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| Volume 51, Number 3, Summer 2002 |
A SCIENCE WRITER IN AFGHANISTANby Tim Friend In the wake of Sept. 11, newsrooms scrambled to cover the tragedies and fallout from the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. As a science writer for the past 15 years for the Life section of USA Today, I felt I could lend my expertise on the subjects of DNA analysis of victims and the collapse of the World Trade Center, but the news section appropriated those stories.
Frustrated, one day I heard that the newspaper was short on volunteers for a new war team it was putting together. I didn't know much about covering a war, but I do know how to survive in harsh places thanks to assignments in Everest, the Antarctic, Greenland, the Amazon, and the deserts of Egypt and Jordan. So when my editor asked if I wanted to go camping in Afghanistan, I thought, why not? I could get even with the news section for stealing my stories and escape my book publisher, who was beginning to wonder why I hadn't turned in my manuscript on animal communication. My plan was perfect. The next thing I knew I was in Tashkent, Uzbekestan, cooling my heels with real war reporters waiting for the border at Termez to open up into Afghanistan. These people have their own macho culture and play this game of "didn't we meet in the Balkans or was it Beirut?" I thought about making something up, but just said "I'm the science writer for USA Today." That drew a lot of puzzled looks. After a week it became clear that Uzbekestan was not opening its border. So I found my way to Dusenbe, where a bunch of other real war reporters were cooling their heels to join a convoy that would take them to the war. After a crazy Mad Max race of 30 cars to the border, I entered Afghanistan by ferry one evening at dusk. My first images of the war were the silhouettes of rag-tag Northern Alliance soldiers waiting on the shore with their Kalishnikovs slung over their shoulders. Passports were stamped in a mud hut under a kerosene lantern, and I was told to pay my new driver $200 to take me roughly 10 miles to Hoja Baddahuin (a town that had as many spellings as it did reporters). Hoj, or Khoj, depending on your tastes, was headquarters for the Northern Alliance. Like I said, I know nothing about covering wars, but I had been reading Peter Baker's terrific stories in the Washington Post. My plan was to steal his ideas until I came up with my own. Two days after arriving, the U.S. started bombing nearby where the Taliban had about 4,000 vigilantes massed on the front line. Up to this point, stories from the north were mostly features about the people that often began with "Mohammad fought against the Russians as a child and has known only war in his lifetime . . .". But now Taliban body counts, civilian casualties, and whether or not the Taliban was weakening was all anyone needed to write about to be on page one.
All I had to do was get to the front. But on my second night, the region was hit with a 100-mile-per-hour dust storm. I was one of the few people staying in a tent. Most reporters were in lice-infested guest houses huddled together for warmth and listening to each other snore. Not me. I had a nifty mountain tent, rated for Everest. At about midnight, the tent started flapping like crazy. I thought the wind would die down but only got worse, and the tent began filling with very fine particles of dust. I considered running to the house where Afghan opposition leader Ahmad Shah Masood had been assassinated just six weeks before (NBC was staying there now). But the wind was too strong and there was no visibility. Several hours later, the tent was so filled with dust it occurred to me I might not survive the night. I began to panic, but told myself to stay calm and placed a water-soaked T-shirt over my face. At 2 a.m., I got a signal on my Irridium satellite phone and called my editor back in Virginia. I wanted him to know that I was in an uncomfortable position (good for my next performance review) and talking to someone kept my mind off of the wind, which kept getting stronger. The storm lasted seven hours. The next morning, NBC's satellite dish was twisted like a pretzel. Tragically, some of the refugees in the camp just two miles away suffocated during the night. A lot of them were kids. They didn't have $400 mountain tents. Getting to the front line required a one-hour-twenty-minute jeep ride over something that once was a road, forging a river on horseback, and then climbing some rather steep hills to get a view of the war and the previous night's bombing raids. Three weeks into these daily trips to the front, I was at a Northern Alliance tank position on a hill. The tank was firing down on