ENTRIES IN THIS SECTION WILL BE AVAILABLE SHORTLY...keep watching
I knew we were gonna need more mobility, so I talked to Mustafa and he made a call to a local rental car agency. About an hour later, off we went to pick up the car, what looked to be a pretty new Mercedes.
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We had decided to go out to eat tonight, and set out walking to a cafe a couple blocks from the apartment.
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I may not have realized at the time, when I selected the name for this book, just how prophetic that name would become...although I think that maybe something inside me sensed it.
Think of it.
You are born into, and raised in, a country. It's YOUR country. YOUR homeland. Your people...and not since LONG before you were born has that homeland been virtually at peace.
War-torn and ravaged for generations. The scene of endless slaughter, of death, of massive injury to property and human lives.
Endless or seemingly so, divisions amongst its people. Factions. Sunni vs Shiite, Arabs vs Persians. Kurds, Pashtun. Split on religious differences, split along ethnic lines. Warring over territory and power disputes over things like drug-running.
The Taliban, Al Qaeda, and on and on and on. ALL warring with each other, all warring AGAINST the national government, and the people of Afghanistan are but chess pieces in a game with the ultimate goal the ultimate take-over of the entire country or at least regions of it.
Then there is the foreign intervention. The Brits, the Russians, now the American presence.
Add to all that the fact that the national government based in the capital is notoriously corrupt. Perhaps not every government official but enough to make the entire government pretty dysfunctional and certainly suspect.
AND, into the middle of ALL this comes a young journalist. Bright, talented, very caring, trained. Zealous and determined to tell the story of what he sees happening all around him. & TELL HE DOES.
Brilliantly, and at great personal risk...until...
All the horror, the chaos, the death and destruction, finally takes its toll.
Struggling with and suffering the effects of PTSD, this brave young journalist continues to ply his craft, even while bullets whiz over his head. He is shot, he is stalked. Hacked, and still he perserveres...
UNTIL...
one day he happens to miss a flight back to his hometown. A flight to take him back to his family and a couple weeks of peace, hopefully. But he does the one thing he has never done before. He misses the flight, and good thing too. Cause if he had been on that flight, surely he would have gotten home and walked smack dab into the middle of a massive car-bombing that killed dozens and wounded dozens more.
His brother walked out to see the bodies strewn about the streets like so many toy men tossed about by children at play. Except the only children in this scenario were either dead or injured and this was NOT playtime but deadly serious.
Our brave young journalist lost five personal friends that day, people he had gone to school with...and there were others too. Later he went to the funeral home and saw the remains, which according to him were awful to see. Some weren't even recognizable, so mutilated by the effects of the bomb.
How would YOU like to BE that young journalist?
Can you even imagine bearing up under that kind of stress? Pain? Grief?
I have felt his pain, seemingly every inch and every minute of it, even though I wasn't hearing from him directly through most of it. I have known it and felt it, without even knowing how I did. Didn't matter how, and that pain he is feeling I feel, somehow. That hurt and anguish is cutting me to the bone even as I write this, like a laser beam.
I FEEL for my Mate. Feel, and ache, and hurt. Without even really knowing why, but again the why doesn't matter. I know my mate needs a friend and I intend to be one. I know he needs a sympathetic ear and he has one. Maybe he needs a place of refuge, and he has that too, for that is what friends are for.
I can't go to him as I have done in the book. He probably can't come here either, to get away from all that he is going through. But whatever else I can do to be there for him and try at least to ease whatever pain and conflict is going on inside him, I will do. For as long as it takes.
Again, THAT is what friends are for.
Wouldn't YOU?
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