Neil Shea

Russians + Americans

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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.

First platoon has never visited Khaki Banday before, though they have been shot at from the area. The village is a last stop on the Americans’ patrol circuit; just beyond it, higher in the mountains, are places considered too dangerous to visit without massive support. The alpine hold of the enemy.

The 26-year-old platoon leader asks Mohammed if Taliban have visited here.

“None!” he says. It’s always about that many.

“How can it be none?” the soldier asks. “We get shot at from here.”

“Not from here.” Mohammed points to the raw, sharp ridges above. “If they shoot at you from up there, you say it is us. If they shoot at you from over there, you say it is us.”

“So they never come to your village?”

“Never.”

The platoon leader sighs.

“We need the shooting to stop,” he says. “You have to take an active stance. These are your people, your villages. You have to push the bad guys away.”

“What can we do?” Mohammed says. He swings his white beard to the north, to the area the soldiers will not go. “I am not responsible for those villages up there. I am responsible for this area only.”

He repeats this several times—this area only. It is a maddening to the soldiers, an answer that breeds contempt.

“You are a citizen of Afghanistan,” the platoon leader says finally. “The country is your responsibility.”

It is the new message, Obama’s message, delivered in a language of exasperation and warning. The soldier speaks slowly and it is better that the weary irritation in his voice disappears as his words filter through the interpreter. But behind him, so large it cannot be seen, an entire army, an entire nation, shouts Stand up for yourselves, goddamit, because soon you will be on your own.

Later, after the soldiers have extracted a promise—that Mohammed will call them if he sees bad guys—I ask about the Russians. The Afghan resistance was born in this province in the late 1970s, when locals rose up first against the Afghan communists and then against the Soviet army. Not far to the east, in a place called Kerala, the communists massacred up to 2,000 people, burying some alive in an enormous pit alongside heaps of the already dead.

Mohammed remembers. He tells me he fled with his family into Pakistan for a time during the Russian war, like thousands of others. Almost everyone left Khaki Banday.

“Would you rather have Russians or Americans?”

“Americans!” he says. “It’s good now. Better than when the Russians were here. When the Russians saw a young man, they just shot him. They killed everything, cows, sheep, goats, dogs.”

He points to patch of bare earth beside us. Twelve cows were killed there by a Russian shell. The Americans don’t do that. Or, at least they don’t do it as often. I wonder what Mohammed truly thinks. Perhaps the Americans are better than the Russians, better than the Taliban. Perhaps war has been here so long that it hardly matters.

We have left the village and are hiking down when a soldier with binoculars notices the residents of Khaki Banday retreating into their houses and shutting the doors. As though before a storm. On the handheld radio scanner, we hear Taliban fighters talking. They note our location, pass it along to others. They discuss how they will attack us. We are a long, thin line pushing awkwardly through the mineral hardness of this place. Their voices seem to flow like water through the rocks.

“When we see a chance to shoot them, we will shoot them,” a Taliban voice says.

The hiss of their radios shadows us down the mountain. Helicopters circle above us, but they see nothing; the enemy is invisible. The soldiers are tired and tense. They watch their feet, trying not to slip in loose gravel, and they wait for the sound of gunfire.

Near the bottom, we rest in the shade and shelter of a small grove of boulders and trees. A lieutenant talks with a sergeant who, like most of the sergeants here, has also fought in Iraq. The lieutenant asks “Would you rather have IEDs and Iraq, or bullets and Afghanistan?”

“Afghanistan!” he says. “I hate IEDs. Fuck Iraq.”