the Taliban. The Taliban was firing back and we were hit. Tank shells make a very weird sound when they pass overhead. But when they land on your position the sound suddenly disappears. Before I could register the fact that the sound of an oncoming shell had stopped, and tell myself to hit the dirt, the blast knocked everybody to the ground. Some of the Northern Alliance guys didn't make it. Gary Scurka, a TV producer for National Geographic, got hit in the butt and knee with shrapnel. He was standing less than a foot from me when the shell exploded. It's strange when the guy next to you gets it and you don't. National Geographic didn't waste the opportunity to promote the hell out of Gary's injury. He was flown home the next day and booked on a dozen talk shows. That same night, four journalists hopped onto an armored personnel carrier and rode with the Northern Alliance into the broken Taliban lines. I can imagine the euphoria they felt being the first into the fallen front. But some of the Taliban were still there. They threw an antipersonnel grenade at the personnel carrier and knocked three of the journalists off. This was occurring at the same time we were getting Gary to the four-room hospital back in Khoj, preparing him for stardom. The Taliban captured the journalists. No one knows exactly what happened, but when their bodies were recovered their noses and ears had been cut off and their eyes removed. They were stabbed and shot many times. Earlier that day, these journalists were hanging out at the Northern Alliance headquarters eating beans and rice with the rest of us. Their deaths were the first of eight journalists killed in less than two months. These people are all but forgotten. I don't know how others dealt with it, but I just blocked it out. It didn't bother me until I went home. You have to keep doing your job, so that's what most people did.
Later, I traveled to the little northern city of Taliqan near Kunduz; the driver negotiating miles of mine fields. For protection, I put the body armor I stole from NBC on the floorboard under my feet. In Taliqan, I rented a house and hired two guys with machine guns ($20 a day) to sit in the yard at night while I wrote stories and then slept. Northern Alliance guys were going house to house shooting Taliban guys who had not yet left. Best to have someone else answer the door if anyone comes knocking. We now had to get to Kabul, which had just been liberated. This meant driving over the Hindu Kush through bandit territory, more mine fields, and over the narrowest roads you can imagine. Some of the jeeps went over the side. No one was killed, but it was pretty terrible. Following my translator's advice, I paid $3,000 to hire the newest jeep in Taliqan-the most money paid by a journalist for the journey to Kabul. At times like this, why quibble over corporate cash. For the bargain price of $1,000, other journalists got broken down jeeps and were robbed on the way by their drivers. We were first of the convoy into Kabul, but not before the networks had chartered helicopters and flew crews in from Pakistan. These pricks booked every room at the bombed-out Intercontinental Hotel, where everyone cool was staying. So my little team spent two nights in a $3-a-night hotel. The good news is we later rented one of the best houses in town-abandoned by the Global Relief Foundation, which was run by al-Qaeda. While the network glams bathed in cold water at their hotel, we had hot showers, warm, comfortable rooms, and access to satellites for the phone from my balcony. The network folks had to leave their rooms and walk to a nearby mined hill to get a signal. With Christmas approaching and no way to get out of Kabul, luck smiled and I snagged a ride on a Russian helicopter out of the Bagram Air Base, where the U.S. troops were setting up camp. I got home before the holidays, but the funny thing about adrenaline is that it keeps you boosted only for so long. I crashed hard and never got rested before going back again for another two months. As for my original plan, I'm back at my desk and the news section is still stealing my stories whenever they want. But, my book editor was promoted to another job while I was gone. My agent and the publisher forgot that I was late and seemed happy that I am back. I was golden. Now I have a new editor and a greatly renewed interest in finishing the book on animal communication. As for the job as a temporary war correspondent, there was no war pay or even a bonus. I did get my picture in the Gannett newsletter, and I got to keep the tent and some decent camping gear. I also learned that the really nice thing about animals is that most of them won't try to kill you. # Tim Friend is a science writer for USA Today. |
