Robert Fisk - The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East

Amid a massive army, there is always a false sense of comfort. Even Major Yuri, his pale eyes constantly scanning the snowfields on each side of us, seemed to possess a dangerous self-confidence. True, the Afghans were attacking the Russians. But who could stop this leviathan, these armoured centipedes that were now creeping across the snows and mountains of Afghanistan? When we stopped at an Afghan checkpoint and the soldiers there could speak no Russian, Major Yuri called back for one of his Soviet Tajik officers to translate. As he did so, the major pointed at the Tajik and said, ‘Muslim.’ Yes, I understood. There were Muslims in the Soviet Union. In fact there were rather a lot of Muslims in the Soviet Union. And that, surely, was partly what this whole invasion was about.

The snow was blurring the windscreen of our truck, almost too fast for the wipers to clear it away, but through the side windows we could see the snowfields stretching away for miles. It was now mid-afternoon and we were grinding along at no more than 25 kilometres an hour, keeping the speed of the slowest truck, a long vulnerable snake of food, bedding, heavy ammunition, mixed in with tanks and carriers, 147 lorries in all, locked onto the main highway, a narrow vein of ice-cloaked tarmac that set every Soviet soldier up as a target for the ‘terrorists’ of Afghanistan. Or so it seemed to the men on Convoy 58. And to me.

Yet we were surprised when the first shots cracked out around us. We were just north of Charikar. And the rounds passed between our truck and the lorry in front, filling the air pockets behind them with little explosions, whizzing off into the frosted orchards to our left. ‘Out!’ Major Yuri shouted. He wanted his soldiers defending themselves in the snow, not trapped in their cabs. I fell into the muck and slush beside the road. The Russians around me were throwing themselves from their trucks. There was more shooting and, far in front of us, in a fog of snow and sleet, there were screams. A curl of blue smoke rose into the air from our right. The bullets kept sweeping over us and one pinged into a driver’s cab. All around me, the Soviet soldiers were lying in the drifts. Major Yuri shouted something at the men closest to him and there was a series of sharp reports as their Kalashnikovs kicked into their shoulders. Could they see what they were shooting at?

A silence fell over the landscape. Some figures moved, far away to our left, next to a dead tree. Yuri was staring at the orchard. ‘They are shooting from there,’ he said in English. He gave me a penetrating glance. This was no longer to be soldiers’ small-talk. I listened to the crackle of the radios, the shouts of officers interrupting each other, the soldiers in the snow looking over their shoulders. Major Yuri had taken off his fur hat; his brown hair was receding and he looked older than his thirty years. ‘Watch this, Robert,’ he said, pulling from his battledress a long tube containing a flare. We stood together in the snow, the slush above our knees, as he tugged at a cord that hung beneath the tube. There was a small explosion, a powerful smell of cordite and a smoke trail that soared high up into the sky. It was watched by the dozen soldiers closest to us, each of whom knew that our lives might depend on that rocket.

The smoke trail had passed a thousand feet in height when it burst into a shower of stars and within fifty seconds a Soviet Air Force Mig jet swept over us at low level, dipping its wings. A minute later, a tracked personnel carrier bearing the number 368 came thrashing through the snow with two of its crew leaning from their hatches and slid to a halt beside Major Yuri’s truck. The radio crackled and he listened in silence for a few moments then held up four fingers towards me. ‘They have killed four Russians in the convoy ahead,’ he said.

We stood on the road, backed up behind the first convoy. One row of soldiers was ordered to move two hundred metres further into the fields. Major Yuri told his men they could open their rations. The Tajik soldier who had translated for the major offered me food and I followed him to his lorry. It was decorated with Islamic pictures, quotations from the Koran, curiously interspersed with photographs of Bolshoi ballet dancers. I sat next to the truck with two soldiers beside me. We had dried biscuits and large hunks of raw pork; the only way I could eat the pork was to hold on to the fur and rip at the salted fat with my teeth. Each soldier was given three oranges, and sardines in a tin that contained about 10 per cent sardines and 90 per cent oil. Every few minutes, Major Yuri would pace the roadway and talk over the radio telephone, and when eventually we did move away with our armoured escorts scattered through the column, he seemed unsure of our exact location on the highway. Could he, he asked, borrow my map? And it was suddenly clear to me that this long convoy did not carry with it a single map of Afghanistan.

There was little evidence of the ambushed convoy in front save for the feet of a dead man being hurriedly pushed into a Soviet army van near Charikar and a great swath of crimson and pink slush that spread for several yards down one side of the road. The highway grew more icy at sundown, but we drove faster. As we journeyed on into the night, the headlights of our 147 trucks running like diamonds over the snow behind us, I was gently handed a Kalashnikov rifle with a full clip of ammunition. A soldier snapped off the safety catch and told me to watch through the window. I had no desire to hold this gun, even less to shoot at Afghan guerrillas, but if we were attacked again – if the Afghans had come right up to the truck as they had done many times on these convoys – they would assume I was a Russian. They would not ask all members of the National Union of Journalists to stand aside before gunning down the soldiers.

I have never since held a weapon in wartime and I hope I never shall again. I have always cursed the journalists who wear military costumes and don helmets and play soldiers with a gun at their hip, greying over the line between reporter and combatant, making our lives ever more dangerous as armies and militias come to regard us as an extension of their enemies, a potential combatant, a military target. But I had not volunteered to travel with the Soviet army. I was not – as that repulsive expression would have it in later wars – ‘embedded’. I was as much their prisoner as their guest. As the weeks went by, Afghans learned to climb aboard the Soviet convoy lorries after dark and knife their occupants. I knew that my taking a rifle – even though I never used it – would produce a reaction from the great and the good in journalism, and it seemed better to admit the reality than to delete this from the narrative. *If I was riding shotgun for the Soviet army, then that was the truth of it.

Three times we passed through towns where villagers and peasants lined the roadside to watch us pass. And of course, it was an eerie, unprecedented experience to sit with a rifle on my lap in a Soviet military column next to armed and uniformed Russian troops and to watch those Afghans – most of them in turbans, long shawls and rubber shoes – staring at us with contempt and disgust. One man in a blue coat stood on the tailboard of an Afghan lorry and watched me with narrowed eyes. It was the nearest I had seen to a look of hatred. He shouted something that was lost in the roar of our convoy.

Major Yuri seemed unperturbed. As we drove through Qarabagh, I told him I didn’t think the Afghans liked the Russians. It was beginning to snow heavily again. The major did not take his eyes from the road. ‘The Afghans are cunning people,’ he said without obvious malice, and then fell silent. We were still sliding along the road to Kabul when I turned to Major Yuri again. So why was the Soviet army in Afghanistan, I asked him? The major thought about this for about a minute and gave me a smile. ‘If you read Pravda,’ he said, ‘you will find that Comrade Leonid Brezhnev has answered this question.’ Major Yuri was a party man to the end. *