This is Not A Drill
Page 9
Driving in Kabul was almost as depressing as visiting the zoo. Kabul’s streets are packed with four million people struggling to get from A to B in a heaving mass of dust, shit (human and animal), exhaust, and entirely too many people with guns. The inevitable gridlock happens every day. As soon as the car stopped moving, the peddlers appeared through the smoke, much like they do in so many other countries. Over the years I’ve been talked into purchasing all kinds of crap I didn’t need, by old women, kids and one-legged, one-eyed people whose final option is to try and eke out an existence by lane splitting in static traffic and selling everything from peanuts to guns.
Warfare has turned most of Kabul’s former middle-class apartment buildings into weird shapes; most were bullet riddled to the point of producing a dimpled golf-ball effect in the concrete, with virtually every single square inch having sustained small arms fire. Others had ‘surgically removed’ balconies where RPGs and mortars had impacted.
This place put me slightly on edge. It was like Afghanistan was watching, watching and waiting like a wild animal, like a wounded, hardened, one-eyed lion. I knew I needed to treat it with respect, keep my actions introverted, my voice even and calm, and only show my teeth in a smile.
Tom was in the front passenger seat with his armalite, muzzle down, between his knees. I sat in the back, looking out into the dusty street. Each passing minute one foot of forward movement rolled by in an excruciating test of endurance. You’re not going to get out and run, not in Kabul, so you may as well accept it, even it if means missing your flight, meeting, appointment, whatever. Through the hot dust a figure emerged, a boy around eight. He had big sad hazel eyes.
‘Spandi,’ said the driver and lowered his window. The boy walked over to our driver’s door. I’d seen them on the street before in Kabul, these young kids, peddling tin cans of smoke like little chimneys. I had no idea what they were up to. They just arrived at your window enveloped in thick spicy blue clouds. The driver handed the boy ten Afghanis and let the smoke billow from the can into the car, then the window went back up and the boy was gone, on to the next car.
The cans, much like the children holding them, all look the same: charred, dirty and too fragile for their purpose. They hang awkwardly from rusted handles resembling old bent clothes hangers, and the smoke . . . what was with that smoke? I thought it might have been hash, tea or a funky decongestant. After half an hour of discussion with Ali, the driver, I discovered that it came from ‘spand’, a herb that can be found in markets across Afghanistan. One who sells spand is referred to as ‘spandi’ by the Afghans. When the herb is burned, the smoke produced is believed to ward off evil spirits and misfortune. The practice goes back centuries, buried deep in Afghan tribalism that revolved around animism and ancestor worship. The spandi eking out an existence on the streets are desperate, so they play on the superstitions deeply rooted in the collective psyche of the Afghan people.
There is a lack of basically everything in Afghanistan. The country is living on a meal ticket supplied by everyone else, and progress is about as fast as a tectonic plate. The 4.6 billion dollars it was promised by the international community has come up very short, thanks to a never-ending daisy chain of bureaucrats who pass paperwork around in a giant merry-go-round of red tape from one side of Kabul to the other. So what does it have apart from more dust than a British rail seat and a lot of poppies? Not much. Perhaps by some miracle in, say, thirty years it will have all the things we take for granted. Changes have been made for the better, compared to Afghanistan circa 2002, and there have been improvements in new construction, roads, power supply and medical aid, but by our standards it’s still a mess.
Already two days had passed. I flopped down on my hotel bed, stared at the ceiling fan and let my brain go numb. And slept the heavy deep sleep you get after a long journey followed by Kabul belly and a nice day at the zoo.
It was lunchtime when I finally woke up. After a call to the boys and a quick bite to eat in the hotel, I was again stuck in Kabul traffic. Chris was next to me in the back, Sami behind the wheel and Tom in the front seat next to him. I could just make out a spandi working his way through the dust and exhaust fumes, down perpetually nervous and impoverished streets.
