The First Stone

by Carsten Jensen

  Children flock around the village women, who are wearing flowered veils but not burkas. Armed men are everywhere. Around one hundred people follow us farther up into the valley. They evacuate the village—they know it’s the next target for some local band of militia or the American Special Forces.

  People frequently move back and forth across the border. Fighting in Afghanistan forces locals to flee to Pakistan, and fighting in Pakistan forces them back. In both countries, they stay with their fellow Pashtuns. They’ve been driven from their country—not from their language or culture—and then they return again. The earth draws them back, and once that’s lost, tragedy begins and despair takes root. They are war’s migratory birds; they leave, but not for good. I can see it in their faces.

  Although we’ll be a large procession moving up the valley, the dense forests of pine trees on the mountainsides will hide us part of the way. We’ll be hard to spot from the air, and our numbers will protect us when we’re out in the open. Yes, the villagers will serve as our human shields, but we’re theirs, too. We can protect them from the militia. When the militia attacks, they’re ruthless about civilian loss. They’re not trying to win people over to their side—they’re out to terrorize them so they’ll be easier to plunder. They rarely face any resistance, but they will this time.

  Before marching farther into the woods and up the valley, I speak to the villagers. It’s unusual to see men and women gathered together in one place, even if they are separated into two groups. All eyes are on me. Women in a rural area like this only wear burkas when they venture into the marketplace. At home, they wear coarse, floor-length dresses with a flowered silk veil over their hair. Because foreign men are present, the women have also covered the bottom half of their faces with their veils. Will they ever see their home again? There’s a stoic calm in their expressions, the acceptance of a destiny filled only with dramatic changes. More than thirty years of war has already hardened them, although not like Sara, who’s been pushed over the edge. The women here are as tough as any who’ve learned that perseverance is the most important attribute in life. Throughout constant wars, assaults, abductions, and countless atrocities, they’ve remained the backbone of life—and they know it. Without them, life is nothing but a battlefield where the last armed man, elder, or boy is soon slaughtered.

  I see the three young women we’ve brought back from captivity. Although they also wear a veil on their hair, their faces are exposed. They’ve accepted their status as Malalai’s sisters. They’re part of the myth now—and myths have no family, no claim to love; they’re alone in their elevated position. We say it’s lonely at the top, but they’re on a different kind of top than the one we know. Not one they’ve crawled their way up to, but one they’ve been placed on by a power as irresistible as a tidal wave.

  “Look at these men,” I say in Pashto, pointing at the Danes. “They’ve left everything to help you. They’ve replaced their own faith with yours. They have no family now, no country. Only each other. And you. They’re here to help you, and you’ve already seen what they’ve accomplished. With them, you will defeat your enemies.”

  The Afghans raise their Kalashnikovs and fire into the sky while yelling praises to the American jihadists. Several of the soldiers are startled; not all of them are equally at ease. Sørensen, who has two boys, looks as if he’d rather be anywhere else. The same goes for Steffensen. I can’t read the chaplain’s expression. Hannah looks tense. The other younger ones—Sylvester, Sebastian, Mathias, and Gustav—seem vigilant, as if preparing for an attack.

  Speaking to them in Danish, I explain that we are dependent on the villagers now, just as they are on us. I don’t call it cooperation—I say it’s symbiotic.

  “You’re about to experience something you’ve never experienced before. A population willing to protect you, who will even throw themselves between you and incoming bullets. That’s reciprocal. You must also protect them. We survive together or we die together. In their eyes you’re heroes. But don’t forget that, from NATO’s perspective, or an American base’s, or, yes, even the Danish army’s, you’ve gone over to the other side. Your enemies will sacrifice their lives for you—and your friends will try to kill you. Look at all these people surrounding you and try not to think of them as LNs, local nationals, Tali-bobs, ragheads, shitheads, or whatever the fuck you’re used to calling them—even Afghans, insurgents, or anything else. Think of them as people whose destiny is now connected to your own. Think of the men as your comrades. Think of the women and children as your family. Comrades are ready to die for each other; men are ready to die for their families. That’s the way it’s always been. That’s the way it still is. We’re going home now—but without them, we won’t get there.”

