Salvador, Nicaragua and Israel. I loved
being a ‘war tourist’.

A PROPER SEND-OFF
“Major, if I see a picture of my battalion surgeon on the front page of the New
York Times holding an AK-47 inside Afghanistan, his balls will be on my desk in
Lucite”. This cheery boy voyage from my Colonel — call him Gerry—was to be
expected, for as Commander of a battalion of Special Forces (Green Berets), he was
privy to what the rest of world would discover only many years later, that the US
was pouring over two billion dollars into the largest covert operation in history and
had it become known that with his full knowledge, his own Battalion Surgeon was
running around Afghanistan in civilian garb and armed alongside mujahidin
actively hunting and killing Russians, his own family jewels would likely repose in
Lucite on the desk of some general in the Pentagon.
But immediately after his invitation-to-an-orchiectomy, the Colonel also made
me memorize a Pakistani telephone number with the stern injunction: “If you need
us, call that number and we’ll come get you. But don’t ever call that number”, just
after which my good friend and Special Forces team sergeant interjected the more
practical suggestion “And never, ever, take off your go-to-hell gear*, keep your
asshole compass** close and never, ever trust a G*** ”.
Next day I was sitting beside my Afghan friend— call him Dr Subhan— on a
jet bound for Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan (“Land of the Pure”), where we
would stage our entrance ‘inside’. The British Airways station chief at San Francisco
airport had been very generous when we told him the destination of our bulky
excess baggage-- seven hundred pounds of medical supplies and equipment-- and
he waived the charges, awfully Christian, I thought, considering the history of
dismal treatment of the British by the gentle mountain Islamic folk of Afghanistan.
As we traveled, first to London and then on to Islamabad, capital of Pakistan, Dr
 AFGHANISTAN, THE FIRST TIME 3

Subhan filled me in on the situation with the refugees and told me we would be
going ‘inside’ Afghanistan and all the way up to the ‘front’, where we would have
the chance to see the mujahidin in action. And having heard and read about their
amazing exploits in the almost ten-year-long guerilla war against the Russians, I
couldn’t wait to see them up close and personal.
But wishing to leave as little to chance as possible, I had left the following
instructions with my office: “If you don’t hear from me by 0600, start with the
number in Peshawar and work backwards through Islamabad and if you receive no
information, alert Colonel McColl, then Colonel Schumacher. If there is any
situation with a capture please get on it as soon as possible and try to buy them off.
If I am killed, you may have to buy me back to this country.” (NOTE: * go to hell
gear= small escape and evasion items worn on a belt around the waist; ** asshole
compass= lozenge-sized compass swallowed to reappear for use the following day;
***G = Special Operations code for ‘guerilla’.)

MY NEW FRIEND
Landing in Islamabad, and after clearing customs (read: paying a bribe), we
traveled to a ‘safe house’ on the outskirts of the capital city where I crashed to nap
for about six hours and awoke to see a very Western face— British, I judged--
staring at me from the opposite bed. “I’m Jim”, he said, holding out his hand, “I
guess we’ll be together inside.” From his rather sketchy recitation of his credentials,
I got the idea he had served in some capacity with the SAS (Special Air Service,
British equivalent of US Special Forces) and was going along in a triple capacity of
medical, military adviser and journalist for Special Forces magazine. I told him a little
bit about me, even confiding in him that I was currently serving in Special Forces,
and we resolved that no matter what we ran into, we would ‘stick together’.
Because of the very real danger for Westerners, especially military types, in the
area, to call as little attention to ourselves as possible in the streets and bazaars, Jim
was assigned the local name ‘Jehan Mohammed’ and I ‘Salaam Khan’ and we
quickly became so accustomed to our new names that we responded reflexively
when called.

THE MOST DANGEROUS LEG OF THE TRIP

We two newly-minted muj were just getting set to appreciate the comforts of
the big capital city when Dr Subhan told us to pack up for the move to the
traditional ‘jumping-off place’ for the war—the romantic and deadly city of
Peshawar. As I look back on it, the most dangerous part of my whole trip was not
the time ‘inside’ Afghanistan but inside Pakistan, specifically the drive from the
capital to Peshawar during which fifty miles we passed the scenes of at least ten
recent horrific crashes, at least four of which were fatal. One interesting statistic that
has held up for years is that while Asia has only 17% of the world vehicle fleet, it
furnishes 44% of road fatalities but after only cursory observation, the reasons for
Pakistan’s ‘red asphalt’ became clear: small poorly-maintained and unsafe vehicles
 AFGHANISTAN, THE FIRST TIME 4

jam-packed with passengers, sometimes without lights or even brakes, no seat belts,
poorly-trained and/or unlicensed drivers with utter disdain for the law, narrow,
sharply-crowned roads and, most importantly, their Islamikamikaze attitudes that
resulted in their piloting their vehicles as if to claim their 72 virgins-- NOW. After
my Pakistani highway experience, I no longer wondered why their highway toll
was so high, but rather why it was so low.

PESHAWAR
On arrival, we were driven ‘across the tracks’ to a small pension that didn’t
even have a name, only a hand-lettered sign that proclaimed “Hot Bathes”, and
hustled to our rooms in the very back where we were told to wait until our friends
returned the next day to take us to the bazaar. Dumping our kit in our room, Jehan
and I immediately oriented ourselves to the building, the stairwells and the
surrounding area to establish escape routes and rally points, a bit of a James
Bondish exercise, perhaps, but I felt I couldn’t be too careful since only a week
earlier, I had heard a BBC news program out of Moscow in which the Russian
military warned that any Westerners caught ‘inside’ Afghanistan would be ‘dealt
with harshly’ and I was not anxious to learn how the Commies defined that word.
Jehan and I confessed to each other the sense of psychological nudity of being in
such a frightening place without the comfort of a sidearm.
There isn’t enough space in Christendom to do justice to Peshawar, ‘The Dodge
City of Pakistan’. It’s one of those phenomena that, like the outsized screen at
IMAX, defy description and whose impact you cannot absorb until you actually see
it, more viscerally in the case of Peshawar, smell it, with the faint and sometimes not
so faint, miasma of fresh feces, brooding incense and rotting everything hanging in
the indolent air. Time has been frozen there for years, if not centuries, and if you
took the motorized vehicles off the streets, you’d be on a movie set for a “King of
the Khyber Rifles” costume drama, starring Tyrone Power and the entire population
of the San Fernando Valley as extras. On every sidewalk were what I called ‘prayer
corrals’, odd-shaped spaces delineated by concrete blocks that pointed the faithful
in the right direction-- literally— and into which they leapt at the call of the
muezzin from the near-by minaret, and there was always one near-by. Why it
happened that some people, even drivers of motorized rickshaws in the street,
immediately ceased what they were doing at the call to prayer to jump into the
corrals and perform their devotionals while others passed by unconcernedly, I was
never able to figure out.
After the evening call to prayer— the mosque was immediately outside and the
muezzin’s amplified keening boomed through a very modern mega-watt speaker
just a few feet from our window— Jehan and I slipped down the back stairs and
hailed a tuktuk*, jumped inside and closed the curtain. “Red Cross Compound”,
said Jehan, and we were off putt-putting through the darkening streets (how Jehan
knew the whereabouts or even the existence of the Red Cross compound, I never
thought to ask). I can’t recall the rest of that evening but it involved drinks with
 AFGHANISTAN, THE FIRST TIME 5

