A letter from Kabul

Hugs and bullets

Ottawa Citizen reporter, Mike Blanchfield reflects on his days covering the campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan

Each day in Kabul would start with a warm smile and a question from Safuddin Sayed who had just finished his internship and postponed the start of his career as a medical doctor to work as my interpreter for far more money than physicians in Kabul get paid these days. "How is your health?" Dr. Sayed, 26, would ask.

The men and women who covered the war in Afghanistan hugged each other a lot. None of us found that the least bit odd, either. It likely had something to do with the fact that eight of our colleagues had been killed covering the war.

On the morning of Dec. 2, Dr. Sayed found me curled up in my very warm U.S. Army sleeping bag (I'd lucked out in a market in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, several weeks earlier). "My health isn't so good," I moaned. Seizing upon this opportunity to practice both of his current professions simultaneously, Dr. Sayed enthusiastically offered to prescribe me various medications and to take my temperature.

I had been up for six hours the night before fighting a bug that made my stomach feel like it was being ripped apart by an army of rats. I was halfway through what was then my second trip to Afghanistan in less than a month when the inevitable happened: I got sick. I probably caught it from my German colleague, Jurgen Heinz, who suffered similar fate the previous night.

He was reporter for the German press agency DPA, who I had worked with for the previous week. I got sick during Jurgen's last night in Kabul. With our driver and fixer, we had a dinner and said goodbye with a round of hugs. That contact is probably how the bug got me.

The men and women who covered the war in Afghanistan hugged each other a lot. None of us found that the least bit odd, either. It likely had something to do with the fact that eight of our colleagues had been killed covering the war. Being violently ill in a cave-like hotel room, with no running water, no seat on the toilet, and no heat in a climate that now dipped below freezing at night did not, in all honesty, seem so bad compared with being shot at or shelled.

A few days earlier, Larry Kaplow of Cox News Service and I spotted each other across a crowded room at the drafty and broken-down Inter-Continental hotel after a UN press conference.

"Larry?"
"Hey!"
We hugged.
No one, besides us, seemed to notice or care.

"How do you guys know each other?" asked Radio Canada's Manon Globinsky, who I had hugged a few days earlier when I met her in the lobby of the same hotel. Larry and I covered the war in Kosovo together two years earlier in much the same way Jurgen and I did. As two non-competing reporters, we roamed post-war Kosovo, discovering the carnage of grisly killing fields and trying to make sense of it all for our readers in the United States and Canada.

Such arrangements are common in war zones, especially among print reporters who — unlike television crews — are forced to travel alone without a team from their organization. Print reporters — the smart ones — form their own teams. You learn the best there is to learn from your teammates, and you offer the best you have in return. You share an unspoken commitment to watch each other's backs.

The hug I almost regretted the most was the one I shared with Levon Sevunts, my friend and colleague with the Gazette in Montreal. On November 2, after being in northern Afghanistan barely a week, I was ordered out by my editors. They were "re-deploying" and the plan was to leave Levon in Afghanistan and for me to swing over to Pakistan.

Levon, a former Soviet soldier who immigrated to Canada in the early 1990s, became a good friend of mine in our short time living and working together in northern Afghanistan, an otherworldly lunar landscape with neither electricity nor running water. Northern Afghanistan looked like Luke Skywalker's home planet with pick-up trucks instead of landspeeders.

A short time later, four more journalists were killed in an ambush on the road from Kabul to Jalalabad. I was poised to make that same journey when my office called and told me to put on the brakes.

Levon and I traveled to the front lines together by horseback — an exhilarating, saddle-free ride across a Big Sky vista. We dove for cover together when a Taliban shell whizzed over our heads, sparking a round of sidesplitting laughter from our Northern Alliance bunker mates. The shell landed a few hundred meters behind us, but it even fooled Levon, who had been in under fire as a Soviet soldier.

Levon invited me to his home in Montreal for some of his wife's fine Armenian home cooking. As we hugged goodbye, I told him I expected to see him in one piece for dinner in a few weeks.

Several days later, I got a call in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, from my editor Aileen McCabe informing me that Levon was missing in action, that the convoy of journalists he had been travelling with had been attacked. I was asked — no, actually, ordered — to buttonhole every foreign journalist I knew staying in my hotel for information on the convoy attack. No one knew anything, but with their faces betraying heartfelt concern, they promised to inform their desks and have their Afghanistan staffers telephone me if they learned anything.

Like my editors back home, I went to bed that night not knowing whether my friend was alive or dead. I cursed myself for the hubris of my parting remark, wondering in one moment of light panic if I'd somehow jinxed him. I prayed very hard that night. My prayers were answered. Levon lived. He narrowly escaped death in a Taliban ambush near the area we first travelled; three other journalists were killed. The story of how he accompanied the body of murdered French radio reporter Johanne Sutton out of Afghanistan is now well known.

A short time later, four more journalists were killed in an ambush on the road from Kabul to Jalalabad. I was poised to make that same journey when my office called and told me to put on the brakes. After Levon was nearly killed, I had been told I would not be going back to Afghanistan. Another editor, Randy Newell, said our company had banned all staff from travelling there.

The next day, he called back to say that an exception had been made: for me. By this point, I had classified my assignment to Central Asia like this: don't volunteer for anything, but don't say no, either. As a human being very much in love with his own life, I reserved the right to say no at any moment, but my instinct told me to go. The office sprung for the $2,500 US for a seat on the United Nations charter. "You're not allowed leave Kabul," my senior editor Peter Robb informed me. That suited me fine. There were plenty of stories in Kabul, anyway.

The city that awaited me was a thriving Third World metropolis by day and a silent ghost town after dark. A 10 p.m. curfew was strictly enforced, and the one night I violated it, my driver and I found ourselves staring down the barrel of Kalishnikov being wielded by a teenaged sentry who handled his weapon with the same swagger as American rock 'n roll legend Chuck Berry slung his guitar. A few days later, I was flat on my back with food poisoning. I'd just filed 1,200 words when it hit. After spending most of the following day on my back, I managed to crank out another 500.

The bug passed through my system, and I finished my second week in Kabul unscathed. I felt it was too early to leave, but the UN flights were filling up fast, and I ran the risk of spending Christmas in Afghanistan. I had already been in Central Asia since early October. I was running out of gas, and I wasn't sure how much luck I had left.

As our plane touched down 100 painless minutes after lifting off from the desolate, burned-out Bagram air base north of Kabul, I turned to the guy across the aisle, a Canadian producer with the BBC whose name I can't remember, and said: "I never thought I'd be so happy to see Islamabad." "No kidding," he laughed.

We stepped out on to tarmac, exhausted, under the brilliant sunshine and a much warmer 25 C, and walked slowly towards the terminal building. I considered hugging the ground.

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Mike Blanchfield is an Ottawa Citizen reporter who works in the Southam News Parliamentary bureau. He covered the aftermath of the September 11 attacks from Halifax, N.S., Portland, Me., Boston, Washington, New York City, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, and northern and central Afghanistan.