The Afghan Campaign

by Steven Pressfield

  Sonofabitch! The man is in the dirt, clawing his way toward cover. Furious fire rakes the ground around him. I see him scramble face-first into a cooking ditch, just as a full burst from an AK takes him square between the shoulder blades. Both elbows fly rearward, then flop; his neck snaps; he crashes face-first into the dirt. He stops moving. “Brake!” I’m shouting to Chutes. “Q! Chris!”

  “Go! Get out!” Chris Candelaria is calling, waving the vehicles to pull back. He has packed Junk’s wound and stripped his own tourniquet, worn lanyard-style around his neck; he’s cinching it around Junk’s thigh as he and the German DSF man help him toward the first Lada Neva.

  “We’re going back!” I shout.

  “What?”

  “The Fijian. We’re not leaving him!”

  A shoulder-fired rocket whistles overhead and blows the hell out of a house across Espresso Street. What little hearing I have left is now gone.

  “We’re not leaving without him.”

  It’s my secret me who’s talking. He has made the decision.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” This is Chutes, my tightest mate and most trusted brother. He sticks his jaw six inches from mine.

  “We’re going back,” I tell him.

  Junk curses. “He’s not our guy, chief! We don’t even know who the fuck he is!”

  “He’s dead!” says Chutes. “There’s two more 177s in there, waiting to blow!”

  Other faces stare at me.

  “Leave the body,” cries the Fijian team leader. “The man would say so himself if he could!”

  I tell the Fijians he’s not theirs, he’s ours.

  Chris Candelaria’s two Kodiaks are hauling ass now; they know they’re targets. Iranian rocket gunners are trying to blow down the building that protects our flank. As their rounds scream in, blocks of concrete the size of bowling balls sail a hundred feet into the air and fall back, crashing all around us. We scramble into the slit trench of sewage. Guys are trying to crawl up inside their helmets. I’m peering around the corner, back into the compound.

  Chutes clutches my sleeve. “Bro, listen to me. We got the engineers, we got the report … that’s what we came here for.” He points past the gate to the compound, to the fresh enemy streaming in along the rooflines. “We go back in there, somebody’s gonna die.”

  There’s no fear in Chutes’s voice. He’s just stating the truth.

  I meet his eyes.

  “Fuck you,” he says, jamming fresh magazines into his belly rig. “You hear me, bro? Fuck you!”

  Back we go. Chris Candelaria comes with us. We can hear the enemy hooting with anticipation. In the interval they have brought up a Russian PKM, which fires Eastern Bloc 7.62 rounds with a nutsack-shriveling rat-a-tat sound, and these are tearing the hell out of the open space we have to cross. The foe has got his second wind now. He is going after our Lada Nevas and the 7-ton truck, which have stayed behind to cover us. Rockets are zinging across the compound like Roman candles.

  We grab the dead Fijian and haul him facedown from the dirt behind the blown-down cookhouse. The IEDs never blow. Chutes curses me all the way back to the gate, curses me when I bag the security man’s effects and lash them around my waist with 550 cord. And he curses me all the way out of town.

  Two hours later, our team has reached safety in Husseinabad, in the fortified compound of an Iranian police chief whose real name is Gholamhossein Mattaki, but whom everyone calls Col. Achmed. Col. Achmed has his own doctor, his cousin Rajeef. Rajeef has a pharmacy and a little surgical suite in a side building of Col. Achmed’s compound. Rajeef is our team doctor. He supplies all our pills and powders. We call him “Medicare.”

  I have driven flat out to Col. Achmed’s, to get Junk (and two engineers whom we discover have been wounded in the dash across the compound) under serious medical care. Our medic Tony is a superb under-fire practitioner, and the DSF tech is good too. But neither one is a surgeon—and neither one has Dr. R’s goody-box of Vicodin and Percoset, Ultram, Fentanyl, OxyContin, and plain old central Asian smack. I also want to bury our Fijian in a site that won’t be desecrated. While our guys rehydrate and wolf down a meal of lamb and lentils, I grab Chutes and Chris Candelaria and organize a powwow with Col. Achmed. We still don’t know who’s invading whom, how dangerous the situation is, or what the hell is happening east in Isfahan and Tehran.

  Achmed is not just a police chief and commander in the paramilitary Masij. He is a hereditary tribal leader and a grandson and great-grandson of Harul and Arishi sheikhs; he is responsible for the safety and welfare of several thousand men, women, and children of allied families, clans, and subtribes. He’s a serious man.

  “Get out now,” he tells us, in the tone that your favorite uncle would take if he were looking out for you. We are in the third of his four storage buildings. The place looks like Costco. On racks and pallets sit unopened packing boxes of air conditioners and computer printers; cartons of Pennzoil, Pampers, and paper towels. Achmed has cases of Evian water, V8, Gatorade; crates of Nike running shoes, T-shirts, and tracksuits. The IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, smuggles in half the goods sold in Iran; the stuff comes in, billions of dollars’ worth, by launch and lighter from Kish and Qeshm, “free trade” islands across the gulf, via the port of Bandar Ganayeh—not to mention whatever the colonel’s minions have looted from ExxonMobil and BP. Guns and ammo are everywhere, in and out of crates—M4-40s, mortars, boxes of 5.56 and 7.62 NATO cartridges. Col. Achmed’s family, he tells us, is packing up. The women and children will flee to southern Iraq and then to Syria. Achmed’s sons and goons fill the room, armed to the teeth. “Don’t wait even for morning,” the colonel tells me, Chutes, and Chris. “If you do, you and your men will be massacred.”

