The View From Above

A week ago Friday night, I went to Afghanistan. More precisely, I flew over Afghanistan. The U.S. Air Force isn’t allowing journalists on combat missions, but they have been allowing them along on food drops. Which is why I found myself in an oxygen mask looking down at what they told me was Afghanistan through the open back of a C-17 cargo jet. Due to security concerns, I’m not allowed to tell you our exact elevation, but we were extremely high. I wasn’t told our route.

In advance, it seemed to me just another media event. But any glimpse of the U.S. military in action is rare, so my employer, Channel One News, sent me and a correspondent, Janet Choi, on the flight. Somewhere en route, I think I learned something important about our new war, something I hadn’t been looking to find.

My excursion had its basis in the dual nature of this war. Since the beginning of the bombing on Oct. 7, we have been dropping food--President Bush has made clear he wants to show the Muslim world that America’s intent is not just to destroy. And so, every night Air Force C-17s fly the long round-trip from Germany to drop meals.

After attending a fairly grueling high-altitude flight training in Washington, during which we were put in a decompression chamber that mimicked the low-oxygen, low-pressure conditions of flying at 25,000 feet, we flew to Germany, where we reported to Ramstein Air Base. Our day started with a visit to the area where huge cardboard boxes are filled with packets of vegetarian food prepared to comply with Muslim dietary requirements. Each packet contains a day’s nutrition. By the time of our visit, four weeks into the food drops, the Air Force had dropped more than a million packets. If you do the math, that comes out to less than 1% of the food needed by Afghanistan’s more than 6 million starving people during that period.

It is at best a meager gesture--which is exactly what the Northern Alliance has said about our other war effort, the bombing.

This war is different.

I’ve had some experience covering conflicts. For the Public Broadcasting Service, I was in Hungary in 1989 when the Iron Curtain began to crumble and in Ethiopia two years later during a coup. In the past seven years at Channel One, I’ve reported on wars around the world, going to Kashmir twice, Algeria twice, Colombia four times, as well as to Sri Lanka, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Abkhazia. My first time in Afghanistan was for the PBS show “Nova” in 1989. I’ve been twice since.

By the time of my second visit, in 1994, the conflict between rival moujahedeen groups had reduced the country to anarchy. Correspondent Lisa Ling and I needed bodyguards in the town of Jalalabad during daylight, because gangs of armed teenagers controlled every crossroads. One of them threatened to shoot me with a machine gun for not taking his picture. On the outskirts of town, tens of thousands of refugees preferred to take their chances living in tents under United Nations auspices rather than remaining in their homes in Kabul. We interviewed one leader, Abdul Haq, who blamed his country’s plight on the U.S. “America had no problem giving us guns and money,” he said, “or in arming the craziest, most fundamentalist fighters in the war against the Soviets. But they’re not willing to help us bring peace now.” This was the same Haq who, after Sept. 11, was seen by many American policymakers as the best hope to lead a new Afghan government. That hope died two weeks ago, when he was captured and executed by the Taliban. In a final note of irony, his death has prompted allegations of CIA ineptitude and Pakistani duplicity--exactly the things Haq blamed for the current mess.

I returned to Afghanistan in 1997, shortly after the Taliban had taken Kabul. We visited the front--ironically just beyond Bagram air base, where the front is today--and saw the war up close. But we also saw peace. In a country that had been phenomenally dangerous three years earlier, we were able to travel freely without armed escorts. People--or at least men--thronged the streets, no longer fearing for their lives. For the first time in many years, the Taliban had brought calm to much of the country, in part by such simple measures as taking the guns away from the teenagers. It wasn’t hard to see the Taliban’s appeal to the average war-weary Afghan. At the same time, we watched Taliban soldiers use rifle butts to drive away some English-speaking Afghans who’d come up to whisper complaints about the restrictiveness of Taliban rule.

After Sept. 11, we reedited that Channel One footage into an hour-long special for the WB network. Looked at retrospectively, it showed this war coming up on us in slow motion.

