The Rigors of Life at the Front

The U.S. fighter jets came early on Thursday, filling the midday sky over the front lines just north of Kabul with an angry roar, only to leave 20 minutes later without launching a single attack.

The rasp of jet noise brought Brother Gul to a second-floor machine-gun post, where he propped one foot on a ledge of dried mud and stared at the Taliban lines just 250 yards away.

“No bombs,” Gul, a soldier with the opposition Northern Alliance, said, shaking his head with an exasperated smile as the jets disappeared. Then the only sounds were the lazy buzzing of flies and wasps, and a dry wind that stirred the dust. Gul went back downstairs to finish his lunch.

A few minutes later, two alliance soldiers walked back toward their farmhouse camp from the direction of the Taliban lines, one with an AK-47 assault rifle balanced on his shoulder, the other stopping every several yards to crouch down and set fire to low-lying brush to clear the abandoned field.

It was the fifth straight day of U.S.-led airstrikes along the front lines north of the Afghan capital, and for the anti-Taliban fighters, the pace of the war was painfully slow.

The bombing has already taken on a predictable rhythm, with the main airstrikes beginning about 3 p.m. or 4 p.m. daily and lasting until sunset.

So the Northern Alliance soldiers at this front-line post, code-named Mahadi, lounged around for most of Thursday morning and lingered over a lunch of boiled mutton pieces, chopped with an ax.

A few retired to the second-floor machine-gun post, where a soldier pulled out a small chunk of hashish and crumbled some into the palm of his hand for rolling. After almost 23 years of war, hash is essential medicine for surviving front-line life, just as Valium and Prozac are to millions succumbing to the stresses of the industrialized world.

About nine Northern Alliance soldiers are stationed at the Mahadi post, which overlooks a fuel storage site next to the Soviet-built Bagram air base. They do 10-day stints at Mahadi, with 10-day breaks in the nearby town of Charikar.

Gul, 24, is a quiet man with pensive green eyes who joined the holy war against the Soviets when he was 13. It was 1989, the last year of Soviet occupation, and he saw a lot of heavy, low-level airstrikes. These days, he usually has to squint to make out the U.S. F/A-18 Hornets as they drop single bombs here and there.

“Everyone thinks about his own life and wants to save it,” Gul said. “That’s why they come here and fly so high. But that makes it harder for them to get a good idea of where our lines and where the Taliban’s lines are. They must come lower.”

One did just that later in the day, diving toward a hilltop Taliban position at Tota Khil, about 15 miles north of Kabul, about 5:15 p.m. A bomb or missile scored a direct hit on what the opposition soldiers said was a tank, which flickered at first in the twilight and then began to burn as white as a star as the fire intensified.

Gul and the other Northern Alliance soldiers watching from the farmhouse rooftop broke into a smattering of applause. They were a very tough audience. The night before, the fighter jets dropped two bombs nearby, one a miss that fell on the Northern Alliance’s side of the front lines.

It isn’t an easy life here at the Mahadi post. The pay is lousy: the equivalent of $12.50 a month. The soldiers often go two or three months without getting paid. They don’t have uniforms, and at least two of them share a pair of shoes.

The men want the war to end, but it’s the only living they have.

Two of the men lost legs to land mines but keep on fighting anyway. Merza Khan, 40, had his leg blown off by a land mine 12 years ago during a moujahedeen attack on a Soviet barracks not far from where he defends the alliance’s front lines now.

“It’s simple for me to fight, except on days like this when a [knee] bolt comes loose,” Khan said, grinning. “I can’t run very fast.”

Khan has five children, ages 7 to 12, and he is old to be a front-line soldier. But he doesn’t want to think of retiring.

“I’m fighting till the end of my life, to defend my country and my people,” he said, still smiling.

Khan’s comrade Abdul Zahir lost his left leg to a land mine while battling the Taliban regime’s troops three years ago at the village of Karabakh, less than two miles from the Mahadi post.

His leg was amputated well above the knee, and Zahir said he hasn’t been able to find a prosthetic leg that fits. He walks with crutches instead and carries his AK-47 assault rifle slung over his shoulder.

The gray plastic crutch handles have two labels: ICRC, for the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Kabul--as in, the city he hopes to enter as a conquering soldier. He’s been wounded six times in his soldiering years, and he isn’t ready to surrender yet.

To fire his rifle, he flips out the stump of his left leg and rests it on one crutch. He braces himself with the other crutch, and then holds his Kalashnikov with his right hand, perfectly level with the ground.

The three extra banana-shaped cartridges that Zahir carries in a green web belt strapped to his back leave no doubt that he is ready for battle. Watching the few U.S. warplanes in action over the front lines each day amuses him.

“About 40 Russian jets used to come and bomb us at once,” he said. “This fighting seems funny to us.”

After Zahir finished pointing out the five bullet scars on his neck, back, shoulder and hand, some jets returned and quickly left about 3:15 p.m., around the regular time for the daily bombing runs to begin.

With an almost predictable bombing schedule, what do the Taliban troops usually do as zero hour approaches, a visitor asked. Zahir was about to answer when an 82-millimeter mortar shell howled in from Taliban lines and exploded about 90 yards from the Mahadi post.

“They go back to their hiding places,” Zahir replied, deadpan.

Mohammed Haider immediately got on his walkie-talkie and contacted another alliance unit close to the blast.

“Kharasan, Kharasan,” he repeated, calling that post’s code name. “What’s happening on your side? Is everything OK?”

After a couple of minutes of anxious silence, a voice came back: “Salaam aleikum [peace be with you]. Nothing is wrong. Everything is quiet.”

The soldiers’ chitchat changed again, and Khan began to dream out loud about what Afghanistan will be like when the fighting is finally over.

“America will build up Afghanistan beautifully,” he said.

“It is impossible to make it beautiful again,” another soldier grumbled as he headed out onto the roof to watch some more of the air war.

About 25 minutes after the bombing runs, a Taliban tank opened fire near the village of Aster Gache, and the Northern Alliance returned tank fire in a duel that lasted about 20 minutes, until the jets returned again.

This time the jets struck targets on the other side of the Shomali plain, and soldiers watching said a few of at least five bombs appeared to be direct hits on Taliban camps, including one where, they said, Arab fighters in Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network were based.

Seconds after the jets disappeared again about 5:25 p.m., a frantic voice came over the walkie-talkie from the Taliban lines.

The man had what sounded like a Pakistani accent, and the soldiers at Mahadi post said he was speaking broken Persian. He was also out of breath.

He made scatological remarks about the alliance soldiers’ mothers and sisters, which an interpreter refused to translate into English. They were not words he would like to repeat, the interpreter said, and then translated the rest.

“If God doesn’t get rid of the Taliban, America can’t do anything,” the voice from the Taliban lines said.