We couldn’t hold off shooting any longer. In a meeting with Ahmad on 7 February, he suggested to Nilu and me that we shoot in Jalalabad, where it was cool but sunny. On the morning of the eighth we instructed him to go, go, go. He explained that it would require a whole raft of new permissions, as the Jalalabad base had neither tanks nor choppers, and the ministry would have to approve it all being relocated from Kabul. We gave him a tentative date of 12 February and, with a salute and a ‘No problem, sisters’, off he went again.
Our fate firmly in the hands of Ahmad and his negotiating skills, we pushed on with pre-production. Mirwais and Aleem travelled to Jalalabad ahead of us and found a suitable location for filming and cast troops from the local base. The Kabul training centre dispatched two tanks on assurances from the ministry that the approval would go through, and also guaranteed Ahmad that the choppers were ready to roll. But when the rest of us set off in our bus the day before filming, the minister still hadn’t issued the official approval.
We had planned an early start on our day of filming, but by 9am we were still waiting for Ahmad to phone through with the go-ahead. The call came at 10am. He had the necessary paperwork and the ministry had informed the commander at the Jalalabad base, via both email and phone, but the man was refusing to move until he had the signed, stamped document in his hand.
I’d like to say that the commander was a queer old fish and that his stance was some behavioural anomaly, but Afghans are fixated on stamped pieces of paper. After every production, my team would hound me for a stamped certificate attesting to their participation in the program; I offered email and phone references to ex-employees, but they were universally insistent that anything less than a printed, signed sheet of A4, bearing an inky impression of the company insignia, was simply unacceptable. I could put it down to some kind of technology time warp, but am more inclined to attribute it to the fact that Afghans just don’t trust one another. So dear, dedicated Ahmad had to get on his motorcycle and ride the three hours to Jalalabad to hand-deliver the document.
He arrived just before 1pm and we got our hero shot—the troops, the tanks and the choppers all emerging over the hill simultaneously—in the last of the afternoon light.
Ahmad, our stills photographer Wakil, and I took the thirty-minute ride back to Kabul on one of the choppers that afternoon. Nilu declined the offer, declaring the thing a ‘death trap’ and opting to travel back by road. The Afghan door gunner happily relinquished his spot so Wakil could take some photos of me holding the machine gun and looking out over the countryside below.
The gunner was at the back of the chopper, eating some food and talking with Ahmad, when I motioned for him to return to his station. With Wakil translating, and with a disturbingly straight face, he informed me that he was quite happy for me to stay where I was. Then he issued me with instructions to shoot anyone below who looked like the Taliban.
I turned to Ahmad and grimaced, but he just waved his hand at me: ‘No problem, no problem, sister.’ And, for the first time since knowing the man, I didn’t quite believe him.
I have had my fair share of hangovers—huge, thumping, head-splitting affairs that have left me vowing lifelong sobriety—and a blinding monstrosity in March 2010 was up there with the best of them. The silver lining, if indeed there was one, was that it was a Friday (our ‘weekend’) and I was able to share my misery with my bed and Season Two of Mad Men on DVD.
This particular hangover came courtesy of a drinking session at The Den with a man I had only ever met once before—in fact, I initially failed to recognise him when he had wandered in the night before and caught me on one of my infrequent visits back to the bar. He was a security contractor who hadn’t left the southern city of Kandahar in seven months and was on his way home to the US to see his wife and meet his newborn baby. But our night’s revels had had very little to do with his newfound fatherhood—rather, we had been celebrating the life of one of the most extraordinary men either of us had ever known.
After I’d finished up working at The Den the previous year, it became my local. For a time I still lived upstairs so, even on nights when I’d decided to stay in, I had the regulars hollering for me to come down and join them. I earned the nickname ‘Rapunzel’, and my appearances on the balcony to tell the boys to leave me alone were met with catcalls and jeers. I could say it annoyed me, but I actually relished being part of a community—I had grown up watching Cheers and its theme song suddenly resonated with me on a whole new level.
