The Afgan Campaign

by Steven Pressfield

  Kakuk and Hazar explain the problem to me. It’s not that the tribesmen don’t want to learn Mack tactics. It’s their horses. Their horses won’t let them.

  I am learning the Afghan mind and the tribal manner of expressing a thought. The brothers don’t mean their horses won’t let them. They mean their hearts won’t. Fighting Macedonian-style, as a unit, is unmanly to Afghan eyes. It lacks honor. It is effeminate. For the tribesman of the steppe the object of battle is to count coup, to distinguish himself in the eyes of his fellows. The Daans have a phrase, “to kiss the mouth of death.” This is their warrior ideal. You cannot kiss the mouth of death except as an individual. So they won’t fight in wedges. They won’t charge boot-to-boot.

  When I confer with Stephanos over this, he understands. It’s a turning point. We stop trying to change our Afghans. The implications are not lost on the poet or on me. “What are you going to do,” he asks, “about Shinar’s brother?”

  My mates, too, volunteer to put the fellow out of the way. There doesn’t have to be bloodshed, says Stephanos. Just find him and get him out of camp. He’s working for the Wolf anyway; they all are.

  No, I don’t want it that way. I can work something out.

  I have become close with Stephanos over the winter. He is compiling for the king’s intelligence a roster of Daan tribes, clans, and khels. I assist him. I’m the only one who can half-savvy the language.

  Daan means “robber” in Persian. To the Afghan of Bactra City or Kabul, who can quote Zoroaster, these northern tribes are the offal of the earth. But Stephanos and I find them brave and decent and honorable. The Massagetae (my former captors under the war chief, Hook) are a pure raiding culture, arrogant and proud, who whip their women and practice torture. The Daans are as savage but not as cruel. Habituated to the direst poverty, they lark on payday like sailors on a spree. Cash flows through their hands. They are incapable of niggardliness. The concept of lending does not exist for them. Ask and they give, with never a thought of payback. The notion of tomorrow lies beyond them. The hour is everything. I never saw anyone get as blind as these fellows. And they are merry drunks. Heat and cold are the same to them, as are pain and pleasure, penury or opulence; they will brag but not complain, take revenge but never hold grudges. On watch, a Daan sentry will man his post till the sky cracks or, dispatched alone across a hundred miles of waste, run himself and his mount to death before giving in. Though they hate us for our incursion upon sacred soil, they will ride at our sides into battle and never betray us. Such is their word. They are loyal and gay and kind and so corrupt that you cannot even get angry at them. To them a bribe is simply good manners, and paying someone off no more than friendship and consideration. One may be terrified of them or appalled by them, but it is impossible not to respect them.

  I am well enough to participate fully in winter’s final exercise. The corps in its entirety takes part; Alexander himself commands. The simulation of combat is so real that scores of men and horses are injured and a half dozen wounded mortally. Our own mate Dice gets the neck-guard of his helmet shot clean through by a bolt from a catapult. I have to escort him to Bactra City in a field ambulance.

  Shinar is absent from the hospital when I get there. No one will tell me where she has gone. Fearing that her brother has found her, I gallop to our quarters. She’s not there, either. I find her past midnight at Elias’s house, on the floor of Daria’s cooking room. Ghilla and Jenin hunker over her. Shinar lies on her side, shivering in a blanket, with her blood saturating the carpet.

  Her brother has not caught up with her.

  She has had an abortion.

  Jenin is the girl in our section who performs this service.

  I understand what has happened.

  I am heartbroken. For the unborn child, for Shinar, but most of all for the fact that my woman has acted with stealth to keep this from me, to get it done while I was away, and, now, for the wall of silence and evasion that I know she and her sisters will throw up the instant I try to help.

  “Are you all right, Shinar? Why did you do this? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Because, she says, she feared I was getting ready to put her aside. She weeps. I kneel beside her. “Shinar,” I hear my voice saying with tenderness that surprises me. “Shinar.”

  Ghilla supports her. Jenin presses a linen compress where the blood still seeps.

  “Tell me truly. Are you all right?”

  “No,” she says.

  My mind is racing. What to use for a litter. How to get her to the hospital. I stroke her soaking brow. I recall other absences of hers. “Have you done this before?”

