WHAT GOES AROUND 

Frank Light

                                                           1971

Come to Herat, pearl of the desert, crossroads of empire. Stroll through history, bargain for souvenirs, savor the exotic cuisine. We took in what we could, R&R on another sun-stroked October day. Next morning I woke up sick. Could it have been that melt-in-your-mouth ravioli with mint-yogurt sauce? None of my teammates ordered it. Kebab purists every one. My stomach emptied from both ends, and I couldn’t bring myself to refill it—not that day or in the week thereafter. Even tea was hard to swallow. Lost the craving for tobacco as well as the thread to my journal: no entries after that. Each morning the guys ventured into the fields. Each evening we reviewed progress. I kept to the compound. They needed an elder, not a meddler. 

At age 27, I headed a seven-man Food for Work team—three engineers from the Ministry of Provincial Development, one German volunteer, and three Peace Corps volunteers, including me. The Afghans graduated from technical school in Kabul that June, the German got his release from kindergarten construction in Kandahar, and the other Americans were fresh out of training, college before that. With hunger on the rise and starvation a threat due to drought, our pilot program distributed wheat to villagers in Farah province south of Herat, north of Kandahar, highlands to the east, Iran on the west. 

The villagers deepened irrigation channels to earn it. They weren’t doing that on their own. Initiative dried as the water table dropped. They labored. They muttered. Such was their fate. Landowners politicked to better theirs. Religion, tradition, proximity, economics, and governance bound rich and poor together. Outsider status gave us foreigners room to maneuver and a fallback should we fail. But it didn’t insulate our engineers from the bureaucracy in which they’d spend the rest of their lives. By Herat, two of the three had quit. 

I’d never been so sick for so long. Disorder in the stomach spread to the skull. Restless one minute, listless the next. I’d plod to the well, the privy, and back to my room. The ladder to the roof where we slept seemed insurmountable. We minimized contact in case I was contagious. Leprosy, tuberculosis, and who knew what lay in wait. The possibilities unnerved me more than my companions. Risk came with the territory, and almost by definition volunteers showed more care for others than for themselves. Not to say this wasn’t an adventure. As a bonus for Charlie and Paul, the Peace Corps kept the draft at bay. 

The team might have attributed my indisposition to stress. They could point, for example, to the granary riot, street demonstrations, alley threats, eviction attempts, internal tension, and insinuations we were corrupt, incompetent, arrogant, and/or transient. Inner conflicts we kept to ourselves.

Stress implies a failure to adapt. That wouldn’t have been us. With the governor, the development director, and Al our regional supervisor gone, we were adjusting to Farah and Farah to us. Down two and a half men, I being the half, we compensated. 

Over the years Kabul promised a lot, delivered little. New day, we proclaimed. The King, the UN, and our embassy very much wanted us to succeed on the premise that a peasantry able to feed itself would lose interest in the fundamentalism, communism, and banditry then starting to take root. When wheat actually arrived—surprise!— and we allocated it fairly—surprise 2— perceptions changed. Every village wanted in. We couldn’t keep up.
	
Especially me. The guys lowered my rope bed from the roof so I could lie in my room out of the solar glare. By mid-autumn it no longer converted the compound into an oven. There were times I shivered in my sleeping bag. Confinement allowed me to catch up, when lucid, on the paperwork. Ditches dug, mouths fed. Lou our country director couldn’t get enough. Nor could Haselbarth, the German from the UN who collaborated with the Minister Without Portfolio to devise the program. All in Kabul, far away. 


“The innkeeper misses you,” Charlie said. He meant the owner of the teahouse where we took our meals. “He prays it wasn’t his cooking.”

“Tell him greens would have prevented it.” Brown stew, brown bread. Even the green tea was brown. The man was getting fat on our business. No competition. But his teahouse didn’t sicken me—the fare never changed. 

“He offered to send a healer.” Charlie smiled by way of comment. Last summer he was loading freight cars in New Mexico.

“Let me guess: a cousin!” You rarely heard of fathers, sons, brothers, strangers, or friends. Cousins and enemies, often. Women, never.

“Cousin’s cousin.” The smile broadened. “From out of the desert.”

“Witch doctor.”

“We could take you to the hospital.” Everything in Farah’s capital was within a few blocks.

“Kicking and screaming?” Last year I lived behind the hospital in Jalalabad, largest town in the East and site of the country’s only medical school. SORGERY read the placard outside the operating room. Replace G with C and you’d have it. Passing grade was 50 percent. The fatality rate stood at 40 percent. That hospital, in contrast to Farah’s, enjoyed electricity, running water, and American mentors.


In Jalalabad I tested positive three times for amoebic and once for bacillary dysentery. That immunized me, Afghan-style. You got the bug but you managed it. This wasn’t that. I plugged up after the initial purge. Knock on wood, I’d aged out of mono and had yet to reach the actuarial threshhold—knock again—for cancer. Plague? We had fleas and rats. Swamp fever? Don’t laugh. Pools formed under Farah’s burning sands. 

“Maybe I’m snakebit.” I tried that on Paul, the other American. As a teenager he’d published a book on the snakes of Thailand and sensed a sequel in Afghanistan. His father’s work for the U.S. government took him to both countries as a child.

“If you’re bit, you’ll know it.” His glasses magnified a peremptory glint.

“Maybe like a vampire where the victim’s asleep, feeling no pain.” 

“You saw me in the karez. That hurt!” 


Karezzes were irrigation tunnels essential to life in Farah. Decades of neglect reduced their effectiveness. Before the Herat excursion, village elders escorted us to a ladder that protruded from theirs. “It’s ancient,” they said, a combined boast and lament. “Like us.”

Projects required an estimate of man-days to completion. By driving alongside the tailings we could measure length with an odometer. Below ground wasn’t so simple. Some segments might be fine, others a disaster. The plink of dropped pebbles indicated water. Paul hooted into the hole with an idea the echo would, like a primitive radar, suggest dimensions. The abyss swallowed his hoot. He hooted again.

Spikes and twine held the ladder together. “Who’s been down?” I asked.

Abashed grins. Earth tones cloaked the elders in anonymity. 

“Anybody?” 

“Boys,” an elder said. Kids on the fringes wiggled and giggled. None stepped forward.

“Roof falling,” a second elder cried out. “Dams the flow.”

In the village they’d shown us a horse treading a slow circle. It powered a bucket-laden belt that hoisted barely enough water for melon patches. The wheat fields had dried up, and they’d sold their sheep for lack of pasture. Soon they’d be eating the seeds.

“Karezmaster,” a third said. “Get a karezmaster.”

The only one in the province had told us his was a dying profession. Disputes over water rights halted past undertakings, and now villages and the government pled poverty. He might try Herat. His two assistants were short and gnarly like him. They could advise but karezzes were labor intensive. Beneficiaries had to pitch in.

