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.

The road came to a T. The road to the left led to still-shaky Kunduz (to visit Kunduz, an ancient though probably still pertinent proverb holds, is tantamount to suicide), to the right the relative calm of Mazar-i-Sharif. After turning toward Mazar, we saw spaced throughout the desert many stranded semi-truck containers, fading stencils providing the only clues to their plundered contents. Some of the empty containers were now being used as makeshift offices for checkpoint soldiers. Ahmed Rashid’s book Taliban (which Western journalists in the region were carrying the way missionaries lug Bibles) describes how these desert fixtures had been party to innovations far more horrifying. It took the Taliban three attempts to take Mazar. The first was disastrous. After a second, equally disastrous sally, Mazaris locked 1,200 Taliban prisoners of war within these empty truck trailers and cooked them to death in the sun.

We came to Mazar. More than a month after the city’s now-famous prison uprising, everything still seemed vaguely on fire. The day had grown chilly, and whole societies formed around whichever trash barrels had a healthy fire in them. On streets which only weeks ago had seen horrific street fighting, old men wobbled on ancient bicycles, children chased one another along the curb with sticks, and pairs of burqa-clad women drifted from shop to shop. The shops’ awnings and signs were crowded with Arabic, the few visible English words—“Agency of Zia Khan, Ltd.,” “Germany Eurol Super Fund,” “A. Computer”—leaping out at the eye with the immediacy of a bat in a white room. Yellow Corollas caromed through the crowds, swerving widely to avoid the local warlords’ mud-flapped and heavily chromed Toyota four-by-fours, not one of which held less than a dozen well-armed bearded passengers, Kalashnikovs and grenade launchers jutting out from the beds like weaponized porcupine quills. Spray-painted upon each truck’s fuselage was some nominal English-language indication of affiliation: “Dragon Man,” “Mercedez-Benz 2000,” “Power Hour,” and “Killer Brothers” some of the more memorable. I rolled down the window. Roasted chicken flesh and human sewage and the bitter headache smell of burning trash mixed with alien Persian voices and a never-ending chorus of car horns sounding as if an entire parking garage’s worth of vehicles had seen the simultaneous trigger of their alarms.

The driver steered us down an unpaved road through a transportingly ancient stone labyrinth to the United Nations’ main compound in the city. Inside, we saw a young man and an old man chatting in a huge, lovely courtyard. The younger man, Solim, had a round face and a thick black mustache and spoke very good English. Where was everybody? Michael asked.

Everyone was “out,” the older man explained, as he welcomed us to a nearby table and arranged for tea. Most of the U.N. staff had been forced to evacuate Mazar in the wake of September 11, and maneuvering the U.N.‘s various operations back onto their runners was going to take time. Had we heard about the grenade?

“Grenade?” Michael asked.

The older man shrugged. “A grenade was thrown into the money-changers’ market yesterday. Very terrible thing for our city. Forty people were injured.”

“No one died?” I asked.

“No,” he said, then smiled. “Afghans are tough.”

Solim asked if we had arranged for a translator during our time in Mazar city. In case not, Solim knew very many literate young men in Mazar city whose incurable pleasure it would be to assist us. “How about you?” Michael said. “What are you doing now? Are you free?”

“Of course yes,” Solim said. “We warmly welcome guests in Mazar city.”

“How are things here?” I asked, once we were moving again. “Is Mazar safe?”

“Of course yes,” Solim said. “Provided one is indoors before curfew, Mazar city is very safe.” The U.N.-recommended curfew was 5 p.m. It was now just after three.

“So, after the curfew, it’s not safe?”

“Of course yes,” Solim said. “At this time Mazar city has some security problems.”

We drove a few blocks to the Barat Hotel. On the way, Michael pointed at an old woman selling, among her Chinese and Pakistani tchotchkes, a small pile of yellow food packets. “There,” he said. “Those are the food packets the Americans air-dropped last month, aren’t they?”

“Of course yes,” Solim said. “Quite delicious. Made in Texas!”

The Barat was an admirably ordinary seven-story building across the street from Mazar’s central square, where the Tomb of Ali, the Fourth Caliph, stood among duck-filled ponds and gardens like a blue-tiled castle. Inside the hotel we found two floors’ worth of Western journalists, including Jeff Schaeffer from the Associated Press and Ravi and Markus from the Friendship Bridge. All were stricken with bed-head, coarse with stubble, sour-breathed, sneaker-shod. They stood chatting outside a hotel room they had transformed into media Mission Control. One look inside at the satellite phones and laptops rigged up to a portable generator and I grasped why this hotel had its own armed guard. They were surprised we had gotten over—and, perhaps, a little concerned, as it meant more beaks pecking at Mazar’s small pile of available feed. What were Michael and I hoping to “get” here? The camps. They nodded, as cordial as in-laws. The aid angle was a grim one.

All the same, Mazar was a great place for stories, Jeff said. “There are hardly any journalists here. It’s not this big media fuckfest yet.”

“The grenade yesterday was amazing,” another reporter chimed in. “There was still blood on the concrete when we got there.”

Ravi was less sanguine, having spent much of the day looking into the incident. The wires were burning: Had the Taliban returned? Ravi determined this was unlikely. One witness told him he saw two Northern Alliance soldiers rough-housing, and that during the friendly scuffle the grenade had been knocked free.

The talk soon turned to other wars, other places where one stood knee-deep in confusion and panned for information. Most everyone had covered combat or its brute equivalent before. Ravi, for instance, had found himself amid several African riots; Jeff had spent time in the West Bank during the Intifadah; Michael, I now learned, had once missed by a single hour being incinerated in a shelled building in Chechnya.

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