  The last thing we do before starting our journey is to bury the fallen Karlsen, Camper’s observer. The tall Icelander carries him over his shoulder for the final distance. It must feel like losing your own arm, but the sharpshooter’s face remains expressionless. We can’t place any kind of cross on the grave. We have to keep acting as if the Danes have all converted. The women bring a white cotton cloth to wrap around Karlsen’s body. He has to be washed first, so they also bring pots filled with water. Men must perform the washing. Karlsen died from a loss of blood caused by internal bleeding. His right leg is riddled with shrapnel, so even a thorough washing won’t make it resemble a normal limb. Camper washes him and then wraps him in the white shroud. Holding the dead man in his arms, he jumps into the hole and then gently lays him to rest.

  Camper hides his face behind one hand, but he doesn’t make a sound. Lukas Møller stands helplessly at one end of the quickly dug hole. In the world’s eyes, he’s not a chaplain any longer—he’s an imam. What does an imam do at a burial when so many eyes are watching him?

  I explain to him that this is an emergency. Karlsen has fallen on the battlefield, and we’re in the middle of a war, so you can skip a lot of rituals, such as the Janazah prayer and the four Takbīr. We only have to see to it that the departed is lying on his side with his head pointing toward Mecca, which, here in Central Asia, is southwest. The head, chin, and shoulders must rest on lumps of clay, positioned specifically for that purpose.

  I’ve been to the burials of a number of colleagues in the secret service and know the Christian ritual of casting dirt on the coffin. It’s basically identical to the Muslim tradition.

  “Say what you usually say,” I tell Møller. “The words are the same. ‘For dust you are, and to dust you will return.’ You don’t have to say ‘Allah.’ Just say ‘God.’ That’s what the word ‘Allah’ means. But I’d avoid making the sign of the cross.”

  I look at Hannah. Now comes the painful part. “You can’t be here. Women do not attend funerals.”

  Her face beneath the bandage stiffens. “Fuck Allah!” she says as she turns around and leaves.

  38

  No one thinks about burying the dead from DarkSky. We’ve left them lying around the village and in the qalat where most of them were killed. I have no intention of reminding anyone about it right now. The soldiers have been through enough; every single one of them is on edge. They need to keep looking ahead. The daylong marches we have ahead of us will prove beneficial. The long journey begins with the first step, and then goes on and on. Until we get there. They have to feel that wholeheartedly.

  I hadn’t taken the villagers into account.

  They didn’t just bury their own while we were away. They’ve been busy with something else—and none of us will ever forget the sight we encounter as we leave Khan Kala and head up the paths into the forested mountainsides. Maybe “forget” isn’t the right word. The sight is like having sulfuric acid thrown into your eyes.

  Nothing will ever be the same now. We feel as if we’re being tested. As if someone is warning us that there’s still time to turn back.

  Yet we know that from this moment forward, there is no turning back.

  The villagers have gone into the qalat where
the men from DarkSky were ensconced and gathered up the bodies. They dragged them across the fields and placed them on both sides of the path we’re on now. They stuck branches into the ground and tied the dead to them, so that the shattered bodies are sitting upright with their legs stretched out in front of them. Their only clothes are a flurry of shiny flies whirling around the horrific stench. Still, this macabre presentation of their dead enemies isn’t all. They flayed the skin off the torsos. They loosened it with a precise cut along the waistline and pulled it up over the shoulders; then they laid it across each bald head like a sweater being pulled over the head, but stopped midway through taking it off. We’re staring at anatomical illustrations: exposed muscles and braided tendons, blue-violet and dark-red entrails, surrounded by yellowy fat.