Al and his buddy Wayne continued to turn up every night. It took a bit of manoeuvring and the addition of a bar stool to accommodate the three of us at Al’s preferred spot, but from our perch we’d caw and commentate on our fellow drinkers like a murder of merciless crows. There were workmates and buddies who regularly filled out our posse, but our tight little trio constituted the quorum.
In Wayne, Al had found a true brother and at times, when they were regaling me with stories of their outrageous antics or simply taking the piss out of each other, I could barely distinguish their voices. They had both been elite warriors, proudly serving their country in Iraq and Afghanistan, but had somehow completely lost it along the way. Neither of them ever really confided in me what had gone wrong, but the little detail they did offer hinted at drug and alcohol abuse. They both seemed to have made similar ignoble exits from the armed forces and in the aftermath suffered long bouts of depression. They’d messed up and been cut loose, and were then left all alone to battle their demons.
But to see them out together, you would never have guessed they were haunted souls. They were so large and hilarious, so loyal to one another and to their chosen tribe, that I felt honoured to be anointed as one of them. In truth, my two extreme, amazing friends made me feel safe in a place that could be dark and dangerous.
Although Al and Wayne lived and worked together, I never really saw them outside of The Den. Al and I kept in constant contact via Facebook and phone, but our after-work catch-ups were the only real times that our lives intersected. Their post-bar activities routinely entailed all-night drinking sessions back at their compound or trips to the local Chinese brothel, so I had to make do with hearing their shocking tales of drunkenness and debauchery the following day.
Soon after I started with Moby, the company opened a guest house for expat employees on the other side of town. Around eight of us—Paul, Jose and Tiggy included—all happily relocated to the double-storey, sprawling home, our only real house rule being that we didn’t talk about work once we left the office. The move, combined with my increasing workload as we went into pre-production on Salam, meant my visits to The Den became less frequent. But I usually managed a couple of excursions each week, and my boys and my bar stool were always there waiting for me.
Then one day I turned up and Wayne was standing at the bar alone. His face looked drawn and pale, and he was sipping on a bottle of water. When I asked him if he was okay, he just shook his head; when I enquired where Al was, he looked positively shamefaced. ‘Let’s get you a drink, beautiful, and I’ll tell you all about it.’
It seems that a few days prior they had scored a bag of coke and had hurried back to Al’s room to sample their stash. After one line each, they knew they’d been shafted—the ‘cocaine’ was clearly heroin, and bad shit at that.
Al was hell-bent on tracking down the Afghan dealer and doing him some serious damage, but Wayne managed to talk him out of it, instructing him to instead flush the rest of the smack down the toilet and write it off as a bad buy. Then Wayne went to his room, but when he returned about an hour later, he found Al snorting more lines.
‘Uggh! That stupid, stupid man!’ I said. ‘So what did you do?’
‘I had more lines with him.’ I thumped him hard on the arm. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know what we’re like when we’re together. Don’t worry—we totally paid the price.’
They both eventually passed out and woke up a few hours later feeling violently ill. They then spent th
e next twenty-four hours constantly throwing up and wishing they were dead.
‘Al’s still not good,’ Wayne told me. ‘I only came here tonight to see you, beautiful, ’cause I’m headin’ home on leave.’ He promised that Al had finally flushed the rest of the heroin away and that they had sworn off any more dodgy drug deals. ‘I think the big guy’s gonna try and tone it down a bit. Look out for him while I’m gone,’ he said as he hugged me goodbye.
I arranged to meet up with Al three days later and, when I walked into the bar, I was honestly astonished. He was clean-shaven, his hair had been freshly trimmed and his face, which of late had been quite red and bloated, glowed with good health.
‘Hey, Trudi! Do you have any idea who this strange man is?’ Tamim joked as I approached the bar.
‘Well look at you!’ I exclaimed as Al swallowed me up in his big-boy embrace.
