The Good Son

by Michael Gruber

  Anyway, they found us among the blankets when they unloaded our truck, and we got roughed up a little and cursed, and then we were taken to the leader of this particular band of mujahideen, Murad Habib, who was called the Colonel, because he had been one in the old Afghan army, before the communist coup. He looked us over and poked us to see if we were worth keeping as pack animals. Wazir was fairly well built at fourteen but I was a skinny little thing-I probably didn’t weigh over seventy pounds at the time-and they were going to take him and send me back as baggage with the trucks, but Wazir said he wouldn’t leave me and he told our clan lineage to them, and it turned out that the Colonel was a Barakzai just like us and he was distantly related to Gul Muhammed. So it was decided that we could stay with them and wash pots and carry things and dig holes, but if they ever ran into our father they would dump us with him and let him deal with us.

  Wazir became a bearer, which meant that at least he went out on ambushes and raids, but I stayed in our village of Gumban and watched the unit’s sheep. We had a flock of several hundred, for meat and milk and sheepskins, and also a herd of donkeys for haulage. The shepherd was Zorak, an older man, formerly a fighter, who had one eye and one leg. The first day he asked me if I wanted to hear how he lost them and naturally I did and he said he had been an RPG gunner and in the midst of a hot fight with a Russian column, he had fired so many rockets that he had fouled the tube of his launcher, and when that happens the tube kicks back when you shoot the next one and the rear sight rips out your eye. I asked him if it had hurt and he said he hadn’t much felt it until later, but the blood had gummed up his other eye and while he was stumbling around in the open, a Russian machine-gunner had blown off his leg.

  He was a friendly enough guy for a Pashtun and seemed glad of my company, and after a few unsuccessful attempts he left my young ass alone and resumed the love of sheep. Every day was the same. We both lived in a one-room stone hut at the edge of the village. At dawn we would eat our breakfast of bread and ewe’s milk and, after morning prayer, feed the donkeys and drive the sheep up to pasture on the slopes of the Babur Valley and pray at noon and eat our lunch of bread and dal, then bring the sheep back at dusk, and pray again. When it snowed, we would feed them on hay and sit around the fire and sing songs and tell stories. Zorak knew the usual tales of kings and their clever daughters, of deos and fairies and man-eating devil-women, and I replied with what I could remember of the Arabian nights and Kipling and the plots of films I had seen. He was particularly fond of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. And we sang, to each other at night and to the sheep in their pastures. He knew a lot of traditional Pashto songs, mainly about love, and I responded with renditions of the ghazals I’d heard at Laghari Sahib’s parties. The sheep seemed to like it. Actually, at the time I had a good, clear boy’s voice and Zorak must have said something to someone in authority, because after a while I was invited to the celebrations the unit used to have after successful operations, to sing the ghazals of Ghalib and Mir and Nazir.

  The NISA was a comparatively liberal organization, as things went in Pashtunistan. It attracted former Afghan army officers like the Colonel and other educated people. Their religion was the traditional mild Sufi-influenced Islam of the region. They loved music. Some of the younger guys had tape players on which they listened to Pashto pop songs from Pakistan, but the senior people liked the old ghazals and the old way of hanging out on a Thursday evening for a concert. I would come in from the sheepfold, wash, put on my one good shalwar kameez, wrap my turban neatly, and perform to the beat of the tabla and the plinking drone of the rubab, singing to my audience of rough, violent men about hopeless love and the great cosmic questions of life and death. I guess I became a kind of pet, especially of Colonel Habib’s. He would ask for particular ghazals; I remember he liked the one that goes:

  We are bound by life and bound by grief,

  It is the same binding cord,

  Why should we look to be unbound from sorrow

  Before the day of death?

  Once I asked the Colonel how long he thought the war would last, and without hesitating he said, “Ten years, just like Vietnam,” and then he had to explain to me what Vietnam was and what had happened there. I got a good strategic education from the Colonel; he spent a lot more time with me than colonels typically spend with shepherd boys.

