Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar

by Matt McAllester

  I developed a theory, based on the kind of intuition that journalists are supposed to eschew, that the abuse endured by a politician—particularly a controversial politician vilified around the world, who was the main target of a demonstration by four hundred thousand Israelis in 1982—could lead to the kind of self-hatred that lies behind many people’s overeating.

  Friends of Sharon also told me that, while the old man used to let things slip on outings like the railroad photo op, his wife, Lily, would keep his eating somewhat in check at home. When she died in 2000, he ate to keep his grief down in his stomach. Perhaps food became a more problematic issue for him then because, just when he needed her emotional support for the big push to the country’s top job, he also needed her wifely nagging to keep him from overdoing it at the table.

  I continued to write about Sharon during the intifada, when he sent Israeli forces into every Palestinian town and village to snuff out the suicide bombers. On the way, I happened across still more food lore about him. He had a penchant for barbecued turkey testicles, which I have since discovered to be a little gummy, much like spine or brain, and to have a slight savor of scallops. His most favored companions would always report their conversations to me as having taken place over a meal at the farm. One told me that, as he called the intifada “a struggle over our existence,” Sharon filled his face with chicken salad.

  A former aide noted that Arik, as Israelis call him, believed in coexistence with the Palestinians. As evidence he pointed out that Sharon used to send his driver to a particularly good roast-chicken restaurant in Beit Jala, a village on the edge of Bethlehem, to bring back pots of the special garlic puree made by the owner, a Palestinian Christian.

  There were those who thought that Sharon’s transformation during his time as prime minister—from a man condemned as a war criminal to a rationalist who became the first head of an Israeli government to refer to the country’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza as an “occupation”—was intended to make the world love him, to replace the images of wailing Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila with the more welcome lamentations—in the eyes of the world’s media, at least—of Israeli settlers booted out of their colonies in the Gaza Strip in 2005.

  It could be that he wanted to be loved, though more likely he saw that holding on to the settlements would lead to inevitable disaster. Israel would soon have found itself ruling over a growing Palestinian population, which is already equal to the number of Jews and will soon represent the majority of the people living in historic Palestine. In other words, Sharon decided to lose the weight represented by the West Bank and Gaza, even though he had done so much to add those extra pounds, so that the skinny little state of Israel—seven miles across at its narrowest point—could live on in good health.

  The health of Sharon himself, however, couldn’t be salvaged. He suffered a stroke in December 2005 and another in early 2006. The second left him in a permanent vegetative state. Because his health failed him just before he was expected to win a new election with a promise of clearing Israel out of most of the West Bank, Sharon left Israel to linger just as his comatose body would, unable to change course and seemingly drifting toward a doom that could come anytime.

  At an interview in his Jerusalem residence shortly before his final stroke, Sharon showed himself once more to be conscious of his physique. It took me an hour to get through the security check at the Balfour Street residence in Rehavia, a neighborhood that passes for “leafy” in most journalistic descriptions, though the trees sporting those leaves are parched if you pause to examine the roots. It wasn’t my fault it took so long to get in; Time magazine had flown in a photographer, Gillian Laub, who takes portraits with deep chiaroscuro effects and who travels with almost as much lighting equipment as U2 on tour. Each bulb had to be checked, it seemed, so that it couldn’t be used to threaten the prime minister.

  Once inside the modest official residence of the Israeli prime minister, we sat at a long dark-wood dining table. Gillian attempted to coax Sharon into a portrait shot sitting in front of the table.

  “No, I want to stay behind the table,” he muttered, hiding his bulky frame—as an aide later confirmed—beneath the tabletop.

  While Gillian’s shutter clicked, I spoke at length with Sharon, making a considerable effort to focus on his right eye, the one that didn’t zip out of control up toward the top of its socket at random moments.

  Only when Gillian had finished with her shoot did we move through the small sitting room and into the prime minister’s inner sanctum. Alone, except for me and his chief press aide, Sharon relaxed behind his small desk and let his tall black leather office chair rock backward. In the center of the desk, the house staff had placed a plate of small round halva cookies. Israelis offer these with coffee.

