News From the Red Desert (8 page)

The giant bald man comes in three or four times a day. He drinks triple-shot cappuccinos and is polite. He watches the Thai woman pretty closely. He never lets her notice him. Or she never lets him notice her noticing him. Many of the other soldiers seem to be afraid of him. They get out of his way when they see him coming. Maybe they work for him. They all come out of that long yellow warehouse near the airstrip and return to it when they're done here. You can see them working, when an airplane or a truck convoy comes in. The bald man walks among those men and watches. But not like he watches the Asian woman.

I did not like Rashid at first. I did not like how he spoke with so many strange words. And that he kept using them after he knew the rest of us could hardly understand him. Maybe even more, then. I understand English. I listen to the radio and read the newspaper. Maybe he spent time in India. They talk like that there, like English is their own language, and that the more of it you know the smarter you are. In Pakistan it is different. We use English too, but Urdu is what we live in and think in. When he tried to talk to us in Urdu and then Pashto I was surprised that Fazil kept changing back into English. But then I understood. It was too soon to show him what we thought.

Rami Issay bought the first chess set when Rashid arrived. It was a strange thing. Rami Issay is normally so bored by his coffee shop. I think meeting Rashid made him more interested. Rashid is smart and suddenly Rami Issay wants the Kandahar Green Beans to be smart too, like cafés in ferenghee cities.

I asked Amr about chess. He told me that chess was invented by Muslims. That it is still a game, but less sinful than the card games the Americans and English are always playing, or dancing, or the music
videos you see them watching in their compounds. “But is it a sin?” I asked him.

“I don't know. I am not an educated man.”

“But there are no holy men here to ask.”

“I think that we should remember to pray, and fast on the holy days, and be pure ourselves. We think the ferenghee are sinful and most of them probably are. But the Taliban would think we are sinners, too.”

“But there is only one God.”

“Yes. And he made the world and the people in it.”

“So the others are not blasphemers?”

“No. They are blasphemers. And you are not them.”

“I don't know what to think.”

“Be pure in your own heart and actions,” he told me.

When the bald American stands in the line for his coffee, he usually looks a little angry. But he isn't any more or less impatient whether the line is long or short. I don't think it would make any difference if he walked in and a free coffee was waiting for him, made already. Or if Rashid had to make it over again three times, like he did on his first day. He would always be the same amount of impatient. He doesn't usually sit down. Usually he stands on the deck and drinks his coffee. Fazil says he's been here since before he opened the shop. He's like that dried-up tree outside his warehouse. He has become part of his place. No wonder he's so angry.

Just Amachai

The boy, Mohammed, is just a baby. He should be living with his family but in this part of the world, who knows how that story goes? Probably nothing you would actually want to hear. In Thailand he'd have become a monk. So pious and eager to please and so pretty. Shave his head and put him in a robe and he'd fit right in.

This place is swarming with French and British and every other sort of western soldier, and every day is busier than the one before it. It's just a matter of time before they kick us out of our shack to make room for more barracks. It's just a matter of time before that Special Forces general, that warrior monk, Lattice, decides that we are an unnecessary luxury anyway, along with the Burger King and the Pizza Hut. Which isn't to say that I was sad to see those go—my little belly was getting so big! This is not something anyone wants in a masseuse. Back to rice and healthy food. Which is probably what the general was thinking, too. No one wants to be soft here. Not even me. Especially me. After they closed, I lost five kilos and my tips doubled.

You never see the generals here. Drinking coffee at a coffee shop would be too leisurely for the likes of them. The generals should be more like the pilots. The pilots come in here when they're not flying and they make no apology and do not act embarrassed. They have less anxiety, I think, because they know what they do. They fly their helicopters and if they get where they're going safely and pick up and drop off whatever they're supposed to, then they did things right. It's nice to have certainty like that. I have it. I know when I'm doing my job right or not. I didn't used to. Which is funny because in those days I was younger and more beautiful and that was my job, to be young and beautiful. If only I could have known that then, I'd have saved myself from the shame and the embarrassment. But this is what it is to get older, isn't it? Finally we are understanding that we were so stupid to have been so anxious about everything back then. Later is when the real trouble comes. Like now. Things generally do get worse. We Buddhists see this more clearly than the puritans. Life is suffering. The more life, the more suffering.

