Is This Your First War? (5 page)

I asked Sohail how everyone in town learned to make weapons. “It's a skill that's passed from father to son. They are not doing it for three or four years. They are doing it for 150 years. My grandfather, he was making guns, too,” Sohail said, and then added: “But I'm different. I want to work as a pharmacist.”

I had grown used to the clatter of small arms fire when louder explosions erupted. Bright flashes like firecrackers appeared on a nearby cliff. Someone was hammering away at the hillside with an anti-aircraft gun.

“They're having a marriage in the town. That's part of the celebration,” Sohail said. “In the city, we use Kalashnikovs. Here, a bigger gun is okay.”

Before leaving we fired off a few magazines from an AK-47, bruising our shoulders and burning our hands on the hot barrel. Then we said our goodbyes to the gunsmiths. On our way out of town, Sohail's friend, who was driving, stopped the car and a small boy, about three years, climbed into Sohail's lap. “This is my friend's neighbour,” he said, nodding at the driver. “He is going to be a smuggler, too.”

We stopped in the smugglers' bazaar on our way back to Peshawar. Sohail knew one of the vendors, so it wasn't a problem for Adam and me to be there. We drank tea in the back of the shop among enormous blocks of hash and opium. “This is the mother of cocaine,” the smuggler said, pointing to a fist-sized chunk of opium, “but you can also break off a little and put it in your tea.”

The hashish and opium seller was a young man with the thinnest wisp of a beard, maybe a teenager, cheerful and irreverent. We were soon cracking jokes and laughing until we wheezed. He must have decided he could confide in us.

“I have something truly forbidden,” he said. “Do you want to see it?”

Adam and I caught our breath. We were surrounded by automatic weapons and drugs. I had a hard time imagining what he could possibly be concealing.

“Sure,” I said.

The teenager glanced toward his shop window and then moved the prayer mat onto the floor. There was a hidden compartment underneath. He reached in and pulled out a bottle of J&B whiskey, grinning at the scandal of possessing it. In the smugglers' bazaar, hashish and guns were readily available and dirt-cheap. A gram of hash cost about three dollars. A bottle of whiskey would set you back a hundred.

We spent another week or so in Peshawar. We wandered the streets during the day, stopping frequently for rice pudding and tea. At night, we ate with Sohail and Fired, scooping handfuls of rice mixed with raisins and carrots into our mouths from shared plates and passing around bowls of yoghurt.

One day Fired took us back to the Tribal Areas and through the Khyber Pass to the border with Afghanistan. We sat on a hill near an old machine gun nest that locals now appeared to be using as a latrine. Hills rolled below us to a village a few kilometres away, inside Afghanistan. We sat facing it, our backs to the narrow confines of the mountainous pass, and beyond that, Peshawar. Afghan boys with skinny bodies, dirty shalwar kamiz, and close-shaved heads approached and tried to sell us worthless Afghan currency. They left when we weren't interested, circling back a short distance away and kicking the dust at their feet. Fired's home was only a couple of hundred kilometres down the road in Kabul, but while he appreciated the relative order the Taliban had brought after years of violent conflict between opposing warlords, he was reluctant to go any farther.

“The Taliban are hard men,” he said, and he pointed at his still beardless face. “If I go back like this, six months in jail.”

Fired mixed some hashish with tobacco and rolled the concoction into a cigarette. He lit it, inhaled, and blew the smoke toward Afghanistan.

“In a few years, if there's no fighting, come back to my shop,” he said. “No problem.”

It Went to Dust

“T
he
kids' mom speaks Creole. Look for a crying black woman.”

It was the city section editor at the
Ottawa Citizen
calling me on my cell as I stood freezing in a parking lot outside the emergency room of an Ottawa hospital, a few months after I returned to Canada to work at the paper. A house fire was rumoured to have killed two young children. The family had already issued a statement asking for privacy, but these things were typically ignored. I was sent to the hospital to find grieving relatives in the waiting room who would talk to the media. Hospital staff knew I was a journalist and kicked me out, which is why I was lurking outside when my editor called with new information to help me narrow my search.

Ambulance chasing at the
Citizen
typically fell to interns. We had a radio scanner near our desks that picked up the chatter of the emergency services, and when we heard reports of a fatal accident, we'd rush off with our notepads and point-and-shoot cameras to record it: a teenager takes his parents' car and crashes it into a lamppost; a toddler drowns in a backyard pool; a drunk drives his snowmobile through the melting spring ice. We'd race to the scene, or else to the homes of friends and relatives to get quotes or ask for photos we could use to illustrate our stories. If an uncle or cousin were unsure which photo we should take, we'd ask for all of them. A reporter from the
Ottawa Sun
, the competing newspaper in town, might be arriving in few minutes looking for photos, and it would be better if the relative didn't have any left to offer.