  This connection helped ease my loneliness, because aside from Zorak I didn’t talk to anyone for days on end, and often when I was in the high pastures I didn’t even talk to him. Wazir had more or less dropped me, which is to say he would have given his life gladly to defend me, but he was a fighter and I wasn’t. He’d moved up from bearer and now carried an Enfield-this was maybe in the spring of our second year with the mujahideen command-and he treated me with a condescension I found hard to take.

  I was a shepherd for something like two and a half years, the first phase of the Russian war. When I started out I was the coddled, maybe even spoiled, child of a wealthy Lahori family and at the end I was a Pashtun shepherd, tough as the roots of a camel thorn, uncomplaining, rainproof, snowproof, uncaring of the cold or the heat, master of the hills. It was the work that did it, I think. It’s no mystery why shepherds have featured so much in the great religions; being out in all weathers, under nothing but the sky, you can feel the eye of God on you all the time, and also the stupidity of the sheep, the constant worry over what they’re getting into, makes you think you should try your hand at fixing the stupidity of men. That, and the land itself, the bony country of the Pashtun: looming hills, red and tan and black above the evergreen forests, and other colors I can’t name, depending on the light and the season; and the softness of the floodplains, their green more gracious and lovely for the contrast with their setting of flint. The white of the apricot trees in spring, and in early summer the whole valley would be red with poppies, and in their midst you could see from the heights the glittering, braided river. And the air of the place, sharp as glass shards in the winter, like breathing live flame in deep summer, and the nights, ear-hissing silent except for the imbecile moaning of the sheep and the eternal wind in the stunted thornbushes, and overhead a million stars wheeling over the black rim of our canyon.

  And I hated the Russians for stepping on my land and I hated anyone who wasn’t us, and a month or so before my thirteenth birthday I got my chance to fight them. I started as a bearer for an RPG team, carrying bags full of rockets and booster tubes. On an ambush, I would hang back a little from the team and hand a rocket and a booster to the loader. The RPG-7 is a terrific weapon and guerrilla warfare would be nearly impossible without it, but it has the disadvantage of being fairly slow to reload and of leaving a trail of blue-gray smoke that points right back to the shooter’s position, which means you have to change position after you fire. But it’s also hard to get a one-shot kill on an armored vehicle at any range and so we always had one team with two RPGs; its leader was Mirzal, our best shot with the weapon, and there was a loader, Bohrum Khan, and now I was a bearer.

  “Are you bored yet?” I asked Gloria.

  “I’m riveted.”

  “Why? I wasn’t riveted when I was doing it. War is pretty boring, especially guerrilla war. Most of it is hanging around and waiting for the other guys to send a convoy through so you can blow it up. And hiding. We did a lot of that.”

  “Okay, did you do any heroics? Let’s cut to the chase here.”

  “Oh, heroics. The problem with heroics is that it all goes down so fast you can hardly remember what happened. Other people have to tell you what you did, after. Why do you want heroics?”

  “Women love heroes; it’s the secret shame of women’s lib. We want our precious eggies to get sprayed by guys who can defend us. And also, you have all these scars on you. Don’t you think I’m curious about how you got them? Surely you’ve been down this road before, the seductive powers of the hero and all.”

  “Not a lot. I’m not that experienced with women, to tell the truth.”
r />   “What? I thought soldiers were the horniest creatures on earth.”

  “Yes, soldiers, but I wasn’t a soldier, I was a mujahid. A Pashtun mujahid. We didn’t mess with the local women. It would’ve torn the jihad apart.”

  “So you were, like, celibate for the whole war? All of you?”

  “No. There were plenty of sheep. Some of the big shots had boy harems. Others… well, for example, me and Wazir were an item after I became a fighter.”

  “You were gay?”

  “That’s the wrong language. I loved him and he loved me and we were warriors together. We shared our blankets. It was part of our war. It’s hard to put in an American frame. He was a terrific person, a terrific fighter, much better than me, a real leader and smart as shit. It was very intense, a kind of love-hate thing going on there too.”

  “Because you thought he was smarter than you and a better soldier?”

  “No, I admired the hell out of him for that. No, it was my mother at first. She sort of took him under her wing, spent a lot of time with him, and I wanted her for myself. “

  “Why was she interested in him?”

