Neil Shea
Neil is a contributing writer for National Geographic magazine.
Dispatches
Repetition, Truth
January 11, 2010
The room is full of old men who remember the Russian war. They sit on couches beside me in long, loose shirts and pants, wrapped in blankets, all the colors they wear reflected in the landscape—gray, beige, coffee. Black turbans on their heads coiled like cloth serpents.
They are from the far-out villages and they have come to talk and argue and ask for things. Demand, threaten, beg. It is all in Pashto, and I don’t understand. So I drift. An elder to my right thumbs caramel-colored prayer beads. They click softly as he spools through them, the sound of prayers rising to heaven.
Tallyban
January 03, 2010
The soldiers at the gate are not pleased that I have invited a Taliban commander for tea.
“What the fuck?” the say, laughing but sort of not laughing. “You mean we gotta search that motherfucker? Man, shit. I mean, if he’s like, wearing a belt.”
By belt they mean bomb. Suicide vest. Like the one an attacker detonated a few days ago on a base in another province, killing five CIA operatives and two American contractors. It is on their minds as the soldiers stand cold and bored beside the only road through this winter valley, searching each local laborer who enters the base to lay stones in the mud or slather cement onto the rocket-resistant buildings. They know that by the time they noticed a bomb, ruffling their hands through the folds of an Afghans’ clothing, the future would already be decided.
Christmas Day
December 25, 2009
Christmas morning and I stumble out of the plywood man cave in which I live with its crickets and its stink and its tiny blinking tree into warm, blinding light. The first conversation of the day—the first time words actually make sense—is with a short, broad soldier who in his other life is a rodeo clown. He is nearly bald, enormous, drawling out of the Midwest. He sits eating cocoa puffs.
Russians + Americans
December 20, 2009
The old man points over the hills.
“A hundred Russians died in a great battle over there!” he says, and the interpreter looks at me and makes a face. It’s always about that many, it seems. As though Russians traveled in packs of 100.
His name is Mohammed and his village, Khaki Banday, sits high above the Pech River, an hour’s hike into the rocks. From a distance, the place appeared like a resort, or perhaps a vineyard. Green, terraced fields stepping up to stone buildings with porches and large, timber-framed windows. Soft light warming the stones. A suggestion of arbors and ivy. Up close the rooms are filled with goat shit and the walls are crumbling.
DO NOT KILL
December 17, 2009
The MPs stand by their enormous armored trucks, waiting for the briefing that comes before they head out on the road. The morning cold wanes as the sun rises, and on the base the day is taking shape. Civilian contractors resume their work, the details of material sustenance—food service, computer service—that keep the military running. Local Afghanis resume their jobs, too, emptying trash barrels, loading the coolers with bottled water, soda, and Gatorade, the official beverage of the war. Beyond the walls and blast barriers, smoke rises above the houses and villagers walk through morning along the solitary road, along the edges of fields, faces wrapped against the fading chill. In the cemetery dogs, bark among the jagged, unmarked headstones.