He was having his first beer of the week and had indeed toned it down—laying off the steroids, working out more and sticking to his curfew. I still gave him a hefty punch in the arm for his starring role in the heroin debacle, but his clean-up campaign was impressive.
‘Why did you do it?’ I asked.
‘I dunno. I just wanted to snort something.’
‘You’re going to end up killing yourself.’
‘Gorgeous, I spent two days in hell. I swear I’m never going back there again.’
I had an early start the next day and Al walked me out to my driver. As we drove off, I watched him piggy-backing one of the kids along the footpath, a ragtag bunch of urchins excitedly chasing behind.
Al wanted to catch up with me the following Thursday night, but I had a work do. Paul thought I should attend and it wasn’t a hard sell, as it was a party at the fabulous compound of one of our clients, with free booze and eats. I knew that Al was missing Wayne—he told me so—but he had plenty of other playmates, and I felt that I needed to start immersing myself in my new world of workmates and funders.
On Friday I answered Al’s first call at noon—he was at The Den and insisted that I join him. I was feeling a little seedy and needed to work on scheduling the Salam shoot, which was imminent, so I begged off and promised to meet up with him later in the week.
He phoned me four more times that day. I could hear people laughing and yelling in the background, and Al was clearly wired on something. With each call he became more belligerent in his demands and after my final, late-afternoon refusal to get on board, he growled: ‘You are dead to me.’ Before abruptly hanging up.
I waited all day Saturday for his make-up text. This was standard practice for us and had been initiated back when I was managing The Den, when, full of beer, he’d storm off into the night over some perceived slight. But in the past he had always said sorry, always sent a message the next day telling me how much he loved me. This time I decided to break the impasse myself and tried phoning him, but my call simply rang out.
I headed to The Den straight after work, expecting to see Al propping up the bar, but there was no sign of him. I had barely made it through the door when Tamim hurried over and led me to a corner of the room.
‘Trudi, have you heard from Al today?’ he asked anxiously.
‘No, why?’
‘I think something has happened to him.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t know, but something is wrong. Sue was in before and I heard Ernie talking with her about him. Ernie knows. Can you please ask him?’
I looked over to Ernie standing at the bar. He was an American guy, a recent arrival in Afghanistan. We’d been introduced and I’d say hi to him in passing, but I really didn’t know him that well.
‘Maybe he’s been in a fight,’ I suggested.
‘Maybe. But can you ask him, Trudi? Please?’
As I approached Ernie, I was already formulating a plausible scenario. Al had been in a fight, with Ernie or one of his mates . . . Or perhaps he’d gone after the Afghan drug dealer. He was lying low or had been confined to his compound . . . I didn’t even entertain the prospect that he might have been jailed or hospitalised. He was simply in trouble; I had it all figured out.
When I asked Ernie if he knew anything about Al, he frowned and told me that he’d rather talk outside. We headed into the garden and settled at a table in a corner of the yard.
We sat opposite each other for an age before he finally spoke. ‘When was the last time you heard from him?’
‘Yesterday. I tried calling him this afternoon but he didn’t pick up.’
He twisted the neck of his beer bottle between his fingers for a moment and then met my eye. ‘Look, I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you this . . . I know you two were close. But Al’s dead.’
‘No . . .’
‘I got a call this afternoon from a buddy he works with. His body was found in a hotel room this morning.’
‘No . . . Oh no . . . How?’
‘I don’t know for sure, but they’re saying it was drugs.’
I think I tried to thank him then for letting me know, but instead I just cried—awful, heaving sobs that poured out of me with such force I could barely breathe. Ernie looked uncomfortable as he reached across and gently gripped my shoulder.
‘Come on, Trudi, don’t do this. You gotta pull yourself together.’
‘I can’t . . . I can’t!’
‘You have to. You gotta go back in there and break the news to Tamim.’
