‘What I’m doing is raising money for mine detectors.’

An Encino lad who recently capped his college education by going on a one-man mission to a part of the world where, as one of his elders observed, “no sensible Jewish boy should be,” returned to his hometown temple this week to plead the case of the Afghan moujahedeen .

Larry Greenfield, home from an undercover tour of the Afghan battle front, gave his impressions of the war to the Ethical Action Committee of Valley Beth Shalom.

He bore news of such horrors as toy-like mines that are dropped among the Afghan freedom fighters to blow their children’s hands and legs off.

His audience responded by donating about $200 to help buy mine detectors.

They also treated Greenfield to a minor hero’s welcome, toasting him with compliments and peppering him with questions about his family and personal ambitions.

For an hour before his talk Monday night, Greenfield, tall and slender in a gray blazer, stood beside color photographs of maimed Afghans while he greeted about 150 school chums and family friends, shaking hands with the men and hugging or kissing the women.

The synagogue’s executive director, Len Smith, introduced the young speaker by first citing the accomplishments of his parents and grandparents.

“With forebears like that, there is no question that he is going to be what he ought to be, the first Jewish President of the United States,” Smith predicted with only partial hyperbole.

Greenfield, in fact, has his sights on a career in foreign affairs, either in politics or journalism. He isn’t sure which quite yet.

In preparation, he studied political science at the University of California Berkeley, then went to the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington.

At a cocktail party put on by the Committee for a Free Afghanistan, Greenfield was introduced to a moujahedeen commander who was visiting Washington in search of assistance for his cause or, failing that, any sympathetic ear.

“He offered me to go with him to visit his troops,” Greenfield told his audience Monday. “I told him I appreciated the offer but, ‘I have to go now.’ ”

But the idea of a mission of conscience took root in Greenfield’s mind, partly, he said, because of the Jewish teaching of the importance of action.

Afghanistan especially excited him because it is so distantly observed by the media.

“It seemed more necessary and more courageous to go somewhere where so few Westerners had been,” he said.

In October, using his own savings and a little borrowed money, Greenfield caught a plane to Peshawar in Pakistan.

On Yom Kippur, adopting the white-robed dress of the band of fighters escorting him, he drove a mountain road into Afghanistan.

For a week he moved from one group to another of the National Islamic Front Assn., the most moderate of the Afghan resistance factions.

Greenfield now plans to lecture wherever he can on the experiences of that trip.

In his debut Monday, he began with a 12-minute video recapping the Soviet invasion of 1979 and the intensifying program to destroy the resistance.

Then he showed dozens of his own photographs: rugged countryside, stacks of rifles and rocket launchers, smiling children and hardened men displaying weapons or living meagerly in mountain camps.

As the slides flicked by, Greenfield rambled through his impressions of the moujahedeen, from their deeply religious spirit to their views on Jewish-Moslem politics.

“The Jew is not the infidel to them,” he said. “If you help them, you are a hero to them.”

“What did you wear on your feet?” someone asked about then.

Greenfield submitted graciously to several such non sequiturs. One woman asked if he had told his mother what he was up to.

He admitted that he had not.

“Remind me to tell you about the battles I saw,” he said a couple of times, saving that for last.

At his emotional peak, Greenfield lifted up a board on which a ragged skin of green plastic was pinned. He said it was an exploded butterfly mine, a palm-sized device left on hillsides for children to pick up.

“They are designed to maim you, not kill you,” he said.

Their purpose is to knock resistance fighters out of combat by maiming their children.

By contrast with that image, the battles were rather bland.

“The first one was not so bad,” Greenfield said. “I didn’t ever see the enemy. We heard some shooting and we fired back.”

In the second one, an Afghan fired a single rocket at the silhouette of a Soviet helicopter on a distant landing field at night.

“For four hours, the Soviets fired back,” he said.

The Afghans merely waited until it was over and left.

Greenfield soon left too, his real mission just beginning.

In his talk he betrayed a touch of uncertainty as to what it should be.

“I don’t really call for anything,” he said at one point. “I’m just reporting what I saw.”

Later, though, Greenfield again invoked the importance of action to call on everyone in the room to do something.

“What I’m doing is raising money for mine detectors,” he said. “Do you have any other ideas?”