English nurses, a heated argument about international politics with a French

socialist (if that’s not redundant) and the devil’s own time finding a tuktuk back to
our hotel after the party flagged in the middle of the night. We walked a long way
and got only a couple of hours sleep before the muezzin blasted us from our beds in
the pre-dawn December darkness.
Next day we visited the bazaar and since I had already grown out my beard ‘in
the way of the Afghan’, I bought the rest of my blend-in garb: first, the traditional
shalwar kameez (pajama-like trousers with long loose outer blouse to the knees), next
the Chitrali cap known in Europe as the chapeau de Massood-- after Ahmed Shah
Masood, the noted Afghan commander who was murdered only two days before
9/11-- and finally a partouk, the traditional Afghan blanket and fashion statement
which would double as warmth and camouflage from prying Russian eyes in the air
and which if the situation became dire enough could be pressed into service as a
prayer rug. Fitted with an underlayer of expensive, damnably expensive, REI silk
long-johns, I was ready for ‘inside’.

GREEN’S
At one time or another, all the journalists, writers, spies, arms merchants, deal-
makers and adrenaline junkies attracted to the war raging just across the border
inside Afghanistan took dinner in Green’s hotel restaurant in Peshawar. One
evening while we were enjoying dinner at at the (in)famous hostelry (food= five-
star, accommodations = no-star), my eye was continually roving over the dining
room, assessing everyone and making up stories to myself about who this one was
and what that was there for but I kept coming back to the burly mustachioed man
engaged in close conversation with three others at a corner table; I couldn’t quite
place the face or the voice, but I knew I knew the man from somewhere and
sometime, but since accosting someone to inquire about their identity or purpose
was not a healthful practice in Peshawar, I never approached him. Fifteen years
later, I suddenly realized just who I had been studying In Green’d when browsing
at the “New Nonfiction” counter at my local Borders and idly picked up a copy of
Charlie Wilson’s War and learned it was none other than my old friend, fellow high
school Latin Club officer and fellow Aliquippan, Gust Avrakotos, who was the
‘rogue CIA agent’ who took the money Congressman “Good-time Charlie” Wilson
wangled out of Congress and translated it into the weapons that drove the Russians
out of Afghanistan. (NOTE: Green’s is still there and doing business, one recent
review as: “. . .if you want ritzy accommodations go to the Pearl. . .this hotel was
totally took over by bugs and disgusting crawling creatures, there was no latest
facility such as internet or swimming pool, the bathrooms were tiny. . .but the room
service was awesome and the food was also ++awesome”. My old pal, Gust, died
before I could verify that he was the mysterious man I had been studying that
Peshawar evening.)

THE WOUNDED
 AFGHANISTAN, THE FIRST TIME 6

Just after our trip to the bazaar, we were taken on tour of the hospitals
maintained by NIFA for the wounded and had an up-close view of the sickening
cost of war. Most of the victims were orthopedic cases with their bodies rigged up
with an endless variety of pins, screws, plates, wires and frames, others were
neurosurgical (mostly unable to be helped), others medical (various short-term
ailments) and still others assorted surgical problems. Although there were no
women in the building, we were told that there was in fact a hospital down the road
just for them.
Talking with the wounded through our translator, we were dismayed to learn
that many casualties—at least at this hospital— were actually not the result of
enemy [Russian] action but from ‘operational losses’ and ‘accidents’, one example of
operational loss being the explosion of a 81mm mortar tube the crew had failed to
clean for six months until it finally blew up, killing three and wounding six, and
another example being the [preventable] injuries resulting from the crazy driving
habits of the muj. And yet example of our friends’ less-than-safe practices we were
to observe the following week ‘inside’ when we were all filing down a mountain
trail and came upon a dud Russian bomb (the Russians had a lot of defective
equipment, we were told) buried in the ground halfway to its tailfins, a chilling
sight for Jehan and me and one to which we gave wide berth but to which each
passing muj showed his contempt and disdain by fetching a mighty kick, with the
resulting percussive note telling the trained ear of this physician that the thing was
not hollow. Although I didn’t share my fear with anyone, one of the things that I
was most watchful about was when an RPG man was near because of my constant
fear he would take a sudden notion to shoot at something with me behind him and I
would be incinerated in the back-blast from the rocket. As previously noted,
operational safety was not much of a concern with the muj, but then again, they had
no OSHA or vast plaintiff’s bar to contend with.
All of that is not to take away from the courage and fortitude of the muj,
however, for there were many injuries incurred in actual combat from gunshots,
bombs, rockets, artillery, mines and the most gut-wrenching of all— napalm. We
visited one man who was sitting in a rattan chair staring into space, his after-
napalm face a twisted mass of scars and his seemingly permanently-open eyes
looking off in different directions and when I asked what had happened, the man
didn’t say a word, only reached into his pocket and handed me a photograph of his
movie idol-handsome before-napalm face; I still have the before and after
photographs. A fifteen-year old lay in his bed, both legs surrounded by metal
orthopedic scaffolding for the wire that penetrated his bones and held them
together while healing and our translator told us the boy was saying he was eager
to return ‘inside’ and “kill the dushman”.

