The Road from Afghanistan

When I Mentioned the word bullshit, the Soviet translator—a beautiful young woman from Moscow University—blinked her big eyes and said, "What is this 'bool-sheet'? It is a rude word?"

Our group of American veterans was trying to teach some useful new vocabulary to the Afghantsi—veterans of the brutal Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—but the translators weren't catching on. After many tries and much theatrical body language, we finally defined it as something like this: Bullshit characterizes blunt contempt for an especially egregious, outrageous lie that no one but a stone, dipstick fool would ever believe. You know—bullshit.

We also tried to explain mind fuck, but that was even tougher. Then again, after talking with Afghantsi for two weeks in Moscow and in the Soviet Central Asian city of Alma-Ata, after listening to their horror stories, after hearing about the universal bitterness and resentment of a manipulative government for having sent them to Afghanistan, after learning about the lousy health care, after seeing the false face of welcome that had met their return—I'd say they understand mind fuck pretty well.

•

Last February, the last Soviet troops drove their armored personnel carriers and tanks out of Kabul, Afghanistan. After nine years and 15,000 dead, their ordeal was finally over. Along the road north, mujahidin—the Afghan guerrillas—stood grinning as the convoy passed, mocking and dry-sniping them with rifles and R.P.G.s (rocket-propelled-grenade antitank weapons). When the troops crossed the bridge into Termez, in Soviet Central Asia, they were welcomed by party officials, a martial band and flowers but, most of all, by their families. One young woman had come all the way from Siberia to greet her husband; another woman searched the ranks until she found her grandson and immediately embraced him. Someone asked one young Soviet what they had accomplished. He shrugged and said, "We survived." Premier Mikhail Gorbachev himself declared the war "an old sin." It sounded like a familiar story.

I went to the Soviet Union last December with a group of 30 Americans, most of them Vietnam veterans, to meet and talk with the Afghantsi. We were more or less ordinary grunts from California, Montana, Illinois and the East Coast, many of whom are now serving as drug-and-alcohol counselors, leaders of veterans' groups or representatives from the Vietnam Veterans of America.

(continued on page 114)Road From Afghanistan(continued from page 93)

Our gathering was as far removed from government rigmarole and interference as possible. "Official" meetings have the taint of Brotherhood and Solidarity—phony words spelled with a capital B and a capital S. We met with many Afghantsi, broke bread, talked and danced. We knocked back many toasts of that righteous Russian vodka (so ice-cold it poured like liqueur) with ordinary ex-soldiers like ourselves; the talk was ordinary soldiers' talk. On such occasions, an Afghanyetz might fill an aperitif glass with vodka, drop a bit of bread into it and leave it on the table, a symbol of the men who had not returned (a subject never far from any conversation). The Soviet Union lost 20,000,000 people in World War Two and has not forgotten that fact. Outside the city, there is a monument to the 28 guardsmen who held back German tanks within plain sight of the city limits, an astonishing act of infantry grit and spit and courage. Everywhere, there are memorials to those who died during World War Two. Newlyweds visit these sites on their wedding day to lay flowers in remembrance. It is as important a ritual as cutting the cake.

Our welcome by the Afghantsi—perhaps 30 men in their early and middle 20s—was profuse, prolonged and astonishingly friendly: handshakes and warm smiles and immediate conversation. Several walked with canes, limping deeply, or leaned on crutches. Accompanying them were the beautiful young interpreters, who had names to match: Svetlana, Irina, Olga, Leila. I don't suppose the distraction was any accident. The Afghantsi's reluctance to speak frankly in front of the translators became immediately obvious. They were hesitant not just because the translators might be informers but because they were young women—and most of the Afghantsi with whom I talked had told their wives and families little of their war experience.

Several of the Afghantsi had photographs of another group of veterans who had visited the previous September, and shared them. It didn't take long for us to crack open our luggage and haul out our own photographs—Vietnam pictures and family pictures. Very soon, there were small clusters of people standing with their coats open and their heads together—Americans, Afghantsi and the interpreters—poring over snapshots, engaged in deep conversations, with increasingly dramatic gestures and intense eye contact for emphasis, explaining uniforms, weapons, exotic names of places, names of friends not seen for 20 years standing bare-chested next to a tank, an 81mm mortar or the base-camp squad hootch or rigged out for night ambush.

