Spoils

by Brian Van Reet

  The other day we were slowed there by new-fallen snow as I guided a truckload of recruits across the pass. The new brothers, six in all, had been vetted in Peshawar by our man at the guesthouse, who judged them fit for training. Among them was a beardless Yemeni, fifteen or sixteen years old. He wore a fine down coat and was also marked as a child of the rich by the haughty look on his face when he was ordered in no polite terms to ready himself for inspection.

  He was pale, slight, hardly like a soldier. It is human nature to keep ourselves at a distance from most people, but every once in a while, we come across someone who passes directly from the periphery to the center, who strikes the core of us like a mallet setting a tuning fork to resonant agitation. This may or may not derive from any extraordinary qualities possessed by this person: it’s an interplay of external and internal states. We must be receptive to the other to receive him.

  Which is to say, I identified with the boy immediately. I must have seemed equally unlikely, traveling to the front so many years ago, a privileged brat eager to fight the Reds, an al-Azhar University dropout fresh off a backpacking tour with stops in Istanbul, Rome, Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam. Wandering stoned loops around gray spidered canals, I passed aimless hours in hostels and museums, train stations and bars and coffeehouses and brothels, those that would serve an Arab.

  This shameful lark was financed with the last of Father’s fortune that he saw fit to allot me for tuition and expenses before realizing I was never going to finish school, was a basket case, a bad investment, and, like the shrewd banker he was—responsibly, with regret, and once and for all—he wrote me off. That winter, as I contemplated in poverty the wreck that had become of my young life, the Soviet 40th Army rumbled across the Afghan border like a deus ex machina, lifting me up and offstage. Exit, war. People who knew me were surprised by what I did, but in a broad sense the move was in keeping with my personality. Joining the mujahideen was—at first—less a religious obligation and more like running away with the circus, only more daring, nobler, and with the added benefit of enraging Father, who believed progress came not through violent resistance but in the form of three-piece suits, Chopin études, quiet atheism, and extra-dry martinis at the cocktail hour. Father was a man bent double from the weight of his polish.

  Two decades are more than enough to erase an identity, and for me they have, almost. The part of my life that the Yemeni recalled is closed off like a wing of rooms in a mansion whose upkeep has become too much for its insolvent owner. It was something in his young face that brought it back, what I was, before I was this: a kind of pomposity mingled with fear that told me he had never known hardship, not like these mountains could provide, but he wanted to know it, he had come here for that very reason, but was afraid.

  I inspected his baggage, ready to find any fault, to make an example of him in front of the other new ones. He carried two leather bags as rich as his coat. I rummaged through and found nothing blameworthy with the exception of a pair of Italian sunglasses and a Swiss Army knife, both of which I confiscated.

  “Your eyes will grow strong in the mountain sunlight, but not if you hide them like a woman,” I said. “And this?” I held up the Swiss knife mischievously. “Why in God’s name would you carry a weapon with the Crusader’s cross to this place? Are you a Christian or just a fool?”

  The boy pointed to my rifle. “Didn’t the kuffar make that, too?”

  Abu Annas moved as if to strike him for his insolence, but I signaled that this was not necessary.

  “You’ve put your finger on it,” I said to the Yemeni. “We’re fighting our battles with our enemies’ weapons. Maybe one day you will design us a better rifle. Until then, I’ll keep this one handy. I hope that won’t be a problem.”

  The boy shook his head no. I noticed him continuing to admire the Kalashnikov. “These?” I patted the stock, tracing the notches with my finger. “Carved when I was your age.”

  I raised the rifle and fired a shot in the air without warning, and the boy startled; the more seasoned brothers laughed. Their hardness pleased me, but I also felt some remorse for scaring and embarrassing the boy, an impulsive thing to do, as much to snap myself from nostalgic contemplation as to impress upon him the seriousness of what he was about to undertake.

  “I no longer carve notches,” I said, once the gunshot had stopped echoing off the mountainside. “That kind of pride is abhorrent to me now. I hope you haven’t come here just to learn how to kill.”

  “No, Emir.”

  “What’s your name, boy?”

