Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [11]
I asked a twenty-two-year-old soldier when he had learned to fire a rocket launcher. He let out a huff of laughter. “What do you mean? I always knew how. I learned when I was a baby.” He dropped his head and bounced his gun, testing its weight.
“I never went to school, and I don’t know how to do anything. Just fighting.”
The ground assault played out like a pantomime of war. The mujahideen hadn’t captured a single prisoner, and had no idea how many men they’d killed. The same patch of ground was gained and lost, over and over again. At night they lay on the earth under thin wool blankets, bitter wind coursing through the hills. They knotted rags around their wounds because they had no bandages. Sometimes, the television crews paid them to fire their tanks into the canyons, and happily the fighters obliged. The mujahideen got so hungry one night they broke into a television news trailer and stole all the food. These were the foot soldiers of the U.S. war on terror.
One of the mujahideen thought he was twenty-two, but he wasn’t sure. His skin was drawn tight over pinched features. “We have no food or blankets. Our lives belong to God,” he said resentfully. “The Americans should come. They should be in the front line, and we will get behind them.”
I learned more from the mujahideen than I did from the smooth-talking warlords. The mujahideen predicted that they would never take Tora Bora. The Soviets had pounded away at the honeycombed network of caves for years and never managed to get inside, they pointed out. The older mujahideen had fought from within the caves back when they had battled on the side of bin Laden and the Americans. In those days, Tora Bora was the epicenter of their jihad against the godless Russians. They thought this latest mission was a lost cause, even when the United States dropped the 15,000-pound “daisy cutter” bombs. The mujahideen talked every day about the Pakistani border, the ease with which the Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters could escape. Even knowing the futility, the fighters didn’t flinch. They shouldered their Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers and trudged dutifully into the hills to fight the war set before them. They sat around camp and told folk stories about Osama bin Laden. He was spotted astride a red pony. He was seen playing with his small son. Somebody saw him crossing a stream late one night. He was melting into myth.
After a week of fighting, the Afghan troops were still scrapping at the fringes of Tora Bora. Zaman was petulant, griping about his American backers. Thirty-one days had passed, he told me pointedly, since Osama bin Laden had fled Jalalabad under the protection of a Pakistani tribal elder. “I’ve been telling America all along,” he said. “If America wants to capture bin Laden, why aren’t they trying?”
I was in the mountains one day. The sky was white and gray and empty overhead. Bitter cold swept down from the north. I was close to the front line, but not quite there. Deep below, a river cut through the cliffs. There were land mines and gun skirmishes on these twisting trails. Sharp mountainsides plunged into deep valleys. It was hard to keep your bearings, hard to understand who was shooting at whom, and why. It was utterly confusing.
Then a commotion of voices echoed through the valleys, and the Afghans began to race up the mountain. All of the reporters charged instinctively after them, choking for oxygen in the thin mountain air. At my side ran another woman, a reporter.
“Where are we running to?” she gasped.
“I don’t know,