The bullet barely missed one of his commanders—he felt its wind as it passed—and came to a stop in the dirt between Massoud’s feet. Massoud called in more artillery fire, and then he and his men quickly retraced their route to the trucks. The trip had served its purpose, though. Massoud had identified two dirt roads that split in front of the Taliban positions and circled behind them. And he had let himself be seen on the front line, reinforcing the Taliban assumption that this was the focus of his attack.
Late that afternoon Massoud and his commanders went back up to the command post. The artillery exchanges had started up again, and a new Ramadan moon hung delicately in the sunset over the Taliban positions. That night, in the bunker, Massoud gave his commanders their final instructions. The offensive was to be carried out by eight groups of sixty men each, in successive waves. They must not be married or have children; they must not be their families’ only sons. They were to take the two roads Massoud had spotted and encircle the Taliban positions on the hill. He told them to cut the supply road and hold their positions while offering the Taliban a way to escape. The idea was not to force the Taliban to fight to the last man. The idea was just to overtake their positions with as few casualties as possible.
The commanders filed out, and Reza and Dr. Abdullah were left alone with Massoud. He was exhausted, and he lay down on his side with his coat over him and his hands folded under his cheek. He fell asleep, woke up, asked Reza a question, then fell asleep, over and over again for the next hour. Occasionally a commander would walk in, and Massoud would ask if he’d repositioned those mortars or distributed the fifty thousand rounds of ammunition to the front. At one point, he asked Reza which country he liked best of all the ones he’d worked in.
“Afghanistan, of course,” Reza said.
“Have you been to Africa?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been to Rwanda?”
“Yes.”
“What happened there? Why those massacres?”
Reza tried to explain. After a few minutes, Massoud sat up. “A few years ago in Kabul, I thought the war was finished, and I started building a home in Panjshir,” he said. “A room for my children, a room for me and my wife, and a big library for all my books. I’ve kept all my books. I’ve put them in boxes, hoping one day I’ll be able to put them on the shelves and I’ll be able to read them. But the house is still unfinished, and the books are still in their boxes. I don’t know when I’ll be able to read my books.”
Finally Massoud bade Reza and Dr. Abdullah good night and then lay back down and went to sleep for good. Though he holds the post of vice-president in Rabbani’s deposed government, Massoud is a man with few aspirations as a political leader, no apparent desire for power. Over and over he has rejected appeals from his friends and allies to take a more active role in the politics of his country. The Koran says that war is such a catastrophe it must be brought to an end as quickly as possible and by any means necessary. That, perhaps, is why Massoud has devoted himself exclusively to waging war.
I woke up at dawn. The sky was pale blue and promised a warm, clear day, which meant that the offensive was on. Reza and I ate some bread and drank tea and then went outside with the fighters. There seemed to be more of them milling around, and they were talking less than usual. They stood in tense little groups in the morning sun, waiting for Commander Massoud to emerge from his quarters.
The artillery fire started up in late morning, a dull smattering of explosions on the front line and the occasional heavy boom of a nearby tank. The plan was for Massoud’s forces to attack at dusk along the ridge, drawing attention to that part of the front, and then around midnight other attacks would be launched farther south. That was where the front passed close to Taloqan. As the afternoon went by, the artillery fire became more and more regular, and then suddenly at five-fifteen a spate of radio calls came into the bunker. Massoud stood up and went outside.
It had begun. Explosions flashed continually against the Taliban positions on the ridge, and rockets started streaking back and forth across the dark valley. We could see the lights from three Taliban tanks that were making their way along the ridgeline to reinforce positions that were getting overrun. A local cameraman named Yusuf had shown me footage of seasoned mujahidin attacking a hill, and I was surprised by how calm and purposeful the process was. In his video the men moved forward at a crouch, stopping to shoot from time to time and then moving forward again until they had reached the top of the hill. They never stopped advancing, and they never went faster than a walk.
Unfortunately, I doubted that the battle I was watching was being conducted with such grace. They were just kids up there, mostly, on the hill in the dark with the land mines and the machine-gun fire and the Taliban tanks. Massoud was yelling on the radio a lot, long bursts of Dari and then short silences while whoever he was talking to tried to explain himself. Things were not going well, it seemed. Some of the commanders weren’t on the front line, where they belonged, and their men had gone straight up the hill instead of circling. As a result, they had attacked through a minefield. Massoud was in a cold fury.
“I never told you to attack from below. I knew it would be mined,” he told one commander in the bunker. The man’s head tipped backward with the force of Massoud’s words. “The plan was not to attack directly. That’s why you hit the mines. You made the same mistake last time.”
The commander suggested that the mistake might have been made by the fighters on the ground.
“I don’t care. These are my children, your children,” Massoud shot back. “When I look at these fighters, they are like lions. The real problem is the commanders. You attacked from below and lost men to land mines. For me, even if you took the position, you lost the war.”
The offensive was supposed to continue all night. Reza and I ate dinner with Massoud, then packed up our truck and set out on the long drive back to Khvajeh Baha od Din. We were leaving the front for good, and on the way out of town we decided to check in at the field hospital. It was just a big canvas tent set up in a mud-walled courtyard, lit inside by kerosene lanterns that glowed softly through the fabric. We stopped the truck and walked inside, and we were just wrapping up our conversation with the doctor when an old Soviet flatbed pulled up.
It was the first truckload of wounded, the guys who had stepped on mines. They were stunned and quiet, each face blackened by the force of a land mine blast, and their eyes cast around in confusion at the sudden activity surrounding them. The medics lifted the men off the back of the truck, carried them inside, and laid them on metal cots. A soldier standing next to me clucked his disapproval when he saw the wounds. The effect of a land mine on a person is so devastating that it is almost disorienting. It takes several minutes to understand that the sack of bones and blood and shredded cloth that you’re looking at used to be a man’s leg. One man lost a leg at the ankle; another man lost a leg at the shin; a third lost an entire leg to the waist. This man didn’t seem to be in pain, and he didn’t seem to have any understanding of what had happened to him. Both would come later. “My back hurts,” he kept saying. “There’s something wrong with my back.”
The medics worked quickly and wordlessly in the lamplight, wrapping the stumps of the legs with gauze. The wounded men would be flown out by helicopter the next day and would eventually wind up in a hospital in Tajikistan. “This is the war,” Reza hissed over and over again as he shot photos. “This is what war means.”
Reza had covered a lot of wars and seen plenty of this in his life, but I hadn’t. I ducked out of the tent and stood in the cold darkness, leaning against a wall. Dogs were barking in the distance, and a soldier shouted into his radio that the wounded were coming in and they needed more medicine, now. I thought about what Reza had said, and after a while I went back inside. This is the war too, and you have to look straight at it, I told myself. You have to look straight at all of it or you have no business being here at all.