“You’ll do the digging,” I reminded the elders. No work, no wheat. 

“Our beards are white.” The elders stroked them for effect. “We’re too old.” 

“Your sons.”

A man flung his arm westward. “Iran.” The land of opportunity. 

“A day’s work, a day’s pay, tell them.” Bring the boys home.

The elders gawked, and it wasn’t at me.

I turned to see Paul planting one foot and then the other on the ladder. 

“The roof!” I blurted. The underside of the field on which we stood. 

“Could go any minute!”

“How would they know?” His head ratcheted below my feet, his voice already chambering. 

“We’ll get the karezmaster.” He could ballpark it, warn us of hazards.

“Good luck finding him.” Paul wasn’t as much volatile as bull-headed. His descent forced my hand. Truth be told, I was curious. Guys with glasses as corrective as mine often were. In Jalalabad I’d taught school after declining a position with the Ministry of Finance in Kabul. Before that I’d been an auditor in San Francisco working toward my CPA, and in the Army, Philadelphia to start. Mind the gaps, as they say. The ladder trembled, so I didn’t put full weight on any one rung. The sway lessened after he alighted. 

“Come on,” I urged as my mouth paused at ground level. Charlie and Mahdud the remaining engineer were chatting up the elders like at a backyard barbecue. Al had repaired to his Travelall. He wasn’t one to micromanage. Werner and Rashid, since departed, were in town checking on the hospital well. I repeated my exhortation. The elders responded with who-me? smirks. “Do you want it or not?” 

Most watched from the top, blocking the light as I clambered below deck. An intrepid few removed turbans and sandals and rolled up their pantaloons. I steadied the ladder from the bottom. The mud floor was slick, and knee-high water incited titters. Its tepidity attested to the distance from the hills where snowmelt recharged the aquifer. 

In a cavern redolent of clay and worms, the men demonstrated how the walls came off in their hands, exactly as the boys told them. Careful, I thought, don’t overdo. Neither timbers, stonework, nor concrete braced the excavation, and the ceiling was unevenly vaulted. 

Getting out from the sun didn’t stop the sweating, only its evaporation. We had neither lamp nor flashlight. The karezmaster’s crew relied on oil lamps. If the flame went out and there was no breeze or heads ached, they exited immediately. 
Paul plunged ahead. In his exuberance he’d forgotten the buddy system. 

“Wait!” Wet to my thighs, boots like anchors, I followed in his wake downstream toward the village. Darkness deepened as did the water. To wade I had to swing my elbows in counterbalance. A clod plopped into the water behind me, striking an almost musical note. A slosh to my front must have been Paul. He’d crossed into subterra incognita. 

“On to the next hole,” Charlie called from the surface. 

The earth groaned as he and others traced the route above us. As for me, despair mixed with exhilaration, recollection with premonition. I’d never been brave but used to be disciplined. Then I got in touch with my feelings. The Sixties demanded it. The party scene in Kabul recreated it. Farah, forget it. 

My breath quickened as claustrophobia closed in. Tunnel rat always seemed a terrible occupation, and I hated headlocks as a kid. Since then, I’d employed imagination as an amulet, invoking the power of positive pessimism, and in that moment, I struggled with the panic it unleashed. Would I live to tell the tale? If so, would Paul leave me with survivor’s guilt? 

A sunbeam drew me on. The buddy system left no choice. The water swirled. I backpaddled. Iran had crocodiles. Did Farah, and were they as hungry as the humans?

Paul jack-in-the-boxed up from the eddies. “Ow!” A jab into the water produced a snake the length of his arm, gray-white and writhing. A tongue slithered out. Its eyes caught the light.

“Not venomous.” He read my mind. 

Part of it. “This ain’t Southeast Asia.” King cobras were his specialty.

He sucked on a bite mark, the knuckles bleeding. “Frank, they’re rat snakes.”

“Well, where the rats?” I’d yet to see one.

“They come out at night.”

“Like when it’s dark?” It was as easy to touch the walls, both sides at once, as see them.

“Come out of holes.” He’d caught my sarcasm.

“Zombies.”

“Flesh-eaters.” He was humoring me. “Ope!” The serpent twisted out of his grasp, and he lunged—whether to recapture or elude it, I couldn’t tell. 

Something feathered against my shin. Lord have mercy. 

“Over here.” That was Charlie, disembodied. “Next hole.” His movement in and out of the beam created a strobic effect. “You guys okay?” 

Mahdud, above ground with Charlie, laughed at a random remark. Given his hankering for modernity and its comforts, he was the last engineer I expected to stick around.

Kerplunk—water again splashed behind me. Ripples swashed against the walls.

The descendant elders clustered by the ladder. A few days earlier, their peers at a nearby village led us to a crater where a melon truck had driven over their karez, collapsing it. 

Afghanistan lay on a fault. Several. In Kabul I’d felt tremors that might have devastated remote villages. Buried alive—what a way to go. Here, the prospect was mortifying because it was elective. My head throbbed, and I’d yet to find my sea legs. I would’ve bolted were I not up to my waist in water, mired in muck, the ceiling dutch-rubbing my scalp. My extremities bucked. But my core refused to abandon our errant herpetologist. I was torn. “Paul!” 

A slush came from his direction. I trudged toward it, the water to armpit level after my boots snowplowed into a depression. Did Farah have quicksand? Sinkholes?

A swoosh! Yikes. A splat! Paul floundered, arms flailing, torso twirling, closer than I’d prepared for. My height but huskier, he made straight for me with a snake in each hand. Sweet Jesus. Two glass-eyed, forked-tongued, slimy squirmers. They were different—thinner? thicker? wilier? —from the first. He brandished them like trophies. 

I backed off. “Don’t let go.” 

“Don’t worry.” I heard that a lot. 

I preferred a more executive word—anticipate. It improved your odds. “Seen enough,” I concluded. “We’ll best-guess it.” The estimate. 

“Let’s go!” 

“They’re more scared than we are.” 

“Speak for yourself.” 

Water dripped off his glasses. Mine clouded. He and his catch jostled past. 

The elders scrambled up the ladder ahead of him. 

Paul ascended at a deliberate pace, wrists on the rungs. Blood ran down his arm. A rung snapped under his boot, sending splinters my way, and the ladder nearly buckled. Oscillation quelled the shakes, or perhaps Paul did with one leg out like a trapeze artist. “First to-do,” he said, “commission a new ladder.”

Up top, the elders were cackling—probably hadn’t been there since childhood, if ever. Wet clothes, mud, and a fugitive glee distinguished us. A Darwinian contentment settled on their dry brethern. Envy enriched it, the village as one.

“They invited us to lunch,” Mahdud announced as though it were his doing. 

Unrequited paranoia tempered my relief. Nobody but Paul knew how freaked I’d been, and my state of mind didn’t feature prominently in his. He assumed a triumphant pose: we who didn’t die salute you. The snakes made a compelling prop. He saw it was too much. On the walk to the village he deposited them in a gunny sack in the Travelall. 

