The Afghan Campaign

by Steven Pressfield

  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 our 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.

  ON THE FIFTY-FIRST day out of Bactra City, two of our scouts spot an enemy convoy threading its way across the badlands. The foe’s train is forty mules, traveling by night and lying up by day, escorted by an equal number of tribal cavalry. We are thirty-two, counting two shikaris and four Afghan muleteers. Stephanos decides not to attack the convoy but to send back to the column for help. He picks two Macks—our comrades Tower, so called for his height, and Pollard for his doughy complexion—and a guide named Hakun. Their orders are to track the foe from concealment while our main body continues parallel on the far flank of a ten-mile spur. In that country, dust will betray an outfit as small as three or four.

  Our company emerges next morning beyond the ten-mile spur. No sign of Tower or Pollard. Instead, where the enemy convoy should have appeared, we mark a swath of earth gouged in a great livid X. Hoofstrikes. Our shikaris refuse to ride in. Stephanos sends riders onto all wings, anticipating an ambush, while he and Flag spur forward. Their search turns up nothing except the violently hoof-scarred earth.

  Several ravens are observed pecking at a patch of dark dirt.

  Stephanos and Flag dismount. They discover, planted upright in the earth, the headless corpses of Tower and Pollard. The scout Hakun is missing. Murdered by the foe? Or welcomed, betraying the men he was supposed to protect?

  The enemy has buried our comrades alive, with only their heads sticking from the dirt, then either trampled them or used them for some grisly manner of horseback sport.

  “These are the savages,” says Stephanos, “that our king proposes to hire for pay, to fight at our sides.”

  Despite such tragedies and misfortunes, the Big Push is working. On the highway south of Nautaca, our company runs into Costas the chronicler. Give this fellow credit; he has crossed the waste on his own from Bactra City, supported only by two servants and a Daan guide. He tells us of battles east and west. Hephaestion’s column has killed eight hundred in one clash, and Alexander has cut off a number of powerful bands trying to slip around his eastern wing. Soon we are in the action too.

  Along the caravan trace to Maracanda lies a broad grass valley called To’shoma, “the Lakes,” because it becomes that in the winter rains. Here, in the second month of the advance, wings of Coenus’s brigade and Ptolemy’s pin elements of the foe and rout them with great slaughter.

  In desert war, pursuit is everything. This is how you make kills. The chase from the Lakes goes on two months. Our sections under Stephanos are reintegrated into the battalion commanded by Bullock; we become an element, now, of a line unit.

  Our charge is to pursue the foe wherever he flees. “Come back with kills,” Bullock tells us, “or don’t come back at all.” A terrible competition arises between companies of the same battalions. Sooner than return empty-handed, we bag any luckless bastard we see. Every village that aids the foe is obliterated. We take no prisoners. Every man we catch, we kill. Driving a band into the mountains, we pursue till not one soul remains. Nothing stops us. Fugitive contingents are chased across the steppe for hundreds of miles.

  The instrument of counterguerrilla warfare is the massacre. Its object is terror, to make oneself an object of such dread that the foe fears to face you ever. This practice has worked for the army of Macedon across all Asia. It does not work here. The Afghan is so proud, so inured to privation, and so in love with liberty that he prefers death to capitulation. The more terror we apply, the more stubborn his resolution becomes. His dames and urchins are worse than he is. They hate our guts. For all the blood we have drained into Afghan soil, we have succeeded neither in breaking the foe’s will to resist nor severing him tribe from tribe, but have instead ignited in his breast a fierce and unquenchable defiance and united him against us in a front of a thousand once-warring tribes, clans, and khels.

  When the chases at the Lakes are over, our company is in a state beyond exhaustion. The hair beneath our desert caps is so matted with dust, grease, and sweat that we can’t shear it even with a razor. The nails of our toes and fingers
are busted to nubs. Our kit can’t be peeled off. We have to cut it away. We reek. We’re so dirty, rivers can’t get us clean.

  Our horses are skin and bones. So are we. We can’t eat. We’ve forgotten how to sleep. We’ve been living on nazz and jute for so long, we can’t keep down so much as a turnip. Wine when we get it runs through us like water. Speech has become superfluous. Who needs it? Flag knows what I’m thinking. At the gallop I glance to Lucas across a hundred feet of steppe. He knows. Even our horses know.