  She won’t answer.

  I confront Ghilla and Jenin.

  They all go mum. Whose worlds can be farther apart than mine and Shinar’s? “I don’t want you to do this ever again.” I glare at both other women, then back to mine. “Do you understand, Shinar? If you do, I will leave you.”

  She has lost quantities of blood. We have to get her to help. Why has she let herself get pregnant? Army women all have ways to prevent this. Why carry the child at all? In the teeth of threats from her clan and countrymen and secured by no pledge or surety from me. The opposite in fact; for clearly she believes I am ready to discard her.

  Can it be that this woman feels love for me?

  I dismiss the possibility out of hand, not because it seems so remote (she has been in my bed, after all, for more than a year), but because it makes so much sense-and every time I think something makes sense with her, her response confounds me.

  What of my own heart? I have thought myself in control of my feelings about her. Yet I discover myself holding her with exquisite gentleness. Tears start. I tense, seeking to drive them back. But Shinar feels them.

  “Will you leave me now?” she asks.

  I hold her closer.

  “You will,” she says.

  “No.” I surprise myself by the certainty with which I state this. “But you must do something for me.”

  “What?”

  “You must let me help you.”

  The hospital will take her. The chief surgeon is her patron; the other physicians all know and care for her. They can’t put her in the soldiers’ ward but the town wing, which is just as good. The surgeons have seen ten thousand induced miscarriages. I tell her this, which she well knows. I kiss her. All the resistance goes out of her body.

  She says, “I don’t think I can walk.”

  “I won’t leave you, Shinar. I’m not angry with you. Only concerned for you, and for this poor child”-I cannot make myself say of ours — “that we have lost because others hate us.”

  She holds me and tries to stand.

  “Help me,” she says.

  BOOK SIX

  The Big Push

  31

  How do you know when a region has been subdued? When its villages have food for you.

  All winter, Forward Operations units have been parleying with Afghan villages along the army’s projected routes north, arranging for dumps of provisions to be stockpiled for the advance.

  Now when we get there, not one has them.

  Entering a village before the main advance, we plead with the elders for their own sake to scrounge up something, anything, for the army. That or flee. The young men of the villages have already made off with every item of value; they have gone to fight for Spitamenes. Only the old remain. They refuse to abandon their homes. What will happen to them?

  “Nothing,” says Stephanos, “that hasn’t happened to them before.”

  Afghanistan south of the Oxus is ribbed with rugged, ocher-colored mountains, separated by dusty barren ravine country. Each valley contains scores of forts-old clan strongholds, employed by the natives in tribal wars. Mack engineers take these over. Sites that will serve are reconfigured, garrisons installed. Those that won’t are leveled. Our bunch spends two days with an engineer company in one of the high valleys. Their captain shows us how they do it. I have never given much thought
to forts. A good one, we learn, is linked by lines of sight to sister strongholds, so its garrison can go to their assistance and be aided in turn by theirs. The blockhouse’s siting must dominate the area, commanding all approaches. The captain shows us how his men lay out linked bastions, above and behind one another, so that if the foe overruns a lower post, he finds himself vulnerable to bombardment and counterattack from its mates above. The science is quite clever and needs nothing more than a few mules, a mason’s plumb, and a stonejack.

  Our columns press north, subduing their sectors. There are no roads in this country; trails snake along dry wadis and channels carved in sandstone by the wind. Upon these trek refugees fleeing south. We pass women in columns, muffled to the eyes, balancing their belongings in bundles atop their heads. Their urchins and hounds trail in the dust; they cart their ancients in barrows or drag them on pole-litters behind emaciated asses. Last year the army would have rounded them up and sold them as slaves. This year we don’t even try. Who will buy them? Packed off five hundred miles, the Afghan returns. He is either stupid or stubborn. Narik ta? What difference does it make?

  Cresting a ridge, we rein and look back. Smoke ascends from a score of razed settlements. We’ll try to talk the villagers ahead into saving themselves. They won’t listen, either. Their eyes tell you.