Sometimes we saw a car, usually military, with a big round disk on the roof. The disk is plugged into a bank of batteries in the back that provide the power for it to pulse out multiple signals to detonate any IEDs (improvised explosive devices) that may be buried in the road ahead. Once a disked car is spotted by the locals it creates a parting-of-the-sea effect, as no-one wants to be ahead of it if a bomb does go off—especially when the IEDs are becoming more and more advanced. Indeed, simple IEDs are giving way to what Tom calls ‘off-route mines’, devices that are hand-turned on a lathe, packed with explosives and capped with a concave steel or copper plate. The mine can be concealed and detonated horizontally or vertically, triggered by remote, infra-red or command wire. The explosion turns the concave plate into a molten jet or EFP (explosively formed projectile) moving at two thousand metres per second. It can penetrate up to ten centimetres of armour plating at one hundred metres. It creates a very effective killing ground and injects real fear as no-one is safe.
Suddenly the traffic started separating, everyone pulled onto the kerb in an effort to get out of the way, and a disked-up car ploughed past, leading a convoy of four vehicles at high speed through the city centre. The cars were big expensive four-wheel drives with blacked-out windows and armour plating. The spandi was caught in the mayhem of traffic, he dropped his can, for a second he was enveloped in a blue cloud, then in a blur the four cars sped past us. Every driver instantly tried to fill the hole the convoy had made in an effort to get an extra twenty yards down the street. Our driver did the same. I looked to my left just in time to see the boy; he was down, his burning spand smoking all around him. One of the convoy vehicles had driven over his left foot, smashing it to a pulp. He just sat there in shock. In seconds we were turning down a side street. I tried to get out, but it was too dangerous: the repercussions of the hit-and-run would soon send the people who saw it into a frenzy, and our driver wasn’t stopping no matter what I did. Tom swivelled in the front seat, his face was blank, ‘Can’t stop, mate. You don’t want to be there, it’ll get nasty.’
Sami pointed the car down tiny parallel back streets, expertly navigating the maze laid out in his head. He is former Mujahadeen and has forgotten more about Kabul than any of us will ever know. I think my bum spent more time in the air than on the seat as we ploughed on, over small boulders and through potholes big enough to have a party in. My whole spine felt it, as any contact with the seat seemed to have the padding of Victoria Beckham.
Later that evening we set out into the city to relax and have a drink. My stomach was doing cartwheels again, thanks to the roads, but after a couple of tablets the German doc had given me I had regained control and was ready for ‘Samarqand’.
‘This place is the wild west, mate,’ said Chris as we bounced down another Kabul back street. High walls topped with razor wire surrounded every structure, and there were big iron gates and armed guards who always made eye contact and tracked your uneven progression past their post. Tom was grinning in the front seat, but he was the one with the pistol on his hip and an M4 armalite in his hand. It was getting dark; random lights broke through the thick dust but visibility was no more than thirty feet.
‘Put your game face on, mate,’ said Chris as I jumped out of the big four-wheel drive and straight into a deep pothole full of grey sludge. The boys had a good laugh. Luckily for me this bar didn’t have a dress code rule regarding being covered in shit from the knees down.
I was asked for ID at the entrance. It’s best to wear shirts and jackets with huge breast pockets here, as reaching inside your clothing tends to look a bit like you’re going for your Magnum, and digging around in your pocket does tend to send armed men frantic even if the only thing you produce is a Mars Bar. I always give the d
oorman a massive tip when going into rough clubs in rough countries. I tell them if they see me running out pursued by some pissed-off punter, I’m the one they let back in.
When we walked in, it became apparent that if there was a rule it was that there were no rules. Everyone looked like an extra from Gladiator. All sorts of shady characters were hanging about, expatriates from all over the world, diplomats, UN staff, soldiers, ex-soldiers, spooks, dealers in opium, arms and worse. I fixed myself on a spot near the back with good access to the rear entrance and not too much light. Okay, I thought, I’ve been in places like this before. Don’t make eye contact unless you’re shaking some bastard’s hand, don’t bump into anyone, don’t talk about the War on Terror, or ‘OBL’ as he was known, don’t get drunk and, for fuck’s sake, don’t talk to any of the women.