GETTING THERE IS HALF THE FUN

To travel from the [relative] safety of Peshawar to the point where we would
cross the border, we rode in a new Volvo ambulance the muj had just received from
 AFGHANISTAN, THE FIRST TIME 7

a wealthy Swedish backer. Although I could visualize such a luxury vehicle on the
primitive roads (read: camel tracks) we knew were ‘inside’, on the [reatively] good
Pakistani highways Jehan and I rode in comfort and style concealed in the
curtained-off rear compartment.
Our route took us south from Peshawar down through the North Western
Frontier Province (NWFP) which enjoys a peculiar independent existence apart
from the central government of Pakistan. Inhabited by Pathan tribesmen and
Afghan refugees, NWFP is ‘governed’ by tribal leaders and tribal laws, and no
police are allowed the enter. We were told that the government would ‘protect’ us
as long as we were actually on a highway but off the highway, salaam aleikum,
y’all, you’re on our own.
The principal ‘commerce’ of the NWFP is drug and guns production and the
epicenter for both is Darra Adam Khel (more commonly ‘Darra’) which boasts more
gun-shops per capita (over 1000) than anyplace in the world and whose city motto
is “There is no gun we can’t copy”. I wasn’t aware that metal could be cloned but
the gunsmiths of Darra mange to do it. Hand them your new S&W “Dirty Harry”
.44 magnum, come back in a week and they’ll hand you its twin, and all wrought
from backyard blast furnaces, hand-powered hacksaws and treadle-driven lathes.
The Afghan guerillas brought captured Russian guns there to have them repaired
and copies of AK-47's and RPG's can be bought for a bargain. On the streets of
Darra, you feel like you’re inside a shooting gallery but it’s simply the gun-shop
customers checking out the goods in the back yard. But I heard more automatic
gunfire in fifteen minutes in Darra than I did in three weeks ‘inside’. Unfortunately
for someone who owned a gunshop back home, we were not allowed to get out of
our limo to shop because white foreigners would simply have attracted too much
attention. All I could do was press my nose to the glass and wonder how much state
paperwork they had to fill out to buy a gun.

CROSSING OVER
Pakistani border guards had strict instructions not to allow foreigners of any
kind ‘inside’ and they were very successful in ferreting them out so we decided to
catch them unaware by presenting ourselves early in the dark clad in traditional
native garb and wrapped in our blankets; crammed in the back of a Toyota pickup
along with boxes of supplies (under which our very upscale Western kit was
hidden) and eight unwashed muj, we hoped we’d get only a cursory once-over.
When the guard threw back the canvas flap to inspect our motley crew, Jehan gave
out with a few inspired-- and disgustingly wet-- snores and the guard dropped the
flap, the driver gunned it and we were finally ‘inside’. (NOTE: A few rupees may
possibly have changed hands but not that I personally witnessed.)

BASE CAMP
Immediately we crossed over, the muj seemed to feel at home, becoming more
voluble and uninhibited and laughing and joking almost constantly. Our first stop
 AFGHANISTAN, THE FIRST TIME 8

was at their staging base whose name slips me but was a most impressive walled-
compound with an entrance closed by 15-foot metal-clad double doors in front of
which Jehan and I posed for ‘tough guys with AK’s’ photos in front as if for one-
sheets for a modern frontier classic “She Wore A Yellow Burka”, with me as John
Wayne and Jehan as Ward Bond. We stayed overnight and got up early the next day
and rode, and rode, and rode, a spleen-rupturing, incontinence-producing and
hemorrhoid-inducing ordeal that at last brought us to the final hill (hah!) and the
pass which would take us to the promised land, our AO (Area of Operations).
Almost ‘there’!
The shades of night were falling fast as we started up the long hill (read: f******
mountain) on a winding ‘road’ that, as my old man used to crack, ‘has curves so
sharp, you have to dim your own headlights’, a ‘road’ that was at widest one and
one-third vehicle widths and carved into the cliff with a five-hundred foot sheer
drop, then a one-thousand-foot drop and then it became too dark to tell what drop
it was to the bottom but a lot more. Then it started to snow. The snow became
heavier and heavier as we ascended and suddenly out of the darkness above, a set
of headlights appeared. A truck was coming back from the front and down the road
where it would have to pass us, or us it, and I thought, shit, this is it, this is where I
die, on a goddamn snowy mountain in Afghanistan. Our driver stopped and
everyone got out and pushed our truck sideways into the cliff for the large cargo
truck to pass. Several muj jumped out of the cargo truck and laughed and joked
briefly with our muj in the dark and the blowing snow and then everyone turned to
the business of sneaking the irresistible force of the big Mercedes truck past the
immovable object of ours without losing everyone over the edge, which somehow
we did but I swear if our truck or theirs had had another coat of paint, we would all
have ended up smashed on the rocks in the gorge below. And all the while the
drivers of both vehicles were keening and wailing in time with the ‘music’ issuing
from their radios turned full up. If I had seen such a scene in a movie, I would not
have believed it.

DEEPER INSIDE
Cresting the hill (mountain, dammit) we careened down the other side with our
crazed muj driver still keening hypnotically to the ‘music’ and now sucking on a
vile cigarette; with the darkness and blowing snow, I could not see the road and had
no sense for the drop inches from our wheels but couldn’t imagine he could either.
Finally we arrived at a ‘hotel’ where we trooped inside but were so keyed up that
Jehan and I didn’t even try to sleep but amused ourselves by teaching our muj the
US airborne song “Blood On The Risers”. Although they made a credible showing
on the chorus, they had no appreciation for the humor and didn’t dnerstand why
Jehan and I laughed. Then the word came to ‘saddle up’ and we moved out for
another two hours over the rocky road before stopping at CAMP #2, where we were
shown inside a large hut and after a little nightcap from my flask of ‘mouthwash’
(read: root beer brandy), I threw my sleeping bag on what looked like a raised stage
 AFGHANISTAN, THE FIRST TIME 9

and slept the sleep of one who had received a midnight call from the governor
stopping, at least delaying, his execution.
Early the next morning, I awoke and looked under my bag to find the ‘stage’ I
had been sleeping on was a stack of some thurty-five 6-foot long crates of surface-
to-air missiles (SAM)— StingerCentral for Paktia Province. We had just started our
breakfast of tur chai (black tea), nan (flat, unleavened bread) and gur (a hard brown
sugar-like candy) when the door opened and in walked none other than the NIFA
Field Marshal for Paktia and Kunar Provinces, General Ramatullah Safi, formerly a
Colonel in the Afghan Army and founder of Afghan ‘Special Forces’ who had gone
over to the resistance and NIFA. After breakfast, he, our field leader, (Mohammed
Gailani) and several local commanders (read: tribe leaders with their own tribes)
had a strategy session as to upcoming operations. Jehan and I strolled around
inspecting the camp, its extensive munitions dump and its multiple dug-in bunkers
and we learned not only were we in Stinger Central but also the training center for
candidates for assignment to Stinger teams.