Forgive the sentimentality, but it struck me at once how young the Afghantsi seemed, how smart and tough and how handsome they were. And looking at the photographs of ourselves, I realized how young and tough and handsome we had been—wiry, hard, not about to take shit from anyone. Standing there in that strange, chilly place, I felt my body swell with feeling for those men who were young enough to be my sons, men I did not even know. We shared a great deal.

•

In Moscow, Sergei and Alexei came up to my room, saying they had something important to tell me. I fetched the bottle of vodka I had chilling on the window sill and poured a round. Our American interpreter, Marianne Clark, and Brent MacKinnon, an ex-Marine, were with us in the tiny room, and we sat on the beds facing one another, knees intertwined.

Sergei spoke first. He told of a time when his company was assaulting a village, moving in a skirmish line, accompanied by armored personnel carriers. When they got within 750 or 1000 meters, a sniper shot and killed their commander, a good soldier popular with the men. The second officer went into a fury. The company moved into the village and searched it, but the mujahidin were gone. They found the house where the villagers—nursing mothers and children—were hiding. The officer, furious with rage, hauled out his pistol and started killing them.

Sergei shook with rage and shame, looking me right in the eye. "What do I do?" he asked.

Brent and I saw ourselves reflected 20 years ago. Yes, we said, the same things happened to us. We felt the same way.

"Did you help kill the women and infants?" we asked.

"No," he replied, "but some of the others did. I couldn't stop them; there was nothing I could do."

Brent leaned toward him and said, "Have you forgiven yourself?"

"No," Sergei said.

Brent told of when he was a radioman, ordered to call an artillery barrage on a village where sniper fire had come from. It was done, he said, out of sheer meanness. In the aftermath, all that was found were the bodies of women and children. "I have learned to forgive myself for that," Brent said after some reflection. "I was young and dumb. You did the best you could. You have to forgive yourself."

Then Alexei spoke up. He had been an N.C.O., like me. He said he was an alcoholic. When he was stationed in Riga, he was always getting drunk and spent a lot of time in the stockade. His commanding officer told him that he would rot there, but he finally managed to transfer to Afghanistan.

In the Soviet army, there was considerable hazing—certainly more than we had given newcomers, who were variously called 'cruits, newbees or fucking new guys. Soviet hazing often involved beatings, and rank was no protection. When Alexei arrived in Afghanistan, he called his squad members out, stood them at attention and said that if anyone thought he could kick his ass, he should step forward. Two men stepped up, and Alexei whipped them.

Some time later, Alexei's troop captured a guerrilla. They bound his arms, set him against a wall and used him for knife target practice. Alexei signified the knife hits by thrusting his fingers at his throat, hissing, "Shew-shew-shew!" Now, he said, he dreams about that and drinks so that he won't dream. "I know it's wrong, but I can't help it."

•

Not all the war stories were grim, of course. One afternoon, a group gathered at the home of one of the Afghantsi to finally talk without the female interpreters, and one of the Afghantsi piped up: "Say, has anybody ever told the story about the guy who got shot in his dick?"

We all said, "Why, no."

So the man, a little pudgy, a little shy, stepped forward. "Well," he said, "we were in a battle"—he went bang-bang-bang with his fingers—"and one guy got shot in his dick, kaput." He stood bolt upright, grabbed his crotch with a big swooping gesture of his hands and fell back into his chair, writhing in agony. He finally opened his eyes, looked at us and sat up. "He asked us to shoot him, said that he was worthless without his dick, but we gave him every kindness, bandaged him up and sent him away." He swirled both hands in front of his crotch, signifying a heap of bandages, and then jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the hospital.

"While he was in the hospital convalescing, he tried to commit suicide," said the storyteller, slashing at his wrists vigorously, "telling himself that life without a dick would be too humiliating. But the nurses always caught him in time. The nurses"—he held both of his hands out in front of himself, as if he were holding basketballs—"sat with him day and night (continued on page 162)Road From Afghanistan(continued from page 114) to make sure he didn't try again.Then, one day, the doctors, taking pity on him, gave him a penile implant"—which he signified by making a fist and sticking his fist and forearm in front of his crotch—a whoppingerection.