My heart splintered all over again. I took Tamim to the back room to tell him. I honestly don’t remember what I said, but I guessed that by now he expected the worst. Afterwards we stood apart for a few minutes, both quietly crying. Then finally I turned to him and took him in my arms. We shook with despair, holding each other up against the weight of our shared grief. It was the first time I had hugged an Afghan man and it was only the arrival of Tamim’s brother that finally separated us.
Paul and Jose came to collect me that night and I staggered out to meet them, drunk, distraught and utterly lost. There were tiny children everywhere: ‘Al is dead! Al is dead!’ rang in my ears as I stumbled into the car. They couldn’t believe he was gone; none of us could, even though we had all really known he’d be the first to go.
Wayne and I were constantly in touch over the following weeks. We had so little to say, but the long silences over the phone somehow lessened the vast distance between us. While he attended Al’s funeral in the States, we held a wake at The Den. Al’s workmates had been in a company-ordered lockdown ever since his death and the gathering was the first time I’d seen any of them.
One of his good friends, Christian, sat with me at the bar, recounting the clean-up of Al’s room. The steroids, the empty beer bottles, the sleeping pills and the drawer full of syringes were all to be expected, but his considerable book collection came as a surprise.
‘Trudi, he had books on everything—religion, philosophy, huge novels . . . even poetry. He really was a complex guy,’ Christian said. But I had known this all along—for me Al had always been a brilliant, luminous shade of grey.
Wayne came back to Kabul, but didn’t last long; it was all too hard without his best friend. Other people left, new ones arrived, and in just a matter of months the impressive mark left by Al had begun to fade.
Then, one night in March I was sitting on the terrace at The Den when a man walked in. He was tall and broad, bushy-faced and wearing a baseball cap. When he stopped and looked straight at me, I thought my heart would stop. Of course it wasn’t Al, but, as he approached me, his eyes still locked to mine, I wondered if some kind of mystical mischief-maker was toying with me.
He smiled when he reached me, and extended his hand. ‘Trudi? It’s Victor . . . I’m Victor, Al’s buddy.’
‘Victor . . .’ It took me a moment to recollect.
Victor. He and Al had been in the military together, and I had met him one night when he was passing through town on the way to his job in Kandahar.
‘Victor,’ he repeated.
&nbs
p; We embraced like old friends, and then I took him by the hand and led him to a table at the edge of the noisy crowd.
‘I came here tonight to find you. Al talked about you all the time. I haven’t left Kandahar since his death and I needed to be with someone who loved him as much as I did.’
We drank a lot of beers that night. Tamim kept them coming, while taking regular breaks from behind the bar to reminisce with us. We laughed and cried shamelessly as we remembered our friend. We were just winding up . . . or maybe we weren’t . . . The timing, the moment really means nothing now, but Victor told me something that gave devastating meaning to Al’s senseless death.
‘You know, Al accidentally killed a kid in Iraq.’
In the silence that followed, it all fell into place. Victor continued. ‘He told me when we were drunk one night. He was stationed in a village, his regiment was helping to rebuild it, and then . . . I don’t know . . . he shot the kid dead.’
‘How?’
‘It was an accident, that’s all he told me. I asked him the same question and he just said: “It’s done, I’m done. It’s over.” He never spoke to me about it again.’
I wonder now if Al ever really spoke to anyone else about it . . . I’m no psychiatrist, but I’m guessing he simply manned up and carried on, paying his own personal penance for a tragedy he would never be able to forget or forgive himself for.
And I will never forget my wonderful, generous friend—a man who, I suspect, ultimately paid for his mistake with his life.
I had never really been a boss before. Sure, I’d had various stints at being ‘top dog’—I was once a supervisor at a VIP domestic cleaning service. But with only one person to supervise, and my supervision consisting of ensuring that there were no crusty spots left in the toilet bowl or dust remaining on the skirting boards, I figured that didn’t really count for much.
During my four years of lawyering, I had personal assistants and the odd legal clerk under my direct authority.
Making Soapies in Kabul Page 7