Eyes pancaked, mouth agape, Al was beside himself. 

“Hey”—Paul understood the concern— “it’s tied tight.”

Al opened the glove compartment for his first aid kit. “Next time, look before you leap.” 

“If it were poisonous”—the patient extended his arm for treatment— “I’d be numb, lucky to be numb.” 


Lunch came in communal bowls of mutton broth. Cross-legged on a tarp without shade or spoon, we tore off hunks of unleavened bread, tossed them in the bowls, let them soak, scooped, and scarfed. The elders, despite bony faces, parched skin, and stringy beards, deferred to our voraciousness. We counter-deferred once we caught on. A memorable meal. It made the spelunking worthwhile.

“No charge for the snakes,” I said.

Jaws locked mid-chew. Did they hear that right?

“Two less to worry about.”

Mahdud leaned back, slapped his knee, and broke into laughter. “Mr. Light, always joking.” Our hosts joined in, none with his gusto. 

Adobe houses gleamed under the midday sun. Dust hovered, blanching the sky. Quick-footed boys hauled the bowls away. They hustled back with melon the color of lime sherbet, too sweet to quench our thirst. We concluded the agreement—kilos of wheat per kilometer rehabilitated—over water bused in by the boys. 

“Deep well,” the elders assured us. “Good while it lasts.” Good and hazy. “Too hot for tea.”

Paul cached the sack in our compound for subsequent identification. Did his captives creep out during the night, roam, raid, and return in the morning? Under mounting pressure, he dumped them, still unidentified, into the cratered karez, to the consternation of the host elders. 

“They eat mice,” I explained. Little rats. “And what do mice eat?”

“Wheat,” they acknowledged. 

Those snakes couldn’t have been my undoing. As Paul said, I’d know. 

What about the one that got away?

“You need a day off,” Al decided after our weekly visit to the municipal bath. “Get out of Farah. I know the place.” He returned to Kandahar the day we left for Herat.

                                                       * * *

Did karezzes, like village ditches, also serve as sewers? Or, thinking outside the box, could my malady have been karma, something not of this world? With a roll of the eyes, Mahdud said the mullah around the corner offered to come by. 

“Maybe tomorrow.” I was fading.

That afternoon the acting governor told the team he’d send help.

“Finally!” Paul said.  

“Certified help,” added Mahdud. The old ways embarrassed him. 

“He can help, tell him, by signing project approvals.” The forms sat on the acting’s desk. Procrastination didn’t get you into trouble the way action could. 

Next morning the public health director and his deputy paid a call. Doctors both, one round, the other angular, their ministrations strayed when they discovered a mini-Playboy calendar a friend in San Francisco had sent. It sat on a ledge between my new Herati miniature, a caravan with inlaid frame, and awakening Buddha, a wooden statuette from a previous life.

“Buddhist?” the director asked. 

I liked the pose, the joyful stretch. “Every religion has something to offer.”

He smiled in the tolerance that was common in those days. “What’s the problem?”

“Chills.” Like our departed teammate Rashid experienced. “No appetite.” I didn’t mention an almost subcutaneous itch, not wanting to come off as a hypochondriac. 

The director leaned over to apply his stethoscope. “Pulse faint and rapid, shallow breath, damp skin.” He spoke in Pashtu, which I’d studied and then practiced for over a year. Not that vocabulary, however. I might have missed something. He turned to the deputy. “Thermometer?”

“Emergency room.” The deputy winced. “Still looking.” 

The director’s lips pursed. On regaining full stature, he rendered judgment: “Malaria.” 

The deputy nodded. “Everybody gets it.” Ravioli absolved! 

But I wondered. “No water, no mosquitoes.” The river was dry as an ashtray.

“Your well is open,” the director noted. “Karezzes have vents.” 

“Can’t remember getting bit.” Aquatics with Paul had distracted me. 

“They come at night”—the deputy showed his palliative skills— “when you’re asleep.” 

In training, the Peace Corps doctor told us chloroquine made repellant unnecessary. “Afghans don’t use mosquito nets,” he said when I followed up, “and neither do we. If you’re worried,” he continued when I said Kabul was over a mile high, “get a mosquito coil. They’re in the bazaar.” Jalalabad, yes. Farah, no. Sunshine bothered us more than mosquitoes, and we also had no sunscreen. We took our pills once a week knowing prophylaxis wasn’t 100 percent. 

The director and deputy said increase the dosage. Would that I could. Rashid pocketed the excess we gave him. Neither the doctors nor the hospital possessed any. They could offer only aspirin. Thanks, but our medicine kit was well-stocked with Bayer. The director glanced at my hands. I was scratching both palms. Weird—didn’t mosquitos go for the back of the hand? Did he suspect this was psychosomatic? He prescribed rest. 

The deputy crossed his arms in affirmation. “You’re doing the right thing.” 

They asked for the calendar. Custom required I accede. 


“You ought to see a real doctor,” Charlie said after the coast cleared.

“Where? That’s the provincial brain trust.” 

“Al would know.” 

“If you can get hold of him.” Based in Kandahar, he was often on the road. 

“There’s always DJ.” Lou’s admin assistant. Calls to Kabul were patched, theoretically, through Kandahar, and Werner’s shortwave was our only radio.

“Lashkar Gah.” Closer than Kandahar. American school, American clinic. Unfortunately, we had no way to get there.

Charlie tucked his chin. “You’re not looking good, Jalalabad Man.”

“Easy for you to say, those trousers.” The Afghan version, as baggy as loose pajamas and still sporting their pre-laundered sheen. He bought them our first day in Farah. Whatever his outfit, Charlie—tall and blond—would never pass for Afghan.

“Serious.” For once he was. 

 
Either my condition worsened or resistance weakened as the mess on the inside worked its way out. I itched all over, including portals such as eyes, ears, nose, and rectum. Fever overlay chills like hot fudge on a sundae, and my urine looked like tea, as if I’d processed nothing. My solid diet consisted of bread scraps. “Practicing for Ramazan,” I joked to Mahdud. He smiled, not sure how to take it. The Muslim month of fasting sunrise to sundown would begin in less than two weeks, and he’d asked about snacking in the privacy of our compound. “We’re travelers,” he’d said. Travelers were exempt. As were the infirm.

Add Paul to the list. He could barely jam foot into boot. Scorpion or spider, he said, maybe the ladder rung that gave out. Although it hobbled him, he put out feelers for the karezmaster, and the team kept ginning up projects. Reports blurred in my mind, everything coated in dust. It was all I could do to think. Or walk. In a summoning of will, I staggered to the communications office. Mail was surprisingly reliable. Haselbarth used it to collect and send forms. We’d yet to test the phone. The line ran on adobe poles no taller than a donkey. The operator rang up Kandahar, and Kandahar put me through to DJ. It worked! 