"When the nurses," big breasts, skinny legs, "discovered what he had, they wouldn't leave him alone." He pumped his arms and fists back and forth, like a kid imitating a choo-choo train. "Day and night they were screwing him"—pump-pump-pump went the arms, bouncy-bouncy-bouncy went the hips—"until he was exhausted. 'Why won't you leave me alone?' he pleaded. 'Before, you wouldn't let me kill myself, and now you are killing me.'" A beseeching, forlorn look came over the soldier's face.

"The man was well enough, so the doctors wanted to discharge him and send him back to his unit. But every time his discharge came through, the nurses picked it out of the stack and threw it away." The storyteller flicked his wrist as if tossing a playing card into a hat across the room. Then he threw up his hands. "Finally, in desperation, the man goes A.W.O.L."—the storyteller sneaked around the table on his tiptoes with one arm out for balance and one finger over his lips—"but the nurses sent the MPs after him to bring him back." And he grabbed himself by the ear and escorted himself briskly around the table, flat-footed, sure of his punishment.

What would the barracks of this world be without impossible stories of impossible fucks?

•

These stories, and many others, came forward because the Afghantsi finally had someone in their midst—as we surely did not two decades ago—who knew what they were talking about. We were fellow soldiers who could listen to the madness and know they were not mad; someone who could validate their worst blood-bath nightmares; someone who had an inkling of the brutality they had endured and inflicted; someone whom they could trust with stories about the deadest, darkest places in their hearts.

That we shared these nightmares is no accident. The comparison between the United States' war in Vietnam and the Soviets' war in Afghanistan is striking.

Both wars were fought without the full support or involvement of their citizens. Indeed, before 1985, the Soviets were told that their troops were in Afghanistan fulfilling their "international duty," building schools and hospitals and planting trees. For six years, the corpses were sent home in sealed zinc boxes, accompanied by military escorts, with orders that the coffinsnot be opened. Families were never certain that their sons were actually inside.

Both wars are clearly understood as foreign-policy disasters. Both were civil wars fought, on one side, by uninspired and lackluster government troops (the "host" government itself was bought and paid for) with the help of main-force battle troops from a powerful (if not over powering) ally. The Soviets spoke of the Afghani troops the same way we spoke of Vietnamese troops—the last to join a battle, the first back to camp when it was over. Both wars were fought against well-armed, highly motivated guerrillas; in Afghanistan, it was the mujahidin, whom the Afghantsi called bandits. Both the Viet Cong and the mujahidin were committed to national liberation and used classic guerrilla terror tactics of hit-and-run fire fights, night ambushes, road mines, booby traps and the safety of abundant border sanctuaries.

Both the American and Soviet veterans were overwhelmingly working class. In the United States, if you didn't have the money for a leisurely college deferment or the family influence to obtain a slot in the National Guard, you were likely to be scooped up in the draft. In the U.S.S.R., it was the children and grandchildren of ordinary working stiffs and peasants who served, not the sons of intellectuals, high-ranking executives or party members.

In both wars, most of the soldiers were in their late teens or early 20s, and they served a fixed tour of duty: GIs one year and the Soviets two years. But there was an important difference at the end of these tours. With the exception of the first arrival of entire divisions, American soldiers arrived and departed Vietnam individually. When you finished your tour, you got onto a plane and went home. There are any number of stories about being in the bush one day and home the next—and by home I mean the house where you grew up—your isolation was sudden and extreme. There was a celebration of survival as well as a feeling of malaise, an everlasting ache in the heart.

Soviet troops served a two-year tour but rotated in and out by unit. The units were often composed of men who had grown up together, gone to school together and then into the army together to do their "international duty." Unit rotation provided the structure for the Afghantsi "clubs" that we met in various districts of Moscow and Alma-Ata, giving the veterans close, mutual support and a ready-made structure around which to organize nationally if their needs are not met. The Young Communist League, Komsomol, is officially responsible for the 1,000,000 Afghantsi. But Komsomol is unprepared to deal with the Afghantsi and is generally mistrusted. One veteran told us, "All the Komsomol bureaucrats have to lose is their position and their privilege. All we have to lose is our chains." The Afghantsi are not kidding about their support of Gorbachev's restructuring and openness. Similarly, the Veterans' Administration—now kicked up to Cabinet level—has never been regarded by Vietnam veterans as an advocate of their health and well-being.

