Steven Pressfield: The Afgan Campaign

The fellow is shouting now. It occurs to me that he must have been standing sentry. There’s probably an Afghan camp a hundred feet round the corner.

Now I’m screaming. Flag! Tollo! The Afghan releases my spear-shaft and flings himself on me. He seems to have forgotten he has weapons. His fingers claw at my eye sockets, his teeth sink into my shoulder. We tumble together in the dust, which is fine as powder and hot as ashes in the sun. I am not frightened now. I am embarrassed. The idea that I will die in this ludicrous manner propels me to prodigies. I lurch free. Both hands are empty. I feel naked and blind with rage at my own stupidity. The Afghan has found his dagger. I grab a rock the size of a boot. The man thrusts at me; I feel his blade tangle in my cloak as I smash the stone with all my strength into his face. I can hear his teeth shatter. He reels and falls. I drop on him with my full weight, breastbone to breastbone.

I beat his brains out with the stone. It takes no time. I feel the skull crack and the hot soup gush over my fingers. Voices cry above me. Three men of the Afghans sprint into view just as Tollo, Rags, and two mercs whose names I don’t know race up from behind me.

Fear, men say, is the most primal emotion. I don’t believe it. Shame is. My feeling as Tollo bolts past after the foe is one of joy and relief, that my senior sergeant has seen me take down my man, however clumsily, and profound release that my humiliation from the village has been at least partly effaced.

More of our fellows pound past. I join the pack. Flag and Lucas sprint ahead. I experience elation, not so much to have slain a man as to have survived him trying to slay me. I race down the canyon. In a shaft of sunlight squats the Afghan camp. Our fellows fall on the foe like wolves. I plunge into the melee. I want frantically to kill again, as quickly as possible and as many of the enemy as I can, not out of lust for blood, but because I can feel the return of my own terror, looming moments away like a wave. I must perform some act of valor before it crashes over me. I dash past a hollow in the canyon wall; two mercs have pinned a lone Afghan but hang back at full shafts’-length, poking at him with their lanceheads. My appearance tips the tide. Three-on-one, we spit the poor fellow like a fish on a spear. He thrashes, impaled, struggling to twist free of our shafts buried in his guts. “Kill him!” all three of us are shouting preposterously. We drive the man back against the canyon wall till we can feel our spearheads, through his belly, scraping stone. His eyes are so human! He is a man, not an animal. The sight of his agony wrenches my heart. A thrust from the first merc finishes him; he drops, dead weight. My mates dance over him, a jig less of triumph than of release from fear. I shout something and haul my comrades into the pursuit. To my astonishment they follow me.

The day ends with a horse chase, in which Stephanos and six of our mercs run down the last fugitives. They bring back four prisoners. Our kill is seventeen. We suffer one dead (the lead merc who bolted past me alongside Tollo) and three wounded, one of them my mate Boxer, breaking his ankle in a fall. Night descends. Our fellows make prizes of the dead men’s weapons. They wolf a meal of the enemy’s mooch and toast their backs around blazes of his firewood. Two Afghans have fallen by my hand this day. Later, I will see their faces in my dreams. Later, remorse will torment me. Later, but now. Now I am happy. I feel pride as I abrade my forearms with Afghan dust, chafing off the blood of men who would have killed me and my comrades if they could. Sleep finds me guiltless and unrepentant. I have never been happier in my life.

The distance our column has covered in six nights chasing the foe, it takes nearly twice as long to traverse returning; we are so exhausted and so is our stock. We have to link up with our other patrols. We can’t track as the hawk flies but have to detour from village to village to fill our bellies.

One of the chores of a rookie is to forage for food. In our litter, it’s Lucas and me who draw this duty. Bring back dinner! Get us something to eat! The practice of “living off the land” is indispensable, we see, to a young trooper’s education. It teaches him how to rough up civilians, intimidate farmers and housedames. The youth learns how to tear up a floor, rip open a roof, how to shake people down. It trains him to take nothing at face value, not the weeping grandmother, the pleading wife, the starving urchin. They’re all lying. They’ve all got mooch.

On the ninth noon returning to Artacoana, a messenger gallops up, mounted on the most spectacular piece of horseflesh I have ever seen. He is a full captain of Alexander’s Companions, bringing orders from the king himself. Three Afghan guides accompany him, perched on plug yaboos that look like hounds alongside the captain’s thoroughbred. But these ponies can fly. While the captain confers with Tollo and Stephanos, our mob grills the scrubs.

Alexander is here, they tell us. At Artacoana. Informed by fast couriers of Satibarzanes’ and Spitamenes’ insurrection, the king has broken off his eastward advance. He has turned about, leaving the heavy corps with his general Craterus, while he with the cavalry and light troops has crossed 180 miles of desert in three days. The rebel horse has shown its heels at his approach. Alexander has cornered the foot troops, thirteen thousand, atop a natural fortress called the Mother’s Breast. If the insurgents will accept him as sovereign, Alexander has pledged, all may return in peace to their homes. The foe has sent back a gutted dog. It means go to hell.

Our own orders, delivered by the Companion captain, are not to return to Artacoana but to make all speed to the site of the original massacre, secure the place, and protect the corpses of our countrymen from further desecration. We are to remain on-site until Alexander himself can conclude his business with the foe and arrive to tender proper honors to the fallen. Two of the Afghans on yaboos will guide us.

The site, when we reach it three dusks later, is in a narrow throat between granite crags. An understrength company of Arcadian mercenaries mans a perimeter. They are ecstatic to see us, as our numbers will hold at bay the droves of Afghan dames who have already picked the gorge clean of plunder and still loiter on the high-lines, awaiting the chance to dash in and make off with the odd buckle or lancehead, whose bronze and iron are worth fortunes in this desert, not to mention their value as trophies.

The Arcadians tell us what happened to our countrymen. Those who survived the initial ambush were beaten and stripped naked; the enemy staked them out on the earth, spread-eagled on their backs, and drove long knives into their thighs, ripping gashes to the bone. They disemboweled our fellows, put out their eyes, and hacked off their genitals. Then they painted them with terebinth oil-turpentine-and set them on fire. All this while they were still alive.

It is the women and children, we learn from the Afghan guides, who have committed these atrocities upon our countrymen. This, they tell us, is the custom of the country. Captives are turned over to the clan females for their pleasure. The tribes do this not only to us but to each other.

The Arcadians have collected the bodies of our comrades in the center of the camp. This is so the Afghan women can’t skulk in after dark and plunder them further. The corpses are wrapped, and we newcomers make no attempt to peek under.

After dark our female besiegers begin to keen. A bloodcurdling ululation commences on one flank of the gorge, answered by an equally mane-blanching chorus from the other. Soon the whole pass is wailing in some ungodly primordial cacophony.