Some of the stories were newsworthy, I suppose. And the desk of one reporter, who covered these small tragedies with more skill and grace than me, was scattered with cards from relatives of accident victims who wanted to thank him for giving meaning to the lives of their dead loved ones, for describing in a few hundred words who they were and why they were important. But I often felt like a parasite. By the summer of 2001, six months into the job, I was starting to have doubts about life as a journalist. I hadn't imagined a career spent badgering people for sound bites in their most painful and intimate moments. Working on the night shift, as the radio scanner crackled and hissed beside me with reports of another multi-car pileup or rooming house fire, I'd scan through websites for graduate schools. I figured that when my contract ended in December, I'd go back to university.

The nature of my job changed utterly on September 11, 2001, eight months into my internship. When the second plane slammed into the World Trade Center, confirming beyond a doubt that the first collision was not an accident and that the United States was under attack, the newsroom exploded into a sort of controlled chaos. Some reporters were immediately on the phone. An office manager tried in vain to find flights. Continually growing crowds formed in clusters around television screens. Then, like a basketball coach staring down the length of his bench for players to put on the floor, one of the editors turned away from the screen and started pointing at the reporters around him. “You. You. Go.”

He picked out nine or ten of us. I was one. With Leonard Stern, another
Citizen
reporter, in the passenger seat beside me, I drove home and grabbed my passport and a change of clothes, stopping at Leonard's house to do the same. The Pentagon was hit as we sped through the pine-and-birch forests along Highway 416 south of Ottawa. The World Trade Center's South Tower collapsed a few minutes later. The young woman's voice on the local station was shaking as she announced it.

“It went to dust. You stand in that hole, you look up, and you wonder where the building went. It went to dust. Everything goes to dust, except metal, light fixtures, stuff like that.”

Alex Alcantara sat across from me on a Metro-North train into Manhattan from Yonkers, where I slept my first few nights in New York. It was about nine in the morning. Alcantara, a twenty-seven-year-old electrician, had been working in the ruins of the World Trade Center for three days and was late getting there again this morning as he had lingered at home to help his father open the family deli. He wore an American flag bandana and another flag taped to his yellow construction helmet, on which he had written “God Bless America” in black magic marker. No one had yet really accepted that there would be no more survivors, least of all Alcantara and the others in his crew, though they hadn't recovered a live body since they started working the day after the attack.

“You find photos of people, the ones that were on their desks. And you think that could be me. It's tough, man. There are still fires burning down below. It heats up, like when you build a fire in Boy Scouts and cover it up. And the smell, man. It's bad. I've never smelled a dead person before, but the firefighters say, yeah, that's the smell of burning flesh.”

Alcantara said nothing for a few moments. He looked out the window. Low-slung buildings slipped by. We were still in the suburbs. He turned back toward me. I hadn't asked him what the point of digging was if you could already smell death, but he answered anyway.

“There are air pockets,” he said. “People can survive in there. It's almost like a cave. You have hope. You're in there and you can almost feel the people's souls. You can feel them under you. It's like they need your help and there is so little you can do. You're helpless. You're afraid to touch anything because it might fall down.” Even if there were no more survivors, Alcantara said he wanted to find a body to give a family a measure of peace. He said that because he had worked on construction projects all over New York, he felt an obligation the World Trade Center's broken rock and dust. “We built this city. We're going to take care of the rubble. We'll build it again.”

Alcantara got off the train at Grand Central Station and jogged away. I walked south to the buildings' ruins. They still were still smouldering. Thick ash covered many cars. A man on a bicycle rode by and collected samples of ash and debris in small plastic bag. Already merchants on Canal Street were selling T-shirts that read “I survived the attack” or “Evil will be punished.” In Manhattan's Chinatown, residents sold paper U.S. flags to raise money for the families of dead firefighters and police. George Hua, vice-president of a local Chinese association, shouted at passersby in English and Chinese.

“Let no one question our loyalty to this country! Let no one question that we love this country!” He voiced seemed tinged with anger, or perhaps worry.

Later that day I visited the El Tawheed Islamic Center in Jersey City. The director, Essam Abu Hamer, said that he and his colleagues had received death threats. “For myself, yesterday, I was getting phone calls saying they are going to blind us, they are going to kill our kids. Some people pass by the mosque and curse us, say we are terrorists, stuff like that.” Others hanging around the mosque or in a nearby coffee shop were concerned about what the attacks would mean for them. They felt that as New Yorkers they were victims of the terrorist attacks. To sense the suspicions of their neighbours on top of that stung. Ismail Abdelraow, an ambulance driver from Sudan, said his wife collapsed when she saw the news of the attacks on television. They fielded phone calls from friends in Sudan who were worried about their safety. He told them they were fine. The couple went to a nearby hospital to donate blood.

When I had finished my interviews and put my notebook away, I fell into conversation over the dregs of my tea with Hussein Gashan, a man whose business card said he was a translator for New York's Arab and Yemeni community. We were talking about Pakistan and got along well. “You know,” he said, referring to the attacks, “I think it was the Jews.”

