Fire

by Sebastian Junger

  A long winter swell will be running. The sunlight will catch the spray like diamonds. He’ll be in the bow with his thigh against the foredeck and the harpoon held high. The past and the future will fall away, until there are no politics, no boycotts, no journalists. There will be just one man with an ancient weapon and his heart in his throat.

  ESCAPE FROM KASHMIR

  1996

  The guerrillas appeared on the ridgeline shortly before dusk and walked down the bare hillside into the Americans’ camp without bothering to unsling their guns. They were lean and dark and had everything they needed on their persons: horse blankets over their shoulders; ammunition belts across their chests; old tennis shoes on their feet. Most of them were very young, but one was at least thirty and hard-looking around the eyes—“a killer,” one witness said. Jane Schelly, a schoolteacher from Spokane, Washington, watched them come.

  “There were ten or twelve of them,” she says, “and they were dressed to move. They didn’t point their guns or anything; they just told us to sit down. Our guides told us they were looking for Israelis.”

  Schelly and her husband, Donald Hutchings, were experienced trekkers in their early forties who took a month every summer to travel somewhere in the world: the Tatra Mountains in Slovakia; the Annapurna Massif; Bolivia. Hutchings, a neuropsychologist, was a skilled technical climber who had led expeditions in Alaska and the Cascade Range. He knew about altitude sickness, he knew about ropes, and he was completely at ease on rock and in snow. The couple had considered climbing farther east, in Nepal, but had set their sights instead on the Zanskar Mountains in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. For centuries, British colonists and Indian royalty had traveled to the region to escape the summer heat, and over the past twenty years it had become a mecca for Western trekkers who didn’t want to test themselves in the higher areas of the Himalayas. It is a staggeringly beautiful land of pine forests and glaciers and—since an Indian government massacre of thirty or forty protesters in its capital, Srinagar, in 1990—simmering civil war.

  The conflict had decimated tourism, but by 1995 Indian officials in Delhi had begun reassuring Westerners that the high country and parts of Srinagar were safe, so in June of that year Schelly and Hutchings headed up there with only the vaguest misgivings. Even the State Department, which issues warnings about dangerous places (and had Kashmir on the list at the time), will admit that Americans visiting such places are far more likely to die in a car accident than as a result of a terrorist attack. The couple hired two native guides and two ponymen (and their horses) and trekked up into the Zanskar Mountains. After ten days, on July 4, they were camped in the Lidder Valley, at eight thousand feet.

  The militants, heads wrapped in scarves, secured Schelly and Hutchings’s camp, rounded up a Japanese man and a pair of Swiss women who were camped nearby, and then left all of them under guard while the rest of the band hiked farther up the Lidder. A mile and a quarter away was a large meadow—the Yellowstone of Kashmir, as Schelly put it—that was guaranteed to yield a bonanza of Western trekkers. Sure enough, the militants returned to the lower camp two hours later with a forty-two-year-old American named John Childs, his native guide, and two Englishmen, Keith Mangan and Paul Wells. Childs, separated with two daughters, was traveling without his family.

  The leader of the militant group, Schelly would learn later, was Abdul Hamid Turki, a seasoned guerrilla who had fought the Russians in Afghanistan and was now a field commander for a Pakistan-based separatist group called Harkat-ul Ansar. He ordered all the hostages to sit down at the entrance to one tent. Childs, nervous, looked down at the ground, trying to avoid eye contact with anyone. He was already convinced that the guerrillas were going to kill him, and he was looking for a chance to escape. A cold rain started to fall, and Turki asked for all their passports. The documents were collected, the militants attempted to read the papers upside down, and then they declared that all the Western men would have to come with them to talk to their senior commander. That was a three-hour walk away, in the village of Aru; they would be detained overnight and released in the morning, said the militants. Schelly was to walk to the upper camp with one of her guides.