This is what I think about when I watch the boy moving among the men, never smiling, working so hard and not looking at anyone at all, hauling racks of coffee mugs into the back to wash, and so worried that he might do the wrong thing. But we all do the wrong thing, honey. The tricky bit is that it isn't usually the thing we think is the wrong thing. It's the problem with the stern religions. We have Muslims in Thailand,
too, but they are not as severe as this. Maybe because the rain comes more often. And we have our monks, too, to be holy for all the rest of us.

Amr Chalabi

The Japanese woman should stop staring at the boy. She knows it makes him uncomfortable, knows it makes him feel like he is sinning, and she keeps doing it, over her cup of green tea. Half-dressed and fresh from the brothel, still reeking of the ferenghee she has been with. I asked Rami Issay two times if he would forbid those women from coming here, but he laughed and said I didn't know anything about café culture. But the boy has no choice about being here, would prefer to be at a madrassa someplace, and ought to be, inshallah. I would die to protect him, but I don't know how to protect him from this torment. If ever the prostitute lifted her eyes from little Mohammed, she would see me and know she is seen. But she never does.

G
eneral Thomas Lattice sat in his office within the Special Forces compound, a hundred yards from the Green Beans café, and sipped from his cup of hot water. He had left his door wide open. It was after midnight, and apart from the duty officer and NCO, who were being conspicuously attentive to the security of the compound, it was generally quiet. He could hear locks being checked. One of the sentries coughed, once.

He was reading summaries of the media coverage of the war over the last month. Both he and General Jeremy Jackson, commander of the whole Afghan operation, had been posted here from Iraq four months ago—and not because things were going well. Still, one of them seemed to be doing just fine in the court of public opinion no matter the facts on the ground. Lattice had been briefed by his staff about how skilfully General Jackson was managing his media profile. Every mention of him included his Princeton PhD and his ability to run a mile in less than seven minutes. Lattice's response to this was disdain. The two had once been friends. Lattice had been Jackson's best man when he married, the summer they graduated from West Point. But even when they were friends, Lattice had understood how interested Jackson was in
everyone's opinion of him. He had silently predicted that such a weakness would limit his Jackson's career success. But he had been wrong. Jackson's attention to how he was seen—image management, it was called now—also included a finely attuned sense of whether he was seen as too concerned with his image. An essential component of field craft is how to observe without being observed.

Lattice's aide had made the point: Jackson was a celebrity. And that status accorded him certain capabilities here and in the future. The same aide had prepared a summary of the reporters Lattice himself needed to cultivate if he wanted to have similar influence. Deirdre O'Malley's coverage of the war had historically been very useful: 88 percent of it positive or message enhancing. (The aide actually hadn't needed to point O'Malley's effectiveness out to him; he'd read her profile of Jackson in
Time
early on in the Iraq war, and understood the role it had played in making his old friend a star, not only in the media but at the Pentagon.) But lately her stories were slightly muted. The success of the surge in Iraq had not been duplicated here, Lattice thought, and she was responding to that. Then there was the matter of how she was seen to cover Jackson long-term. She could not have sustained the admiration she'd revealed in the profile and retained credibility with her editors. Still, 88 percent.

Stewart Robinson was about to visit the base. Robinson had fashioned himself a public intellectual—an unusual step for someone so junior and from the intelligence community. Not that Lattice knew anything explicit about Robinson's covert roles. But he could smell spook. Anyway, in Robinson's op-eds and lectures he supported the war or furthered the message 64 percent of the time, but was judged to have a higher impact than O'Malley because of the walk that had made him a celebrity and because he had been publicly critical of the military in several instances. “The Fox News guys don't change anyone's minds, sir,” the aide had said. “People who could go either way listen to other people who could go either way. We need him on our side.”

Then the aide added: “Jackson's lustre is bound to fade here. You'll want to position yourself for that.” Lattice looked hard at that young
man with his master's in communications. Ten years ago he would have fired him on the spot. Not now.

Stewart Robinson walked off the RAF Herc and hoisted his bag over his shoulder and looked around. He put his Oakleys on and silently took in the familiar hills south of the airstrip, even as a Major Horner—with dual appointments in public affairs and the base adjutant's office, the man quickly explained—fell in beside him. The major said he was really quite pleased that Robinson could come. He imagined that the book tour for
Country of Stone
had been pretty exciting. As he had discussed with Robinson's publicist, he had arranged a reading for the soldiers that night. There were ten media requests for interviews, seven of them television. Was there any way Robinson could extend his stay? Had he followed the reviews in the American and British press and did he ever expect a response like this?

