The Afgan Campaign

by Steven Pressfield

  The day ends with a horse chase, in which Stephanos and six of our mercs run down the last fugitives. They bring back four prisoners. Our kill is seventeen. We suffer one dead (the lead merc who bolted past me alongside Tollo) and three wounded, one of them my mate Boxer, breaking his ankle in a fall. Night descends. Our fellows make prizes of the dead men’s weapons. They wolf a meal of the enemy’s mooch and toast their backs around blazes of his firewood. Two Afghans have fallen by my hand this day. Later, I will see their faces in my dreams. Later, remorse will torment me. Later, but now. Now I am happy. I feel pride as I abrade my forearms with Afghan dust, chafing off the blood of men who would have killed me and my comrades if they could. Sleep finds me guiltless and unrepentant. I have never been happier in my life.

  9

  The distance our column has covered in six nights chasing the foe, it takes nearly twice as long to traverse returning; we are so exhausted and so is our stock. We have to link up with our other patrols. We can’t track as the hawk flies but have to detour from village to village to fill our bellies.

  One of the chores of a rookie is to forage for food. In our litter, it’s Lucas and me who draw this duty. Bring back dinner! Get us something to eat! The practice of “living off the land” is indispensable, we see, to a young trooper’s education. It teaches him how to rough up civilians, intimidate farmers and housedames. The youth learns how to tear up a floor, rip open a roof, how to shake people down. It trains him to take nothing at face value, not the weeping grandmother, the pleading wife, the starving urchin. They’re all lying. They’ve all got mooch.

  On the ninth noon returning to Artacoana, a messenger gallops up, mounted on the most spectacular piece of horseflesh I have ever seen. He is a full captain of Alexander’s Companions, bringing orders from the king himself. Three Afghan guides accompany him, perched on plug yaboos that look like hounds alongside the captain’s thoroughbred. But these ponies can fly. While the captain confers with Tollo and Stephanos, our mob grills the scrubs.

  Alexander is here, they tell us. At Artacoana. Informed by fast couriers of Satibarzanes’ and Spitamenes’ insurrection, the king has broken off his eastward advance. He has turned about, leaving the heavy corps with his general Craterus, while he with the cavalry and light troops has crossed 180 miles of desert in three days. The rebel horse has shown its heels at his approach. Alexander has cornered the foot troops, thirteen thousand, atop a natural fortress called the Mother’s Breast. If the insurgents will accept him as sovereign, Alexander has pledged, all may return in peace to their homes. The foe has sent back a gutted dog. It means go to hell.

  Our own orders, delivered by the Companion captain, are not to return to Artacoana but to make all speed to the site of the original massacre, secure the place, and protect the corpses of our countrymen from further desecration. We are to remain on-site until Alexander himself can conclude his business with the foe and arrive to tender proper honors to the fallen. Two of the Afghans on yaboos will guide us.

  The site, when we reach it three dusks later, is in a narrow throat between granite crags. An understrength company of Arcadian mercenaries mans a perimeter. They are ecstatic to see us, as our numbers will hold at bay the droves of Afghan dames who have already picked the gorge clean of plunder and still loiter on the high-lines, awaiting the chance to dash in and make off with the odd buckle or lancehead, whose bronze and iron are worth fortunes in this desert, not to mention their value as trophies.

  The Arcadians tell us what happened to our countrymen. Those who survived the initial ambush were beaten and stripped naked; the enemy staked them out on the earth, spread-eagled on their backs, and drove long knives into their thighs, ripping gashes to the bone. They disemboweled our fellows, put out their eyes, and hacked off their genitals. Then they painted them with terebinth oil-turpentine-and set them on fire. All this while they were still alive.

  It is the women and children, we learn from the Afghan guides, who have committed these atrocities upon our countrymen. This, they tell us, is the custom of the country. Captives are turned over to the clan females for their pleasure. The tribes do this not only to us but to each other.

  The Arcadians have collected the bodies of our comrades in the center of the camp. This is so the Afghan women can’t skulk in after dark and plunder them further. The corpses are wrapped, and we newcomers make no attempt to peek under.