  “After I left, the men [were told] to lie down and pull their jackets over their heads, and that if they looked up, they’d be shot,” says Schelly, who learned these details later from Child’s guide. “The [kidnappers] went through the tents, stealing stuff. And then they took the guys off. By ten o’clock I’d gone to the upper camp and come back down [with the wife and the girlfriend of the Englishmen], and we all piled into one tent because we were still scared. I was awake at four the next morning, and I just kept looking down the trail thinking they’d be coming anytime now. It was six-thirty, and then seven, and then nine; that’s when the knot in my stomach started.”

  Finally, Childs’s guide returned. He had a note with him that he had been instructed to give to “the American woman.” It said, “For the American Government only,” and it was a list of twenty-one people the militants wanted released from Indian prisons. The top three were Harkat-ul Ansar.

  The kidnapped men walked most of the night. They weren’t being taken to the “senior commander”—he didn’t exist—they were just being led deep into the mountains. The deception reminded John Childs of the tactics the Nazis used to cajole people into the gas chambers, and made him all the more determined to escape. The men walked single file through dark forests of pines and then up past the tree line into the great alpine expanses of the Zanskar Range. It was wild, ungovernable country the Indian Army didn’t even attempt to control, and Childs believed that there was no way anyone was going to save them or even find them. They were on their own.

  “I was convinced [the militants] were going to shoot us, and so as soon as I heard someone chamber a round into one of those weapons, I was going to take off into the woods,” says Childs. “At one point we crossed a stream—it was snowmelt season, and the mountain streams were absolutely raging torrents—and I considered jumping in and flushing down to the bottom, but it would have been instant death.”

  Childs kept his eyes and ears open and waited. A chemical engineer for an explosives company, he was used to solving problems. This was just another one: how to escape from sixteen men with machine guns. There were personalities, quirks, rifts among his captors he was sure he could exploit. He started lagging while he walked, seeing if he could stretch the line out a little bit; he started taking mental notes of the terrain; he started probing for weaknesses in the group. “Escape is a mental thing,” he says. “Ninety percent is getting yourself prepared to take advantage of an opportunity or create an opportunity. I knew that given enough time, I’d get away.”

  Late that night they came upon a family of nomads at a cluster of three log huts. The head of the family stepped out into the darkness to give Turki a hug. Then the militants and hostages all squeezed into the huts and fell into an exhausted sleep. A few hours later, as soon as it was light, Childs sat up and peered through a chink in the wall: alpine barrens and rock, nothing more. Escaping through the forest would have been at least a possibility, but crossing a mile of open meadow would be suicide. He’d be cut down by gunfire in the first twenty steps.

  After the hostages were given a quick meal of chapatis, rice, and a local yogurt dish called lassi, they lined up on the trail and started walking again. This would become their routine in the next several days: up at dawn, hike all day, sleep in nomads’ huts at night. The militants bought—or took—whatever food they wanted from the nomads and never had to carry more than a blanket and their guns. They told the hostages that they had been trained in Pakistan, near the town of Gilgit, and had come across the border on foot. They’d been in the mountains for months together and were prepared to die for their cause. When Donald Hutchings tried to engage them in talk about their families, one of the militants just patted his gun and said, “This is my family.”

  India and Pakistan have fought three wars over
Kashmir, and Turki’s band was the latest permutation in the fifty-year conflict. Harkat-ul Ansar (HUA) is committed to overthrowing Indian (thus, Hindu) rule in Kashmir and absorbing the state into the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Since 1990 the militancy, as the rebel movement is known, has been waging a sporadic guerrilla campaign against Indian authority with automatic rifles, hand grenades, and other small arms acquired from Pakistan. Turki called the group he commanded Al Faran, a reference to a mountain in Saudi Arabia near where the Islamic prophet Muhammad was born. The first time anyone had ever heard of Al Faran was on July 4, 1995, when they came walking down out of the mountains into Schelly and Hutchings’s camp.