In both wars, medical evacuation by helicopter and advances in frontline medical care saved many lives but produced thousands of bedridden and disabled veterans who need long-term medical care, prosthetics, wheelchairs and treatment for alcoholism, among other things.

In the Sixties and Seventies, the Veterans' Administration was ill-equipped to deal with Vietnam GIs. Many Soviet clinics are outdated, and there are no special facilities for the wheelchair-bound or the blind in public areas, and the engineering of artificial limbs is antiquated.

In Moscow, we heard that several weeks before we arrived, a group of wheelchair-bound Afghantsi had gathered in Red Square to protest the lack of facilities and access and were beaten up by the cops. Is it any wonder that they are bitter toward Komsomol and its bureaucratic jive?

Both sets of veterans are experiencing prolonged emotional problems following military service—posttraumatic stress disorder, known simply as P.T.S.D. or delayed stress. A list of symptoms goes with it: a survivor's guilt expressed as a crushing depression, with recurring dreams and nightmares, supravigilance and heightened startle responses and self-destructive impulses that may take the form of drug or alcohol abuse or violent behavior. Other symptoms include the inability to show emotion and "attitude" problems—distrust of authority, fits of temper and undirected anger and inability to keep a job.

Before 1980, meaningful, sensible treatment by the V.A. for delayed stress was unheard of. If a Vietnam veteran went to the V.A., he might have been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, invited to enter the psychiatric ward and join the Thorazine shuffle. Soviet psychiatrists and psychologists had never heard the term posttraumatic stress disorder until last September, when the first group of Vietnam veterans visited. Until now, the Soviet response to treatment has also been psychotropic drugs, and plenty of them.

Soviet government policies dictated that communities have welcome-home ceremonies, no doubt to the bafflement of local officials and communities, since the troops had been in Afghanistan "engaged in public works." The Afghantsi have called these largely meaningless, horsy rituals the "false face of welcome." Vietnam veterans returned proud and sad at the same time, knowing that something was terribly wrong; and if they weren't literally spit on or called baby killers, and most were not, at the very least, they were met with an aggressive indifference—"Been to Vietnam? So what?" Or the more blunt "Lost your arm? Well, good! Serves you right!" The welcome-home parades now popular in this country are distinctly gratuitous, a day late and a dollar short.

•

During our stay in Moscow, the Afghantsi took us to their memorial in Druzhba ("Friendship") Park. The memorial was begun last summer by two Afghantsi when they simply "liberated" about seven and a half acres in the park. The project was quickly embraced by the city and then the entire country. With the help of donated labor, they put up a huge chip of quarrystone about shoulder high and built a small garden. The bronze plaque bolted to the face of the stone reads: A memorial will be established here for the internationalists who died in Afghanistan. There was a simple but well-attended unofficial dedication in June 1988. The city then donated the land, and it now belongs to the local Afghantsi club.

After stopping off to buy carnations, we walked across the meadow in deep snow, our boots squeaking, to the top of a rise where the foundation stone had been laid among raised beds of roses and chrysanthemums. We shivered in the cold and laid our flowers across the top and around the base in the icy snow.

One of the Afghantsi stepped forward and said, "We started this as a memorial, but this stone has become sacred for many people. Families come here. People come here on their wedding day. Afghantsi come here. Children come here." We stood looking at the inscription, comparing that place to our own Vietnam memorial, which is visited by solid throngs day in and day out. I remembered and understood full well what it was we had seen in Vietnam, what we had done, what we had become, we soldiers; good friends dead 20 years, killed for a lie; the everlasting reverberations of vivid memories that will not fade. We and the Afghantsi stood in the snow and embraced with crushing hugs. We Americans wanted to express our uttermost sympathy and fellow feeling to the Afghantsi, for whom grief was very fresh.

•

When we left Moscow for Alma-Ata, we assembled in the dreary foreigners' lounge of the Moscow airport. To our astonishment, we shared the room with a group of Vietnamese kids dressed in light street clothes and high-topped gym shoes, sleeping on benches among their coats and rag-wrapped luggage. It was clear that they were not traveling for pleasure.