STINGER TEAMS
The most powerful weapon of the Afghan war was the General Dynamics (later,
Raytheon) heat-seeking surface-to-air missile, the Stinger, of such devastating
effectuveness that the legendary Masood himself said “There are only two things
that Afghans must have: the Quran and Stingers” and of which a Soviet journalist
said (to an American) “Your Stingers and your women, they are both very, very
dangerous”.
Stingers were deployed with three-man teams spotted around the military crest
of a hill where they would wait for hapless Russians to fly within range. The Stinger
itself--- effective range, six miles, altitude 11,000 feet at Mach 1.5-- was very effective
at high-flying aircraft but ineffective under one hundred feet or so and the muj
quickly figured out they needed a ‘high man’ with a Stinger and a ‘low man’ with
an RPG— range, 500 meters— for the foolish chopper-jock who sought safety down
low. So effective was the Stinger that it was rumored that, on occasion, Russian
pilots didn’t even wait for the actual launch of the missile but bailed out when they
heard the steady electronic tone indicating the Stinger had ‘locked on’ to them.
Although I could never confirm those rumors as to the SAM’S prowess, I can testify
that applications of the muj to Stinger team had fallen sharply because the teams got
bored sitting around praying and drinking tea while the Russian pilots stayed way
up high out of range.
One day Jehan wangled himself a temporary assignment as ‘low man’ (RPG) to
a Stinger team but even he got bored (you can see it in his face in the photo I took of
him ‘on duty’) and handed the weapon back and we walked back down the hill.
When we came back down to join our group, General Safi had just emerged from
his Joint Chiefs of Staff conference and as we said goodbye, put his hand on my
shoulder and with tears in his eyes, said “When you get home, thank the American
people for the Stinger. Before we had them, we lived in caves and traveled by night.
 AFGHANISTAN, THE FIRST TIME 10

But now we are going to win-- Inshallah. (NOTE: In the weeks after its introduction,
the Russians lost one aircraft per day to the Stinger and even now, on YouTube,
there is a very good video demonstration of the Stinger in Afghanistan in which
General Safi can be seen. But I guess I wasn’t there that day.)

FORWARD OPERATING BASE (FOB)

We parked our MujMobile in the lee of a big-ass hill and walked the rest of the
way, about an hour over moderately smooth trails and along the way, passed what
had obviously been a village with a rather large meeting-hall type building on a
plateau above the stream but had been bombed to a fresh pile of rubble. Word came
back along the column what had happened and when I divined a number of
mujahidin had lost their lives there, I innocently asked “How many were killed?”, I
received a stony look from my translator who tautly informed me that the fighters
were not ‘killed’ because ‘killed’ is what you do to dogs; the mujahidin, he proudly
intoned, were shaheed, meaning ‘martyred’ in the cause of Islam; I never made that
mistake again.
We finally reached what we were told was our FOB, although as I surveyed the
non-descript and featureless hill, I failed to appreciate any tenant improvements
until a cleverly-crafted and concealed log door in a dirt bank was thrown back and I
was ushered into a man-made cave that burrowed under the hill for some fifty
meters and was thirty or forty meters wide but I had to stoop uncomfortably to
walk inside. They had a fire going, but just where the ventilation was that would
prevent us all from dying of carbon monoxide poisoning, I could not tell. I was
shown to what I presumed was the place of honor all the way in the back of the
cave and farthest from the door. After dinner (hah!) and glad to be off my feet and
out of range of whatever the Russians were shooting that night, I crawled into my
new sleeping bag, an interesting story in and of itself. Wanna hear it? Sure you do.

MY NEW SLEEPING BAG, by Forrest Smith

I prepared for my trip by buying some $2000 worth of REI gear, including an ‘Everest-model’
sleeping bag good to a minus50 degrees, which when I got home and looked at my receipt, realized I
had not been charged for. My first thought was ‘screw those REI Berkeley liberals’ but then I told
myself even liberals didn’t deserve to take such a big hit because of one employee’s carelessness,
then my second thought was ‘you know, just as soon as you don’t pay for this and take it to a war
zone, a pissed-off karma is going to make your deluxe Everest sleeping bag your deluxe Everest
body bag’. So I phoned up the REI store manager and told him exactly what had happened and
you’ll never guess what that wonderful and sensitive man did? No, you’re wrong! That’s what I
thought he’d do, too, but what that ***hole actually did was charge me the full sticker price for the
bag plus ding me for the f****** state tax, too, so my purity of heart came at a cost of $800. And
some people say money can’t buy happiness? As for you, REI, I haven’t been back since and
probably won’t.

But even though I was wrapped securely in the sleeping bag I had bought and
paid for, sleep did not come for the simple reason that I have a fear of closed spaces
and ‘freaked out’ at the thought of all that dirt over my head awaiting one Russian
122mm rocket to pour down and bury me so I slowly and quietly, as not to awaken
 AFGHANISTAN, THE FIRST TIME 11

the muj, crawled closer the door. Then I realized halfway wasn’t enough so I moved
all the way over right next to the door. But still I fidgeted because I was inside a
dark, smoky, carbon-monoxide-rich and, with 25 sweating muj, stinky cave and
finally I couldn’t stand it anymore so I took my bag outside, never mind it was as
cold as the proverbial witch’s mammary. Outside was the wide open spaces and, I
shortly discovered, well-lit wide-open spaces since nervous Russian soldiers in
Afghanistan did what nervous American soldiers did in Vietnam, that is, shoot
parachute flares from heavy mortars to illuminate the area all night around their
firebases to forestall enemy attack. The muj had some Pashtun phrase for it that I
don’t remember, but it translated out as ‘the Russian moon’.