  The militants led the hostages by day through snowfields and high passes, traveling north. Childs’s impression was that they were simply marking time in the high country, avoiding the pony trails in the valleys, where they might run into Indian soldiers. As the day wore on, the militants became less worried about being caught, and their vigilance slackened a bit. Turki remained dour and implacable, but the younger ones warmed up to the hostages. They called Don Hutchings chacha, meaning “uncle,” and practiced their high school English whenever they could. Far from being threatening or abusive, they did anything they could to keep the hostages healthy: bandaging their blisters, giving them the best food, making sure they were warm enough at night. Not only did the hostages represent possible freedom for twenty-one separatists rotting in Indian jails, but they were also the only protection Al Faran had from the Indian military. They were a commodity, and they were treated as such.

  “It was like a Boy Scout troop with AK-47s,” says Childs. “The youngest militant was sixteen or so, a Kashmiri kid who’d been recruited to the cause. He hadn’t been issued a weapon yet because he hadn’t been through training; he was educated and bright, and his English was good. Turki was dead serious, though, and I didn’t let any kind of camaraderie fool me. If he told them to kill someone, these guys wouldn’t hesitate for a second; they were too well trained.”

  By the second day Childs had noticed an interesting—and horrifying—dynamic. The hostages, all desperately scared, turned to one another for comfort and support. They talked about their families, their homes, and their fears. But they had also been thrown into a ruthless kind of competition. They knew that if the militants were forced to prove their intent, they would shoot one of the hostages. That much was clear, but who would it be? An American? A Brit? A weak hiker? A brave man? A coward?

  Since the hostages didn’t know the answer, they did the next best thing: They tried to make as little an impression on their captors as possible. They didn’t complain; they didn’t cry; they didn’t do anything that might cause them to be noticed. They blended in as completely as possible and hoped that if the time came to kill people, they’d be invisible to the man with the gun.

  Childs quickly realized that he was losing the competition not to stand out.

  “I was in really rough shape. My boots weren’t broken in, and I’d gotten blisters on my heels before I was captured,” he says. “The days went on, and the skin was rubbed literally to the bone. By the fourth day I was having trouble keeping up.” Childs believed that he and Hutchings, the U.S. citizens, were the most valuable hostages, “but you could burn one American and still have one left over.”

  From time to time the hostages discussed the possibility of trying to escape en masse, but the consensus was that they would be putting themselves at terrible risk. Keith Mangan, in particular, was convinced that the situation would resolve itself peacefully. “Look, these things usually end without any tragedies,” he told the others at one point. Childs wasn’t so sure. Not only did he believe that Turki would kill them without a second thought, but he felt singled out for the first execution. Adding to his misery, he had come down with a devastating case of dysentery. By the end of the first day he was stepping off the trail every hour or so to drop his pants. A militant always gave him a Lomotil pill and followed him, so after a while Childs started relieving himself in the middle of the trail, in front of everyone. Soon they were waving him away in disgust, and he thought, “This is going to be useful. I don’t know how, but it will.”

  The next time a militant put a pill in his mouth, Childs didn’t swallow. He waited until the man looked the other way; then he spit the medicine out onto the ground.

  It took six hours for Jane Schelly to hike out to Pahalgam, a jumping-off point for people heading into Kashmir’s high country. The entire trekking population of the valley—some sixty or seventy people—was by the end walking out with her, and when they arrived at the Pahalgam police station, utter pandemonium broke out. Schelly informed an officer that her husband had been abducted, and she was taken into a back room and interrogated. “I had to decide whether to give them the note or not,” she says, “because it said, ‘For the American Government only.’ I looked over at my guide, and he nodded and I thought, ‘If they’re going to help, let’s get this show on the road.’ So I gave it to them, they copied down the names, and then I went to the UN post. That was at eight P.M.; they called the [American] embassy, and things were kicked into motion.”