But seeing it coming, I have come to realize, doesn’t mean we can see where it is going. And that’s the spooky thing.

Friday afternoon at Ramstein, Choi and I were fitted for oxygen masks and told that the night’s food-drop flight would last 14 or 15 hours. Then we were led into the briefing room where the C-17 flight crews had been going over that night’s missions. The briefing concluded when a military chaplain led a prayer for the safety of all of us.

There were four C-17s going up that night, two to drop food, two on missions that were not explained to us. Our plane had three pilots, two load masters in charge of dropping the food, and two physiologists in charge of making sure that the rest of us did not die of hypoxia when the back door opened over Afghanistan.

Hours passed. Somewhere over the edge of Europe, we had the first of three aerial refuelings. We ate dinner--a boxed Air Force lunch that we’d paid $6 each for. The crew drew pictures and wrote messages on the outside of the 42 giant cardboard boxes that filled most of the cargo bay of the plane. They offered us a chance to write something. It was daunting, like being back in high school, trying to figure out what to write in someone’s yearbook.

An hour and a half before we reached the drop zone, we went on oxygen, to drive some of the nitrogen out of our bodies, thereby reducing the risk of decompression sickness--the bends. At the same time, they gradually dimmed the lights on the plane, because we couldn’t be lit up over Afghanistan. We sat there in the windowless cargo hold, wearing oxygen masks in the dark, unable to converse, waiting to be hit by antiaircraft fire or to reach the drop zone.

Every now and then, the physiologists asked us to give a thumbs up sign to indicate that we didn’t have hypoxia. Every now and then, they wrote our current elevation on a box. In this nightmarish gloom, it seemed we were living a metaphor of this war. As journalists, we didn’t know what was going on around us--and so neither does the public. But the military personnel with us didn’t either.

That’s why this war is different. We all don’t know. And it isn’t the outcome that we don’t know--because conflicts like Vietnam were in doubt early on. We don’t know what our own fate will be--a question that never came up in Vietnam or the Gulf War. For the first time since World War II, we’re engaged in a war that, if we lose, might have a dramatic impact on life inside the United States.

Sitting there in the cargo bay, waiting, I thought of the night before, in Frankfurt. The taxi driver taking us to dinner was pointing out sights and called our attention to the “old” district. “Those buildings look old, but they’re not, of course, because of the bombing.” I couldn’t help but feel guilty, although his voice held no rancor. In World War II, we leveled Frankfurt, as we leveled other German cities, killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. We gave no thought to winning their “hearts and minds,” or to hoping they had enough to eat. We never entertained the notion that perhaps the unfair Treaty of Versailles had given Germans a just grievance against the Allies. It was an odd thing to contemplate while preparing to go on a mission over a “hostile fire zone” to drop food for a people whom we’re careful not to call the enemy. In relative terms, we seem to be fighting a halfhearted war so as not to offend. Maybe that’s what war is now. Or maybe we’re headed for trouble.

When the drop moment came over Afghanistan, the back of the C-17 opened. Outside, it was 50 below zero, but adrenalin kept us warm. The load masters released the constraints, and within a few seconds the boxes surged off into the blackness, carrying down 17,000 meals.

The crew gave Choi a final meal packet to throw off, then the door closed. The interior was quickly repressurized. We took off our oxygen masks. I looked back and saw one of the physiologists dancing. We had survived. The crew gave us sleeping bags to spread out on the now cavernous interior.

Seven hours later, we were back at Ramstein. They told us to watch ourselves for signs of decompression sickness, but we were going home. In the past when I’ve covered wars, getting safely to the airport for the flight back was the point where I could relax. I’d gotten out and was safe. This time it didn’t feel that way. I was going home all right, but I wasn’t leaving the uncertainty and threat behind. It stayed with me during the long wait at Frankfurt International Airport’s security checkpoints. It was still with me when I arrived home to Gov. Gray Davis’ bridge warning and news that the anthrax investigation remained without leads. In that sense, we’re all of us now flying over Afghanistan.