  “I don’t know. We never talked about it. I was embarrassed, I guess, and she didn’t volunteer anything. She was a very strange woman-is, I mean. They wouldn’t-I mean the family wouldn’t-really let her raise me; I was the eldest son of the eldest son, the heir. I guess that made her want to have someone of her own to form. You would’ve thought that Gul Muhammed would’ve objected, but for some reason he didn’t. They had a funny relationship too, practically never talked, but he would stare at her when she walked by, like she had two heads. I never could figure it out. So then later, because I could sing and knew a lot of poetry, ghazals and Rahman Baba and all that, I became a favorite of the Colonel, and Wazir got crazy jealous.”

  “Why, did you do the Colonel too?”

  “Of course. He was a great man. It was an honor to be asked. And Wazir found out about it and we had a knock-down drag-out fight and he kicked my ass. That was just before the Tsawkey operation-”

  “Wait, what happened to him?”

  “Wazir? I don’t know. If he survived the war and the Taliban afterward, he’s still up there. He might even be fighting against us.”

  “How come you left?”

  “I’ll get to that. Do you want to hear about my heroic deed?”

  “After I pee,” she said.

  I was still humping rockets for Mirzal and Bohrum Khan. We’d been hitting the outlying posts pretty regularly, shooting them up, killing DRA and stealing weapons, but now the Colonel wanted to take out the main post, which was set up in the two-story brick high school in Tsawkey town. We had about fifty mujahideen, with Kalashnikovs, Enfields, RPGs, and two PK light machine guns. They had a company of Democratic Republic of Afghanistan troops and a few Russian advisers.

  We went in just before sunrise. I was part of a team under a commander named Sahak, twenty-one men and a boy, me, tasked to attack the south side of the school, and there were other teams going to hit the north and east sides simultaneously. I was carrying a satchel of rockets and boosters, a bag of Russian hand grenades, and an Enfield slung across my back, a load that weighed apporoximately as much as I did.

  We had good cover in woods up until about a hundred meters off, where the enemy had cleared off the trees and brush. Our target was the heavy machine gun they had mounted on the roof, one of two up there in sandbagged positions. They also had a battery of 82mm Podnos mortars up there, so it was a pretty tough nut. We spread out along the tree line, and Mirzal, Bohrum, and I sneaked out and set up on a little rise a couple of dozen meters out. We were just aiming our first round when someone in one of the other attack groups must have stumbled or maybe he was just an asshole, of which we had a good number in our ranks, but there was a burst of fire off to our flank and immediately parachute flares shot up from the school and it was like we were in the movies, I could see the hairs in Mirzal’s beard. He took aim, though, at the bulk of the huge machine gun and I dropped to the ground, and there was this enormous noise and something heavy and wet dropped on me. I struggled out from under it and found it was the top half of Mirzal’s body, headless and trailing guts. He’d taken a full burst and the 12.7 had killed Bohrum too.

  But the RPG was intact, all loaded, and when the flare went out and the rockets from the next one were just tracing a red pencil up into the night, I picked up the launcher without much thought and fired it at the machine gun. It was my first shot, but I’d seen it done often enough; the main thing is to remember that the rocket tends to fly into the wind and not away from it like a bullet. As soon as I shot I started running toward the school, because I knew I was dead if I stayed there and dead if I tried to make it back to the trees, and as it happened my shot just clipped the steel shield that protects a DShK machine gun from small-arms fire, and it exploded and one of the guns on the roof was out of action.

  I heard a cheer behind me as the mujahideen swarmed out of the wood, and then the mortars started up and bombs fell among them but I didn’t look back. I just ran toward the school and a door in the wall. Other DRA were shooting down from the roof and out of loopholes in the walls. I could hear the snap of rounds going by and felt a sharp blow on my side, but I figured it was from the tip of one of the rockets, it was always happening, and the other men were pouring in fire at the guys shooting at me so I stopped, knelt, loaded my tube, and shot one at the door. It blew down and I ran up to the doorway and pulled out a grenade and tossed it in, wondering why the grenade was all slippery, and then I dropped my tube and the bag of rockets and went into the building with my rifle.