IT IS THEIR WAR
“It is better they do it imperfectly than you do it perfectly. For it is their war and their
country and your time here is limited.” (Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” by T.E. Lawrence)
I struggled to keep those wise words in mind as we watched the Afghans in their
daily routine, and non-routine. As both of us had been trained both in the science of
medicine and the craft of the military, Jehan and I tried to give helpful hints, but not
only would they not do it ‘imperfectly”, they usually would not do it at all, or did it
the way they had for centuries, which is to say, their way.
EXAMPLE: Coming in-country, we were riding in the bed of the muj
workhorse, a Toyota pickup, and in order to reach the (comparative) safety of our
hilly area of operations (AO), we had to traverse a wide expanse of open plain in
broad daylight. Imagining the air assets monitoring our movements, Jehan and I
were ‘nervous in the service’ and, as the muj smoked and joked, we ceaselessly
scanned the skies for the death sure to rain down at any moment. Midway over the
broad plain, the MujMobile ground to a halt on a stream bank, out jumped the
guerrillas, plotted a rough azimuth to Mecca and spread their rugs: prayer time.
WTF? said Jehan and both with the same purpose, we jumped out, ripped branches
from nearby bushes, gouging them into the mud at the edge of the stream and
applying our field-expedient camouflage to the bright white truck, after which we
retired a safe distance away and waited. Ritual over, the muj jumped up to behold
their mud-besmirched pride and joy and I suppose we should count ourselves
fortunate we were not shot on the spot but we were forced to wait nervously until
they performed a ritual ablution on the truck before we could get on our way. We
never again tried to camouflage the white trucks but on any stop, retired at least
three bomb-blast radii away. (NOTE: In his 1984 book, Afghanistan: Inside A Rebel
Stronghold, Mike Martin makes exactly this observation in almost exact terms : “we
were crossing a wide plain and the men were constantly scanning the skies, fearful
of attack. . .yet they halted for afternoon prayers and when I observed we were
sitting targets, they replied that God would never allow Muslims to die while at
prayer. I felt rather vulnerable”.
EXAMPLE: Each time we conducted a ‘tailgate clinic’ or an impromptu ‘sick
call’ we would give out pills and capsules but in more cases than not, even after
 AFGHANISTAN, THE FIRST TIME 12

being instructed in his native tongue as to how to take it, i.e. swallow it with water,
the recipient would reach into the depths of his shalwar, pull out a filthy baggie full
of various pills and add our medicine to his collection. Turns out many rural folk
believed the medicines were amulets that would protect them by their mere
presence.
EXAMPLE: Flushed with high hopes of being the founders of the Afghanistan
Army Medical Corps, Jehan and I undertook to give classes to the line soldiers,
starting with the two basic step of combat medicine, ‘self-aid’, in which the
wounded soldier applies a field dressing to his own wound and ‘buddy-aid’ (self-
explanatory). We carefully showed them how to apply it and before nocturnal
combat operations, even pinned a combat dressing to the lapel of each one’s shalwar
kameez but when they returned from the mission, the dressings were still neatly in
place, even on the wounded. Turns out they believed that field dressings, like pills,
were not something actually to be used but amulets to ward off harm.

WEAPONS OF THE MUJAHIDIN

Afghans are legendary for their capitalizing on whatever weapons come to
hand, or can be fashioned by hand, for the pursuit of their twin aims of tribal
supremacy and throwing out whatever invaders happen to wander into their land.
The celebrated Brit, Joseph Kipling, once wrote:
A scrimmage in a Border Station. . .a canter down some dark defile
Two thousand pounds of education. . . drops to a ten-rupee jezail
which speaks of the ease the British soldier (‘two thousand pounds of education’)
was dispatched by a cheap muzzle-loading rifle (‘ten-rupee jezail’). We might
imagine if Joe Kipling were alive today and ‘embedded’ with our Army in, say,
Kandahar, he might update his gloomy quatrain as:
Projected by imperial power. . .product of the USA
A million-dollar Yankee flower. . .pluck’d by a hundred-buck AK
The ‘basics’ of life, such as food, shelter, sanitation and medicine were difficult
to come by but there was no shortage of weapons in Afghanistan, the prime
example being the ubiquitous AK-47 (7.62 x 39 calibre), the most successful small-
arms design in history, scattered RPG’s (rocket-propelled grenades), RPD’s (belt-fed
machine gun), AK-74’s (AK in .223 calibre) and, of course, an abundance of the
almost century-old Lee-Enfield .303’s; everyone had a gun and everyone knew how
to use it. If it is true that “an armed society is a polite society” the Afghans were the
souls of comity.

GOING TO WAR IN STYLE—AFGHAN STYLE

The modern American soldier is thoroughly spoiled in going to war because he
has three huge advantages on his side: 1) air supremacy, meaning death from
above—of the other guy— always on call and; 2) artillery support, to fire 24/7 on
people who piss him off and; 3) the best med-evac system in the world, which
means if wounded, he is seldom more than one hour from advanced medical help.
 AFGHANISTAN, THE FIRST TIME 13

But in my Afghanistan, I had no air support and no artillery and the med-evac
‘system’ consisted of four hundred miles of bumping, banging and bleeding in the
bed of a pickup truck over the same rocky trails and rutted roads over which we
came; the black humor was “anyone who could survive med-evac didn’t need it”.
So for my entire stay inside, the famous final quatrain from Kipling’s “The Young
British Soldier” haunted my mind: “When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s
plains. . .And the women come out to cut up what remains. . .Jest roll to your rifle and blow
out your brains. . .And go to your Gawd like a soldier.”

SPECIALIZED WESTERN MEDICAL BACKUP

Late one night after chow (hah!) we were getting into our sleeping bags when
one of the muj turned on his portable radio and everyone gathered around to listen
to the evening news from Radio Kandahar, the closest large city. At one point they
all burst out laughing and when we asked what was so funny, our guide translated
the radio newsreader’s words as “Yesterday, a column of three hundred ‘rebels’, led by
Mohammed Gailani and with specialized Western medical backup. . .” and which then
went on to describe our movements perfectly. A chill ran down my spine: We were
being watched. All of our ‘low profile’ had been for naught. Visions of personally
experiencing Kipling’s roll to your rifle and blow out your brains came to my brains
and I didn’t sleep so well that night so I was thankful for my little flask of root beer
mouthwash.