  “Omar ibn Saeed.”

  A few brothers scoffed and remarked at his naïveté. Even his fellow recruits, encamped all of a half hour, realized his transgression. So green, I thought of him, just a child, wondering, lest I grow hard-hearted, if I should send him back over the pass, back to his mother, who, wherever she was, surely missed him.

  “Little brother, that’s not your real name, is it?”

  The Yemeni nodded, confused.

  “Don’t use it anymore. When you come here you must take a new one.” I nodded at Abu Annas. “That one there, the ugly one with the thick head? He is called the Father of Friendliness.” I turned to Abu Muqhatil. “And this man is the Father of Fighters. I’m the Father of Dread. Do you see? When you come to us, you give up your family, your home—even your name, your birthright. Look around. This is your new family. These are your new brothers. At this moment you are like a newborn child, but soon you’ll learn to walk again. We’ll teach you how to dress, how to pray, how to fight, and how to die. You may question our orders, but you may not go against them. The door swings both ways. Leave if you don’t like it, understood?”

  He assented.

  “So, what should we call you?”

  With care he considered the choice of name. “Father of Lion Cubs.”

  “There it is. Everyone, welcome the Father of Lion Cubs. He has joined us today in our jihad.”

  “God has willed it, God has willed it, God has willed it!” the brothers cheered the newly named Abu Hafs.

  Abu Ali broke his leg early this morning on a moonlit run along the northwest ridge of Takur Gar. Hopping from boulder to boulder in the dark, he slipped and fell and after he tumbled out of view was feared dead. The brothers found him lower down the slope, splinted his leg, and carried him the five kilometers back to camp. He arrived barely conscious, looking ashen, the sharp edge of his femur protruding. When the sun rose, some of us drove him across the pass to hospital. I took the opportunity to scold Dr. Walid, whom I have placed in charge of physical training, reminding him that these night runs on the mountain are not worth the risk. He listened to my complaint but did not seem concerned. And why should he be? What is one broken bone when new bodies are always forthcoming? Today it was a father-son Uzbek pair: the father I could take or leave, but his boy, Abu Bakr, has the makings of a fine soldier. Dr. Walid and I watched from the shade of my tent as Abu Annas put them and the other recruits through their paces.

  “That one’s the best of the lot,” I said, indicating Abu Bakr. “Look how he’s stopped caring about what the others are doing and is concentrating only on his own form. Impressive self-possession. Ones like that always make the best leaders.”

  “And fighters,” Dr. Walid added.

  There were years when we would have received only a few like that in the course of a season. Now, it is regular. The influx continues to astound. The doctor and I project unity, satisfaction, confidence, but privately reveal ourselves to be just as befuddled as everyone else. There has been no new front opened in the struggle, not since Chechnya, and the second paroxysm of that terrible war is years old and more or less stalemated. Some say we have grown stronger as the Taliban has risen to prominence, but their rise and ours are merely incidental, two different flowers sharing the same soil. We are guests among the Pashtun, for whom I have much affection, but the Taliban itself I find distasteful. Its commanders exert an iron-fisted rule over the peasantry that wi
ll backfire in time. They waste their days patrolling for contraband, ribbons of confiscated audio-and videotape tied to the roll bars of their trucks, the black magnetic strands fluttering like shredded banners in the wind.

  “They are innovators, not to be trusted,” Dr. Walid says, whenever the subject comes up. “The Taliban are too strict in their application of the law.”

  For him to accuse anyone of harshness is rare, and accurate in this case; we abide the Taliban, and they us, but that’s the extent of it. We take no side in their war against Shah Massoud and the Northern Alliance. It’s not a true jihad, despite their claims. We’re in Afghanistan not to fight but to train for the struggle elsewhere. A beacon has been lit in these mountains, and mujahideen from around the world are hastening to it: in days like these a man might be forgiven for believing he lives in an auspicious moment, that he has discerned a pattern in the chaos of events, a clear signal where once was only static. If history shows us anything, it’s that—for reasons obscure or obvious—movements of people combine and act as one to shape the world. I take comfort in being part of something larger than myself. It is one reason I am still here.

