Soldiers of God (2 page)

Prologue
Walking Through a Minefield

A
MPUTATIONS
were the most common form of surgery in Afghanistan in the 1980s. A West German doctor, Frank Pau-lin, traveled around Nangarhar province in April 1985, cutting off the limbs of mine victims with a survival knife. “Sometimes I'd use a saw, basically anything I could get my hands on,” he recollected. The only anesthetic that Paulin had available for his patients was ordinary barbiturates. Some of the patients died, but the ones who survived wouldn't have had a chance without him. Radio Moscow accused Paulin by name of being a “CIA spy.” While being hunted by Soviet troops, he contracted cholera and had to be carried on the back of a mule over a fourteen-thousand-foot mountain pass to safety in Pakistan. Paulin had only one fear: that he too would step on a mine.

An Afghan who stepped on a mine frequently died of shock and loss of blood a few feet from the explosion. More often, he was carried by a relative or friend to a primitive medical outpost run by someone like Paulin. If the victim was really lucky, he made it to a Red Cross hospital in Quetta or Peshawar over the border in Pakistan — antiseptic sanctuaries of Western medicine where emergency surgery was conducted around the clock.

I remember a Scottish surgeon at one of these hospitals who had just come off a long shift and needed to talk and get a little drunk. In the bar at Peshawar's American Club, he sat at a
table with me and two other journalists and recited from memory several stanzas of Rudyard Kipling's poem “The Ballad of East and West” in a deliberately loud and passionate voice, as if to demonstrate that he didn't give a damn what people thought of him:

At the table there was an embarrassed silence. Then the surgeon talked about what was really on his mind. “The philosophy of war is truly sinister,” he said in a hushed tone. “Now, you take the Russians. Most of the mines they've laid are designed to maim, not kill, because a dead body causes no inconvenience. It only removes the one dead person from the field. But somebody who is wounded and in pain requires the full-time assistance of several people all down the line who could otherwise be fighting. And if you want to depopulate an area, then you want many of the casualties to be small children. The most stubborn peasants will give up and flee when their children are mutilated.”

These were old facts that left everyone at the table numb. In Peshawar the journalists and relief workers all knew these things. But the surgeon had discovered them on his own in the lonely, pulsing stillness of the operating theater, where he was in constant physical contact with the evidence. When he recited Kipling's poetry it showed all over his face.

“The future battlefield is to be liberally sown with mines,” wrote the British military historian John Keegan in his prophetic work
The Face of Battle.
Never before in history have
mines played such an important role in a war as in Afghanistan. Nobody knows precisely how many were sown by Soviet troops and airmen in the ten years between their invasion and their withdrawal. The figures offered are biblical. The British Broadcasting Corporation, on June 8, 1988, simply stated “millions.” The Afghan resistance claimed five million. The U.S. government's first estimate was three million. Later, on August 15, 1988, State Department spokesman Charles Red-mon said the figure was more likely “between 10 and 30 million.” That would be 2 mines for every Afghan who survived the war; between 40 and 120 mines per square mile of Afghan territory. Tens of thousands of civilians, if not more — many of them small children — have already been disabled by mine detonations in Afghanistan. Even though the Russian phase of the war has ended, mines threaten to kill and maim thousands more, some of whom haven't been born yet.

“The widespread sowing of millions of land mines has added an ominous new dimension to the rehabilitation effort,” Undersecretary of State Michael H. Armacost told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on June 23, 1988. According to both American and United Nations officials, mines will cripple Afghanistan's economic life for years to come, inhibiting the tilling of fields, access to pasture areas, and collection of firewood.

No group of people knew as much about mines in Afghanistan as news photographers and television cameramen. Getting close-ups of the war meant traveling with the mujahidin, the “holy warriors of Islam.” And the muj — as journalists called them — walked through minefields. “It's like walking a tightrope,” said Tony O’Brien, a free-lance photographer who would later be captured and then released by Afghan regime forces. “You're in a group, yet you're totally alone. Still, there's this absolutely incredible bond with the person ahead of you and behind you. You forget the heat, the thirst, the diarrhea. Then you're out of the minefield and instantaneously you're
hot and thirsty again. The minute I start thinking about it I start worrying and I get totally freaked.”

For several days I rode in a Toyota Land Cruiser through the mine-strewn desert outside the southern Afghan city of Kandahar. The trails were marked with the rusted carcasses of trucks that told you it was almost better not to survive such an explosion. My driver kept safely to previous tread marks. But when another vehicle approached from the opposite direction we had to make room for each other, and I became so afraid that I held my breath just to keep from whimpering. At night, or in the frequent dust storms when we lost the track, the fear went on for hours at a stretch, leaving me physically sick.

Joe Gaal, a Canadian photographer for the Associated Press, had been around so many minefields and had collected enough fragments of different mines that he had developed a sapper's tactile intuition about them, which was apparent in the movements of his hands and fingers whenever we discussed the matter. An intense, gutsy fellow, Gaal had an encyclopedic knowledge of Soviet mines. His terror had turned into an obsession.

The mine that could really put him in a cold sweat was what the mujahidin called a “jumping” mine, a Russian version of the “Bouncing Betty,” used by the Americans in Vietnam. It is activated by a trip wire that causes a projectile to shoot up from underground a few feet ahead. The mine is designed to go off several seconds later and explode at waist level, just as you pass over it. “It blows off your genitals and peppers your guts with shrapnel,” Gaal explained.