“Love you, Frank.” Fire-engine-red nails, gray hair in a barretted bun, DJ was our mother hen, older even than her boss. “Listen to you, cowboy. Home on the range.” Late forties, I’d guess, functional smile, manner between brisk and peppy. “‘Poor Frank.’” She singsang to mimic the misguided. “‘What’d Lou do with him?’ I hear that. You wouldn’t believe. I tell ‘em you did it to yourself. But you didn’t call to chitchat. What’s up?” 

“Medevac.” It killed me to say that, the team already short-handed.

“Say again.” Her pitch flatlined.

“Need a medevac.” 

Static prevailed. “Explain.” 

“Sick.”

Her respiration filtered through the crackle. “Who?” 

“You’re talking to him.” 

“Oh Frank.” Crackles amplified the silence. “You sure?” 

I summarized my ailment, its duration, the downward trend.

“Lou’ll hate to hear this,” she said. “I hate to hear it.” With her boss in a meeting at the embassy and our doctor up north, she said she’d try to call Al.

“Bring chloroquine, tell him.” I inquired about laxatives. I hadn’t had a movement in forever. That brought a laugh. Intestinal medicines in Afghanistan treated the opposite problem. I didn’t have the energy to put this congestion into words, to . . . what? Agh. Damn if I was going to moan. Aghgh. That wasn’t me. It came from above—an aircraft, the first I’d heard since Kabul. It thumped. My chest thumped.

“Gotta go,” I told her. “This might be my only chance.”

It was a helicopter, a resonance every Vietnam veteran receives as a harbinger, a potential harbinger, of change. It got louder and ear-splittingly louder until rotors blew dust through the window. I smelled the exhaust, felt the metallic heat, the projection of force. The machine settled onto a vacant lot between the telephone office and our compound. Heavy and bulbous, it had to be Soviet. Any port in a storm.

I bumbled upon doctors Haselbarth and Wakil, the Minister without Portfolio, the latter overdressed and the former underdressed. Old friends, of a sort. We stood at the otherwise deserted intersection where I’d broken up a brawl between the development director and the acting governor. Not recognizing me at first (like Charlie, I’d reverted to native dress, and I was neither tall nor blond), the visitors fought the impulse to recoil as though from a vagrant begging for food without work. 

“What are you doing here?” Haselbarth demanded. “All by yourself.” No pat on the shoulder, not even a handshake. 

The Minister squinted. “Where’s the team?” 

Bummer they weren’t doctors of medicine. “Get me out.” Like DJ, I’d moved beyond small talk.

Their heads shook tsk-tsk as I recited symptoms. When you’re with helicopter there’s never enough time. They needed to see the acting governor, and Herat’s governor was expecting them. He wanted a program like Farah’s. His province had twice the population, many times the wealth and the clout that went with it. The visitors hadn’t brought the tape measures or maps we asked for, couldn’t recall the requests. 

“And the truck?” Our biggest ask.

Their eyes glazed.

“Move wheat to the highlands.” We were on the hook.

“Patience,” Hasebarth counseled. “Multiple ministries.”

“The people can’t wait.” Nor I. As they could plainly see.

They promised to call for help. I said I already had. I wished I was still on the line with DJ, the first woman I’d spoken to since we got here. 


In Vietnam I came to grips, in bursts, with mortality, too haphazard a reckoning to last. They say the enemy has a vote, and in Jalalabad last spring it appeared in the guise of apathy, a recognition that the English I taught paled against more basic priorities. 

I tottered to the compound, thinking this was how my pathetically brief life ends, wasting away in a dried-up backwater without wife or kids, too spent to write those I-never-got-to-say-how-much-I-love-you letters. Nothing to show for it save a cursory journal that fell short of lessons learned. I lay my glasses on the shelf and sprawled face down on the bed. 

The sag undercut all repose. I tried back, stomach, and sides. The rope chafed. Twists and turns kept me off balance even as they provided new perspectives those times the fog lifted. 


Werner stood next to the bed. Alpenglow hair, pomade luster, triangular goatee, accented English. “You need German meat.” He said it with oomph, backed by a can of sausage from his trunk. “Flat-tailed sheep”—the teahouse staple— “verboten!” We’d kid around in sitcom German. 

I reminded him I wasn’t eating anything.

His smile added years to a precociously avuncular face. “Even chocolate?” That trunk was bottomless.

“Ja, ja,” I conceded. “Maybe tomorrow.” Along with the mullah.

Rosy cheeks, twinkly eyes, Werner was Kris Kringle transported, with a belly-ballasted voice. He leaned over, as though this were a secret: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

“My mother used to say that.” She got it from her mother.

That smile again. “Nietzsche was first.”

Charlie entered.

“I’m having flashbacks,” I complained. As our countercultural rep, he might understand.

“No, it’s really me.” Always the comedian.

Werner ducked out. They were tag-teaming! Were Paul and Madhud next?

“You’re tripping.” Charlie did understand. “The docs said it happens with malaria.”

“I don’t remember.”

“You were hallucinating.”

“Poor man’s LSD.”

“Your problem’s physical.”

“All the above.”


“Morning, we’re taking you to Lashkar Gah.” That was Paul, his baritone as somber as “Taps” on a bugle. “The acting says we can use the development jeep.”

“Out of the shop?” It kept breaking down.

“So he says.”

“Driver?” That slacker was out more than he was in, and volunteers were forbidden to get behind the wheel. 

“Don’t ask.” Paul stood at ease in the military sense, white T-shirt over khaki slacks. Dude was born serious. His foot was better, thank you, as was an abrasion on his elbow from a stoning he and Rashid had fled. Mahdud might have visited earlier. 

“Nah,” I said. DJ didn’t mess around. “What if Al shows and we’ve split?”

“He who hesitates . . .” That wouldn’t be Paul.


I caught the undertone but not the gist of him and Werner sotto voce in the courtyard. The lingering reek of what I took to be aviation fuel roiled my stomach. The air freshened after Werner, our resident gadgeteer and solitary smoker since I’d bequeathed him my cigarettes, extinguished his lantern. 

My last night on the roof the moon had been full. It was coming up later and thinner now. I heard the windlass unspool, bucket clank, toilet door scrape, crossties creak, a dog woof—sounds tethering me to the moment. A phantom of my former self probed for openings. Delirium set out decoys, while memories marshaled the reserves. A persistent one dredged up a revelation that helped me through my affliction—and shame. My behavior in the karez withstood scrutiny. The agitation did not. Anxiety increased as life span decreased. That ran backward. It defied logic. This was the Peace Corps, not a combat tour. In the latter a gutshot comrade vowed he’d pull through as long as he felt the pain. That provisional optimism paired well with positive pessimism. We were auditors. Enablers, at most. No war crimes to disclose, no PTSD. Presentiments only.