Brent MacKinnon, who spoke Vietnamese, engaged them in conversation. He found out that they were contract-labor "volunteers" sent by the Hanoi government to work in the mines. Some of us wanted to join in; to say something, anything—"I'm sorry," if nothing else. Some of us demonstrably did not want to engage the Vietnamese at all. Jack Lyon (a former Marine Corps platoon leader) took one look at them, turned and walked into the next room near our gate and sat heavily in a chair. "Jesus," he said, making a grim joke, "a cluster fuck of gooks, and me without a weapon!"

He later told me, "I was stunned. There it was—every Marine's wet dream. I had not been alone among that many Vietnamese since I was overseas. It was disorienting, a real flashback. Sort of a slap in the face. At the memorial, everything was, 'Peace, we're all brothers,' then we walked in and there they were, and there was that dark feeling. Fear is an easy thing to tickle. The whole focus of my life has been to feed the light, and the darkness will take care of itself. And in that moment, the dark hatred in my heart came forward. It was an undeniable, conditioned response, as if nothing had intervened between leaving Vietnam and arriving at the Moscow airport."

Not a week later, an earthquake killed 25,000 people in Armenia. We would hear the rumor that 300 miners had been trapped underground and would wonder if the young Vietnamese were among them.

We took off on the Aeroflot redeye for Alma-Ata, but halfway there, the plane was diverted to Tashkent because of bad weather. We arrived in Tashkent about three o'clock in the morning, staggering with jet lag, and were ushered into another lounge segregated for foreigners. We couldn't cat-nap because of the overpowering fluorescent lights and horrible chairs, so we just sat around and talked—until four o'clock the next afternoon.

We fell into conversation with a group of Afghani nationals. Several of the group were young guys who had served in the army; there was also an older businessman in a neat, good-looking suit. The young guys seemed genuinely pleased to be meeting Americans—no doubt the first they'd seen. After they left to get their plane, the businessman expressed a furious, righteous anger about the war. He wanted to know why the Americans were giving guns and such to the mujahidin—"Your weapons killed my father," he kept saying, as if we had done it.

Later that morning, Diana Glasgow—who had organized the trip under the auspices of Earthstewards Network, a peace-activist group from Seattle—sat down next to me. We got to talking about my novel Paco's Story, which contains a chapter about a Viet Cong girl who is captured after a fire fight, gang-raped by 40 or so members of Paco's company and then shot in the head by one of the men; he walks away from the corpse with her scalp in his hand.

We talked about the horror of the atrocity, and then Diana told me this story: In the summer of 1968, she was visiting in Chicago and had a lover who was a Vietnam veteran. One night, after a long session of lovemaking, he told her about a gang-rape and murder that he had been a party to during the war. She listened in horror.

In the middle of the night, she woke up with terrible abdominal cramps—waves of pain, she said. Her lover took her to the hospital emergency room, where the resident asked if she were pregnant. Diana replied that she was not. The resident said, "Well, you're having quite regular and sound labor contractions. Are you sure you're not pregnant?" No. The resident gave her some muscle relaxers, and she was released from the hospital and went home.

She looked at me and said, "How strange to be having labor pains. All I can think is that whatever my lover's story meant to him or to me, physically or emotionally, my body wanted it out, and by any means possible."

•

When we finally got to Alma-Ata, it was nearly dark. A number of Afghantsi met us at the airport, where they had been waiting all day. They wore their uniforms, complete with rank, patches, ribbons, as well as the blue berets of airborne troops. They sang for us, and we were given handfuls of flowers. A large loaf of bread the size of a hatbox was presented to us—the top sprinkled with salt, an old Russian custom—a gesture of welcome and hospitality. The crowds immediately intermingled.

It didn't take long to notice that the Afghantsi had tattoos on their wrists—single letters as big as my thumb and not very well done. I asked what they were. One of the Afghantsi told me that they were blood-type tattoos; members of airborne troops had them on the tips of their shoulders. The Soviet military had not provided dog tags, and the Afghantsi were more than bitter about it. They understood that it was part of the government's failure to acknowledge the war. So they improvised their own. Some were simple homemade tattoos. Some were more elaborate: spent brass cartridges crimped at the end and worn around their necks with rolled-up pieces of paper inside with their name, their family's address and phone number, their blood type and other information; some were large scraps of army-green khaki or rubberized canvas sewn on the inside of their clothes.