I spent ten days in New York, and during that time any anti-American bigotry that had clung to me since adolescence melted away. It wasn't because I felt sorry for New Yorkers. How could I, when they so clearly didn't feel sorry for themselves? It was partly the selflessness of men like Alcantara who wouldn't leave Ground Zero for weeks to come, and of course it was the bravery of the hundreds of firefighters who climbed into burning buildings knowing they would most likely die there. At a ceremony in Brooklyn I watched as some 160 firefighters were promoted to replace their colleagues who had been killed a few days earlier. When it was over, a girl, about four years old, too young to really understand what had happened, asked her father about the pins and medals on his uniform.

“These are like the stars you get in school,” he said. “I got this one today. I'll tell you about it someday.”

But there was also something about the more pervasive spirit of solidarity, and a frank and expressive openness among ordinary New Yorkers, that made a deep impression on me. Perhaps more than anyone else I met in New York, I'll remember a man I didn't speak to and whose name I never learned. I saw him in lower Manhattan, close to the site of World Trade Center, where men were gathering to dig in the ruins. It was an unorganized affair. I don't think any city officials were involved. Those who had come were not professional rescue workers or medics. They were men who owned their own hard hats and steel-toed boots and wanted to help. This man, who must have weighed close to 300 pounds, tried to take charge of the situation. He bellowed and beckoned, waving an arm over his head and pointing like a general in an old war movie as he herded people into the backs of pickup trucks — “Let's go! Let's go!” He climbed in one himself and was driven away.

An information booth had been set up at the State Armory on Lexington Avenue, a few blocks from a morgue at the city medical examiner's office. Here, in a line stretching some 200 metres, victims' relatives waited and filled out forms that asked excruciating questions: “Does your loved one have dentures or braces?” “Is he circumcised?” “Are her toenails dirty?” “Are they decorated?” “Does he have old shrapnel or bullets in his body?” “How many earrings does she wear?”

Back home in Ottawa, I always felt like I was intruding on a family's grief, violating their privacy, when I called or showed up at their homes in the wake of a motor accident that took the life of another teenager. In New York, grieving relatives were easy to find and none recoiled from speaking about their loss. Many carried photographs of their missing loved ones. The images had typically been photocopied and made into rough posters that displayed a candid photograph from a birthday or Christmas or some other family event, below which would be name, a description, and often a declaration of love. They posted them on walls and fences all over the city. At first I found this lack of reserve unnerving. I don't think it was motivated by anything as crass as a desire to be in a newspaper or on television. There was of course the faint hope that their husband or daughter might be still be alive, somewhere, unconscious and without identification. But I also think New Yorkers simply felt inclined to keep less hidden, which, for me at least, made the strength and the goodness that so many of them showed in those weeks seem all the more genuine.

On September 14, U.S. President George W. Bush stood on the roof of a burned fire truck in the rubble of the World Trade Center surrounded by rescue workers, firefighters, and police. He was dressed casually. In one hand he held a bullhorn, and the other he draped around the shoulders of a dust-covered fireman, Bob Beck, his helmet on and his dirty work gloves tucked under an arm.

“Let's go get 'em, George!” someone shouted.

Bush began by telling the rescue workers and all New Yorkers that the country was praying and mourning with them, but when a worker shouted that he couldn't hear, Bush broke away from his prepared remarks.

“I can hear you!” he shouted. “The rest of the world hears you! And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”

The workers around him erupted in cheers, raised fists, and chants of “USA! USA!”

It is easy to forget now, but there were moments early in his presidency when Bush managed to capture perfectly the mood of his country. This was one of them. With the World Trade Center smoking and bodies still not recovered, America needed to stick out its chest and flex its muscles. It wanted to hear from its president that vengeance was coming. Bush understood that and seized the moment.

Six days later, Bush addressed a joint session of Congress at which he told Americans that the available evidence indicated that al-Qaeda had carried out the attacks. He explained that “al-Qaeda is to terror what the mafia is to crime,” and he identified the group's leader, “a person named Osama bin Laden.” The group was based in Afghanistan, he said, where it supported and was protected by the Taliban regime.

“By aiding and abetting murder, the Taliban regime is committing murder,” Bush said. He demanded that the Taliban hand all members of al-Qaeda over to the United States, dismantle their terrorist camps, and give the United States access to these sites to ensure they have been destroyed. “The Taliban must act and act immediately. They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate.”

Nothing Bush said that night was surprising. Within hours of the attacks, it looked inevitable that war would come to Afghanistan. Every television set in every bar in New York was repeatedly showing the same limited footage of bin Laden in Afghanistan. There was the clip of the al-Qaeda leader awkwardly firing an AK-47 and then smiling, and one of al-Qaeda recruits traversing monkey bars, hand over hand.

With the focus of the world shifting to Afghanistan, there didn't seem to be much point for a journalist to stay in New York. Before leaving, I had lunch in a downtown Afghan restaurant belonging to Shah Rosni. He had fled his homeland in 1978 and still had family there. He was especially worried about a sister in Kabul. While I ate, Rosni insisted that the Taliban were not Afghans. They were foreigners who had taken over his country, and he wanted the United States to drive them out. “Even if I lose one relative it could secure the world,” he said.