  Bound to a branch with a rope around the neck so they don’t fall over, the dead men’s heads face straight ahead. The villagers have flayed the skin loose from the middle of the forehead and rolled it down to the chin; it resembles a rubber mask pulled halfway down by an exhausted carnival worker. They’ve left the eyeballs, however. There are no black holes like those on grinning skull heads, no death as emptiness; instead, they look like dead animals staring blankly. No closed eyelids offer the illusion of merciful sleep or eternal rest, because there aren’t any eyelids, only lifeless exposed eyeballs. The basic mechanics of anatomy—is that all there is?

  Once the skin has been flayed off, what does a human head say? Not the same thing as a naked skull. It doesn’t say anything about death, so what does it speak of? Animals being slaughtered. A truth other than death’s, and is that an even more difficult truth?

  Then I see it. Eyeballs moving in the remains of a face. A chin rising and falling beneath the bloody rims of sliced-off lips, as if trying to scream. But the pain-seeking expression comes from a well so deep that no sound escapes the tortured body. I recognize nothing in the flayed face—but I know who it is. And I know that I have to put an end to his suffering, only I can’t do it myself. Coward, screams everything within me, but my hands are frozen.

  Locating Simon, I place my hand on his shoulder. “I need your help,” I say, pulling him over to the living dead. (I can’t think of any other expression to describe what’s left of Mr. Timothy.) “He’s still alive,” I say. Simon understands exactly what I mean.

  Several of the soldiers gather around us. I expect them to start expressing their disgust. “Keep quiet, all of you!” I yell. “I don’t want to hear a sound from any of you.”

  Now they know the cost of their survival: accepting everything that happens from here on in.

  I’ve never seen it, but my father told me about captured Russian soldiers flayed alive and then suffocated in bags made of their own skin pulled down over their heads. Their intestines were pulled out and their flayed bodies stuffed with straw. They were nothing more than slaughtered animals.

  He supported the Russians—and stories like that motivated him to become a helicopter pilot. He was at war with barbarism; he didn’t want to live in that kind of country. Then the Russians decided that the only way to fight barbarism was to outmatch it.

  From the pilot seat of Mi-6 transport helicopters, he saw Russian soldiers toss prisoners out from incredible heights. Sometimes an ally also went flying out the door, because the soldiers were too drunk to distinguish between friend and foe. They robbed bazaars and attacked merchants on the way to the market just to get their hands on some alcohol. That war was like drunk driving, he used to say. He learned that expression when he got his license to drive a taxi. Later he just called it the booze war.

  “The words lose their meaning for me,” he once said to me. “Barbarism, civilization. Good, evil. Right, wrong. Ultimately, I didn’t know who to support.”

  The soldiers from Third Platoon are in the same boat as my father—and the sooner they realize that concepts like good and evil and right and wrong no longer have any meaning, the easier it will be for them. They can always have pangs of conscience later. Right now we can’t afford them. Right now we’re holding our breath morally.

  To get home, we’ll have to obey the number one rule of the game. At no point can we deviate from the role the Afghans have given us.

  From now on, we’re jihadists.

  39

  We move up a wide trail that cuts through luxuriant woods of willows and wild olive, cherry, and apple trees. Their crowns aren’t dense enough to provide cover, though, so we’re still visible from the air. Every so often, we pass an open stretch with fresh grass growing in mounds. Grazing must occur here, although I don’t see any animals. Elsewhere we find clearings in the forest and lumber lying in stacks waiting to be transported, probably to a sawmill nearby. Otherwise there’s no sign of life.

  The men from Khan Kala follow us, basking in the glow emanating from the American jihadists. The Afghans want to be part of the very invincibility that they’ve fabricated. But who are they at war with? Foreign forces? The explanation is obvious, although I’m not sure that anyone really understands what it involves. I think they’re at war with randomness, with the uncertainty and unpredictability created by any war without a front.

