Kandahar Cockney: A Tale of Two Worlds. James Fergusson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ He needed the exercise, said Ewan with studied preposterousness, tilting back his head and exhaling a long stream of smoke into the evening air.

      – Jesus, I said. He might have been killed. Was anybody hit?

      Ewan gave me a cool look.

      – You don’t understand. Anybody might have been hit. There was no cover up there at all. The trenches were hopeless. It didn’t make any difference where you were.

      – But was anybody hit?

      Ewan looked away at the sky again and did not reply.

      – Some guys up the line got smoked, said Rick after a pause.

      – You think, said Ewan.

      – Nah, they did. I told you, I saw it. A shell came down right on top of them. There was nothing left. I think they must have been blown to pieces. I really wish I’d photographed it.

      There was another silence. With the probable exception of Rick, we were all thinking the same thing: journalists are supposed to report objectively on events, not provoke them. People dying, just so that a journalist from Eastern Europe could see what it was like to come under fire? This was serious stuff. Al seemed soberer than the other two and had so far said little, but he had read my thoughts, and now he spoke up.

      – Afghanistan isn’t like other places. I’ve been coming here a lot. You can’t always separate yourself from the story like you should. Because we’re here, we’re in it. It’s a war. And if you try to stay objective you end up reporting on nothing. Believe me, I’ve tried.

      – Right on, drawled Rick.

      Al ignored him.

      – Publicity is a weapon for these people just like anything else. They use us like we use them. That’s just how it is. You shouldn’t lose sleep over it.

      – So do you think it was worth it? I said. Worth people dying for, I mean?

      – I don’t know, Al shrugged. I think I got some good stuff. I won’t know until the edit. But if the pictures are any good we’ll use them.

      – Of course it was worth it, Ewan interrupted crossly. They’re frontline soldiers – they live every day with the possibility of death. They take their risks, we took ours. And it might have been us, you know? It isn’t as if we were observing from ten miles back through binoculars. Besides, we didn’t ask them to start firing. It’s their war, after all.

      Al nodded agreement, but I was full of doubt. A part of me very much wanted to know what it was like to come under fire. Like many British boys of my generation I grew up in the shadow of the Second World War. My Fergusson forebears included several soldiers who fought the Russians in the Crimea, the Dervish at Omdurman and the Germans at Arras and Cambrai, but the one I remembered most was my Great-Uncle Bernard. Passionate, irascible, boastful, occasionally pompous, he was larger than life and we children loved him. He wore a monocle, led a column of Chindits against the Japanese in Burma under Orde Wingate in 1943–44 and became Governor-General of New Zealand before retiring to Scotland. When I was a child he used to pick me up and let me puff at him like a candle on a birthday cake. With a hammed-up gasp of surprise he would let his monocle drop from his eye, only to catch it with a satisfying plop far down below in the palm of his hand. Behind enemy lines in Burma, Great-Uncle Bernard was said by the newspapers of the time to have been supplied with fresh monocles by parachute.

      Small wonder, then, that as a boy I spent all my pocket money on Airfix models and Commando magazines – trash mags, we called them. I drew battleships and fighter planes in the margins of schoolbooks. I played endless war games in the sandpit of our London garden, marshalling toy tanks and tiny plastic soldiers across the burning wastes of the North African desert, circa 1942.

      Yet now that I had the opportunity to live out this intoxicating fantasy I found myself weighing up the matter in a manner I had not anticipated. Ewan was surely wrong. Never mind the extreme personal risk – somebody’s death, even a nameless Afghan conscript’s, was too high a price to pay for war tourism. I was under no illusion about the value of the experience from a professional point of view either. Perhaps it was justifiable for an agency cameraman whose pictures might be stored away or used in a different context to tell a story worth telling. But I was a freelance adventurer with an uncertain commission from the London Independent, and I knew that a strategically meaningless exchange of shellfire in a back-page war would be worth a column inch or two at best. It seemed better to keep my doubts to myself, however. For a first-timer in Afghanistan, travelling companions had obvious advantages – and I definitely needed the services of a good fixer-interpreter. Later that night I persuaded Ewan and Rick to let me join them.

      I found my Afghan adventure all right. We flew low in an army helicopter through valleys so steep that the sheep looked down on us. The pilot, who was stoned, made me sit in the Perspex nose beyond his foot pedals, laughing maniacally as his machine pitched and rolled through the vertiginous passes. When at last we touched down in a field of poppies near the front line at Bala Murghab, guerrillas emerged from hiding places in the rocks to unload the cargo. The poorly stacked crates on which the others had been perching turned out to be filled with Iranian-made anti-personnel mines. Our visit to the western front only lasted a week, but it seemed far longer, and there was no possibility of getting off the roller-coaster. It was like a mad theme park. We lurched about the front lines on the back of a stinking tank, fired Kalashnikovs at tin cans, tracked an imaginary Mig through the cross-hairs of a fifty-year-old anti-aircraft gun, and rode out on patrol with a posse of Uzbek cavalrymen whose horses were trained not to flinch when their masters fired rocket-propelled grenades at full gallop between their ears. At night we slept fitfully in the dugouts of field commanders who were mostly psychotic or homosexual, and sometimes both, while making ourselves sick from their contaminated water supplies.

      We didn’t see the enemy but they were never more than a few miles away, secreted in dugouts just like our own, watching and waiting for the spring fighting season to begin again. At dusk each evening the two sides traded insults over their field radios. Mir thought this battlefield ritual a wonderful game, and asked to take over the handset.

      – Talib Talib Talib, he growled, suppressing a giggle. Your mother was a camel and your father was a Pakistani spy.

      – Spawn of Satan, crackled the outraged respondent. Your offspring are all bastards. With Allah’s help we will soon put an end to your infernal mating with dogs and donkeys.

      – Hooh, did you hear that? Mir whispered, wide-eyed at the profanity of it. Dogs and donkeys! Can you imagine?

      Mir was an excellent fixer. His family were prominent in Mazar, and everybody seemed to know him. His father was no ordinary member of the judiciary but an ’alim, one of the hundred or so most senior Sharia judges in the country, so Mir’s family name alone commanded a certain respect. He had the knack of knowing when to drop a name, when to cajole with flattery or a gift.

      Ewan could be impatient, but Mir unfailingly took this in his stride. If anything, he was sometimes too eager to please. For instance, he had never ridden a horse before, but he agreed without hesitating to go along on a cavalry expedition. Ewan and Rick hoped to persuade the Uzbeks to let us participate in a full-blown cavalry charge, which was ambitious. Ewan demonstrated his superior horsemanship by cantering around a field with one hand on his hip like some eighteenth-century cavalier, but to Mir’s relief our hosts rejected his proposal. Ewan turned sarcastic in his disappointment and blamed Mir for the failure to persuade СКАЧАТЬ