•

Several days later, after attending a memorial service at Saint Nikol'skaya Church for soldiers killed in the Afghan war, we went to the park in the city's center, which was the site of the war memorial and the eternal flame. At one end of a lane dedicated to the Great Patriotic War (World War Two) was a large bronze tableau done in the fierce, heroic style of all really bad public art. In front of it was a long, wide slab of polished granite where the eternal flame burned luxuriously. Around it stood four guards at crisply held attention, dressed in gray army greatcoats, gripping AK-47s at port arms across their chests.

I had not seen an AK-47 in 20 years, since I was an N.C.O. in the 25th Division in the midst of the Michelin Rubber Plantation. It was the first months of the Tet offensive in 1968, a time I thought I would never survive. At a place called Suoi Cut, next to the Cambodian border, I saw the bodies of 500 North Vietnamese soldiers stacked like cordwood, then dumped into a head-high common grave dug by a bulldozer. We buried them the way you'd make lasagna: a layer of bodies, a layer of quicklime by the bagful, then another layer of bodies—grim work that took all fucking day. The Automatic Kalashnikovs and the R.P.G. launchers, the corpses and the cartridge brass and other fire-fight junk littered the ground like garbage in the bleachers after a ball game.

Seeing the AK-47s again, I couldn't help but shiver. It was a shock of autonomic memory, like the one Jack Lyon had felt after encountering the Vietnamese kids. My response to the AKs was, no doubt, a permanent imprint—even though the Afghantsi said the weapons were toys, the guards mere children.

Next, we visited the Riskulova Cemetery on the outskirts of town. The small, compact gravesites were set helter-skelter in close-packed rows, each grave separated from the other by a low wrought-iron fence. Our party, probably 60 people, wound in and out among the graves in a long, meandering procession. Some of the graves were marked with Russian Orthodox crosses, but most were marked with large, thick stones. It was clear to me as I walked through the deepening beauty and melancholy of the place that the Russians knew how to organize their grief, draw it out and keep it close.

The mothers of Afghantsi buried there refer to themselves as cemetery mothers, a kind of club; their grief and these visits are two things they share. We met a man visiting the graves of his son, an Afghanyetz, and his wife, who had died within a year of her son. I heard later of several mothers who followed their sons to the grave.

At one of the headstones, Victor Nasatov stepped forward to speak as we laid flowers across it. In Afghanistan, he had been a political officer, functioning in somewhat the same capacity as an American Army chaplain. (U.S. chaplains generally take care of the soldiers' "morals" by giving "character lectures"—more often than not polite harangues to "Shut up and do what you're told.") Political officers had the added jobs of censoring mail and keeping track of a network of snitches.

Victor, older than the others, seemed very little like a political officer. At the graveside, he spoke eloquently and at length about the waste of lives. He talked with some bitterness about a government that would send them to fight and die in a useless war but that for six years had sent K.I.A.s (soldiers killed in action) home in sealed zinc boxes with no explanation. He finished with these words: "We have to struggle for disarmament actively. It's difficult for any one person to struggle, but when the whole world starts struggling, I think the government and the people in government will start listening to the people of the world. There is a lot of work to do. For the time being, our boys are fighting in Afghanistan. They are still dying from American, English and Italian missiles and mines."

Here was a man thinking through something very hard.

Marianne Clark, who had been standing next to Victor and translating his words, spoke through tears.

Quiet and regardful, Victor reminded me of an observation Michael Herr makes in Dispatches about the wasted lives of wasted grunts; how the war made a place for you that was all yours and how discovering it was like listening to esoteric music; how some walked along its dark, hard path and returned "wised up" but with an eviscerated heart. Never mind for a moment that these Soviet soldiers had turned Afghanistan into dead, rocky slaw—this was what the war had done to them.

At another grave, we laid more flowers. The dead soldier's mother said, "Just before my son was to come home, he wrote that I should make something sweet. For months after he was killed, I cooked these sweet dishes," until her friends began to worry about her. She said, "My life has no meaning. Night is the same as day. There is no pain in the world like the pain of a mother who has lost her son."