  Maybe they’d say they’re fighting in Allah’s name against the infidel ferengi. They might also claim that they are Pashtuns, so they don’t need to be part of the Taliban. They value their land, their animals, and their walled-in qalats. They’re fighting for their everyday life. That’s what they want back—the security of what they know, a life dictated by the rhythm of the seasons, crops, the slaughtering of animals, visits to the markets, births, sons and daughters, the everyday life a war steals from them. No jet fighters, no boots on the ground, no foreign forces, no slogans about democracy, no governments in distant capitals can give them back their everyday life once they’ve lost it.

  They take their everyday life with them on this trek up the sloping landscape. Women, children, livestock. They’re not an army—they’re an armed migration. The only thing they aren’t taking with them is their land. That’s why they’ll only be gone for a limited period of time. They want to come back, back to their everyday life.

  And who are their enemies?

  The answer is simple. Their enemies are anyone who would interrupt their everyday life. If we have to fight in the coming days, I know they’ll put everything they have into it: women, children, animals. They’ll either win or be massacred right down to the last living being. Inshallah, they’ll say with their last breath, but they aren’t dying for Allah. They’re dying for each other. Community is their eternity, an extremely tangible eternity.

  When we arrive at the next village, Spinlay, a few hours farther up the path, qalat walls are not the first thing we see. Men, women, and children are standing outside, waiting, like a reflection of our own procession. I know immediately that they want to join us. Our group will grow and grow. We’re a hundred people strong now; tomorrow we’ll be two hundred. And the next day?

  I’m not worried about the local militia, although they’re surely planning an attack. It’s DarkSky and the American troops. I’m certain that at this very moment we’re under satellite surveillance. Drones are on their way, as are Chinook helicopters loaded with Special Forces and Apache helicopters with their highly effective 30 millimeter machine guns. They’ll hover over us and hesitate while waiting for permission to attack, all the while cursing those fucking inconvenient rules of engagement preventing them from letting all hell break loose because there are women and children. Human shields, they’ll say.

  Spinlay’s inhabitants examine the beds of woven branches with the murdered women on them. They uncover the women’s faces and start to wail. In a little while, the same rite of burial that Karlsen went through will begin again.

  I walk over to one of the older villagers, a man in a gray turban with a long white beard down to his chest, and shove a handful of afghanis into his hand. “I’d like to buy one of your sheep,” I tell him.

  “Don’t insult me,” he says. “
What is mine is yours.”

  He hands the money back formally, as if we’re in the middle of an official ceremony—and in a way it is. He’s demonstrating Pashtun hospitality.

  Sheep swarm around us. He reaches out for one of them and, grabbing hold of its loose neck skin, gives me the animal. Then he loosens a sharp knife from a leather belt hanging across his chest and hands it to me.

  I tug on the sheep, which instinctively resists by digging in its hooves. Laughing, a couple of boys shove it from behind. Once I reach the soldiers at the front of our procession, I call for Simon and hand him the knife. “Go over there,” I say, pointing at an open area between us and the crowd of Spinlay’s inhabitants.

  We’re standing in a small plaza surrounded by plane trees whose pale new leaves are casting gently swaying shadows across our faces. Two groups of people face each other. There are men with heavy faces and strong beards, and boys with bright, curious eyes. Because they’re meeting foreigners, the women on both sides are in burkas. The small girls clinging to them are as wide-eyed as the boys. Most of the Danes are tall and broad shouldered, their shaven faces flickering in the spotty shadows cast by the trees. Next to them stand Malalai’s sisters, with their exposed faces, gazing blankly at the horizon. I can’t tell whether they’re terrified or have already succumbed to their new role as untouchable martyrs for the war that has destroyed their lives.

  Despite the presence of many weapons, most of them displayed openly, I view the scene as idyllic. Nothing more. It’s the sunlight, early spring in another country with a different climate, yet unmistakably springtime.

  Steffensen walks over. “What’s going on with that sheep?”

  Simon is staring at me, too. “I figured you wanted me to slaughter it, but why?”

  “It’s an offering of atonement,” I say. “Nanawate.”