  After dark our female besiegers begin to keen. A bloodcurdling ululation commences on one flank of the gorge, answered by an equally mane-blanching chorus from the other. Soon the whole pass is wailing in some ungodly primordial cacophony.

  “Is that jackals or people?” Flea asks.

  Lucas glances to me. “Jackals would sound more human.”

  The evening is warm but we’re all shivering. In camp it is custom for rookies only to stand sentry; this night the vets take their turn too.

  Sometime in the third watch an Afghan vixen is slain by two of Bullock’s grooms; she has crawled in, past the guard, all the way to the picketed horses, one of which she is in the act of hamstringing, just a pebble’s toss from the commander’s tent. Next morning, I and several others are detailed to remove the bodies of our countrymen to an even more secure site in the camp. We grab the first wrapped form to lift it; it plunges free of its shroud, in sections, at our feet. The man has been beheaded and cut off at the knees.

  10

  Our column returns to Artacoana to find the lower city abandoned and the upper city reduced to rubble. In our absence the natives have risen and been crushed. East in the hills, the siege of the Mother’s Breast is over. Alexander and his elite corps have already started south, into Drangiana, in pursuit of the rebel Barsaentes and the cavalry commander, Spitamenes.

  It is Spitamenes’ men, we learn, whom our pursuit party has been chasing. The original massacre was his work. By his orders our luckless countrymen were betrayed; at his command were they turned over for mutilation.

  He is clever, too, this villain. While our chase companies have spent themselves on his false trail into the desert, he himself has doubled back with his main force. He has led Artacoana into revolt.

  Where is he now? Fled again.

  I have never seen a city devastated. The lane where our boot-maker’s shop had stood is now stone and ash. The tannery district lies in ruins; kites and packs of wild dogs colonize the neighborhoods of the wealthy. Only the parks survive unscathed. Tent camps fill them; maids carrying water in earthen jugs shuttle back and forth to the river.

  Our column of replacements still hasn’t linked with Alexander. We catch up instead with the heavy divisions under Craterus, which have returned to Artacoana, trailing Alexander. The siege train is just now loading out to move south; it is their artillery that has taken the city down. We inspect their handiwork. Half the city walls have been battered to powder; the timber mantlets remain, shielding the trenches from which our engineers and bucket-men have excavated their undermines. A dozen great stone-throwers, quarter-milers, lie burned and broken, the result apparently of sallies in force by the foe. The entire pine summit of the Mother’s Breast has been scorched to cinder.

  Our outfit is given ten days to rest and refit. We are permitted to go up to the citadel and take a look. You can see where lanes have been barricaded by the foe with wagons and wicker hurdles. All are ash now. The successive ramparts, which are not stone but only mud-brick, lie beaten apart like children’s castles. Seared skeletons of the enemy litter rooms as black as the insides of smithies; your tread crunches over brittle bones.

  We trek out, sightseers, to the Mother’s Breast. This is a spectacularly defensible outcrop, stronger than the city itself. Dense woods stud its flanks. Bluffs front the west. A dry course marks the eastern slope, which is less precipitous; two bridges span this. We can see where Alexander had these escape routes cut to trap the enemy, and where he massed his own troops along the cliffs. He waited for the wind to come round out of the west, then ordered his sapper
s to light off the dense, desiccated pines. He left an avenue of egress on the eastern flank, where the ground funneled the foe in flight into a rocky defile; he stationed his javelin men on the high ground close in and his cavalry on the flanks farther down. Their orders were to let no man escape. When the city fell the next day, our fellows put to the sword all males of military age and sold into slavery every woman and child.

  Craterus has orders, now, to pay out the wider region for its complicity in the revolt. Our outfit is integrated into his corps. We will serve as blocking forces. Eleven villages line the valley. Our companies’ task is to cut off avenues of escape. Craterus’s men will take care of the villages.

  I have never seen warriors as terrifying as these. They are of a whole order beyond Flag, Tollo, and Stephanos. They make no show of their prowess. This is work to them. These are veterans who learned their trade in the Balkan Wars under King Philip; they were old hands when Alexander was a child. Their arms broke Athens and Thebes and humbled mighty Sparta. Persia and her empire have fallen before them. The victories of the Granicus, Issus, and Gaugamela stand as their trophies; it is they who sacked Tyre and Gaza, captured Babylon and Susa and Persepolis.