  We have kept Tower’s and Pollard’s ashes. One night, on an eminence north of the Lakes, a likely spot presents itself. Our urns are leather sacks. We inter them not within cairns, which the foe will sniff out and desecrate, but beneath stones marked underside with our names and unit. We offer the Hymn for the Fallen. Stephanos composes these lines:

  Hunting for Baz

  The boys need their nazz.

  Lacking soap, dope, and hope; coochless, moochless,

  We achieve the unachievable, sustained by belief

  in the unbelievable.

  Lucas has been keeping a notebook. He won’t tell anyone what’s in it. Finally this night he breaks it out.

  He calls it Letters I Never Sent Home.

  The document tells what we do in a day. No story. Just a list.

  “When we first marched out from Macedon,” says Lucas, “trekking was our life. It was all we did. We thought nothing of it. You remember.

  “Now we get up in the morning and we kill people. We kill them all day, and the next day we kill some more. That’s our life. It’s so ordinary to us, we think nothing of it.”

  He rattles off the chases we’ve run in the last two days. Already the others call him to quit.

  He won’t.

  “How do you know how far-gone you are? When you write letters home. Try to tell your people what you’ve been doing. You can’t. Not even your old man, a decorated vet himself. He can’t understand; no words can make him. So you write in this crazy prose that says less than nothing.”

  Dark laughter now. Lucas doesn’t smile.

  “You look in the faces of your mates, boys of twenty who look fifty, and you know that’s how you look too. But you’re not fifty. You’re twenty. You’re twenty and fifty. Things you thought you’d never do, you’ve done, and you can never tell anyone…”

  Dice lobs a fist of pebbles. “Sack it, Lucas.”

  “…never tell anyone except your mates. Only you don’t need to tell them. They know. They know you. Better than a man knows his wife, better than he knows himself. They’re bound to you and you to them, like wolves in a pack. It’s not you and them. You are them. The unit is indivisible. One dies, we all die. Individual mind? It doesn’t exist anymore. We’ve become incapable of independent thought or any thought at all except when is the next mooch, the next bonze, the next chop. Where is the foe? One day we chase him into the mountains, next day over the plains. That’s all we know. That’s all we do. That’s all—”

  This is enough. Even I tell Lucas to stop.

  He looks up. “Why doesn’t some correspondent write about this? Stephanos, you’re a literary fellow. Why don’t you set some of this to stanzas?”

  Our leader stands above the circle. He tells Lucas his harangue has gone on long enough. “You’re tired, my friend.”

  Lucas’s eye glitters in the firelight.

  “You have no idea,” he says, “how tired I am.”

  33.

  The army reaches Maracanda on Daesius 28, midsummer. A letter is waiting for me from my brother Philip at Bactra City.

  Elias has died.

  His woman Daria poisoned him. I know, I can’t believe it either. She was caught introducing aconite into the rations of others in the hospital. Apparently she’d been dosing Elias in small quantities all winter. I have his ashes. I shall send them home to Mother. I won’t leave him out here.

  I am struck dumb to read this. It can’t be true! I strain at the letter, to make certain the handwriting is Philip’s. How can Elias be dead? He was well! I saw him just ninety days ago!

  Forgive me, brother, for communicating this unhappy report by post. But you must know at once. Army regulations permit a brother to escort his brother’s remains home. You must do this, Matthias. I have set the process in motion through Headquarters Bactra City. I am certain that approval will not be withheld.

  Home? I know at once that this is out of the question. I cannot leave Lucas and Flag and Stephanos. I cannot leave my mates.

  I have to sit. The letter has been delivered by pouch rider, along with everyone else’s mail, in camp on the Many Blessings. I pass the letter to Flag. He scans it in silence and hands it on. Everyone reads it.

  My mates are as shaken as I. Not just by Elias’s death (he was a favorite of all), but by its manner. Suddenly the war seems more un-winnable than ever.

