War Zones for Idiots

Travel Stories: The "World Series of Journalism" had begun in Afghanistan, and Tom Bissell didn't have to qualify to play. He just had to show up.

Photo by Tom Bissell

Two journalists were waiting at the Friendship Bridge when Michael and I pulled up. Ravi Nessman’s shaven head revealed a formidably lumpy skull, and his scraggly goatee suggested some time away from the hot-water trappings of civilization. He normally worked out of South Africa for the Associated Press, and the prospect of venturing into Afghanistan did not seem to faze him. Markus Bensmann was a large, Cheshire-grinning German in the employ of a Japanese newspaper, as Japanese reporters were apparently forbidden from working in war zones. That a civilization only a few generations removed from kamikaze missions now shirked combat suggested the possibility of a somewhat less apocalyptic future for Afghanistan. Ravi and Markus stood next to the Friendship Bridge’s gate, enclosed in an atoll of luggage—huge, hardy bags packed with satellite phones and laptops. Provided they traveled to Mazar-i-Sharif ahead of us, I decided I would not much worry about highway robbery.

“Bissell, Thomas,” the bridge guard called out.

I gathered up my gear and was preparing to cross over to the other side of the checkpoint when Michael began arguing in Russian with the bridge’s commander.

“What’s going on, Michael?”

Michael looked at me in disgust. “I’m on their bloody list, but for some reason my name has a big ‘NYET’ written next to it. I can’t cross. You’ll have to go without me.”

I looked at Ravi and Markus. They shrugged.

“No,” I said. “I’m only going in with you.”

Without remark Ravi and Markus started off toward Afghanistan, while Michael and I sped toward the center of Termez to straighten things out. When we got back the bridge guards seemed to be standing in the same positions. “Name?”

“You know my name,” Michael said. “We were just here. Has the ministry called?”

The commander fixed his small, piggish eyes on Michael, then turned his clipboard around. There, next to Michael’s name, “NYET” was crossed out. We threw our backpacks over our shoulders, walked beneath the lifted gate, and strolled uphill along a blacktop road to the next checkpoint, a ramble of buildings so tightly arranged and similarly designed the area had the feel of a village under military occupation. Jeeps rolled by, their Uzbek pilots saluting us. Sharpshooters patrolled the shore of the Amu Darya. A fleet of green armored personnel carriers stood parked. Looking at the Friendship Bridge’s gimcrack first checkpoint provided no sense that something this operational existed just beyond it. For years this area had been one of the most sensitive pressure points in the Soviet Union, and the air still felt sick with some violent inevitability. A lieutenant with cartoonishly large epaulettes appeared, then, and walked alongside us in escort. “Going to Afghanistan, yes?” the lieutenant asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Looking for heroin?”

“Mmm,” I said, uncomfortably.

“He’s being friendly, I think,” Michael whispered.

“Actually,” I said, “I’m joining al-Qaeda.”

He laughed and slapped me on the back. “Ha! Good luck!”

The lieutenant left us to our fate, and we walked along the bridge for a hundred yards in total silence. Then Michael burst out laughing. “My God,” he said.

“I know. I can’t believe this. I can’t believe you let me do this.”

“You’ll thank me,” he said. “In one hour we’ll be drinking tea in Mazar-i-Sharif, and you’ll thank me.”

Uzbek officials had, for much of the delay in opening the Friendship Bridge, maintained that engineers needed to vouchsafe its integrity. Walking upon it now made it difficult to see what needed to be reinforced. A trim two-lane span with shallow train tracks running down the center, the bridge was splendid, solid, clean—until we came to its indisputably Afghan side. Suddenly graffiti streaked along the girders, all of it scrawled in indecipherable Arabic-alphabet Persian. An orb of helpless illiteracy closed around my brain. It seemed like an emergency that I turn around. Michael, perhaps sensing this, once again took my arm.

To enter Afghanistan is to learn five interesting things. Hiring a taxi-yellow Toyota Corolla is (1) incredibly easy. The seventy-kilometer journey from the Friendship Bridge to Mazar-i-Sharif costs (2) a not unreasonable fifty dollars. Afghanistan’s time is (3) one half hour behind Uzbekistan’s, the month we know as December is (4) actually called Qus, and the year, as it happens, is (5) 1380.

Our driver raced along the highway at speeds I had known previously only as figures of speech. Repetitive, fascinatingly awful Afghan music keened through the badly wired speakers. On all sides the Dash-te-Laili Desert expanded with interstellar vastness. Yet somehow the driver knew the ailing highway’s every knot and gouge, slowing down to a speed that scarcely registered any disturbance. This was the northernmost portion of Afghanistan, a largely arid desert that fertilizes as one travels south. The whole of northern Afghanistan is separated from the south by the highest mountains of the Hindu Kush (which means “Hindu killer,” evidently with good reason), and the regions were mutually inaccessible as recently as the mid-1960s, when the Salang Pass Tunnel was completed. The mostly Uzbek-, Tajik-, and Hazara-populated quarter of northern Afghanistan contains about eighty percent of the nation’s industrial wealth and sixty percent of its agricultural resources. This has been a historical source of consternation to the south’s more populous Pashtun inhabitants, a people not known for their even tempers.

The desert kept growing, a nightmare of smooth gray sand that looked as though the color had been blasted out of it. The Romans had been amazed, millennia ago, by Central Asians’ ability to navigate the desert solely by the position of the stars. This was suddenly not at all amazing. Out here, one was either Copernicus or vulture bait. The memento mori of Afghanistan’s never-ending war appeared in the form of blasted green shells of T-62D tanks and abandoned 122mm howitzers. Some of the tanks seemed one payload of fuel from being operational while others had holes blown in them that looked like the bloom of some metallic flower. We soon happened upon our first checkpoint. Michael’s and my doors were yanked open. Biblically bearded faces peered in at us, free-swinging Kalashnikov barrels arcing into the Toyota. The soldiers quickly slammed shut the doors and slapped the Toyota’s roof. Our driver floored it.

“You okay?” Michael asked.

“Right as rain.”

“I ask because your eyes are smashed shut.”

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