By this point, they had reached the holed and patched-over building they all called Taliban's Last Stand. Its rooms were being used as offices now. Horner and Stewart paused for a moment and looked at the pock-marks of machine-gun fire on its walls.

“You have powerful memories of this place, I'm sure,” Horner said.

“I do. It's where it all started, you know.”

“Your writing career?”

“No. The Taliban.”

“Oh, of course.”

“So what's next?”

“I'll bring you to your room and let you get cleaned up. Then we're having lunch with the ISAF battalion commanders on base.”

“Who wants to interview me?”

“Peter Morgan from CBS, Tom Parry of CBC, Caroline Rudolph from NBC, Jim Ackers from Fox, Clark Smith from ABC.”

“Is Deirdre O'Malley here?”

“Yes. She's been back for a few weeks.”

“Has she put in a request to interview me?”

“No. But I'm not sure she knew you were coming. She's been out on patrol a lot.”

“Does she go by the press tent?”

“Only when she needs something from someone.”

Robinson grinned. “Have you ever worked in the media?”

“I was a reporter for the
Times Picayune
for a couple of years before enlisting. That's in New Orleans.”

“Six years ago?” Robinson asked, glancing at his rank insignia and calculating.

“Yes.”

“Was it a good decision?”

“Are you kidding? Best decision ever. I was going nowhere as journalist. Hardly anyone was. And it's even worse now for the print media, I think.”

“Think we're getting much done over here?”

Horner paused. Brits—even ones immersed in the intelligence world—are not Americans. “It's a really tough job we've taken on. We might not succeed.” He prayed he would never be quoted saying that. “But that would be a strange kind of effort—only trying when you know you'll win.”

Robinson conceded, “It's got a better chance of working out than Iraq does.”

“Iraq will work out, too.”

“Will it?”

“Already has, partly. We've gotten rid of a genocidal tyrant.”

“That's not the story the Iraqis are telling one another these days.”

“If we're going to win, we have to change that story,” Horner said, smiling.

“Or the facts that drive it?” Robinson asked.

“I heard you wrote a book,” Horner replied, his smile growing ever wider, and his eyes narrowing almost imperceptibly.

Okay, he was smarter than Robinson had thought. Maybe no more interesting. “I did. I told a story about people I met and what they told me.”

“Why?”

Robinson let that hang and they walked a while more, until Horner stopped them in front of a barracks. “Is this where I'm staying?” Robinson asked.

“It is. Room 104. Here's the key. I'll meet you here in an hour. Don't drink the tap water.”

Horner returned to his office while Robinson was cleaning up. He found a stack of messages on his desk. The one on top was a high-profile memo, addressed to public affairs personnel in theatre. Signals intelligence had recorded large volumes of data being exchanged through InformationIsFree.​com. Some of it, the memo speculated, may have compromised operational security and may have pertained to military operations involving Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Any contact with media personnel who ask about or refer to that website shall be reported to the sender of this briefing, the memo concluded.

He set aside the memo and shuffled through his inbox. There were last-minute confirmations of attendance at Stewart Robinson's discussion.
Foreign Affairs
had loved his book, as did
Foreign Policy
and the
Times
and the
Post.
Reading those reviews, Horner thought he could detect the envy of every foreign policy wonk in the country—intellectuals all, longing to be adventurers. And Robinson worked it well. He was charismatic and, when it served his narrative purposes, funny. Equally, the soldiers who followed the lay discussion about the war—and all the ambitious senior officers did—were struck by the meteoric rise of Robinson's media profile. Speed trumps weight, pithy paragraphs trump credentials, and individuals' stories are more gripping than collective ones: the sort of thing that made soldiers hate the press. Jessica Lynch becoming more famous than Tommy Franks. “Welcome to my world,” thought Horner as he adjusted the attendance figures for the talk.

Robinson would be done his shower by now. Horner stood. He told himself he was still a journalist. It was just that now he worked on one big story. What a book he himself could write. He should start keeping notes. Then he felt ridiculous for even thinking that. But he should be keeping notes reflexively. A journal, maybe. He'd come here for a reason, after all. He had wanted to have a larger life.