  Worse news comes by verbal report. There’s a reason our patrols have not encountered Spitamenes all summer. The Desert Wolf has been raiding in our rear. He crossed the Oxus two months ago, heading south with six thousand Daan, Sacae, and Massagetae horse, despite our saturation coverage of the region. He has captured Bani Mis and both Bactra-region freight compounds, constructed last winter. More massacres. Our general Craterus is defending central Afghanistan with four brigades; he has chased the Wolf but lost him, as usual, north in the steppe country.

  I respond at once to Philip, declining his offer with respect.

  Elias.

  Must I speak of my brother now in the past tense? Must I say “was”?

  Elias was Mother’s darling; how will she endure his loss? How will our sister Eleni? Will Philip inform them of Daria?

  The next ten days pass like a hundred. Grief has overhauled me. I have ducked it for so long. Since Father. Tollo. Rags, Flea, Knuckles, Torch and Turtle, Tower and Pollard.

  Now Elias.

  It all catches up to me.

  I saw my brother last just before the Big Push stepped off. He was in the officers infirmary at Bactra City. A wound of the foot, got not in action but from stepping on a nail on his way to the latrine. This is a grand joke to him. The surgeons bled him to defend against lockjaw. It works. I visit him twice. He seems in fine spirits. I spend six weeks in the field, training. When I get back, a note tells me Elias has been moved from the hospital to a private home. I go straight over.

  When I enter, I see his right leg elevated. The foot has been amputated. The stump starts twelve inches below the knee.

  “Don’t go green on me, brother,” pronounces Elias gaily. “I’ve got what every soldier dreams of—a ticket home!”

  Daria is with him. She sleeps on a fleece at his bedside. We talk of everything except what’s in front of us. Each time I look at my brother, tears well.

  “Will you control that please, Matthias? It’s unsoldierly.”

  Daria brings chai and sesame cakes. To witness the tenderness with which she cares for Elias makes my eyes burn.

  My brother counsels me. He wants me out of a line company. The army owes him, he says. He can get me a headquarters job. We argue. I assure him I am with a crack outfit; I’m safer than in my own bed at home.

  “This is no game, Matthias….”

  I assure him I’m aware of that.

  “…nor shall we best this foe, as we have all others.”

  My brother has lost his first love, the army. His grief endows him with a kind of clarity.

  “Listen to me, Matthias. I’m going to tell you how to fight this war. You will do as I instruct you, as I am your elder and I so command.”

  He makes me promise. His eyes hold me like our mother’s, the color of iron.

  “Show the foe no mercy. What he tells you will be a lie. Fear his women more than his men and act toward them with greater implacability. You will be told to take prisoners to sell as slaves. Do not. Kill them. That is the only way you will get out of here alive.”

  My brother regards me gravely.

  “I know you,
Matthias. The more you come to know this country, the more sympathy you will feel for the foe. You will admire his fighting qualities and respect his love of freedom. You will see him as a human being, not unlike our own highlanders, and thus worthy of respect.

  “Forget this. Howsoever legitimate such sentiments may be, if you indulge them they will bring you to grief. We are here and we must win. The sooner we bring the foe to his senses, the better for us and the better for him.

  “Now listen to me carefully, for what I tell you now is most critical of all.

  “We are wrong to be here. The enemy are better men than we are, and their cause, which is liberty, is just. Never tell yourself otherwise. If you do, you will go mad. Fight the foe as you would fight hell itself. Seek nowhere for honor. You will not find it. Get yourself a ‘ticket home’ if you can. And if you can’t, kill the enemy to the last man.”

  34.

  Two packets arrive from Shinar while I am at Maracanda. She doesn’t know how to write, so she sends stuff. Candy, beadwork, a pony carved of oryx horn. My emotion upon receiving these little gift boxes surprises me. I have registered Shinar under my oikos. She gets half my pay. In her second packet is a note scratched on beaten leather, with the sign of a scribe from the marketplace. The broken Greek is his, not hers.

  I come to Maracanda. Ghilla’s son is born. The soldiers kill Daria for your brother. I bring your pay. If you find a new woman, I make my own way.

  So Lucas is a father now. Ghilla has not yet sent a letter. He’s happy to learn, any way he can. We roast a goose to celebrate.