  I ask him who will come after us.

  “Me,” he says with a smile. “Everyone.”

  Col. Achmed explains.

  “They will not be able to help themselves. First they will come for your weapons and everything of yours that they can steal, then for honor, to avenge the humiliation you and your countrymen have inflicted upon our national manhood simply by your presence and your blue eyes. Next they will come to get you before others do, for the greatest honor goes to him who strikes first, while those who hesitate will be accounted cowards.”

  I ask him what will happen in the next week or ten days. He gives it to me in Revolutionspeak, but the gist is this: Shiite Iran—meaning those Revolutionary Guardsmen, army colonels, patriots, tribesmen, and true believers who have been biding their time throughout this long, phony war will unite now with their Iraqi Shiite coreligionists and, casting off the yoke of the West and its hirelings, strike east along the arc of the Shiite Crescent that runs from the Dasht-i-Margo—the Afghan Desert of Death—across Iran to the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia (not coincidentally the swath of real estate that contains the richest petroleum reserves on earth) and purge this land of those who do not belong or believe.

  “Do my men and I have time,” I ask, “to finish dinner?”

  Achmed’s tribal code mandates hospitality. He helps us bury our Fijian, though he insists, first, on declaring the man a convert to Islam (which Col. Achmed can do, being a mullah as well as a tribal chief, and to which none of our Fijian’s mates objects under the circumstances), then tops off our fuel tanks and loads us up with Neda spring water and sixteen-ounce cans of Beefaroni. One of Achmed’s sons brings a tray of delicious homemade sohan—pistachio candy.

  Col. Achmed maps out the safest route to the frontier (the one he’ll be chasing us on) and helps key into our GPSes the sequence of junctures—all unmarked desert and mountain tracks that we could never find without his help. Dr. Rajeef rigs mobile hospital beds for Junk and our two wounded engineers; he stocks us up with two dozen vials of morphine, plus sample packs of Demerol and Dilau-did with sterile syringes and a hundred ampules of methylephidrine, which we all need in our exhausted, postadrenalinized state.

  We take our leave over
cups of black Persian coffee. It’s midnight. Our engines idle beyond the walls in the night. Achmed and his men leave us alone, for our final prep and words for each other.

  “Chief.” It’s Chutes, stepping forward before the others. “I’m sorry for what I said back there in Nazirabad …”

  “Forget it.”

  He apologizes for refusing, at first, to go back after the Fijian, whose name, we have learned, is Manasa Singh. Chris Candelaria seconds this. I thank them both. It takes guts to speak up in front of the others. The act is not without cost to proud men. I appreciate it and I tell them.

  The men surround me in the headlight-lit court. Safety lies two hundred miles east, in the dark, across country none of us knows—back valleys and passes peopled by warriors who will know where we are, how many we are, and where we are heading. Every one of us knows this, and every one feels the fear in his bones.

  “Because we went back when we didn’t have to,” I say, “we know something about ourselves that we didn’t know before. You know now, Chris, that if you fall, I won’t abandon you. I’ll come back, if it costs me my life—and so will Q and so will Junk and so will Chutes. And we know the same about you.”

  A bottle makes the rounds.

  “The contract we signed says nothing about honor. The company doesn’t give a shit. But I do. I fight for money, yeah—but that’s not why I’m here, and it’s not why any of you are here either.”

  From inside the compound, Col. Achmed and his sons listen. Two hours from now they’ll be hunting us as if we were animals. But for this moment they know us as men, and we know them.

  “What we did today in Nazirabad,” I tell my brothers, “would earn decorations for valor in any army in the world. You know what I’ll give you for it?”

  I grab my crotch.

  Chris Candelaria laughs.

  Chutes follows. The whole crew shakes their heads and rocks back and forth.

  You have to lead men sometimes. As unit commander, you have to put words to the bonds of love they feel but may be too embarrassed to speak of—and to the secret aspirations of their hearts, which are invariably selfless and noble. More important, you have to take those actions yourself, first and alone, that they themselves know they should take, but they just haven’t figured it out yet.

  ALSO BY

  STEVEN PRESSFIELD

  FICTION

  The Virtues of War

  Last of the Amazons

  Tides of War

  Gates of Fire

  The Legend of Bagger Vance

  NONFICTION

  The War of Art

  PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY

  Copyright © 2006 by Steven Pressfield

  Excerpt from The Profession copyright © 2011 by Stephen Pressfield

  All Rights Reserved

  Published in the United States by Doubleday, an imprint of The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book The Profession by Steven Pressfield. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Epigraph on p. xi: Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of the Loeb Classical Library from QUINTUS CURTIUS: VOL. II, LCL 369, trans. John C. Rolfe, p. 27, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946. The Loeb Classical Library ® is a registered trademark of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

  Excerpt from Cyropaedia on page 83: Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of the Loeb Classical Library from XENOPHON: VOL. V, LCL 52, trans. Walter Miller, p. 17, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914. The Loeb Classical Library ® is a registered trademark of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Pressfield, Steven.

  The Afghan campaign: a novel / Steven Pressfield.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Alexander, the Great, 356–323 B.C.—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3566.R3944 A69 2006

  813/.54—dc22

  2005046621

  eISBN: 978-0-385-52008-9

  v3.0_r1