  Shinar’s eyes are like the eyes of these villagers. When I held her on the floor in Daria’s kitchen, I saw the same look. You see it in the faces of Afghan matrons when we Macks roust them out at midnight, to bind their sons and drag them into the dark-a look of rage but mostly of resignation, of submission to that unknowable power that we call Necessity and they call God. It is a look more fitting to a beast than to a human being, and more proper to a stone than to either. To feel pity for these brutes is folly, for they loathe us in their bones. To seek to remedy their state is arrogance, for in their hearts they are, if not happy in the sense that we of the West understand, then at least at one with their fate. Who are we to instruct them otherwise?

  Flag trots alongside me. “You’re thinking again.”

  I laugh.

  “About your girl, eh?” He has heard about Shinar’s abortion. Everyone has. “Why don’t you marry her?”

  “Yes, we’ll make a fine pair.”

  “Get yourself a ‘ticket home,’” Flag says. Meaning a crippling wound. “Pack her back to Macedon.”

  We trot across a pan so devoid of all that sustains life that neither we nor our horses permit ourselves the luxury of hunger or thirst.

  “I did ask her, you know?” I gesture across the waste. “Promised to take her away from all this. I meant it.”

  Flag grins. “I always mean it too.”

  “No,” I say. “I’m serious.”

  He laughs. “I’m serious too.”

  32

  The army pushes north in five columns spread across 280 miles. Commanders are Hephaestion, Ptolemy, Perdiccas, Coenus and Artabazus jointly, and Alexander himself. Areas in-between are “wolf country,” enemy territory, across which the foe moves with impunity. Brigade commanders dispatch patrols into these deserts. These operations are of three types-probes, penetrations, and reconnaissances-in-force. The first may be comprised of as few as two or three men, the second and third of up to hundreds. All aims are the same-to find and track the enemy, take prisoners, bring back intelligence of any kind that will permit our columns to hedge off and close with the foe.

  Before the Big Push, Alexander calls the army together. The force assembles at Bactra City beneath the great fortress of Bal Teghrib, “Stone Mountain,” whose slopes hold a hundred thousand.

  “Brothers, are you tired of this war?”

  The corps erupts.

  “I am!” Alexander cries. “By the rivers of hell, I am!”

  Our lord likens Afghanistan to a great dusty floor. He intends to sweep it clean. We start here where we stand, in Bactra City, and drive north, subduing every village and camp, however remote, and reducing every stronghold as we go. Indeed, Alexander acknowledges, we will be bringing into submission the same country we vanquished in last year’s campaign. This time we will make it stick.

  “Note this, you officers who will be dictating dispatches and situation reports. There is a phrase I wish never to read: pockets of resistance.”

  Again the army roars.

  “We shall leave no pockets of resistance. The unsubdued foe-man, woman, or child-shall be driven before us, north toward the Oxus, and beyond across the Jaxartes. Along the way we shall found a mighty string of forts. We will cut off the foe’s lines of retreat. Where he shelters, we will rout him out. We will make all Afghanistan between here and the Wild Lands hostile to him. He shall find no patch of green to graze his stock and no shade to get his men out of the sun. This will be our summer’s work, my friends. And when it is done we will not go into winter quarters. We will pursue the enemy into his sanctuaries. We will hunt him down and kill him. I do not intend to spend another winter in this sphere of hell, do you?”

  The corps answers with a tumult of spearshafts clashing on shields.

  “Spitamenes! He is the head of the hydra. Slay him and the serpent dies. Every act we take must have this object: Bring the Wolf to battle!”

  Alexander underscores one final point: that in this campaign, columns and individual units will of necessity be dispersed across hundreds of miles and thus out of communication with higher command. Junior officers, and even sergeants and corporals must act on their own.

  “Act for this then, men, and I shall never fault you: Find the Wolf! Attack him! Drive him toward our allied columns! Brothers, I pledge this night his weight in gold to that man who brings me Spitamenes-the living man or his head!”

  Thunder breaks across the plain, as it does in that season. The army’s ovation joins the storm in riotous uproar.

  I am sitting between Flag and Stephanos as Alexander finishes.

  “Sounds easy, doesn’t it?” observes the poet.

  Flag rises, scratching his buttocks. “Nothing to it.”