  The United Nations has had a presence in Kashmir since 1949, after Britain formally relinquished control of its Indian colony and the subcontinent sank into ethnic chaos. The British government’s last administrative act was to draw a border between the Muslim majority in Pakistan and the Hindu majority in India, and that sent six million people fleeing in one direction or the other. Hindu mobs attacked trains packed with Muslims trying to cross into Pakistan, and Muslims did the same thing to Hindus going in the other direction. Trains plowed across the border between Amritsar and Lahore with blood dripping from their doors.

  While half a million people were being slaughtered, the semi-independent state of Kashmir was trying to decide whether to incorporate itself into India or into Pakistan. Kashmir was primarily Muslim, but it was ruled by a Hindu maharajah, and that inspired an army of Pakistani bandits to cross the border and try to take Srinagar in a lightning raid. They were slowed by their taste for pillage, however, which allowed Indian troops to rush into the area and defend the city. War broke out between India and Pakistan, and the nascent UN was finally forced to divide Kashmir and demilitarize the border. Fighting continued to flare up for the next forty years, and a surge in Pakistani-backed guerrilla activity again brought the two nations to the brink of war in 1990. This time the stakes were higher, though: India had hundreds of thousands of troops in Kashmir, and both nations reportedly had the capacity to deliver nuclear weapons. Diplomats defused that crisis, but American envoys in Delhi still considered Kashmir the world’s most likely flash point for a nuclear war.

  By the time Jane Schelly and Donald Hutchings showed up in Srinagar, as many as thirty thousand locals had been killed since 1992, and Kashmir had been turned into a virtual police state. The brutal tactics employed by the Indian Army had brought a certain amount of stability to the area—it was alleged, for example, that security forces machine-gunned every member of a household that had any association with the militants—but the war continued to rumble on in the hills. In 1994 two Brits had been kidnapped by militants and held in exchange for twenty or so HUA guerrillas serving time in Indian jails. The Indian government had refused to bargain, and after seventeen days the militants relented and let the hostages go. They even gave their prisoners locally made wall clocks as souvenirs of the adventure.

  Schelly spent her first night out of the mountains at the UN post, and the next day she moved to a secure Indian government compound. High-level British, German, and American embassy officials flew up on the afternoon flight from Delhi, and by July 7 a formidable diplomatic machine was in gear. Terrorism experts—unnamed in the press—were flown in from London, Bonn, and Washington, D.C. Negotiation and hostage release specialists were made available to the Indian authorities. Surveillance satellites reportedly tried to locate the militants on the ground, and the Delta Force, a branch of t
he U.S. Special Forces, was in the area being readied for possible deployment. Indian security forces began working their informants in the separatist movement, and Urdu-speaking agents started trying to maneuver between brutally simple parameters for negotiation: no ransom and no prisoner exchanges. Any concession to the guerrillas’ demands, it was feared, would only encourage more kidnappings.

  Still, there was some hope that Al Faran could be eased toward compromise. Communication was carried out by notes sent along an impenetrable network of local journalists, militants, and nomadic hill people. Hamstrung, on the one hand, by an Indian government that was not entirely displeased with a situation that made Pakistan look bad and, on the other, by a U.S. policy that forbade concessions to terrorists, negotiators found themselves with almost no wiggle room, as they say. The best they could do was relay messages to Al Faran that pointed out the immeasurable harm the kidnappings had done to the Kashmiri cause; the only way to regain credibility, said the negotiators, was to let the hostages go. To encourage this line of thought, the U.S. government left the negotiating to the Indians—whose country it was, after all—and started pulling strings elsewhere in the Islamic world. They persuaded a Saudi cleric to condemn the kidnappings as un-Islamic, and they tried to massage some of their contacts in Pakistan.

  “Al Faran was clearly an HUA-affiliated group, and what we know about HUA is that it’s not very hierarchical,” says a U.S. government source who closely followed the incident. “It’s not at all clear that Al Faran was even interested in communicating with [HUA] headquarters. If we’d had anything suggesting a tightly hierarchical organization, it would have been much easier to negotiate. And they had very poor, unsophisticated decision making. These were not people with a Plan B.”