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Kabul, Afghanistan Afghans have strange ways of memorializing their wars. They weave rugs with crudely rendered illustrations of tanks and the twin towers and other hieroglyphs depicting invasions and withdrawals; they put Soviet fighter jets high up on stilts like big tin gargoyles to ornament their airports. They fill a museum in Herat with tanks and helicopters and armored vehicles rendered impotent by mujahideen ambushes, proudly (if prematurely) displayed as trophies of war and homage to independence.
Kabul's museum has claymores and antitank mines, fragmentation grenades, rocket-propelled grenades, and rounds as big as your forearm, all in open display cases so you can reach in and pick the things up. I see ordnance from Russia, England, China, Egypt, Italy, Pakistan, and America, buried relics that were littered across the country by a ceaseless procession of invaders backed by a long roster of international meddlers. But the museum's specialty is antipersonnel explosives: land mines.
My first month in Afghanistan, I drove out of the city, north on Shamali Road to an empty expanse of earth leading up to the mountains that once provided perches for rival warlords. After the Taliban fled, this for a time was a place of peace, where people lived, played, prayed, and brought their goats to graze. But then a woman hauling water stepped on a pressure-activated antipersonnel mine, and they knew the earth was charged.
In came the mine clearers to excavate the earth, first tracing paths with their metal detectors and lining them with stones painted white—the nationally recognized symbol for neutralized land. Red rocks mean live mines. They focused on a barren creek bed that provided natural cover for fighters advancing on Bagra-m airbase. The Soviets and then the Northern Alliance planted mines there, creating an explosive moat that extends twenty minutes in each direction (the mine clearers measure distance in time, which is the critical metric if one of them needs to be driven to a hospital).
The day I'm there, they unearth an Iranian mine that hasn't seen daylight since it was buried seventeen years ago and that can't be removed because it's planted against the wall of the creek bed, which has been baked by summer heat and is now brittle and crumbling. And anyway, they suspect it's been jury-rigged to other explosives in a "daisy chain" designed to take the legs off an entire regiment. So they blow it themselves and watch black smoke and pulverized rock shoot fifty feet into the sky.
In the capital city, amputees are everywhere, sitting on street sides, pushing out stumps where limbs once were to power their appeals for spare change. Kabul, so goes the joke, is the only city in the world where one shoe is as valuable as a pair.
Just over a year ago, I sat in Duke Chapel wearing a cap and gown, ushered off by President Richard Brodhead's baccalaureate address, in which he disclosed in front of thousands that one of the graduating students was going to Afghanistan as a freelance journalist. At the time, it was still just an idea, one of questionable prudence and incomplete preparation, and I'd tried to be discreet with my plans in case, for one reason or another, they fell through. Even so, somehow, everyone seemed to know Brodhead was talking about me.
Getting there was still an issue when Brodhead made his speech. I had relied—naïvely, as it turns out—on Duke ponying up some cash in the form of grants or a fellowship, since the idea had been so well received among the few faculty members and administrators with whom I had quietly shared my plans. Brodhead had said something earlier while I was in his office preparing for an alumni event I'd been asked to take part in. "Sometimes the most important things we do in life, we do without an institution supporting us." Here a cynical mind reads shrewd jujitsu—a seasoned tactician appeasing an impressionable mind. I had little choice but to embrace it.
And so, late last August, I went to my bank and withdrew all the money I'd made writing throughout college. I was literally going for broke, and, grasping for humor to assuage the anxiety, I asked the teller to give me my money in a metal suitcase with a combo lock. She smiled feebly, and instead offered a manila envelope and a bundle of bills that fit easily into one fist.
I once heard the parade of young journalists who marched into Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation described as manifestations of Hemingway, fulfilling a gloriously distorted notion of what it meant to be a man. And that was me, twenty years later, coming to watch war and consume culture like a tourist. My senior year at Duke became a two-semester endeavor to justify the journey to myself and those around me, which was more than anything an exercise in the selective disregard of well-meaning advice.
Finally, I found my rationalization in a Vanity Fair story that mentioned the 2005 terrorist attacks on the London subway, which I ripped out and inked up with a circle around the following line: "…the 7/7 bombings, which killed 52 civilians (including a young Afghan, At[t]ique Sharifi, who had fled to London to escape the Taliban)…."
I learned that Sharifi had a younger sister, Farishta, he never saw again after leaving the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif in 2002, though it was her he sent all his spare money to; Farishta, really, the one for whom he'd made the journey in the first place.
So I'd go find the story of the boy in the parentheses, first landing in London (where I found enough to publish a feature for Esquire UK), and then I'd head to Afghanistan, freelance awhile, maybe find a development project to attach myself to, and when the time was right, go north to find Farishta. In the little litigations in my mind, this was how I argued away the risks, though I had no illusions about the fact that my postgraduate trajectory had been determined by a dead young man stuck in a sentence as an afterthought.
Members of my family resigned themselves to the fact that the white Jewish prodigal son was decamping for the land of the Taliban, and when it came time for me to leave, my father, who has always indulged in denial about the dangers faced by his children, went through the ritual of packing me a first-aid kit. He chose the clutch-sized kind with tiny Band-Aids, best suited for minor sewing accidents.
I arrived in Kabul amid what most reports deemed a deteriorating security situation. The surviving hostages from the bus full of Korean missionaries kidnapped six weeks before had just been freed by the Taliban, and the country had been allowed a brief media-orchestrated sigh of optimism. But the airport I flew into was bombed the day before I arrived. I would be staying initially in a fortified compound belonging to one of the countless NGOs operating in Afghanistan, and I was told as a matter of course which room was the sturdiest in case of a rocket attack. It was advice furnished with the same dubious air I imagined Cold War grade-school teachers assumed when instructing their students to hide under desks in case of a nuclear attack—as if a slab of wood could deflect an atomic blast wave and nuclear fallout. Likewise, I had little confidence the mud-brick walls around me would offer any resistance should it start raining mortar rounds.
I made Afghan friends, because I had no bureau and needed people to look after me. I saw my share of suicide bombings, watched how people reacted to them, went to morgues afterward and saw what bombs in confined spaces do to bodies. I went to the Iranian border. I got arrested getting a haircut. And I wrote about everything, for Esquire and Newsweek, a piece each for Durham's Independent Weekly and The Philadelphia Inquirer, my adopted and hometown papers, respectively.
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