COMBAT OPERATIONS
Attacks on Russian compounds and forward bases were conducted most
evenings and Jehan would go along as ‘observer’, or at least ‘observation’ was what
he told me but knowing him, he likely did a lot more than observe and since a
number of times those he went with returned wounded, there must have been
shooting going on out there. After one operation, one of the muj presented me with
one of those blue-gray Russian fur-hats with earlugs and lacquered red star pin, but
whether he had claimed it as war trophy on the operation or bought it in the bazaar
in Peshawar, I never did know nor did I ask. Although I considered going out
myself on the combat operations, as any self-respecting soldier of fortune would
have done, I knew there wasn’t a whole lot one more AK-47 in my hands could
contribute to the mission and it would go very badly for me if I were wounded, not
only for the fact that there was no med evac system and my SF commander would
have my balls in Lucite but most importantly for the cheery sendoff from my
insurance agent: If you get hurt or killed, have them drag you back across the border and
claim it was an accident. Your policies specifically exclude coverage for war zones. Besides,
if I had gotten injured or killed ‘inside’, my wife would have injured or killed me
when I got ‘outside’ and I couldn’t take that chance.

FIRE MISSION
Early one Sunday morning, we were awakened by our FO (Forward Observer)
 AFGHANISTAN, THE FIRST TIME 14

on the ridge who had sighted a Russian convoy led by two armored vehicles
moving on the valley road toward Khost so an impromptu fire mission was called
with everyone ordered to carry one rocket round up the hill. Fearing my picture in
the NYT carrying implements of war would also result in the orchiectomy promised
by my Colonel, I bravely carried Jehan’s gear and camera up the hill while he
carried the deadly munitions (don’t deny it, Jehan, you little sod, you’re guilty of
war crimes and The World Court will catch up with you one day).
Toe-nailed into the sharp slope halfway up was the one and only piece of muj
heavy artillery, an antiquated BM-12 rocket launcher that looked like it might have
last been used on the Germans at the Battle of Stalingrad; but it worked. The
‘gunner’ supervised the loading of all 12 tubes as he communicated on his walky-
talky to the FO, plotting range and azimuth and pushing and pulling the little trailer
over the snowy ground to get the right angle; finally satisfied with the set of his
gun, he said something in Pashto and handed the controller to me as he cranked the
little hand-generator that would supply the electric current to touch off the rocket.
Dr Subhan quickly explained that as chief visiting fireman, I was to have the honor
of the first shot and when I heard the group shout “Allihu Akhbar” (‘God is
supreme’), I was to press the first button, which they did and I did (Are you happy,
Jehan? I admitted it and the World Court will get both of us). After my ceremonial
shot, the controller was passed around and with eleven more Allahu akhbars and
eleven more “Bang-whooshes” of the departing rockets, we sat back to awaited the
BDA (Battle Damage Assessment) from our FO, which came shortly as a total of one
of the armored vehicles gone, three trucks destroyed and four out of commission.
Exactly which shots scored which hits I never did learn so don’t ask.
As we turned to troop back down the hill, I looked down at the ground and
idly noted the fiery rocket back-blasts of our rockets had vaporized all the thick
mounds of snow piled behind the launcher and at the sudden realization, quickly
jerked my head up to behold with horror the large comma-shaped cloud of dense
white mist rising slowly into the clear blue sky, its tail pointing directly at our
position like an accusing finger. I gestured to Jehan and he looked up, then looked
at me with sick eyes, mouthing silently “We’re f*****”. As we filed back down the
hill, I breathed a little prayer that the Russian artillery was not on the job and still in
bed hung-over from Saturday night or whatever young Russian soldiers did on
Sunday mornings. But I’d have to worry about that later-- it was time for tea.

FLAT ROCK TEA & BFK CEREMONY

We came down off the BM-12 fire mission to the [now] famous Flat Rock Tea &
BFK Ceremony, the occasion being the arrival of a notorious local warlord who was
to receive hospitality and tribute from our itinerant band in the form of breakfast,
tea, munitions and in my case, the awarding of a BFK (Big F****** Knife), a coveted
status symbol in the Third World. Four MujMobiles clattered up into our camp and
fifteen-twenty fierce Pathan warriors jumped out, including our warlord guy and
everyone assembled on the wide flat rock in the center of the camp for breakfast.
 AFGHANISTAN, THE FIRST TIME 15

After the hearty meal (mine was MRE’s) and after the tea and speeches and the
formal session wound down, I took the opportunity to give my own flowery speech
(which no one understood but Jehan and he agrees it was a good one) and present
the warlord with the large Gerber fighting knife I had bought for the purpose: his
eyes lit up and he eagerly accepted the offering, distinctly saying “BFK. . .good”.
Then all hell broke loose in the form of a flight of 122mm rockets coming “whoosh”
over the hill and landing “bang” right onto our position. Since my memory for the
traumatic event is rather addled, I quote Jehan’s article in a military magazine: “At
the thunderclap of the first rocket, I threw myself into a depression. . .and the mujahideen
were assuming similar postures, all except Salaam Khan who was still sitting on the rock
drinking his tea. God, I thought, these Green Berets are cool customers.” Truth be known,
with all my adventures to that point, I had not before been the target of artillery or
rocket fire and had not become familiar with the peculiar whistling, screaming and
scything sounds made by the jagged, ragged steel shrapnel flying through the air.
Jehan picks back up: “Salaam asked me, “What’s happening” and his calm vanished with
my words “Shrapnel! We’re under fire!” We ducked and dived along a dry stream bed until
the roar of a 122mm rocket pushed us to the ground followed by a deafening explosion. I
attempted a new speed record through a narrow defile and just ahead, saw a series of small
holes which I assumed were like those the Vietnam villagers disappeared into when the
bombs fell and pushed Salaam Khan into one. But it wasn’t a foxhole, it was a community
latrine. The bombardment ended about ten minutes later and we emerged, the last out being
a very unhappy and unhealthy-smelling Salaam Khan. “It washes off”, I told him, but his
mood did not improve. As far as I was concerned, however never mind the crap, I was
thankful to be alive and I still have the fin from one of the rockets I found after the
‘all-clear’ was sounded, a twisted piece of metal I labeled “From Russia, With
Love”. (NOTE: This was my first painful lesson that ‘outgoing’ artillery goes “bang-
whoosh” and ‘incoming’ goes “whoosh-bang” but I took a quiet satisfaction that the
fecal matter soiling my clothes was all on the outside, none on the inside.)