 
                                                          1968

It began with a staff sergeant, five ethnic irregulars, and me walking from their team house to a dock. We all wore tiger fatigues so that nobody stood out, though the irregulars carried carbines and dipsy-doodled like kids on a class trip. A second sergeant was laid up with an ankle he sprained shoring up the water tank. With no Americans to spare, the team radioed the base for volunteers. I didn’t hesitate as I did with Lou and Farah. I was younger then. A moonlighting auditor was better than nothing.

The water by the dock mirrored evening stars against a lavender sky, the symmetry ruffled when we boarded a dinghy. It puttered along an inlet to a promontory that jutted from the coastal range across a saddle to the west. That morning two boatloads of irregulars had secured the hilltop, manned for the first time since the previous month’s overrun. Then, both the team and guards at our base to the northeast saw and heard signs of an attack so sudden the defenders never got on their radio. At the airfield adjacent to the base, the officer in charge decided against rushing a reaction force into a chaotic unknown. Hours later, at first light, the responders found dead or wounded Americans and irregulars, the Viet Cong gone. No one wanted to talk about it, and I didn’t want to pry. It happened the night before New Year’s Eve. Two weeks hence put us in mid-January, halfway to Tet, Vietnam’s biggest holiday. 

The outpost may have been cursed but it was property with a view—of palms, paddies, and marshes from which, on occasion, the VC fast-fired mortars at our base before scurrying to cover. Bare on top and in plain sight, the hill became a no-man’s land—until our return. The vantage was also a disadvantage. They could see us better than we saw them.

That afternoon the team medic drove a third sergeant who’d been on our manifest to the field hospital. Malaria, the team sergeant thought. The medic had his doubts. It was as if the sergeant had given up the ghost. 

“R&R’ll cure him,” the staff sergeant said as we walked the perimeter, checking the setup and dispersing the irregulars. “Australia did me.”

I remembered thinking, once it was too late to ask, couldn’t this have waited? We’d received no special instructions or reports of imminent threat. Was headquarters withholding information? Or did our attendance, like the Peace Corps in Afghanistan, merely signal intent regardless of result?

An assessment had been made: lightning would not strike twice. If only the VC thought like we thought they thought. If only Afghans would. If only I could stop thinking. In Farah I’d become a human thermometer flush with heat and pale with cold. The present alternated, like current, with the past. Was that buzz conjured, a mosquito on the prowl, or Werner’s shortwave, the news in German as guttural as Pashtu in the villages? 

I rolled off the bed with a thud. Cool earth soothed the savage itch. A spider skittered across my pack. I’d seen bigger. After releasing the snakes, Paul nabbed a smaller but venomous specimen by our gate and stashed it in a jar with a sheet of paper for a lid—until it escaped. “Might kill a mouse,” he’d said to placate us. “A rabbit. Not a person.” Its coloration matched the dust, our house its new home. Night drifted through the window hole and doorway.

In the tropics it fell like loose rock. Lightening the mood, two irregulars struck poses with a Browning Automatic Rifle, a weapon that debuted in World War I and the closest thing to a machine gun on the outpost. “Anything better,” the sergeant said, “would make us a target.” The disconnect between orders and outcomes amused him. If you didn’t like it, don’t volunteer. 

The carbines dated from World War II. As did our mortar, the smallest in the U.S. arsenal. But they worked. Same with my Colt .45, introduced in the Spanish-American War. I’d left that and a carbine in my locker. A fool for fashion, I opted for a sleek high-powered M-16, jams be damned. That afternoon I’d lubed it. The bullets were clean.

The sergeant brought Dexedrine to keep us alert. No need. The climb elevated my pulse, which plateaued from there. My toes tingled. Fingers twitched. In Farah I could have used some of that as I lay on the floor reliving my life in bits and pieces. This, reconstructed, is the most relevant segment, one never shared after separation because it didn’t measure up to civilian expectations. I feared Farah, my time there, would meet the same fate. 

Insect repellant as fragrant as cherry Life Savers wafted over us. In wetlands, mosquitoes swarmed. In the desert they flew solo. You forgot about them until you slapped late, a reminder that repellant, like chloroquine, wasn’t 100 percent. Then you’d forget that until you found yourself scratching. The sergeant tensed his forearm to detain an intruder he smushed with a finger from his other hand. He’d been on R&R the night of the overrun and would rather talk about hot babes in the Land Down Under. I left him with mortar, shotgun, revolver, machete, backpack radio, detonator, and cigarette shielded to hide the glow while I made the rounds with a handheld radio, rifle, and night-vision scope. 

He’d coordinate the response if something happened. I’d bolster the faint of heart through persuasion and presence. As with the Peace Corps, we had no interpreters. The sergeant communicated with the irregulars through gestures, training, repetition, and—when all else failed—words. I drew from a Vietnamese-for-beginners course I’d taken in the States. 

Three rings of concertina wire encircled our egg-shaped trench. Empty cans attached to the wire would jangle if disturbed. You didn’t want sappers crawling through the grass turning claymore mines around as happened, apparently, the night before New Year’s Eve. Stuck in the ground like croquet wickets, they faced outward from between the rings. Cord linked them to the detonator. 

The south side presented the best evasion route—more jungly. That depended on the attackers’ location, of course. And the sergeant. He wouldn’t run. He was the Alamo type.

Every so often an irregular rang a bell. Others chimed in to affirm readiness and situational kinship. They weren’t doing this out of patriotism. It was a job—and a macho frolic. Those off-shift heated rations in metal canteen covers over Sterno-like fires of plastique prised, against orders, from claymores said to be “broken.” They offered a taste. Umm, fermented fish sauce. I wasn’t alone but close to it. Like in Farah.

After midnight a roar erupted from the airfield. A twin-prop accelerated down the runway toward the mountains, lights out. “Spooky”—the sergeant gave the name for a C-47 armed with miniguns. More effective than bombers, gunships were in great demand. “Somebody called it in.” Perhaps an A-team, like the sergeant’s, but upcountry. I’d passed that way on audits near the Lao border in November; everybody ate and slept underground. Here on the eastern front, all quiet. Beyond the rising silhouette, a splotch marked the monumental Buddha in town. Set on a hill higher than ours, it was so white it looked scrubbed from below. 


Before Christmas my buddy Win, our hoochmate Jack, and I took the office jeep there. The hill oversaw the cathedral, train station, and outlying paddies. Trees, weeds, and swastikas covered the rear slope. A temple angled down from the Buddha’s base, and a dragon guarded the entrance. Idlers took notice. Peddlers touted incense. Prompted by Jack, Win offered a one-minute course on the Wheel of Life. He’d majored in philosophy.

“What goes around comes around,” I quipped. That was more threat than joke when we were kids. In Vietnam it became a statement of fact. Or faith. 

Or concern.

A verdict. 

Would we be judged collectively or case by case?