  The columns roll out of Bactra City next morning. The king’s division takes the rightmost track, the ancient camel trace across the spurs of Paraetacae toward Cyropolis. Our column under Coenus parallels his advance, sixty miles west. West of ours comes Ptolemy’s brigade, then Perdiccas’s, and Hephaestion’s. It takes all day for the full force to get clear of the city and another five for each division to reach its assigned axis. The blank spaces between columns are so vast-two days’ ride at some points-that existing reconnaissance elements can’t cover them all. New companies must be formed.

  Our section under Stephanos becomes one of these. This is good news. It means bonuses and hazard pay, and it gets us out from under column discipline. It’s also, by far, the most dangerous duty we’ve ever undertaken.

  It is no small thing to set out into such country with five men or ten, guided by shikaris who are almost certainly working for the foe and, if they’re not, stand ready to go over at a moment’s notice. When contact is made with the enemy, riders must be sent back to column. The Afghan knows this. He lets you spot him, then picks off the lone courier or the pair galloping in tandem. If his party is numerous enough, he takes on your whole patrol. He gets behind you, cuts you off from the way you came. The enemy loves to attack out of the rising or setting sun. In the mountains, vales and even shadows can conceal battalions. In prairie country, dust storms building late in the day provide cover behind which the foe maneuvers and strikes. The tribesman appears along your track, where you think only your own men are coming from. He knows how to use glare to blind you and grit and rain to obscure his numbers. Suddenly he’s on top of you.

  The foe has other tricks. One is to lure a lesser detachment into trouble, then ambush the more numerous column dispatched to its aid. Another ruse is the counterfeit convoy. The enemy baits our patrols with a slow caravan or a herd of sheep or horses. When our greed overcomes caution, the foe strikes from hiding. He fattens himself on ou
r convoys. Every strongpoint that Mack troops fortify must be garrisoned and supplied. The train bringing their mooch is a duck on the water. In this desert you come upon “write-ups”-massacres for which nothing can be done except file the report.

  In the forty-three days the column takes to advance from Bactra City to Nautaca, our section runs twenty-one probes and penetrations. Nine times we make contact and set up blocking positions, observation posts, ambushes. But always the enemy uncovers our intentions and either slips away or turns the tables. East and west, no one can find Spitamenes. One thinks of such wilderness as being uninhabited; in truth the waste supports a surprising density of population-nomads and herdsmen, “shy camps,” pocket villages. Here every goatherd is a lookout and every caravanner a sentry. Wherever Spitamenes is, he learns of our approach days in advance. Can our forces track him? We never even come on his trail. The desert is so vast, it swallows armies like stones in the sea.

  Under such conditions, morale takes a beating. Not so much for us in scout detachments, who can keep on the move and thus fend off boredom, as for the foot troops of the central columns, whose experience of campaign is nine-tenths tedium, in which they endure the tramp, the heat and dust, the constant wind, frigid nights and baking days, and one-tenth pandemonium, in which they are rousted out of a dead sleep to arm and form up double-quick, then chop at flying speed into the wasteland, with no mooch, no bonze, evil water, where they must prepare an assault or take up a blocking position, only to watch the crisis fizzle for cause of arriving too soon, too late, upon the wrong site, or because the foe has fucked off under their very noses and they’re too beat or parched to give him chase.

  Candor compels me to cite another factor adding to the troops’ frustration and exasperation. I mean liquor and dope. In conventional warfare, commanders knew when a battle was coming; the quartermasters had days if not months of buildup, throughout which they could lay in stocks of spirits to ease the men’s anxiety. In Afghanistan there’s no such luxury. Here, action can break out any moment. The result is men get varnished every chance they get. We learn from the natives. Our allied Afghans live on black nazz and juto, a desert plant the juice of whose spiny leaves will keep you awake day and night. This stuff catches on among the Macks. I myself use it. We all do. You can buy “jute” from the Daans and Sacae or harvest it from the desert yourself. You get thin on it. Your cheeks get hollow, you lose muscle. But you can stay up forever and never get hungry. In these badlands, where a man must pack every ounce of mooch he cooks for his dinner, such advantages are hard to resist.