  The mysteries of religion may confound me, but history is something I know better, a discipline in which I’ve rooted my command. God is an idea employed to talk about what we cannot know, but the logic of what happens on His earth throughout time can be studied and relied upon. Change is the only certainty, death the end: each generation passes away, while another, more fit for the age, is born to it. The things men build, the machines and the systems, may likewise change, but their other, more essential qualities remain immutable. The strong march against the weak. The oppressors torment the oppressed. When placed in contradiction with the truth, falsehood loses its authority.

  Last night we heard the news on the BBC out of Peshawar. Manhattan lies in ruins. The Pentagon, destroyed. I find it impossible to believe. It’s said that tens of thousands of kuffar may have perished and that the towers of the World Trade Center have fallen and burned to ash.

  “Praise God for this justice,” Dr. Walid muttered, huddled near the shortwave with the rest of us, listening to the reports.

  “You call this justice,” I said chidingly. “To kill women and children.”

  With the choice of target, the disregard for civilian death, there is no mistaking who has done this. I’ve never sworn fealty to Sheikh Osama; I met the man only once, near Tora Bora, years ago, and to my knowledge Dr. Walid never has. Nevertheless, he was as proud of the attacks as if he had planned them, pleased beyond seemliness that Afghanistan had, in one fell stroke, become the most relevant country on earth. He looked at me unnervingly, his tone riding the razor’s edge between deference and condescension. “This is the greatest victory for us since the last Soviet dog was driven across the border into Uzbekistan. Didn’t the Americans bring us Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Weren’t innocent women and children in those cities? Sheikh Osama is simply taking the method of fighting the West invented and visiting it back upon them.”

  “You could be right” was all I said, mired again in doubt. My heart is torn. How can I lead these men if I appear weak? How can I lead those who do not share my mind? My inborn nature tends more toward the philosophical, but my duties demand a rigidity of thought that forbids too many points of departure from the crowd. God knows there have been enough of those that I’ve tried to keep hidden. I wonder if I am, at middle age, already a relic from a bygone era. I wonder if Sheikh Osama will be proven correct. Great men tend to inhabit the extremes of thought, and that is one reason for their greatness. I myself have managed to vacillate between extremes without inhabiting them long enough to allow anything truly impressive to coalesce.

  There is no denying that Manhattan changes everything. Listening to the radio, the rough talk, Dr. Walid and the other brothers gloating, I foresee a war to dwarf even Chechnya, the worst I’ve ever known, where still my own Hassan rests in that ice-hard field south of Grozny. My precious boy, the only one of my sons who insisted on following me down this path. With the towers knocked over, there will be a hundred thousand more like him in a hundred thousand shallow graves. Dr. Walid seems thrilled about it. I find him increasingly revolting, yet hide my misgivings like a corrupt judge. I don’t know how long I can maintain this mask. Before Manhattan, I’d been thinking of stepping aside and letting him assume the emirship. I know he’s wanted it for years, and it’s past time for new blood at the helm. Now, however, with the way he exults over Manhattan, his succeeding me has become much more problematic.

  In the early morning after the attack, the brothers, charged with emotion, ascended the mountainside, whooping, scrambling over boulders, and in celebration emptied their rifles and launched volleys of rockets that shrieked and whistled across the valley, deafening me, recalling past battles; I worried in the chaos some careless recruit might burn another with the backwash from his rocket. The moon was large and close, our shouts and the explosions echoing from peak to peak, revealing in flashes and sound the vastness of the nightscape. The boy Abu Hafs was handed a launcher and for the first time fired a grenade that went crashing through the pines and into the river below, sending up a column of water and flame.

  “Excellent shooting, cub,” Dr. Walid said. “I’ve always liked the sound of an RPG.”