Marianne translated with tears rolling down her cheeks—we all cried for the death of this stranger. The mother did not cry; the grace and dignity of her grief had long since transformed her. She put an arm around Marianne to comfort her and said, "We have a lot of pain. God forbid that you should ever have it. Don't let it happen again."

One of the Afghantsi took a folded photograph out of his coat pocket and gave it to the woman. It was a picture of her son's corpse in his coffin that had been smuggled home. The woman looked at the picture and said without irony, "I am luckier than most mothers, because even though my son is dead, at least I have proof, here, in this photograph."

A small group stopped at the grave of Oleg Tchivilov, a young officer who had earned the Red Star and the Order of Lenin for extraordinary bravery. His mother, Zinaida, stood at the side of the grave.

Just then, two Komsomol officials, waiting in their limousine, came into the cemetery and stood nearby. As Zinaida looked at the portrait of her son on the headstone, she was approached by an old woman. "Don't cry, Mother," she said. "Your son died defending his motherland. Be proud of him."

"Died defending our motherland?" said Zinaida, suddenly enraged. "Then why did he die not within our borders? Why do our sons come back from Cuba and Angola and Afghanistan in zinc boxes? Maybe our friends from Komsomol can answer my question."

One of them replied, "Why don't you ask the Americans?"

She ignored him.

One of the mothers went up to her and said, "Please be quiet"; but Zinaida would not be quiet. She said she'd waited for years to talk to Americans. Her reason for sharing her anger was that she suspected that the mothers and the wives of men killed in Vietnam, Beirut, Grenada and Central America were in the same predicament. "I really want to talk to American mothers. There must be something we can do."

Jack Lyon and Bill Leslie walked with her back to the parking lot. Leslie, an ex-Marine, had helped bury the corpses of good friends during the war and later went back to exhume them. His own mother had passed away some years earlier, and as he walked next to Zinaida Tchivilova, he tried to talk to her, but her extraordinary grief and bitterness affected him so much that he could hardly get the breath to speak. Finally, he told her, "If you will be my Russian mother, I will be your American son."

Jack Lyon met her at the cemetery again, and gave her his Silver Star, earned for bravery in combat. She brought a gift, too—an heirloom shawl of sheer cloth, red and white, seven feet long, handmade by her great-grandmother and passed down from daughter to daughter. She had planned to give it to Oleg's fiancée.

During the conversation, she said, "How can they treat our boys like cannon meat? Not cannon fodder but meat!"

She invited Jack back to the small apartment she shared with her husband, Nikolai, a retired military man. He had been in shock since his son's death six years earlier and spent his time staring at the shrine Zinaida had made of Oleg's photograph and his medals. She told Jack that the bullet that had killed her son had killed all three of them.

•

Before the end of our stay in Alma-Ata, a letter was produced for us to sign; it was addressed to the Pakistani government, asking for the release of the Soviet prisoners of war—who were said to be traded back and forth among the mujahidin like slaves. It was a blatant manipulation by Komsomol, which wanted to make the Afghantsi and their families think it was making an effort in their behalf. We told the Afghantsi that we were private citizens, that the war was still going on, that this was work for diplomats, that we could not sign.

Jack Lyon came to the gathering from Zinaida Tchivilova's apartment and had her shawl in his kit bag. He shook his head, saying that we were all simple, honorable soldiers and that this letter, and the argument that followed, was precisely the way wars start. Then, one by one, the Afghantsi got up and apologized to us, as if it were their fault, not Komsomol's.

One of the Afghantsi stood and spoke directly to Jack from across the room. "I was trained to hate Americans. I was trained to kill guys like you. But after our meeting, knowing you, if they were to order me to shoot, I would not shoot you. I would throw down my rifle, and they could call me a coward, but I would not shoot."

•

The Afghantsi have caused a great many people a great deal of grief and have themselves suffered—for a lie, let us not forget—the same as we in the United States have caused much suffering in Southeast Asia and have also suffered much in return, also for a lie. It was no small betrayal, no small lesson for a man to learn at the age of 19. Any soldier returning home must rediscover his humanity and establish a livable peace with the discovered, liberated, permanently dark places in his own heart—the darkness that is always with us.

"It struck me how young the Afghantsi seemed, how smart and tough and how handsome they were."