Steven Pressfield: The Afgan Campaign

Beneath this, defended by this, I bear my lifeless infant.

How long do we labor through the shanty quarter? I don’t know. We pass lane after lane, sealed off by security details. We traverse the shoulder of the entire mountain, each forced deflection carrying us farther from the summit. Why do I seek these heights? I have no idea. The instinct for high-lining perhaps.

Suddenly everything drops into shadow. Behind the fortress, the sun plunges. Great cheers ascend. We can hear drums and cymbals, bells and tambours, celebrating the wedding. The five hundred kites have been loosed; I glimpse their soaring shapes in the gaps above the twisting lanes. Flag hangs on at my shoulder, spent from this lunatic chase upon which I have led him.

We collapse against a mud-brick wall. Our knees give out. Flag drops across from me. The lane is so narrow that our splayed legs flop atop one another. We are too exhausted to disentangle them.

I have not lost my senses.

I understand what has happened.

I apprehend the fatal inevitability of this hour. Events, it is clear to me, as it has been all along to Shinar, have unfolded as if preordained, from the Macedonian army’s initial invasion of Afghanistan to this moment. We who enacted it-from Baz and Ash and Jenin to me and Flag and Shinar-owned no more freedom of will than planets in their passage or days in a month.

Wedding kites sail above. They soar in sun; we hunker in shadow. I meet Flag’s eye. Behind him ascends a ragged slat-fence, screening a tributary alley. A puppy and a naked little boy, no more than twelve months old, squat together in the powdery earth. A young mother steps from a door. She sees Flag and me and snatches up her child; in an instant she has vanished. I hear the sound of beating wings.

Doves.

White doves.

Across a shaft of sunlight the brilliant flock streaks, celebrating the union of Alexander and the princess Roxane.

The war is over.

Among the more dolorous rites any soldier must perform is the inventorying of the unclaimed personal effects of a fallen comrade. When the property is that of a woman and a child, for whom he has come to care more than he imagined possible, the chore becomes even more heartbreaking.

In the end I keep only two tokens of Shinar: her shoes (the ragged pashin in which she crossed the Hindu Kush) and the letter she sent me from Bactra City, written out by a scribe in the marketplace, in Greek that was far inferior to her own.

I come to Maracanda. Ghilla’s son is born. The soldiers kill Daria for your brother. I bring your pay. If you find a new woman, I make my own way.

I will have other women if I live. Perhaps memory of Shinar will fade with time. But I doubt it. She was braver than I, stronger and wiser. It was my folly that brought about her end, which she foresaw so clearly, while I, blind and unheeding, hauled her forward to our doom.

As for Shinar’s brother, I cannot hate him. I can’t condemn even the code under whose compulsion he took her life. We were three. The empire holds thirty million. Show me one whose heart has not been riven by the pitiless harrow of war.

When the divisions march out for India in the spring, it chances that our company parades alongside that Afghan contingent of which Shinar’s brother and cousins had been part. I see faces from the jurga. These men will form, now, one element of the garrison force under Alexander’s banner, to hold Afghanistan in his name. What monument shall we erect to this achievement, that these men serve the same warlord they served before, in the same place, to the same profit, only salaried now in Macedonian tender?

I have sold my mare, Snow. She was not lucky for me.

I decided not to take my discharge. I re-upped instead. To the infantry. Signed for two more bumps. The corps gave me a promotion. I hold Flag’s old rank now.

He did indeed go home, my mate and mentor. It is I, now, who instruct the raw scuffs who trek in with the latest train of replacements. They are dumb as puppies. I ride them hard. You have to, to keep them alive.

Stephanos and I remain together. We “bumped over” in the same patch. He wants to see India. He’s a captain now; princes of Old Macedon are not as rich as he. He sends it all home, keeping only enough to replace weapons and armor. “The soldier,” he says, “needs no more than that.”

We part that final morning, Flag and I, on the Plain of Sorrows. He digs into my pack, comes up with Tollo’s boars’-tusk cap. He works it onto my skull.

“There,” he says. “That’s better.”

Ghilla stands at my shoulder. I have taken her and her son, little Lucas, under my protection. I will raise the child as my own.

“As a soldier?” asks Flag.

We laugh. The lad will grow into that, no doubt, no matter what I say.

Earlier this morning, as the mule trains were forming in the dark, my brother had cantered along the column on his way to his march post. Philip will ride out to India too. He is all-business still, or pretends to be. He dismounts. Inspects my kit. “You break my heart, Matthias.”

He weeps.

“Finding you here,” he says, “all my worst fears have been realized.”

The column groans into motion up ahead. When the army of Macedon deploys to a new theater of war, it does so by divisions in order of seniority. Mine, the taxis of Coenus, is number two behind Alexander’s elite brigades.

Philip remounts, stretches down his hand. I take it. “Keep off the high line,” he says.

“Don’t outgallop your cover.”

He tugs his reins over; his spurs dig. With a start, his mount bolts away down the line.

The plain over which the camp sprawls is a welter of dismantled field kitchens and struck sixteen-man tents. These will not accompany the marching army. They’ll follow with the heavy baggage. On the trek, the troops will bonze under goatskin bichees and dine on mooch and hurry bread. The trail will be the same one we descended from the Khawak Pass three springs ago. This time the column will take lower, easier passes. We’ll lay over for training in the Kabul Valley until the worst of the summer heat has passed, then descend with autumn to the Punjab.

My mother writes:

Have I lost you, child? Will my arms never hold you again?

It would comfort this dear lady to understand why I can’t come home. How can I explain it? What would I become there except another sad old man, a fractured veteran good neither to my family, my country, or myself?

I wished once to become a soldier. I have become that. Just not the way I thought I would.

The motion of the column at last reaches our station. The first day’s trek is never far. In case you forget something important, you need to be able to send a man back.

Passing down the camps of the trailing divisions, I spy a familiar white beard.

Ash wrangles a train of two dozen. The mules’ loads are roped up and balanced, but sit now on the ground, so their weight won’t wear out the beasts prematurely. Ash has taught me that-and how to shave a pack animal’s back so the hairs of his coat don’t get twisted into burrs that chafe beneath his load.

“I told you, Meckie, that we would drive you out.”

Indeed he did.

I stop and take the old bandit’s hand.

“I’m sorry for your girl, Matthias.”

I quote his proverb:

Though blind, God sees; though deaf, He hears.

I rejoin the column. “See you in India.”

“May I starve first!”

The beauty of Afghanistan lies in its distances and its light. The massif of the Hindu Kush, a hundred miles off, looks close enough to touch. But before we get there, hailstones big as sling bullets will ring off our bronze and iron; floods will carry off men and horses we love; the sun will bake us like the bricks of this country’s ten thousand villages. We are as overjoyed to be quit of this place as it is to see us go.