TWO NIGHTS IN ANOTHER TOWN

One day’s hike from our FOB, we set up a field clinic a short distance away
from the Russian garrison just over a rise. We billeted in a kind of Tri-plex mud hut
condo on the slope of a deep defile with one end apartment a munitions storeroom
piled high with implements of war, the middle room our combination clinic, eating
and sleeping area and the other end apartment the local butcher shop where cuts of
meat hung from the rafters and dried, also as I noticed, rotted in the open air. As
medical people, Jehan and I were grateful to have an actual ‘office’ in which to treat
the military and civilian casualties but as military people horrified that deadly
munitions were co-located with humanitarian assistance material. Right outside my
door, the muj had neatly stacked over sixty plastic yellow-ribbed objects which
looked like decorator flower pots but in reality were Italian-made TS-6.1 anti-
vehicle mines, designed to destroy large tanks; had a single incendiary round hit the
stack or an errant Russian rocket gone off anywhere near, the sympathetic explosion
 AFGHANISTAN, THE FIRST TIME 16

would have blown us all into a fine mist. Though we tried gentle suggestion that it
might be wise to stack high explosives away from people, no one seemed to get the
idea. I didn’t sleep well those two nights in another town. (NOTE: By the time I got
there, munitions from the West (read: US) were in such abundance that the TS-6.1
mines were no longer used as intended but were opened up and their clay-like HE
was burned to heat things, although I wouldn’t stand anywhere near while
someone pried open an anti-tank mine. The muj were either crazier or more
courageous than I, probably both.
We held clinic one day and they came from kilometers around, most
complaining of the usual aches and pains and most going away clutching a pill or
two—which they added to the store they already had in their plastic baggies—but
we did treat a few gunshot and shrapnel wounds and a dozen napalm burns. Jehan
showed a surprising knowledge, if an unhealthy zeal, for dentistry and pulled a
succession of bothersome teeth, which brings up the point of Afghan dentition: The
muj loved sweets in whatever form they could get them, gnawing on raw sugar
cane, eating gur, a brown sugar-like hard candy and drinking tea as a super-
saturated sugar solution but in spite of the fact I never witnessed tooth-brushing, an
Afghan smile revealed either of two sights: the decayed dentition of a meth addict
or a movie-idol set of pearly thirty-two’s. I’m wondering if tooth decay is genetic.

A RECOVERED MEMORY
We had just gotten underway for the trip out when we stopped for a little ‘tea
and tailgate clinic’ in a small village along the road. After tea and treatment of
several villagers, as we started back down the road toward our truck, we noticed a
large explosion on a hill in the distance, so far away that it took several seconds for
the sound to reach us, meaning the impact was roughly two miles away. I raised my
camera and idly took a picture of the interesting sight and as we were wondering
why a bare hill rated an expensive artillery round, another explosion occurred
somewhat closer that I calculated to be about a mile away but describing a line
directly at us and the light suddenly dawned—Holy Moley, Batman, they’re coming for
us—as it quickly became obvious that the firing was not blind and not random but
was being directed by some Forward Observer up in the hills or up in the air. It was
one of the few times in my life that I realized someone was doing his best to kill me-
-- personally me, that is. Frantic, we ran for the truck and at that point my memory
ended, but in his Special Forces article Jehan picked it up as:
“Salaam Khan was busy verbally abusing the driver who had locked the keys
in the truck and himself out. The mujahideen pleaded with me as I strode
forward to break the passenger window with a rifle butt— they did not want
the vehicle damaged. But ‘Salaam Khan’, obviously still sore as a result of his
experience with the latrine, quickly solved the problem of getting to the lock as
he forced his fingers between the window and the outer door panel on the
driver’s side and tore it off with his bare hands.”
My memory apparently picked up again after I lifted the locking lever and we got
into the truck and I remember flying crazily down the mountain road around a
 AFGHANISTAN, THE FIRST TIME 17

bend out of sight of the murderous walking barrage of FO, where we stopped and
Jehan and I piled out onto the road, collapsing in laughter. It wasn’t until I read
Jim’s article that the mystery was cleared up as to why when I came home and
resumed my medical practice, the great pain in my fingertips prevented me from
doing surgery for over a week. Adrenaline is a funny thing and the immediate
prospect of being blown into a fine red mist produces a lot of adrenaline.

COMING OUT
The higher we got as we drove up the long mountain track over which we had
entered, the harder the rain fell until on the down-slope the road itself became a
flashflood with the feeling not of riding in a wheeled vehicle over land but in a wild,
pitching canoe down the rapids of the American River but somehow we reached the
valley safely. Only later did we learn that the large storm that was passing over the
mountains just as we left, washed out every single bridge and culvert on the track
and totally closed the road for six weeks and when that same storm passed over the
mountains into the great valley we had left ‘inside’ it brought to a halt all
operations, both Russian and muj, for over two months. So my timing could not
possibly have been better for my entrance to Afghanistan and my exit.

ANOTHER RECOVERED MEMORY

Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely considering my Eighty-Second Airborne
Division son also has huge memory gaps for his own time ‘inside’ Afghanistan, it
wasn’t until I reviewed a file I had not seen in twenty years that I recovered a
memory of my trip which I call “Guess who’s coming to dinner—not?” Here’s what
happened: Coming out of the wilds of Afghanistan, we arrived at the five-star (hah!)
Peshawar Pearl Continental Hotel and I was so fatigued, debilitated and nauseated
that I retired immediately to my room. Ever the astute combat medic, ‘Jehan’, now
reverted to ‘Jim’, diagnosed my problem as terminal dehydration and arrived at my
door with two ice-cold beers in hand, both of which I quickly consumed and fell
into a deep slumber. As Jim later told me, when he went back down to the hotel
lobby, he met a group of Saudis on their way ‘inside’ and their ‘leader’ extended his
dinner invitation to the two of us to brief him on the latest conditions at the front.
Jim ran back up to my room and banged on the door as loudly as possible but failed
to rouse me, so he shoved under my door the little note that had lain forgotten in
my file for twenty years: Bin Laden—Dinner?
On the sidewalk outside the Pearl next morning, an interpreter introduced me
to an unnaturally-tall, soft-spoken Saudi Arabian who, when he learned I was a
Special Forces physician, invited me to go back ‘inside’ as doctor for his group.
Although I was flattered at his offer, I was anxious to get back to my family and
medical practice, not to mention recover my personal health and the thirty pounds I
left somewhere ‘inside’, so I declined and we parted. All of which is to prepare you
against the possible day a photograph should pop up on the internet showing yours
truly in shalwar kameez and beard standing agreeably beside the world’s [now] most
 AFGHANISTAN, THE FIRST TIME 18

wanted man, please understand I am not, nor have I ever been, a terrorist and also
understand that the means of the governmental overthrow I advocate are strictly,
oh so strictly, non-violent. (NOTE: If OBL’s usual physician, the Egyptian Ayman al
Zawahiri, was there that day, I cannot recall but since at the time I had no clue who
either of them was, I wouldn’t have recognized him anyway.)