  Our munitions spent, we returned to camp. Like a tattered stage curtain, the line of dawn descended the serrated ridges of the Hindu Kush until at last the valley floor was illuminated and night’s chill forgotten. Lambs were slaughtered, and juices and sweets distributed, enough for several days, though our stores ran low. Now is the evening of the next day, and we have only begun to prepare for the counterattack. We didn’t sign on for this offensive. Regardless, I suffer no illusions that our ignorance or prior restraint will mitigate what the future holds. Blood must have blood. We are Muslims training in Afghanistan, and for the Americans that will be enough. Only a fool would deny we are now enemies.

  3

  CASSANDRA: COMMUNICATIONS BLACKOUT

  36 Days Before

  KUWAIT

  In the cool dark of the bunker they shelter uncomfortably close, waiting for the Scud drill to end and the war to start. Cassandra is the only woman among them—though, in army-speak, never a woman but a female—crammed alongside men and boys packed like wriggling cordwood to fill a blast shelter a meter and a half tall, three meters wide, ten long. Other, identical bunkers stretch in an ellipsis across the moonlit Kuwaiti desert.

  Camp New York has been placed on communications blackout, which means the invasion will begin any day; the Scud drill, the increasingly realistic tempo of their training, are further proof. Warning sirens mounted on telephone poles ring the camp’s perimeter berm and blare three short air-horn blasts, followed by a moment of silence, the pattern signifying Gas gas gas! and repeating itself in off-time rhythm with the empty protective mask case that jangles at her hip as she duckwalks and shimmies her way deeper into the black, narrow space. When she can go no farther, she squats back on her heels and props her rifle beside her. Men surge in behind, and suddenly there’s no room to move; to get out of here, she is beholden to the people near the entrance. Bad luck to be claustrophobic right about now. These bunkers, in no way designed for comfort, were constructed by overturning preformed arches of concrete originally made for culverts. Right side up, the shape would sluice water. Upside down, they provide what defense contractors have deemed acceptable coverage from indirect blast effects and shrapnel.

  An hour past sundown, the final wispy trails of lavender and blue fade from the expansive desert sky. The stars are magnificent, the Milky Way a smear of bioluminescence, but inside the bunker is only blackness, all the soldiers masked up, drawing labored breaths through biochem filters. In addition to the masks, they’re also encumbered with charcoal-lined chemical suits, plastic hoods, rubber gloves, rubber overboots, forty pounds of Kevlar and ceramic-plate body armor, a combat load of smoke grenades, frag grenades, and
seven M16 magazines, and some are carrying light machine guns or radios or combat lifesaver bags, but even lugging around the heaviest piece of gear is no match for the sheer stifling annoyance of the mask, which, she must admit, does possess at least one redeeming quality: sparing her from the body odor of the men nearby. No doubt many skipped showers that morning, refusing to wait in the long lines for personal-hygiene trailers.

  The army camp is overcrowded, but, thanks to the ingenuity of Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, it’s eminently expandable. Off-loaded piece by piece from ships in the Persian Gulf, trucked through Kuwait City and into the deep desert, all of Camp New York’s assemblages are modular. Steel eyelets the size of a fist, sunk into the top face of the bunker, allow it to be hoisted with a crane, loaded onto a flatbed, and hauled into all tomorrow’s war zones.

  Erected in a matter of weeks and in its character not unlike a boomtown, the camp houses more than five thousand American soldiers—all but a few hundred are men—impatiently living out the last days of peace in large air-conditioned tents like those where especially well-cared-for refugees might stay. Portable buildings flank the hardpack road that spans the center of camp: double-wide trailers painted a drab eggshell white and modified to fill every organizational purpose. Trailers to sort and receive mail; trailers to treat soldiers on sick call; to house VIPs and KBR employees; a trailer stocked with a flimsy bench press, a squat rack, some dumbbells, and a treadmill so clogged with sand, the mechanism makes a sound like a coffee grinder whenever some clueless new arrival tries to jog on it. There are trailers to shower in, trailers to command troops from, refrigerator trailers to store perishables in, and the most popular on camp, a Morale, Welfare, and Recreation phone trailer (corporate sponsorship by AT&T), subdivided into fourteen obscenely well-graffitied cubicles, each with a pay phone, accepting only calling cards, no coin. For reasons of efficiency the army doesn’t ship U.S. specie into theater.