  When the coffee arrived, Sharon slid the as-yet-untouched plate across the surface of the desk so that it sat in front of him. As we talked, he munched his way through the entire plate of sesame-flavored cookies, which have the texture of a very soft shortbread. The crumbs gathered on his navy blue tie, collecting in a butter-yellow strip on the ledge formed by the protrusion of his belly. He brushed at the crumbs around his mouth, which landed on his lapels.

  By this time it was past nine o’clock at night. Apparently Sharon’s self-control diminished when he wasn’t watched by photographers with the power to record an unflattering image and, like many of us, his tiredness at the end of a demanding day urged an injection of sugar. Quite a lot of sugar. There had been more than a dozen cookies on the plate Sharon emptied.

  After I left him that night, I thought about Sharon’s gorging. It couldn’t truly be called Rabelaisian, because in person—regardless of his bullish political persona—he was the last man one would accuse of impoliteness or gross behavior. In fact, he was rather outlandishly gentlemanly for an Israeli, compared to the uncouth bluntness cultivated by many of his compatriots as an antidote to the manners of the European society that had persecuted them.

  I understood the isolation and self-hatred of his overeating, the need to keep the consumption at least from public view, even though his bulk shoved it in their faces after the fact. Politicians all have their secrets. Sharon’s successor as prime minister, Ehud Olmert, combed a foot of hair across his obviously bald head. After Olmert came a second term for Netanyahu, who smokes cigars as long as a porno penis, but refuses to be photographed doing so because it’s hardly the way a man of the people relaxes. (Netanyahu also turned up frequently at my gym in Jerusalem, marching listlessly on the treadmill as he read digests from aides and making no apparent reduction in his own paunch, which shows signs of one day reaching Sharonian proportions.)

  So this was Sharon’s secret. He wanted people to think he wasn’t fat, when he patently was. Perhaps delusion is part of political success. The nature of elections is that the public chooses to be deluded by politicians. Why shouldn’t the politicians deceive themselves, too? A politician must have the kind of ego that refuses to allow him to see himself for who he is. In a conflict zone like Israel, that self-deception might need to be still deeper, because the purported stakes are higher. American politicians ask voters to trust them with their mortgages, their savings, their schools. Israeli politicians tell electors they’d better vote for them or else Israel’s enemies may triumph and their state will cease to exist.

  I sensed that I couldn’t report what I’d learned about Sharon through his eating—not in the kind of magazine for which I used to write. It was too much about feel. It wasn’t attributable to some expert in a quote. It wouldn’t be balanced, in the way of Middle Eastern reporting, with another expert saying, “To be sure, there are Arab leaders who eat too much, as well.”

  Since the spring of 2006, when his doctors concluded that he wouldn’t recover from his coma, Sharon has lain in a private room in Tel Hashomer, a Tel Aviv hospital with a long-term care facility. The macabre joke among Israeli political correspondents is that no one would recognize him because
the doctors aren’t overfeeding him through the tube with which he takes his nourishment. So he’s down to a normal weight. He’s reported to be about 110 pounds.

  ~ PART THREE ~

  FOOD UNDER FIRE

  SAME-DAY COW

  ~ AFGHANISTAN ~

  TIM HETHERINGTON

  IT WAS COLD AND QUIET UP ON THE ABAS GHAR RIDGE. A FEW CROWS flew overhead and circled back in their quest for food, clearly spotting the American unit that was spread out along the trail below. The men relaxed and talked in hushed voices. It was October 2007, and the soldiers were on the third day of a combat operation aimed at flushing out insurgents in the Korengal Valley—widely considered one of the most deadly places for American soldiers in Afghanistan. Some lay down against their packs while others gathered in small groups, white ribbons of smoke spiraling upward from their cigarettes. The lieutenant was busy on his radio, and many took it as an opportunity to open up an MRE (Meal, Ready-to-Eat) ration pack. Sergeant Stichter sat beside a large tree and focused intently on spreading the contents of a tube of jelly over a beef patty. Sterling Jones watched the culinary experiment and chuckled to himself, “We eat our boredom.”

