Documentary : Checking in With Death at a Kabul Hotel : The rockets fall from dawn to dusk in war-weary Afghanistan. One offers a reminder of the madness in covering war.

They killed the hotel manager just an hour or so before we checked in.

It was a chance killing, to be sure. An anonymous million-to-one shot that leaves somebody dead somewhere every day in this battered battle zone called Kabul, a city of cratered streets and pockmarked walls where rebel rockets fall from dawn to dusk.

We’d seen it many times before. This was, after all, just one of many recent trips to cover the decade-old Afghan war from inside the Soviet-backed regime’s long-besieged capital city, where hundreds have died during the years of rebel rocket barrages.

But it was different this time.

Perhaps it was because this was the first of the 127 rockets we would dodge in the coming six days. Or maybe it was simply that this time it had hit so close to home. But clearly, for all three of us, the hotel manager’s death last week served as an instant reminder of the occasional madness inherent yet largely unseen in covering the world’s lingering “regional conflicts” from the inside.

Some hotels offer welcome drinks, I thought as I checked in at Kabul’s once-elegant Inter-Continental Hotel with two colleagues from Time magazine last week. In Kabul, they offer rockets and death.

We arrived at noon. The rockets had only beaten us by an hour.

Like the two dozen other anti-personnel missiles that pounded Kabul throughout that day and on each day that followed, the Sakr-20 Egyptian-made rocket had been fired blindly from rebel positions just beyond the Pagman Mountains more than 12 miles away. No one knows just what the rebels were actually aiming at. Probably nothing, the experts said. Just Kabul, they said. Anywhere in Kabul.

The hotel manager, a security guard and a hotel driver just happened to be there checking the damage of a previous rocket when this one slammed into the Inter-Continental’s vacant parking lot, killing all three of them.

A few minutes difference, we thought, as our taxi wheeled through the bloodstains still fresh on the parking lot pavement--if our plane had been on time, if the luggage had come a bit sooner at the airport, if the rebels had waited a bit longer before they fired. . . . But the thought only lasted for a moment.

The manager’s name was Najib, and he was a friend. He had taken good care of the foreign journalists who occasionally filled a handful of his 110 decaying hotel rooms during the years since Kabul became a war zone. Najib went out of his way to make life in his embattled city as comfortable for us as possible. It was partly the legendary Afghan hospitality. It was partly pragmatic. We were, after all, Najib’s only guests.

Such relationships between journalists and hoteliers in war-torn cities are neither uncommon nor unimportant. Though largely unseen by the readers and viewers who follow the conflicts from thousands of miles away, they are like islands of compassion and warmth that make it possible to report on the devastation just outside the hotels’ revolving doors.

When Beirut was being pulverized from a paradise into a slum during the 1980s, for example, Youssef, the urbane manager of West Beirut’s Commodore Hotel, was among the most important behind-the-scenes figures for international coverage of Lebanon’s civil war.

Against impossible odds, Youssef made telephone and telex machines work so journalists could file their dispatches. Once he even saved the life of a reporter dying of pneumonia by rushing him to the hospital at 3 a.m. through a shoot-to-kill curfew that left his brand-new Mercedes riddled with bullet holes.

Such was the case with the Kabul Inter-Continental’s Najib, who served simultaneously as post-curfew emergency driver, mechanic, telephone operator, telex magician and occasional news source for the journalists who took refuge in his otherwise ghost hotel. After a funeral, a massacre or a day on the front lines, Najib was there, smiling and reassuring us that as long as there is life, there is hope.

Najib had started as a waiter at the Inter-Continental 21 years ago, during the heady prewar years when Afghanistan’s rugged natural riches drew tens of thousands of tourists. Najib’s establishment was strictly top of the line, the only five-star luxury hotel in Kabul. There was often a wait at the Pamir Supper Club. The Brasserie Coffee Shop was jammed every morning. The Nuristan bar roared with laughter at night. It was impossible to book a tennis court on weekends.