The Bouncing Betty was one of several different antipersonnel mines the Soviets employed, mines that had to be dug into the ground by special units and were meant to kill or maim anyone within a radius of twenty feet. But the vast majority of mines in Afghanistan were dropped from the air. The most common of these was the “butterfly” mine. The butterfly was
the
mine of Afghanistan, so much so that it had become part of the country's landscape, like the white flags above the graves of martyred mujahidin. Soviet helicopter gunships would fly in at one or two thousand feet and litter the ground with mines. The butterfly's winged shape caused it to go into a spin, slowing its descent. The detonator pin was set on impact with the ground. Green was the most common color, but the Soviets had a light brown version for desert areas and a gray one for riverbeds. Some mujahidin, not knowing this, thought the mines actually changed color.

Only eight inches long and blending in with the ground, the butterfly mine was hard to spot, especially if you were fatigued from hours of walking, which was most of the time. Except for the light aluminum detonator it was all plastic, so it was difficult to detect with mine-sweeping equipment. The mine was often mistaken for a toy by Afghan children, who paid with the loss of a limb or an eye. Its explosive power was about equal to that of the smallest hand grenade: sufficient to maim, not to kill. Contrary to Soviet claims, the mine has no self-destruct mechanism, and will be mutilating Afghans for a long time to come.

Butterfly mines, along with aerial bombardment, were the centerpiece of Moscow's strategy of depopulation. Depopulation had come after pacification had failed and before the Communist-inspired bombing campaign in Pakistani cities. During the heyday of depopulation, in the early and mid-1980s, the Soviets dropped plastic mines disguised as wrist-watches and ball-point pens over Afghan villages in the heavily populated Panjshir Valley northeast of Kabul.

There were even reports of mines disguised as dolls. The New York-based Afghanistan Relief Committee ran an advertisement in a number of American magazines featuring a photograph of a doll with its left arm blown off and a caption that read, “The toy that's making a lasting impression on thousands of Afghan children.” The larger version of these ads
contained a line in small type advising the reader that the doll in the photograph was not a real Soviet bomb, but a replica constructed on the basis of refugee accounts. In fact, no photographs of such dolls exist, even though one would have been worth thousands of dollars to a news photographer. Peter Jouvenal, a British television cameraman who made over forty trips inside Afghanistan with the mujahidin and saw every other kind of Soviet mine, suspected that the story of the dolls was apocryphal. “The Soviets were guilty of so much in Afghanistan. Why exaggerate?” he remarked.

Right up to the time of their withdrawal, the Soviets kept introducing new kinds of mines. When journalists entered the garrison town of Barikot, in Kunar province near the Pakistan border, after the Soviets had evacuated it in April 1988, they discovered mines stuck on stakes in the bushes. They dubbed them Noriega mines, on account of their pineapple texture. These were sonic mines, fitted with diaphragms that picked up the lightest footstep and sprayed shrapnel thirty feet in all directions.

In Barikot, the Soviets also booby-trapped grain bags in some of the places they evacuated, using a grenade with its detonator pin pulled, hooked up to a trip wire concealed in the sack. Several mujahidin and a dozen refugees were wounded when they opened the bags.

The overwhelming majority of hospital patients in Peshawar and Quetta were mine victims. After Red Cross doctors operated on them, the wounded were dispatched to clinics run by the various mujahidin political parties to recover. These clinics lived on donations from the refugees themselves and usually received little or no aid from either international relief organizations or the Pakistani government. Pakistani landlords owned the clinics and charged as much rent as they could. In the heat of summer, when temperatures rarely dipped below ninety degrees in daytime, there were no fans or air conditioners
for the patients, who were accustomed to the bracing mountain climate of Afghanistan. The clinics were short of nearly everything, including food.

Of the twenty patients I saw at a clinic in Quetta one day in July 1988, sixteen were missing at least one limb. Many of the mine accidents had occurred only two or three weeks earlier. But there were no signs of illness or general physical weakness on the victims’ faces, even though most of them not only had lost large quantities of blood and eaten little in the intervening period, but also had to endure days of travel on a mule or in a lolloping four-wheel-drive vehicle before getting to a proper medical facility.

Many people have the idea that once a limb is amputated the pain stops. That's not true. Pain from damaged nerve tissue lasts for months, usually longer if a clean amputation is not done soon after the accident, which was always the case in Afghanistan, where painkillers were not always available. Add this to weeks of drugged discomfort, for patients were all but drowned in antibiotics in order to prevent tetanus and other infections caused by mine fragments.

Yet, despite the pain and a missing arm or foot, the patients in these wards looked healthy and normal. There was a vibrancy in their faces, a trace of humor even, and a total absence of embarrassment. “I have given my foot to Allah,” said a twenty-seven-year-old man who also had only one eye and a burned, deformed hand. “Now I will continue my
jihad
[holy war] in another way.” This man had a wife and three children. At first, I dismissed what he said as bravado meant to impress a foreigner. I found it impossible to believe that he really felt this emotion, that he truly accepted what had happened to him. His eyes, however, evinced neither the rage of a fanatic, which would have accounted for his defiance, nor the shocked and sorrowful look of someone who was really depressed. If anything registered on his face when I spoke to him, it was bewilderment. He didn't seem to understand why I thought
he should be unhappy. He had lost an eye, a foot, and part of a hand — and that was that.

The Afghan mujahidin came equipped with psychological armor that was not easy to pierce or fathom. They had the courage and strength of zealots, but their eyes were a mystery. Their eyes were not the bottomless black wells of hatred and cunning that a visitor grows accustomed to seeing in Iran and elsewhere in the Moslem world. There was a reassuring clarity about them. Sometimes, while I was talking and sipping cups of green tea with the mujahidin, their eyes would appear so instantly recognizable to me that I thought they could have been those of my childhood friends. How could people with such familiar, nonthreatening eyes walk so readily through minefields?