  For Staff Sergeant Larry Rougle from Utah, an MRE on the side of the Abas Ghar would be his last meal. Half an hour later, he would be dead and two others wounded, shot at close range after insurgents managed to overrun their position. U.S. intercepts had picked up the enemy whispering on the radios but hadn’t realized that this was because they were so close to where the men were camped out. Gunfire exploded around the men, the bullets breaking off branches and tearing up the hillside. Spenser Dunn, in the middle of his meal, lurched forward to find cover behind a pine tree, sending the contents of his ration pack flying. Meanwhile, on an outcrop eighty yards away, Kevin Rice fell back through thick foliage after being shot through the stomach. The ambush was over in an instant, leaving behind it the debris of spilled rations and a trail of blood down the mountainside.

  Napoleon famously said that an army marches on its stomach. Likewise today, American soldiers in Afghanistan live and die on MREs. Meals, Ready-to-Eat, otherwise known as Meals Rejected by Everyone, Meals Rarely Edible, Meals Rejected by the Enemy, or Materials Resembling Edibles. While five thousand soldiers in rear bases wear pressed clothing and feast on fresh produce, front-line combat soldiers in their alternative reality hold company with fleas and the thick chocolate plastic packaging of MRE meal packs. Field rations for combat units originated by order of Congress during the American Revolutionary War and have undergone numerous incarnations since—most recently from the heavy-duty canned rations of the Korean War to the “Meal, Combat, Individual” ration (also known as C-rations or Charlie Rats) of the Vietnam War, to the introduction of dehydrated MREs in the early 1980s.

  Inevitably soldiers have a complicated relationship with their rations, which they both malign and fetishize. They ascribe all sorts of powers to these hated, beloved meals. Some claim the MREs contain dangerous levels of bromide designed to take away their sex drive (though judging by the amount of porn I saw consumed in the Korengal, this hadn’t worked); others that the gum provided in each packet is really a laxative (though I once went through four packets without finding relief from a terrible bout of constipation). It is even commonly held that “Charms”—the hard-boiled candies that come with one of the meals—are, by their very name, harbingers of bad luck. Whenever someone found a packet of Charms in his MRE in the Korengal, it was customary for him to hurl the candies down the mountainside. I imagined how young Korengali children might come across the American treats lodged between boulders as they tended their goats and cows on the slopes below. Specialist Cortez looked a little sheepish one day when he was caught red-handed eating a whole packet. He immediately confessed to premeditation—claiming he was so bored out of his mind that he had wanted to start a firefight by eating them when no one was looking. It didn’t work.

  In the upside-down world of the Korengal, eating was a way to beat the boredom that suffocated soldiers between bouts of fighting. Later on during my many weeks with the soldiers there, I’d wonder what it was about food up there—it wasn’t that you stopped caring about eating, but it was hard to derive any satisfaction from an MRE. The name of each meal would change, but the contents seemed the same.

  Whatever the intentions of the Department of Defense, its rations did not provide any emotional fulfillment—there was rarely a moment of satisfied reverie after eating an MRE during which a soldier’s guard might drop. Certainly U.S. MREs did not replicate the European army experience of a carefully crafted gastronomie—French ration packs assumed a satisfying meal by the very inclusion of an after-dinner cigarette. Some of the best meals out there had little to do with what was actually being eaten, and more to do with the context and act of eating itself: Specialist Jason Monroe (a.k.a. “Money”) working his way through two pounds of canned tuna that a relative had sent him in a care package, in an act of defiant excess.

