Fifteen Years on the Frontline

October 30, 2009

By Stephen Dupont

Diary Entry – February, 1994

What am I doing here? I’ve been sitting on my bags on the Kabul Airport tarmac for hours now. I’m waiting for my Ariana Airways flight back to Delhi. Ariana.more like ‘Inshallah Airways’! What am I doing even catching this plane–there’s no way I’ll make it back to India. I’ve spent weeks here in Kabul dodging bullets and now I’m going to blow it all away and go down in tin pot air ship. Why did I come this way, was it the cheapest option? What an idiot! The air traffic control tower is blown up and there’s one guy up there with binoculars waiting for a visual on the plane. He’s spotted it and starts waving his arms with excitement.

‘The plane, the plane.it’s coming!’ he’s yelling to nobody. I see it, I see it, I wish I could get excited, but this just quickens my overwhelming horror that I’ll never get off the plane alive. The plane corkscrews downward so as to avoid any incoming anti-aircraft gunfire. I loose visual on the plane and spot a plane’s wheel fly right past me along the runway. A wheel, what the fuck.? Then the plane rolls up towards us stranded, bewildered passengers. An old man then comes out of the terminal rolling a new wheel for the crippled plane. Only in Afghanistan!

Diary Entry – October 25, 2001

Commander Malak read my papers over cups of tea, handing me new letters and documents–my right of passage for the journey. Afghanistan doesn’t function without the delivery services of small scrunched-up pieces of paper. These notes can cross great distances and can sometimes be the only form of communication. Having the right signature can be the only thing holding you between life and death. With my new papers I set about finding reliable guides. Language became a problem until I drew a horse and stick figure on a piece of scrap paper and moved it in the direction of Pakistan.

Climbing a narrow trail along the Tagab-i-Mongan River, we hug the cliff faces, the horses sure footed, the riders grateful. Our shadows caress the natural walls, swaying with the rhythmic motion of the horses, creating a peaceful space, and I start to dream. The silence broken only by the steady clip clop of the horse’s hooves sends me into a light hypnotic state, a meditation. We ride on, swallowed up into the belly of the Hindu Kush Mountains. Emerald green waters below us turn to black, as the moonlight becomes our guide.

I was led inside the ancient Silk Road teahouse. Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Star Wars, extra-terrestrial and primitive, low-lit oil lamps almost manage to reveal faces from another time, hard, brutal, strange and beautiful. A silence greeted me that was as tangible as mud, eyes from within dark and unfamiliar faces remained fixed on me, I was the alien, not them. From within, wafts of smoke, the acrid smells of cooking fats, the pungent and unpleasant sour stench of sweat from a thousand years, the familiar blanket of sheep’s piss on human skin, and the unmistakable sweet fragrance of hashish crowded my nasal passages.