Chris appeared with a round of beers, sat down next to me and rattled off the names and backgrounds of two-thirds of the men in the bar, every one sounding as disturbing as the last. Some were what the boys called ‘Walters’, short for Walter Mitty, meaning someone who talks it up; some were ‘Bongos’, or business-orientated NGOs, who were there for charitable reasons but got paid more than Somalia’s national debt. The only attractive woman in the room was as popular as a naked prom queen handing out free beer at the footy; she was slowly backing away from a conversation with increasingly overt ‘someone jump in and save me’ looks to the room. The guy she was talking to had obviously changed from the dark handsome stranger to a fanatical big-mouth with a serious chip on his shoulder.
The bar started to fill with more and more guys; the full ensemble and cast of the ubiquitous ‘don’t ask me why I’m here’ consultancy company, some exchanged close quiet conversation, others roared in loud backslapping stories, chasing endless shooters with jugs of beer and cigars. It was a Thursday night, party night as the Islamic weekend is Friday, and by 10 p.m. it was packed, loud and everyone was having a good time. Then suddenly an explosive fight broke out. Two guys traded blows for a few seconds but were quickly separated. The fight was over the good-looking woman, who had, by all accounts, been with both of the men, and now hard stares across the room just didn’t cut it anymore. So in the true tradition of drunks with guns, these two men decided to settle their dispute over the woman by stepping outside and having a good old-fashioned duel. You know, ten paces, turn and fire.
They dropped the mags from their pistols, leaving one round in the breech, re-holstered their weapons, stood back to back, swaying, then staggered apart; no-one was counting as everyone was either hiding or looking for cover. The younger of the two spun around, but in his rush he put his only bullet into the ground before his pistol had cleared the holster. Realising his predicament, he spun round the other way and took off down the street, zigzagging in all directions. While all this was going on the older and, as it turned out, more experienced of the two took his time and carefully aimed at his frantic, sprinting opponent, but missed. He actually looked genuinely disappointed and wandered back to the bar. The woman had gone; everyone just went back to their conversations, picking up right where they had left off.
Chris and Tom kept a low profile, and their people were also very quiet, blending into the walls so well they were almost forgotten. Most of them are ex-Gurkhas and can dissolve into an Afghan street remarkably well. The boys play their cards close to their chest, but it’s obvious they are very good at what they do; even when they get drunk they remain aware of everything.
Everyone in Kabul can drink, and if you come here you’ll want to, you’ll need to. No-one here is without a horror story, and if you stay long enough you’ll hear them all. The nightlife in Kabul is surprising. When everyone and his dog has a gun, and you never know what’s going to happen next, it adds a certain moment of satisfaction to every meal you eat, every sip of whisky, every new day. The conversation is better, the jokes are fucking hilarious, and the drinks are never ending. For a moment it could have been another Kabul, the best version, the one from the 1960s, the halfway house in a righteous passage through a spectacular dope-filled wonderland en route to Kathmandu and enlightenment. One hit of edible opium goes for less than a dollar here, while I’m paying more than I do in Sydney to drink whisky. As far as good hash, opium and bad roads are concerned, Kabul has not changed that much since those halcyon days.
The drinks kept on coming, the night rolled into a full-blown drunk, it was spectacular and so was the hangover.
I woke up with a beauty the next morning. Chris and Tom were having breakfast in their office with a map laid out on the table.
‘Morning,’ Tom said and smiled the way you do when you know you stopped drinking early enough the night before.
My mouth felt like an Arab’s sandal, but there was a lot to talk about; not the rosy-cheeked scamperings of the previous evening but about the following day’s three-car convoy to ‘Camp 87’, a cement plant and road works eighty-seven kilometres from Kabul, past a few thousand landmines and other assorted unexploded ordnance, near the town of Gardez, right on the Peshawar–Pakistan border. It was a routine visit, so I jumped at the chance to go along and see the front line of Afghanistan’s new infrastructure.