  I discovered I’d been dumb lucky, because the defenders had just been setting up a defensive position with a PK machine gun behind a pile of office desks in the corridor on the other side of the door just as my rocket hit, and the blast had killed or wounded half a dozen men. One of them tried to get up and I shot him with my rifle, my first face-to-face kill, not counting my boyhood revenge. The machine gun seemed all right so I picked it up and draped the belt of rounds over my shoulder and another one around my neck like a fashionable scarf. The PK is just a glorified Kalashnikov and weighs about fifteen pounds, so compared to what I usually carried I was floating on air. I went through a door and down a corridor. Three men came racing around a corner, pulling on equipment. They seemed surprised to see me and skidded to a halt, open-mouthed, and I shot them down.

  Then I heard the sound of lots of men coming, pounding boots, so I ducked in a door, which turned out to be a stairway. I went up the stairs, past the second floor and up to the roof. Just as I got to the last flight up, the roof door opened and a man in Soviet camo gear appeared and yelled something. He was surprised to see me too, I guess.

  After I shot him I stepped over his body and out onto the roof. There were the mortarmen loading rounds like crazy and an officer with night goggles standing by the parapet behind some sandbags yelling ranges and azimuths, and the other DShK machine gun was blasting away. So I set myself against the edge of the doorway I’d just come through and with one long burst shot everyone on the roof. There was still firing coming from the north side of the building, and I looked down and saw that the DRAs had set up a sandbagged position in front of the north door and they were holding up our guys attacking from that side, so I dropped a couple of grenades down on them. I was feeling a little bushed by then, so after making sure that everyone was dead and shooting them if they weren’t, I sat down against the sandbags near the DShK gun and checked my weapon. My PK was nearly out of ammunition but I had lots of grenades. I remember seeing that the grenade bag was covered in blood, but it somehow didn’t occur to me that it was mine.

  I got up and began to futz around with the DShK, and figured out how to fire it, and did fire a short burst just for fun. As I was wondering what was keeping the rest of my people I heard sounds of boots and voices on the stairwell and out walked two DRA soldiers carrying crates of mortar bombs. Th
ey stopped and looked at the scene on the roof, stunned, I guess, and I turned the big machine gun around and blew them both to rags. Then I ran to the head of the stairs and threw a bunch of grenades down there, and the explosions must have set off the mortar bombs because the whole roof erupted like a volcano and knocked me on my ass.

  When I came to again I was in bed back in our village and Wazir was sitting next to my charpoy holding my hand. There were tears in his eyes. He asked me to forgive him for his envy. He said the Prophet, on whom be peace, taught that envy eats up good actions as fire eats up wood. I asked him why he was envious of me-I had been a shepherd boy and a mere bearer while he had fought the jihad with arms and was accounted brave-and he answered, because the Colonel favored you. And then he went into a long story about something that had happened five hundred years ago, about the envy between the son and the adopted son of Ghoughusht and how this had brought calamities on their tribe, and this was the same thing and he was ashamed. He said he thought he could own me like a pet, which was very wrong, for all belong to God alone, especially we mujahideen, and this is proven by what you did with God’s help two days ago; the Pashtuns will sing of it for a thousand years, how one boy captured a fort by himself and slew sixty men.

  So I forgave him and said I loved him above all men and we were reconciled. It was interesting that I’d been out of it for two whole days. I didn’t recall anything that happened after I fired the RPG, and it took days for me to recollect what I’d done. I’d taken a round through the flesh on my right side, my first battle scar. After that, people treated me with a kind of awed respect, since it was clear to them that I was under the special protection of God, or else I never could have captured a strongpoint almost single-handed and wiped out the better part of a company of soldiers. But the fact is that things like that happen from time to time in combat, call it God or inexplicable luck. You read, say, Audie Murphy’s Medal of Honor citation, and it sounds like someone made it up. For a whole hour this little guy holds off an entire company of Wehrmacht infantry, supported by six tanks, while standing upright in a burning vehicle firing a.50-caliber machine gun-and survives. He was eighteen when he did that. I was thirteen when I took the high school in Tsawkey. It makes no sense.