But, when we arrived last week, the entire hotel was, as usual, empty, the tourists long-since driven away by an intractable war that has left more than a million Afghans dead and 5 million others refugees. There was only the handful of employees: the sleepy desk clerks, the old, bearded door guards and bell men and the room boys, who had nothing to do but mourn Najib’s loss and tearfully begin fixing the ballroom windows blown out by the rocket that ended Najib’s career.

“You see what is happening to us. Afghans killing Afghans,” the old door guard we call “Baba” said, shaking his head and wiping a tear. “Every day, there are rockets. Rockets. Rockets. Rockets. And now you see, they come right to our front door.”

Analysts among Kabul’s truncated diplomatic corps say the daily rocket barrages are principally a tool of psychological warfare, a continuing strategy of the U.S.-backed rebels to wear down Kabul’s 2 million residents and ultimately turn them against the leftist regime that has clung desperately to power since the Soviet troop pullout 18 months ago.

Within days of the pullout in 1989, the barrage strategy succeeded in scaring away every Western diplomat based in Kabul, with the Americans taking the lead in declaring that the regime was like “a building without girders.”

But some East European and Asian diplomats have remained behind--two dozen embassies in all, not counting the estimated 500 Soviet diplomats who remain, largely sheltered within the high walls of their sprawling compound. And most of the diplomats here speculated that the recent escalation in rebel rocket attacks on Kabul was timed to coincide with the U.S.-Soviet summit, where the Afghan conflict was discussed.

But, like Najib, a few of those diplomats have gotten a far more intimate view of the strategy than they had wished for in recent weeks.

Just a few days preceding the rocket that crashed into the Inter-Continental parking lot, another, far-more-lethal variety known as a “cluster rocket” interrupted a Saturday afternoon garden party at the home of a United Nations worker here.

It was just after a sweaty game of volleyball, at about 4:30 p.m., that the rocket exploded 50 feet above the party-goers, raining 98 “bomblets” filled with razor-sharp shrapnel on the yard. One piece lodged in the wrist of a top U.N. official here. Another remains just below the right knee of Yugoslavia’s new charge d’affaires in Kabul, despite two operations to remove it.

“It wasn’t until they took me to the hospital that night that I realized the dimensions of the tragedy here,” Velibor Dulovic, the Yugoslav diplomat, recalled one evening over drinks in an embassy surrounded by eight-foot-high sandbagged walls and taped-up windows.

“The Red Cross nurses draped a cardboard sign around my neck with the number 29 on it. That was my place in line for surgery. I waited for an hour along with all of the Afghans who were injured that day. What I remember most is the children. They were injured much worse than I. They were bleeding and obviously in great pain. But, you know, none of them cried. Not once. Not even a whimper.

“Maybe by now they’ve all just grown accustomed to it, to all the pain, to all the killing, to this daily rain of rockets. But I don’t know how. I certainly haven’t.”

Neither did we.

Every morning during our six days in Kabul, the rockets came at dawn like wake-up calls, blasting us into another day of uncertainty. During the day, they crashed randomly into the city at irregular intervals, punctuating interviews, snarling traffic and leaving behind the smell of cordite and the aftertaste of death.

On average, four people died from the rockets each day we were there, and each time we drove into the hotel parking lot, we sunk lower into our seats, glancing anxiously toward the mountains of Pagman. Not even the lively wedding that a brave Afghan family chose to hold in the hotel’s boarded-up ballroom could change the mood. We simply thought to ourselves, “My God, not during a wedding,” as an occasional rocket continued to pound into nearby hilltops.

Finally, six days later, the trip ended for us as it had begun.

As usual, we were stopped at the chain-link gate to Kabul’s international airport by heavily armed Afghan soldiers, who insisted on searching our luggage. We were outside and exposed just 100 yards from the terminal building that is a frequent target of the rebel rockets. We spent five minutes arguing with the soldiers before they let us through.

Five minutes later, as we entered the terminal, a cluster rocket exploded on the very spot where we had been standing with the soldiers, sending them flying along with terrified baggage boys and taxi drivers.

Inside the terminal, as dozens of passengers nervously crouched behind the ticket counters, our government guide turned to us with a long face, and, as he bid us a curt farewell, he said what we were thinking to ourselves.

“Now you know,” he said, “what it is like in a place where one minute is the distance between life and death.”