Ropey, old-man arms and plaid sleeves stretch out
from under a tan ballistic vest as Gene offers up a cup of the care-package
coffee he just brewed. Dense, wiry grey hair and supporting moustache
compliment a slight southern drawl. With these features and the opaque, black
coffee, Gene might have sprung from a screenwriter’s description of the chatty,
avuncular guy you unintentionally sit next to at some Badlands truck stop – the
halogen lights flickering at the pumps as a waitress slides your tuna melt
across the laminate counter.
“Have you read any Calvino?”
“Embarrassingly, no.”
“Well, there’s a short story about children gathering
around a fire. Its night-time and as Calvino tells it, flames lick up into the
night, and as the story gets told both words and heat ripple across their
faces. But behind them, the dark is cold and endless. And of course there’s a
witch.
What’s important though, is the narrator’s lilt — his
pitch and timbre; there’s pacing and tempo: all the things that make a good
campfire tale. The story gets told again and again, to different groups of
children. But if all the orator’s skills fall into perfect harmony, the flames
will reach to his full height as he stands above the kids, seated on the
ground. The flames spiral and the witch erupts from the logs and embers, taking
a child into the flames and vanishing.”
Days later, looking south across Kabul’s smog-filled
valley, Gene tells me another tale.
“A few months before you got here, we had a wire
service photographer come out… He was AP, or maybe Reuters. He’d also been
bouncing around the various camps and we did the same thing with him.”
“You made him too much coffee and stuffed him full of
three-year-old Werther’s?”
“Yeah, there’s that. We also did the driving tour:
Checked out the ANA, poked around in the Soviet wreckage, pointed to the CIA
compound that you’re not allowed to know about. So he’s up here, walking
around, swapping lens, but he’s also grumbling about something. After a while
he comes over to me, acting like some sort of movie director, all worked up
about the smog. “The light, the light” – he actually said this – “I can’t work
with this light.” So we drive back down to Alamo and a day later he’s gone,
unimpressed.”
“So, I heard this from another PA guy down near Helmand,
that after the Reuters guy left Alamo, he headed down to the fighting. So he’s
down with the Jarheads around Masum Ghar, trundling through the vineyards in a
HumVee, and he’s complaining about how boring it all is — How this is the most boring
assignment he’s been on. And that’s when they hit an IED. The Jarheads are all
kinds of fucked up, and the photographer gets his leg blown off.”
“Really? Shit Gene,
that’s…”
“Predictable? It’s a predictable fucking story. You
just don’t complain about the quiet, especially down south. He shoulda’ known
better than to complain about the quiet. You complain about the quiet and a witch will sure as
shit jump out of the flames.”
For all the sadness and boredom, for all the death
and waste, and beauty in this war, you can (mostly) be sure that those who live
are glad to not be dead. And in that gladness, you can easily turn to humour
and storytelling, and in the telling of those stories the occasional witch will arise.