  These Afghan villages are scrap meat to them. They cordon two in a morning and scorch them to ashes by noon. The foe falls before them like wheat. It does the enemy no good to hide in garner or grain crib; Craterus’s men drag him forth and gut him where he stands. Village elders confront them in indignation, cursing the invaders in a tongue they can’t understand and care nothing for. The Macks drive them to their knees and butcher them like hogs. It is farmer’s work. Slaughter.

  Lucas and I look on in horror from our posts on the perimeter. Most appalling is the outcry of the women, rounded up for the slavers’ train. The dames howl like animals; nothing can make them stop. Prayers to heaven ascend amid swirling dust and columns of black smoke. We herd the fugitives like cattle. Those that get away, we leave for wolves and crows. Mute urchins gape with eyes dark as death, while black-cawled crones lift palms to the Almighty to call down damnation upon us.

  The operation takes eleven days. When we return to Artacoana, the engineers have laid out a new city. The metropolis, to be called Alexandria-in-Areia, is a model of our young king’s shrewdness and of his reckoning of the weakness and cupidity of the foe.

  All Afghans look alike to us scuffs; we can’t tell one from another. But Alexander calculates more cannily. He sees this country as a devil’s barnyard of contending clans and khels, who have warred with each other for centuries. The tribes of southern Areia have long coveted this valley, which has been held, beneath Persian sway, by their hated northern rivals. Why not let the new kickers have a crack at it? Why should we Macks spend blood and treasure to suppress the aboriginals? Let their foes do it for us.

  Alexander puts out the call, not only for masons, carpenters, and teamsters, to whom he promises work at wages unheard-of in these kingdoms, but for settlers and pioneers as well. To these he pledges land and pasturage, rights of way, warrants of exclusivity for trade and commerce. The southern tribes flood in, delirious at the prospect of lording it over their northern adversaries. Within days the construction site is overrun with every able-bodied tribesman in the region and half the respectable women, who serve as cooks and tailors, laundresses, nurses, vendors, seamstresses (a vital function, sewing tents and pack covers, ground rolls, straps, and panniers). Dispossessed females flock here too, peshnarwan, “those left behind,” to perform such services as their more fortunate sisters will not.

  Our king’s scheme works. What had been, days before, the site of a grisly valley-wide massacre has become a burgeoning boomtown. New arrivals have displaced the old, all owing their good fortune to Alexander. Jobs are plentiful. Pay and hopes are high. By art as much as by might, our king has brought the country to its knees.

  Those elements of the army not employed in providing security for the construction, which means us (Craterus’s brigades having marched south to overhaul Alexander and the elite elements), are kept busy on night raids, mopping up the last of the resistance. We strike downvalley, the same villages Craterus’s men devastated before, where Afghan sons who have taken to the hills return after dark to visit their wives and mothers, to have wounds tended, and to get food or news. We kick down their gates and drag them into the dark. Orders have been issued not to put captives to the sword in front of their women. Better to haul them off into the desert, leaving their ends unknown; this produces a more abiding terror because of the natives’ belief in djinns and demons. The scent of blood draws wolves, who scavenge the corpses. The packs learn to follow us. Their yellow eyes glitter in the torchlight. They cannot be driven off, even when pelted with stones.

  It is Lucas who hates this work the most. His eyes have gone dark and hollow. “Are we more civilized than the foe?” he demands one night as we young men sprawl exhausted beside some trail, trekking back from the evening’s labor. “By what definition of virtue do we call ourselves soldiers and the enemy savages?”

  Boxer warns Lucas to keep it down. Officers might hear and think he takes the Afghans’ side.