‘Do you want a weapon?’ asked Chris, rather like you would ask someone if they wanted an umbrella before a country walk. He knew I had used firearms before, but this time was different, I was here of my own volition and, more importantly, I was free to run away. ‘It’s like having a condom,’ he went on. ‘Better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.’
‘No, mate, I’m not going to shoot some bastard,’ I replied and gulped down my coffee. As much as I liked his analogy, I struggled with the mental picture of myself running to a twenty-four-hour chemist, as opposed to finding myself unarmed while someone empties an automatic weapon at me.
‘Okay, there’ll be plenty of support if something does happen.’ Chris went on to describe our route and the day’s events at a pace that was way too fast and detailed for my brain to retain. He showed me on two different maps at the same time, then suddenly stopped when he looked at me and realised that I’m no former fighter pilot like him, and given the amount of whisky I’d necked the night before he was talking to someone with the mental retention capacity of a wet piece of toilet paper. At one point, I think I may have even gone cross-eyed.
Tom sat at his desk reading something, then the phone rang, he answered and instantly sat forward with his free hand cupping his left ear. Chris stopped talking and we looked on, as the call was obviously not good news. Within moments I was sprinting down the hall trying to keep up with Tom, who was heading straight for the car, while Chris jumped on the phone. Tom relayed what had happened: one of his staff, an Afghan man who works for CTG, had been stabbed repeatedly outside his home in what appeared to be a random robbery. He was at the UN hospital and was waiting for transport to the bigger hospital.
The stark UN building seemed deserted except for the occasional small group of Afghan workers huddled in a corner and whispering together. Tom broke into a run, rounded the last few corners and burst into a room where Mr Nazari lay on a gurney, tears streaming down the sides of his hollow cheeks. Mr Nazari is a real person; he is a forty-five-year-old man, with a wife, a brother and no other family. He loves both his wife and his brother dearly. Mr Nazari could not understand the Spanish military doctors conversing with each other, but knew that his life was hanging in the balance. I stood unnoticed in the corner; the room was organised chaos. I could see Mr Nazari’s eyes: he couldn’t believe he was in this situation. He had lived through the jihad against the Soviets and he had survived the Taliban, only to get shived in his own front yard. He was aware that there were so many things he may never get to say, so many goodbyes.
The tears rolled down the side of his face and slowly over his ears. He looked around, slowly, his movement constrained by both an oxygen mask and a central line drip that was secured by a cannula inserted into his clavicle. He saw Tom, their eyes met, and ther
e was a glimmer of recognition. Tom knelt down beside Mr Nazari and felt for a pulse. Mr Nazari mumbled something under the mask, Tom leaned in.
‘Mr Tom, please find my wife and my brother, please,’ he whispered. Tom’s eyes said it all. A former captain in the British Parachute Regiment, he has seen men lose their life for cause and country but he wasn’t going to let Mr Nazari go for this. The private exchange between the two men in front of me was intensely moving.
Mr Nazari was transferred into an ambulance. The arriving medics knew the prognosis wasn’t good, they knew how much damage a human body can absorb. Just forty-eight hours ago they’d lost seventeen of their friends in a helicopter crash. The flags in the compound were still flying at half-mast.
The UN doctor was from Romania and the military doctors were Spanish. Together they went through the handover. One of the Spanish doctors directed the UN doctor’s attention to the various entry wounds, and clinically cast aside the sheet under which Mr Nazari was lying, exposing his modesty. Mr Nazari was ‘the patient’, this was purely business for the doctors, but Mr Nazari was a devoutly Muslim man. Semiconscious, he tried to move the sheet to cover himself. He was aware of the Spanish nurse and was humiliated by his exposure. His movement was pathetic, there was no strength left in his arms and even less coordination. He continued to stare into the hard sun, his eyes never shifting, his pride never wavering once, his dignity eternal.
There are occasions in life to be amazed by the physical and mental courage of the human animal under stress. This was one of them. Later Tom would quietly relax, expressing himself with a kind of fatalistic humour and simplicity that both comforts and disarms. He leaves you with a warm heart in the end, perhaps because you know he doesn’t really care what you think.