GOING HOME
I must have looked the pitiable wreck that I felt there in the departure lounge in
the Islamabad airport as the British Airways station approached me and asked if I
were “all right”. When I told him I was just a bit tired from being ‘inside’ for the last
month, he asked for my ticket, took it behind the counter and shortly returned,
handing me my new ‘Business Class’ ticket all the way through to San Francisco.
Those British—as full of hospitality as the Afghans.

EYEWITNESS TO HISTORY
Only after I came home and read articles in Time Magazine did I realize I had
been a walk-on (a movie extra with no lines) in “The Battle of Khost”, a rather large
historical drama in which the Russians mounted a great offensive of 20,000+ troops,
backed by artillery, helicopter gun-ships and Sukhoi-25 attack jets to open the fifty-
mile road from Gardez to Khost, which had lain under siege for ten years. Most
analysts saw the Battle of Khost not as an end in itself but as Russia’s ‘eleven
o’clock number’ in which they would once more demonstrate their awesome and
unstoppable military power in preparation for the final scene, the big ‘production
number’ of driving over the river and through the woods back to their own
homeland, which in point of historic fact they did eleven months later to end nine
years in Afghanistan.

ICON FROM A WAR

Occupying a place of honor on my wall is the icon of my first trip ‘inside’: a
crudely-drawn but gaily- colored picture of a school bus being attacked by a
helicopter gunship. This picture was tacked on the wall of a hotel where we once
stopped for tea and when I admired it, true to the Afghan code of hospitality, the
ten-year old artist who painted it, and son of the hotel owner, pulled it down and
handed it to me. Every day I pass that picture and wonder if that child survived the
war, the Taliban ‘occupation’ and the last eight years of whatever we’re calling this
war. If he has, he would be about thirty years of age now and I would love nothing
better than to find him and give his artwork back to him.

THIS SPACE FOR RANT

When I got home, I went over to Berserkeley and had a T-shirt run up in camo
with large black block lettered legend-- “RUCK THE FUSSIANS”— and I offended
liberals with that for years. But now it’s as out of date as the companion piece I also
had run up—“NUKE JANE FONDA”. But the young nowadays have neither a
 AFGHANISTAN, THE FIRST TIME 19

sense of history nor of humor, so it’s just as well.

POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER (PTSD)

I was glad to be home in a ‘real’ world but in the middle of the very first night
realized I had smuggled some of that ‘unreal’ world home with me when a pair of
military jets out of the nearby Naval Air Station came screaming over the ridgeline
directly over my house and I found myself trying to dig under the bed in fear. Next
day, while marveling as to the amazing coincidence of those fighter jets picking that
particular night to follow a route they had never taken before, I suddenly realized
they often came over the ridge and at all hours, I had just never heard them before,
that is, really heard them. And it was over a year before I stopped my internal
cringing at the slapping sound of helicopter blades. Yeah, I know, mine is a classic
case of a classic syndrome but one that did not arise de novo from my brief
experience over there, as Afghanistan was more a booster dose for the case I had
conceived long ago in my days and nights of fear of an alcoholic father; PTSD and I
were old friends.

LESSONS LEARNED
Not so much. I didn’t become a ‘better person’ and I didn’t ‘see God’ or have
any of the epiphanies a person might expect to have in a place and situation like
that. It was probably very selfish of me to leave a family behind and risk my
physical well-being and livelihood just to indulge myself in trying to prove to
someone that I really was OK. Mine were not the actions of a fully-mature adult but
then again, I never claimed to be one, so never mind the criticism as the self-
flagellation phase has already been completed. I guess we all have our own forms of
drugs and this was mine. But I promised myself I’d never return to Afghanistan.

*************************************************
EPILOGUE: After the Russians were driven out of Afghanistan, my old friend
General Ramatullah Safi became the Taliban’s European Ambassador to the UN
and although the man I knew was anything but a terrorist, his name was actually
on the US official list of those ‘suspected of links to al Qaeda’ but he was
successful in having his name removed after he recanted his Taliban affiliation and
adopted a more centrist position. As for Afghanistan itself, my 82nd Airborne
Ranger paratrooper son found it not significantly improved or even changed since
his father had seen it two decades earlier and he, too, is not eager to return. My old
friend Jehan Mohammed— real name James Shortt-- has been much in the UK news
lately for allegedly falsifying his military credentials and in fact is the subject of a
whole WikiPedia entry supposedly detailing those falsifications. While I can’t
speak to the validity of any of the official honors or decorations he might claim, I
can state for a fact that the man has no shorttage (intentional) of personal bravery
 AFGHANISTAN, THE FIRST TIME 20

and courage in combat situations and can testify to that as an eyewitness. I can
also testify to his skill as a combat medic and I’d be proud to have him with me
anywhere under combat conditions. What he might say about me, well, I don’t
know. And whether or not his detractors will allow me to write something for the
website remains to be seen but I hope they will use what I have written here to
provide some balance in his favor because it pains me to see people vilifying a man
who was such a great and good friend to me in a very trying experience. As for my
own sanity, so concerned was I that I had fantasized the Osama bin Laden meeting,
I recently got back in touch with Jim/Jehan, with whom I had not talked for fifteen
years and who is now living in Ireland, and I casually asked him some details
about our trip (so as not to program him) then casually, oh so casually, asked if he
remembered any perhaps unusual people we might have met on the trip and he
replied without hesitation “You mean Osama bin Laden? Sure.” When I asked him
why he had not written about our meeting the world’s most wanted man, he said
“With all the s*** they’ve been printing about me, who but you was going to believe
that story?” I was happy to see I had not left my sanity ‘inside’ Afghanistan for
had Jim not confirmed what I had feared was only a fevered fantasy, I would never
have told the story. And as for you, Osama, if you’re reading this: Lighten up, big
guy-- we were friends once. That’s got to count for something.