Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [5]
One day, Zaman’s men brought the bodies of eight dead guerrilla soldiers down from the mountains and laid them out on the hospital floor. Then he herded in a great swarm of reporters to gape and snap photographs. He stalked over the dead, face twisted with rage, railing about the bombings. The Americans were killing peasants loyal to him, and now his mujahideen. They must be using old maps, he thundered. Who is telling them where to bomb? Do these look like Al Qaeda to you?
The dead men were skinny, all of them, muddy and ragged. One man’s face had been blown off. Another lay with the back of his head gone, his brains leaking. Filtered sunlight spilled onto the floor; the smell of death was heavy. An American reporter fell on the ground and lay there crying. I looked at her, and at the corpses. Intellectually, I knew that her reaction was appropriate, but I felt disgusted by her weakness. Staring down at the bodies, I felt numb, light, as if my own body might vaporize, as if I didn’t need to breathe.
The dying were worse than the dead. They came down from the hills in rattling caravans, slow as torture over bone-cracking roads of mud and rock, bleeding all over the backseats of rattletrap cars. Three hours, four hours, bright red lives seeping away.
They wound up in the dim wards of Jalalabad’s filthy hospital. There weren’t enough antibiotics or antiseptics. Little girls who wouldn’t live through the night were stacked two to a cot, covered in blood. A baby with its head caked in scab and pus and one eye full of blood cried in the listless arms of a young, young girl. A little boy who had lost his arms, his eyesight, and his family lay motionless in the hot afternoon. The rooms smelled of sweat and infection; flies and woolen blankets. All of it coming down from those American planes.
We drifted out of the hospital. In the car I tasted metal. After a long time, Brian spoke.
“That was pretty bad.” He cleared his throat.
“Yeah.”
We looked out the window, and the driver turned up the music. The sunlight and the dust were gilding everything to silver. The spindly dome of trees cupped the road, bicycle spokes flickered and goats plodded in the blue fog of exhaust. Afghans were rushing home from the market, arms loaded with fresh meat and vegetables to break the Ramadan fast. The hotel room was dark and cold. I opened a pad of paper and tried to make some notes. This is what I wrote:
I didn’t mean to really see these things. I didn’t know how it would be.
Late one night, bombs fell on the village of Kama Ado, a tiny, isolated hamlet of mud houses. I interviewed people who were hauled from the wreckage. I wrote a story about it. I fell asleep.
By morning, my story wasn’t the same. Instead of leading with the news of the crushed village, the top of the story had Pentagon officials denying reports of the bombing. The first voice in the article was no longer that of an Afghan victim. Instead, it was a Pentagon official who said: “This is a false story.”
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the same: “If we cannot know for certain how many people were killed in lower Manhattan, where we have full access to the site, thousands of reporters, investigators, rescue workers combing the wreckage, and no enemy propaganda to confuse the situation, one ought to be sensitive to how difficult it is to know with certainty, in real time, what may have happened in any given situation in Afghanistan, where we lack access and we’re dealing with world class liars.”
I read it once. I read it twice. Were we to believe the village had spontaneously collapsed while U.S. warplanes circled