Jack laughed. “You might not recognize it on the rebound, Frank.”
“It won’t recognize me.” Banter came easy when you felt on top of things.

“The Buddha will.” Win cocked his head, a sign he was posturing. After college he got an MBA then went to Guatemala with the Peace Corps, his governmental trajectory the reverse of mine. The draft swooped in when he terminated early. He saw it coming. So did Jack and I. In our ignorance we preferred it to the alternatives. We didn’t appreciate how little we’d be missed. 


The whop-whomp of a Huey descending vectored west to east, the opposite direction the gunship had taken. There—we saw it!—dark on dark. 

“Medevac.” Time in country informed the sergeant’s guesses. 

“Probably where Spooky went.”

Rotors sliced the air, and lights turned on at the hospital landing zone between airfield and town. Red cross on a white circle—we stared, spellbound. Lights dimmed. The helicopter lifted. The whack-wack—acoustics differed on the way up—dissolved into the distance. 

The sergeant settled in with his gear while I checked the guards.

The irregular at the easternmost position tapped his ear and pointed downslope. “VC,” he whispered, knowing that would get my attention. A sound like pebbles rubbing against stone arose from a creek that trickled into the bay. Was it crabs? Crocodiles? Tide? The air smelled estuarial, transitional. I couldn’t spy a source—too much vegetation, shades of green through the scope. Somewhere an unseen, unnumbered enemy eyed our dirty dozen inside an oval half the size of a hockey rink. Could that rustle be footsteps? 

The sergeant couldn’t hear it from where he sat. I asked if the Viet Cong had tunnels thereabouts. 

He snorted. “They’d drown.”  

“How’d they sneak up?”

“Routine.”

“Wasn’t that a first?” The attack.

“I mean on the hill.”

To put me at ease he fired an illumination round. Shadows shifted as the flare swung on its parachute and the crepitations paused, only to resume after it burned out. We chuckled in acknowledgment of the tenacity, the audacity. He extended his pack of cigarettes. I declined, as with the Dexedrine. He also refrained. We were getting in sync.

I pointed to a grenade on my web harness and then, without speaking, to where I’d been. He radioed heads-up to the team, confirming none of our guys were in the neighborhood. I returned to the eastern perimeter. Glad for the company, the irregular was happier still when he saw me unhook the grenade. I pulled the pin, held the device for a second, and tossed it: one thousand one . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . flash! 

Bang.

So loud, so bright. So over. The irregular gave a thumbs-up. In the stillness I realized you don’t know it when you’re dead. That freed me as kismet—fate—did Farah’s farmers. And then it slipped away. I slipped away. 

A crescent moon emerged. A dog barked. A faraway one howled.

The Peace Corps roused this scarecrow and then left him to the elements. Deal with it, I told myself. Plant feet. Drink up. Well water tasted better without iodine, and dysentery cleansed the pipes.

	
 
                                                           1971
        
Al arrived before sunset prayers in his sandblasted Travelall. “Whoa, you look different”—tall, balding, ungainly, and erudite—"professor," Mahdud addressed him in Pashtu. He sized up his ward. “Like you came down from the mountain.” 

“Highlands, anyway.” He’d driven us there on a six-day recon. “Or up from the depths.”

Al rubbed his cheek. “Skin and bones.” Usually he hid his concerns. 

“Lean and mean.” The town barber kept my hair cropped, and I had the scraggly start of a beard. 

“The whites of your eyes.” He turned his head sideways. “They’re orange.” 

Neither the doctors nor my teammates had mentioned that, and the break from shaving obviated the need for our only mirror—Werner’s, left on the lip of the well as a public good. I raised my wrist. “Stained.” As if with iodine.

Al frowned. “And scratched.”

Scabby, too. Forearms were more accessible—and socially acceptable—than orifices. “I tried not to.” 

Al wagged his head. “Fever?” 

Up and down. “You bring a thermometer?”

“Your medical kit.”

“Oh, yeah.” I forgot. Like I forgot the aspirin. 

“Hepatitis.” Al clasped his hands in certitude. 

“Not malaria?” Which was worse? 

“That’s the good news. We’re leaving the crack of dawn.” The roads weren’t safe at night.

“Lashkar Gah.” Air conditioning! Women! Burgers for when my appetite returned. 

“Kabul.” 

A two-day drive. “They got medicine?”

“For malaria.” Al pulled a bottle of chloroquine from his pocket. “Take one. Can’t hurt. Keep a couple for the drive. We’ll leave the rest for the team.”

“You go to med school, your other life?” The town doctors attended the one in Jalalabad.

“On-the-job training.” 

“Is Doc back?” 

“You know what he’ll say.”

“Don’t drink the water.”

“Keep hydrating.” The party line.

“I should say good-bye.” 

“They’ll see you tonight.” Al meant the team. They’d yet to come in for the day.

“The acting governor.” We were beginning to understand each other.

Al put on his official face. 

“I don’t want to steal away.” 

He drew up his shoulders. “We talked.”

Before seeing me? “When?”

“He told the Minister you’re doing projects without his approval.”

“The villages self-start.” They were out of control.

Al held his tongue. He’d yet to hear my version.

“Get the wheat out, right? Bottom line, nobody’s starving.”

“That’s the goal. Let the man feel—let people see—he’s a player. The team’ll send your regrets. Who should we say’s in charge?”

“They work together.” And did better with me at fifty percent. That might be the sweet spot. Down to zero? Hang on.

“Management will want a name.”

“Charlie’s a team player.” 

“Tough enough?”

“He’ll surprise you.” He’d followed up in the highlands, with Mahdud and the development driver. That in itself was an accomplishment. 

“All of you do.” Al surveyed my room. He himself had been a volunteer, in the north. Later, as staff, he’d been the last man out of Libya. I wasn’t his first evacuee. He held up the miniature. Nothing like it in Farah. Precious few in Herat. The oval shape and focus on camels distinguished it. Those ships of the desert didn’t pass our way—no oases to tide them over. “Nice.”

“I paid too much.”

“Not if you like it.” He set it beside the Buddha. “What happened?” A hand was missing.

“Bumped it.” While drunk and mortared.

Al put it back on the shelf. “What do you have—one pack?” A towel hung from a nail.

“You’re looking at it, sayib.”

“Rolling Stone?” Stacked in the corner. He brushed laundry off an adjacent stack. “Sporting News?” 

Periodicals went by ship to Karachi and overland from there. “I’ll never catch up.” 

“Welcome to the club.”

                                                          * * *

Pedal to the metal, with the quickest of rest stops, Al condensed the two-day drive into one. We hurtled down the blacktop, evading potholes and easing through washouts. Some vehicles pulled over. A few tried to race, anything to beat the boredom. His jokes, riddles, anecdotes, and gossip ate up the miles. He wasn’t concerned about the acting governor. A new governor had been named. The Minister would talk to him in Kabul. 