  While emotional satisfaction may not have been possible, just thinking about those brown packets could nevertheless evoke a Pavlovian response, especially on the final stretch of a patrol. You needed to pay attention during the sprint out of the village of Kalaygal—it would be careless to get shot after getting up so early and doing all the hard work—but once around the cusp of the spur, the final two hundred yards back to Outpost Restrepo were plain sailing. Situated on a high rocky outcrop with commanding views over the Korengal, Restrepo was an important strategic piece in the battle for the valley. The final moments of the steep climb up to the outpost required little concentration, and my mind often strayed to thoughts of food.

  Looking out across the way one morning as I passed through the concertina wire, I could see tall trees dotting the upper reaches of valley walls, their silhouettes standing against the morning light, while down on the valley floor, a blanket of mist thinned to reveal small patchworks of yellow and green terrace. Local people were bent over gathering ripe bundles of wheat, and small flecks were cattle meandering across the rocky crags in search of a morning meal. I found my colleague Sebastian already sitting down on a small rocky outcrop that serves as a kind of bench. He was shaking his head from side to side, and then, tilting his head back, finally took a large gulp.

  “I’m just having a coffee,” he said. “I lost the cup, so I’m just putting the coffee mix in my mouth and adding water.” He paused, noticing my expression.

  “It’s actually not that bad,” he said.

  It has been many months since I was last in the Korengal, but I still can’t entirely shake the effects of living off processed, indigestible material for months on end. As much as the fighting, the daily ritual of eating became a fundamental part of the experience we all shared. Nowadays I go out to a fancy restaurant in New York and will sit there like some confused old person wondering what to eat, but out in the Korengal I moved fast at mealtimes. I knew I’d have only a split second to get to the scrambled eggs and ham pouch when someone opened up the holy grail of MREs—the luminous white box of winter’s rations.

  Unlike the brown boxes of regular MREs, the white boxes for winter food contained freeze-dried meals that required the addition of hot water. It was actually like making a meal. Even if you were in the middle of wiping a dry cracker with a healthy dose of jalapeño cheese spread, the sweet music of someone ripping open a new carton of food was the signal to get off your ass and over there before the rest of the marauding hordes beat you to the best stuff. Bobby Gene had large square paws that could easily beat me to the bottom of the box in search of Beef Ravioli. No point in hesitating—I mean, who wants to end up with the loser’s lot of Cheese Macaroni—not even the platoon dog was that stupid.

  To pick the right MRE packet, one needed to comprehend in a split second all the ramifications of a particular choice. Each meal packet was its own universe, with its own particular assets and liabilities. For instance, take the packet Chicken Fajitas. In 2007, the Salt Lake Tribune a
sked three gourmet chefs to taste eighteen different MRE meals. All survived the experiment and went on to draw up a ranking table to compare their experiences. On a tasting scale of 1 to 10, the average of all the meals was a miserable 5.7, but the Chicken Fajitas was singled out as being the worst of all, ranking only an average score of 1.3. Framed like this, you’d think every soldier would avoid choosing an MRE Chicken Fajitas—but in fact, there were plenty of reasons why this would be a good choice. Think about all the great things that came in the brown sack of deliciousness along with the fajitas. I remember an orange beverage far superior to the fluorescent pink grapefruit one that came with another main course and stained your teeth. And there were chewy Tootsie Rolls that you could sequester away in your personal food treasury for a later date; syrupy spiced apples; and the pièce de résistance—cherry cobbler that could be warmed up. Each MRE was more than just the main course by which it was known; it was a holistic experience.

  Army logisticians determined that soldiers should eat only MREs no longer than twenty-one days in a row, but Outpost Restrepo became some kind of weird laboratory where men were pitted against the laws of nature and evolved new eating habits. One day I came across Sergeant Aron Hijar in the midst of culinary experimentation. In one hand he held an open packet of Meatloaf and Gravy, while in his other he slowly ground a pile of crackers in his palm and added them to the mixture. Next, a tube of peanut butter spread went in, followed by a sprinkling of M&M’s candies rounded off with two mini-bottles of Tabasco sauce. Hijar stirred the potent mixture together with a brown plastic spoon while staring at me intently.