  “Fuck the Afghans,” Lucas says. “I don’t care an iron spit for these murderous cowards. I’m talking about us. You and me, Boxer-and Matthias and Rags and every other young scuff thrown into this hell. What’s happening to us? ”

  The fact is clear, though no rookie other than Lucas owns the bowels to give it voice, that we have entered a crucible of the soul, of war’s horror, and that it will change us. It has changed us already. Where will it end? Who will we be then? Myself, I feel its weight nightlong inside my skull, as spectacles of slaughter re-present themselves with such ghastliness that I dare not even shut my eyes.

  “Part of me is dying,” says Lucas. “Something evil grows in its place. I don’t know what it is, but I fear and hate it. I fear and hate myself.”

  Lucas calls us all on our jockeying within formation. He has seen us edge away from the fore line, where the butchery takes place. He’s right. The gruesomeness of war has hit us hard. Many can’t sleep. Others have withdrawn into silence and self-isolation. “We’re all thinking the same thing,” Lucas says. “‘What have I gotten myself into? Can I endure it? Will it drive me mad?’ I see it on all our faces; we’re running schemes in our heads: ‘How can I get out? What act will it take to get me sent home?’”

  “Not all of us,” says Boxer. Rags and Flea back him up.

  “What about you, Matthias? How can you endure this?”

  “My father and brothers,” I respond with truth, though I have not even thought about it before this moment. All three are warriors and heroes. I would sooner die than prove unworthy of them. Shame at my failure in the first village (and other acts of reluctance and irresolution since then) has made me, if anything, even harder on myself-to banish doubt, to be a soldier, to reject all such arguments as my friend voices now. “We can’t let ourselves think that way. This is war, Lucas!”

  “Yes,” my friend answers. “But what kind of war?”

  BOOK TWO

  A New Kind of War

  11

  Alexander enters from the wing and mounts to the stage with a single athletic bound. A sigh expels from the company. There he is!

  Twenty-six days’ trek has taken us to Phrada, southern Afghanistan. On our right, the column skirts the Dasht-i-Margo, the Desert of Death. To the left ascend the foothills of the Paropamisus (“that over which the eagle cannot fly”) and, beyond, the shoulders of the Hindu Kush. We can see the peaks a hundred miles off, already mantled with snow. Here, on the military highway, the grit underfoot is blistering. The night crawls with adders and scorpions.

  It is autumn. The Wind of a Hundred and Twenty Days has begun. For four days in Phrada, our companies-those Macks who will be integrated into the regular corps-are assembled at dawn to be addressed by our king. For four days Alexander doesn’t show. We stand down each time, to hunker wretchedly in the furnace-blast
of the gale.

  What makes Afghanistan so miserable is there’s no shelter. The wind howls out of the mountains with not a twig to break its rush. Terrain is spectacular, but its beauty, if you can call it that, is stern and unforgiving. No trees intercept the rain, which descends, when it does, in volumes unimaginable. In the hot season you bind covers round every surface of metal exposed to the sun. To touch them unprotected blisters you to the bone. Now comes the wind.

  To trek in such a gale is like marching in a tunnel. The universe contracts to the cylinder between your muffled eyes and the rucksack of the man in front of you. Where are we? As usual, nobody tells us. On a downgrade somewhere east of Lake Seistan, a colorful-looking fellow overhauls the column, driving a two-mule wagon. “Halloo, the highway!” he bawls, trying to use his downhill momentum to work through the jam. We are jostled onto the shoulder. The tourist is a chronicler, one of the cohort of freeloading correspondents who have attached themselves to Alexander’s party, pledging to record for posterity all exploits of the expedition. Soldiers love and hate these half-obol Homers, whom they perceive as spectating from safety upon that stage where they, the troops, bleed real blood. Still they are here with us, these ink-mice, eating the same dust and shaking the same serpents out of their boots. Besides, they know the news.

  “Hey, wax-scratcher!” Tollo hails the fellow. “What’s the story!”

  The chronicler brightens, hearing our sergeant’s brogue. “Are you Macks?” The column is all Achaeans and Lycians. “What are you doing back here?”

  “You tell us, you’re the one in the know.”

  “Where are you from?”

  This is the question all correspondents ask soldiers. It makes suckers of us, as it must every other mob of witless scuffs. We shout out our hometowns, as if we believe our new crony will record them in his dispatches and make us famous.