Steven Pressfield: The Afgan Campaign

A fist seizes me from behind. Tollo. He has found me out. Without a word he drives me out of the lane and into a dirt courtyard. Half a dozen Macks fill the space. Tollo propels me through the low entry of a hut, into a cramped dark room. I crack my skull so hard on the lintel it nearly knocks me cold. Tollo shoves me toward something in the center of the room. A man. A striking-looking Afghan, probably fifty, held by two Macks I don’t recognize. The captive’s teeth have been knocked out; his mouth is a mass of blood. He’s on his knees. Tollo seizes my right hand and shoves the hilt of a gut-cutter, the short Spartan-type sword, into it.

No need to issue an order. What I must do is clear.

I cannot.

“Air him out!” Tollo bawls at me. How? I have no idea what type of blow to strike. The Afghan’s eyes fasten onto mine. He says something in his tongue that I can’t understand. I feel Tollo’s blade touch my neck. The old man repeats his curse, shouting now.

I thrust my blade into his gut. But I have not struck hard enough; the man squirms sideways with a cry; I feel my edge glance off the cage of his ribs and squirt free. I have not even drawn blood. Tollo cuffs me hard, appending a sheaf of obscenities. I can hear men laughing behind me. I feel a burning shame. The two Macks who hold the old man wrest him back before me. He is spitting into my face now, screaming that same oath. I seize my hilt with both hands and drive the blade, uppercutting, into his belly. But now I have pushed too far. The swordpoint has run clear through him and shot out the far side. It is jammed between the ribs of his back. The blade is stuck. I can’t get it out. I hear the two Macks behind me, convulsed with hysterics. Tollo pummels me again. I set my heel on the old man’s chest and haul the sword clear. His guts open, but he loses not a jot of animation. He continues to spit and curse me.

I raise the weapon and plunge it, aiming for the big artery of the foe’s thigh, but somehow I cut not him but myself. A gash opens on my right leg, from which blood sheets in quantities unimaginable. I am beside myself with shame, mortification, fear, rage, and grief. Now even Tollo is laughing. Somehow a dog has got into the room. It sets up a dreadful racket. The Afghan keeps spitting on me. A form moves into my vision above me and on my left. I feel, more than see, a fist seize the old man by the hair; the form delivers one powerful backhand slash, then a second and third. The captive’s head comes off. Marrow gushes from the cervical spine, painting the killer’s feet.

It is Flag. He drops the head; it plops onto the floor with the sound of a squashed melon. The Macks release the headless body. It pitches forward onto me, sheeting blood from the void of its neck. I puke up everything I have eaten for the last three days.

Outside, I am aware of the sorry spectacle I present. Unlike my veteran countrymen, whose spear hands and smock fronts are lacquered like skilled workmen of the slaughterhouse, I am soaked from thigh to heel with alien blood and with my own, and with vomit, piss, and dirt. Lucas stanches my wound. I recognize the Mack colonel Bullock as he passes with several officers, eyeing me with bemusement and contempt.

“What’s this then?” he inquires.

Tollo emerges from the hut. “The New Corps.”

Bullock shakes his head. “God help us.”

I am too ashamed to take chow that night. Tollo has to order me. I strip my clothes but can’t wash them. “Burn ’em,” says Flag.

Our outfit is on the trot two hours before dawn, Lucas and I mounted on yaboos, with our pack-asses with the trailers following on. Chase-riders of our outfit have kept up all night with those Afghans who got away. They guide us by stations. The enemy’s numbers are about fifty, half horseback and half on foot; we are above two hundred, all mounted, leaving aside those wounded and others left behind to hold the village and to raze three more settlements down-valley.

We ride four days. The word for that country is tora balan, “black stones.” Waterless badlands creased by serried basalt ridges. It’s like riding down the streets of a city. You proceed by canyons pinched between ridges, whose courses may be blind or dry or both. Ten times a day we backtrack out of dead ends. Our party has Afghan guides, but they’re worthless except to find water and forage, and the only reason they do this is so they themselves don’t starve. Our mounts wear down after the second day. The pursuit looks more like a death march. At night we collapse like corpses.

I haven’t slept since the village. When I close my eyes I hear women screaming and see the old man pitch headless into my lap.

I have resolved to murder no innocents. I can tell this to no one, not even Lucas. I try but he will not hear it.

“Did you kill anyone in the village?” I ask as we settle the first night, apart from the others, into our bedrolls. He did not. I ask what he will do.

“What do you mean?”

“Next time. What will you do?”

My friend kicks his groundcloth open.

“What will I do? I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Exactly what you’ll do. I’ll do what they tell me to. I’ll do what Flag and Tollo tell me to!”

He hears the anger in his voice and looks away, ashamed.

“Don’t bring this up anymore, Matthias. I don’t want to hear it. Whatever you’re thinking, keep it to yourself!”

And he pulls his ground cover over him and turns his back.

I am thinking that we are like criminals. When a new man is initiated into the confederacy of murderers, his seniors make him commit the same crime they have. Now he is as guilty as they. He cannot turn on them. He is one of them.

I tell this to Flag. “You’re still thinking,” he says.

The sixth noon we top a rise and there they are-a ragged column of shoeless, dismounted fugitives. About two dozen, tracking single-file along the base of a black stone ridge. Afghans look different from Macks at a distance. A column of ours would bristle with spearshafts and lanceheads. The Afghan fights with bow and sling, and with three knives-small, medium, and large-which he carries along with his mooch in a belt-sash called a gitwa.

The Afghans get away. When we rush them, they climb like goats, slinging boulders down behind them and setting off slides, which start out as pea-rollers and build into avalanches by the time they drive us onto our bellies in the scree. A rock the size of an army kettle screams past my ear, hurtling like a sling bullet. Horses can’t climb that shingle; we have to chase on foot. We don’t come within a hundred feet of the foe. He tops the crest and turns into smoke.

We chase him two more days, on foot now, leading our exhausted ponies. Our guides have vanished. We’re lost. Everything turns now on finding water; if we spot a trickle at noon, we don’t dare chase too far, for fear of finding no more and not making it back by night. Making camp beside a mudhole the sixth evening, Flag sends me and all the other rookies searching for a spring. I’m by myself, tramping down a dry canyon. I come round a corner. Ten feet away, an Afghan squats in the dust, taking a shit.

My first impulse is to apologize. It occurs to me, with ridiculous blandness, that this is the enemy. He’s staring at me, as frozen with astonishment as I am. I want to shout for my mates. Nothing comes. Terror has stricken me mute.

The Afghan is on his feet now. He’s about thirty, with black eyes set in a beard as dense as a curry brush. I’m paralyzed. I think: Maybe I can scare him. I lunge two steps, thrusting my half-pike. Fear fills his eyes. He gulps one breath and hurls himself at me. Before I can think, he has catapulted past my spearpoint; he seizes the shaft in both fists. He pulls. I pull. We’re having a tug-of-war.