“Team can concentrate on projects,” I said. Still no karezmaster. 

“Write it up later.” 

“Afghans’ll have to take on more.” 

“Development office a mess.” As he knew.

“Governor’s been briefed. The new one.”

“Will he do anything?” The last governor, not so much.

“Can’t wait to see your wrap-up.”

I asked where he thought I caught the disease. You got it from bad water.

He shrugged. “Allah knows.” 

My temperature was barely a hundred when we left, and, with the wind in our faces, it seemed normal. So I skipped the chloroquine. 

“What’s the incubation period?” 

“Hey”—Al lifted his hands— “I’m just the ambulance driver.” 

“Madman.” Role model. Savior. 

“Have you looked in the mirror lately?” 

Would a side mirror do? “Whole lot of nothing.” Farah receding. 

“Whoa.” A drugrunner’s zigzag. “Out of nowhere.” Stray donkey.

“You’re giving me whiplash, boss.”

In Libya, Al said, he’d gunned the engine to get up a dune. His Travelall launched off the crest—whoops, vertical drop on the other side. He landed nose-first. The steering wheel secured him like a seatbelt, though the female volunteer by his side was touch and go. 
Mail he brought included an aerogram from Win asking if I’d run into any Sufis and should he reciprocate the visit I’d taken, before Afghanistan, to the plantation he managed in Nicaragua. 

“Dog!” I warned.

Al swerved. 

The dog didn’t. Big and burly, it walked point for a caravan heading south for the winter, the camels bedecked and burdened, the nomads on foot. 

The engine sputtered. “Dammit.” Vapor lock had slowed us in the highlands. 

“Thought you got it fixed.” In Lashkar Gah.

Cough, harrumph—the engine recovered, and Al flashed a smile. “Enshallah.” 

I pointed to a heat mirage ahead. From out of it a top-heavy bus careened toward us. Overloaded with rooftop cargo, tires undoubtedly bald, it veered left, our right. Al veered left, its right. Both vehicles had been straddling the middle. Whoosh! Horns honked, an exultation more than anything. 


Doc confirmed Al’s diagnosis. “Your gamma globulin’s expired,” he said.

I stood accused. “Wasn’t when I left Kabul.” 

“Four months.” All it was good for. Like me, he needed a shave. 

Unlike me, he could lose a few pounds. “Six max. You slipped through the cracks.” 

“You weren’t around.” Gone to Herat, as I recall. By air, no less, after he’d vaccinated the others. I’d been late from a summer getaway to Laos. 

“Tea kills germs,” he told us our first day in country. As if it were always available. A guest couldn’t simply plunk an iodine tablet into a glass of water, stir, and wait twenty minutes. 

He had never seen a bilirubin count as high as mine. It was bilirubin that turned your skin orange and made you itch. “No alcohol,” he declared. “Nothing fried.” Rest cured many an ill, which explained the cots in his attic. “Don’t worry. The itch’ll go. The irritability, too.”

“Irritability!” No one had mentioned that. Like with the Halloween eyes. 

He chortled. “You used to be more diplomatic.”

“In Farah.” 

Doc laughed. For all he knew I was telling the truth. His school-age daughters brought meals prepared by an Afghan cook under their mother’s supervision. Like paterfamilias, they wore thick, Peace Corps glasses and kind-hearted smiles that put me on my best behavior. 

The staging center flew recruits over in groups, 43 in mine. If I terminated early, an option Doc raised, fewer than half would remain. One who also went to Jalalabad lay on a cot with malaria. On his back, knee raised, wrist across forehead, he moaned and writhed. The only other of our group to consider Food for Work had requested a preemptive appendectomy before leaving Kabul. After a sit-down with Doc, he agreed the university needed him more. 

By Thanksgiving I was able to help train new Food for Work volunteers, and I stopped to chat with DJ before seeing Lou. She and her husband had recently gone to Herat for volunteer visits, horseback riding, sightseeing, and carpets for themselves, miniatures for Christmas. The ravioli, she said with a ruby-red grin, was to die for. 

The grin undulated as she gave me a once-over—jungle boots, dress-green trousers, a collared shirt, and my father’s old Army sweater perforated by Jalalabadian moths. Kabul in December, 6000 feet up, had a nip to the air.

Lou stood. “Have a seat.” On reclaiming his, he said Washington approved the new recruits when our pilot program blew past all predictions. He was sending a vanful to see what made Farah tick. 

“Does Charlie know?”

“Al told him, and the governor’s on board.” Lou clicked his lips. “Want to go?” 

That was crazy. And tempting. “I don’t want to bump anybody.”

“Don’t worry.” Lou smiled. “Doc won’t hear of it.” He leaned in. Nice tan. “Frank, how you doing?” His voice softened. “Really.”

I fought off a fidget. Volunteers who confessed, often to hashish use, found themselves on the next plane out. “Better.” The itch was gone, irritability in check.

“Well enough to fly home?” Doc must have said something. 

“The job half done?” That wasn’t my modus, nor Lou’s, and he knew it. 

In white shirt with cufflinks, top button unbuttoned, and striped tie, blazer on the coatrack, he empathized at one level, directed at another. In the States he’d been a Marine lieutenant, an Episcopal priest, and then a civil-rights activist. “After New Year’s we’ll talk.”

Join us for the holidays, my mother wrote, your father knows a specialist. 

Charlie wrote to say the provincial cabinet denounced Mahdud for soliciting kickbacks. Mahdud characterized it as a misunderstanding. He grew up speaking Dari, not Pashtu. 

A packet of letters arrived from last year’s students. In idiosyncratic English you could pin on me they extolled the beauty of their valley, the respite in their gardens. Several thought I’d left for America. One was very sick. His classmate asked for a camera and a gun. Two hundred fifty individuals, five classes, three grades, one contradictory culture. A school year that seemed interminable was now remembered more for being over than for the day to day. 


                                                           1968

The observation post licensed tales that revolved, unavoidably, around the narrator. Coveting his own, Jack signed up after the night nothing happened. A perk—you got the next day off. I was asleep when he barged in, unable to stifle questions about what to take, what to leave. He looked dangerous—callous, cunning, capricious, and kinetic—in tiger fatigues. “Don’t forget your bayonet,” I said.    

“Bayonet!” His eyes narrowed.

“You never know.” I liked to tease him. “Close quarters, hand to hand.” 

A horn honked. Jeep and irregular driver were outside, the engine running. 

“I can’t.” Danger turned to desperation. “Can’t go.” Jack’s arms stiffened and shoulders shuddered like a convulsive in a straitjacket. “I can’t.”

“They’re counting on you.” They needed at least two Americans. 

He hacked out a laugh. “I’d rather be a live chicken.” The laugh curdled. “Honest!”

“Than what?” Make him say it.

“A dead duck.” There was a waddle to his wobble. “Live to quack another day.”

“Don’t look here.” I waved him off. “Don’t!”

“All right, here.” His arms spread. “Tall. Broad shoulders.” A recruiting poster personified. “Great hair.” Black as an M-16. And glossier. 
“Don’t be jealous.” He swiped at his widow’s peaks. I’d kid him he was going bald. “An easy target.” Slow and obvious. “I got a future. The ladies love me.” 

“Try Win.” 

“Poker night. He blew me off.” 

I heard the burr from a childhood digging for potatoes in Ireland. Jack viewed life transactionally. Like Win and me, he volunteered for in-country jump school. The benefits were obvious—extra pay, parachute badge, green beret. The benefits from a night on the outpost were intangible and so subject to interpretation. The risks were low but catastrophic if realized.

Double honk.

“Frank!” Jack’s face reddened. “My one and only roommate. Can you go? You’re small. Fast. Dodgy. Know the ropes. You’ll blend right in.”

On the boat that evening I peered into mangrove where the rustle originated the night before. In the movies, I thought, this is when it happens. The precipitating action. Or concluding one. Put-put went the motor. My M-16 inclined outward, round in chamber, safety on. The sergeant who’d sprained his ankle covered the salt marshes on the starboard side. 

I wasn’t nervous so much as open to anything. Anticipation stretched time and then compressed it, like a Slinky on the stairs. In cleaning up after teammates, I atoned, partially, for failures so numerous I didn’t know where to begin. From the boat I saw only foliage, nor did I hear anything of note then or atop the hill. The sergeant removed his boot and redid the wrap, his foot puffy like Paul’s after the snakebite. “Flex, toes. Wiggle, little fellows.” He was as expansive as his predecessor wasn’t. His own anecdotes left him in stitches. It was infectious. The irregulars caught it, too. An enemy scout wouldn’t know what to make of the hilarity. If the team could get away with a real soldier plus a straphanger once, they strategized, why not twice? A guerrilla couldn’t tell by looking. Same uniform, comparable weapons. 

In war stories that resonate, the hero succumbs to irony and/or the enemy. The narrator survives. What didn’t happen extended my license despite disappointing my audience, Jack most of all. He could have kicked himself the morning after.

Later that month, the Viet Cong rocketed our base from the coastal range, infiltrated forces into town, and stormed the airfield. This jump-started the Tet Offensive, pivot point of the war. Win stowed onto a medics’ truck responding to the mayhem. He hopped off to join irregulars led by an American lieutenant taking fire from a bungalow at the base of the Buddha. A Vietnamese gunman stepped out from a rock pile. Win hesitated. The man shot him in the midsection. The lieutenant fired back, sending the gunman behind the rocks. Win fell to his hands and knees. The medics drove him to the hospital. 

“Million-dollar wound,” he chirped in a postoperative high, “grazed the liver going in, spine going out.” Painkillers helped, and a nurse played along when I visited until an incoming helicopter pulled her away. “VC had a straight shot from the hills”—he nodded toward the west— “except they knew you were watching.” 

“Not me.” It’d been weeks.

“VC didn’t know that. Your stand-ins would’ve spotted it.” Win cocked his head, and his eyes widened in self-induced credulity. Every bed in his wing was occupied—by Vietnamese as well as Americans, many of them dazed, most with IVs. I was the only one standing. “So he slipped in from the north, long march, nobody watching, nobody we’d listen to, and he bogged down at the Buddha.”

“Thanks to you.” 

“Think about it.” Stitches constrained his laughter. “Ooh!” Grimace. “Won’t be the same. Here.” He pressed a finger to his temple. “Hah!” He also laughed when shot, the lieutenant told us later: If I can feel it, Win grunted as blood dripped onto his rifle, I can make it.

He convalesced in Japan. Rather than repatriate, he insisted on picking up where he left off. He’d quit on the Peace Corps. He wouldn’t do that to us. We coursed the Mekong Delta by foot, boat, truck, jeep, helicopter, and fixed wing to regularize irregular finances, a tall order. We ourselves became irregular, shunning repetition and pattern. That saved us. As it limited us. Our country had much to offer—under the right conditions. 

The Peace Corps, Win said wistfully, emphasized people to people, and you were on your own. He a secular Jew, I a lapsed Christian, we accepted the spiritual price for physical salvation. He carried only a pistol, leaving range and rate of fire to me and my M-16 if necessary (it wasn’t). From him I saw, as I would on that drive with Al, how none of us completely got over things if they once raised a ruckus in our minds. Forgettables filled our days. Memory attached to change, or the apprehension of it. In positive pessimism, I told him, expect the worst. You’ll never be disappointed. You may be pleasantly surprised. 

The nights nothing happened resurfaced when my resistance faltered in Farah. I perceived, but didn’t fully believe, myself in extremis. Continuance didn’t make me stronger, just longer—inoculated, I hoped, for life. 

 

                                                            1972

In January I went as the sole foreigner to highlands higher than Farah’s, by the border with Pakistan. No Westerner had worked there before. Lou said I could handle it, meaning he had no other candidates. The terrain was cold and damp, quite different from the desert. Local reaction was similar, some supportive, some not. Best part for me was getting outside of myself, getting into the present. Contacts lent structure. Teamwork tempered it. Maintenance came from within. On a final fling, to the cliffside Buddha the Taliban would later destroy, I met my future wife coming out of a cave. 

Lou reassigned Paul and Charlie to my north while I was in those highlands. Paul drove their truck into a river for a wash. The river rose and the truck may still be submerged, Charlie said with a laugh, project records on the floor. He said Farah flooded after I left. Locals blamed it on our projects. Any counternarrative from Paul would be undercut by a late-developing tendency to write fiction, including two novels set in Afghanistan. “Don’t worry about me,” Charlie joshed—he’d lost his journal on an Indian train. I still have mine. Though spare, it seeded this account. 


                                                    21st Century

My old hoochmate Jack stayed true to form, his stories honed, the hairline holding but streaked with silver. I saw him last at a reunion Win and his wife hosted in ‘02, a high point before the diagnoses came in. Pancreatic cancer soon took her away, and VA surgeons recommended replacing the mesh where he’d been shot. They postponed the procedure as more urgent casualties streamed in from Iraq and Afghanistan. After leaving a voicemail with his doctor saying something was wrong, he bled out. 

The VA considers me disabled due to a rare type of leukemia associated with Agent Orange. My oncologist fears the condition, along with lymphoma associated with 9/11 and recurring chemo for both, compromises my immunity. A recurrence of liver malfunction limits me to half a beer a day from a can I share with my wife. On reflection, experience did make me stronger, and don’t we wish that was contagious? Farther afield, Afghanistan tumbled into a dark space where the zealous rule the hapless. A similar calamity befell Vietnam, another country mine wanted to forget. Afghanistan will also evolve, eventually. Lead-up matters. Meantime matters more.