War Diaries Part III
The War in Afghanistan | 99 Days

Chapter 3: Bread & Bombs

We’re watching squirts of tracer fire out of Kabul. On a television set. In the living room of our rental house in southern Uzbekistan. The same fuzzy nightscope images that you're watching. That the rest of the world is watching. We're probably a bit closer than most--350 miles from Kabul, But world's away compared to some of our colleagues. A handful of souls sleeping in tents on the front lines. Just 40 miles from the outskirts of town. They're drinking local water treated with iodine. Eating dry biscuits. We watch as they do their videophone live shots. Green television phantoms standing on the threshold of war. We admire them. We envy them. We prepare to do our own live hits. From our enclosed courtyard. At the back of our rental house. There's no sounds of anti-aircraft fire from our position. Just a dog. A barking dog. We will be up all night. Telling what we know. Relaying the information we gathered from our little part of this thing. But at dawn, we will crack a beer or two. Sleep in beds. Satisfied in our role, for now. After all, we traveled so far to get here.

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I’m eating a cold M.R.E.

I'm eating a cold pre-packaged military ration known as a meal-ready-to-eat. M.R.E. More specifically, I'm plastic-spooning a gelatinous beef with mushroom entree from a rectangular foil pouch, that looks like a large packet of fast-food salad dressing. I'm doing this while cramped in the back of a Toyota Sentra cruising 80-kilometers an hour on Iranian Highway 20. This road, I read from my Iran Lonely Planet guide (while eating my cold MRE) is also part of the famous Silk Road to China. The overland route, by which traders from the Middle East moved opium into China and silk out. It's less glamorous than it's name. Nothing but rocks and sand for hours. It's also a bit incongruous to me.The circumstances. This ancient historical path on which I'm now traveling. No silk, no opium. Just a spoon, an M.R.E.-- and a directive from NBC's Foreign Desk to catch the first flight to Uzbekistan.

They've pulled the plug on our Iranian operation. We're shipping out. Simple as that. Simple as moving little red push-pins on a global map in an office in Seacacus, New Jersey. Well, not that simple. First we have to drive 12 hours east to west. From
Mashad to Tehran. Across the Silk Road.

We're all a bit down. We had flown to Mashad from Tehran only two days ago. We were fiercely intent on getting a videophone live shot from the Afghan border. Correspondent Jim Maceda straddling the line between eastern Iran and Western Afghanistan. Maybe even a couple of Taliban border guards behind him. We had haggled for a full day with the spooks and bureaucrats at the local office of the Ministry of Culture and Guidance (the government branch that keeps an eye on foreign journalists). Finally, we had the proper permits. Letters of transit. Then we got the phone call. U.S. military planes would use former Soviet air bases in Uzbekistan as a staging point for flights into Afghanistan. It was a hole in our TV news perimeter. The one place in the region NBC didn't have a crew yet. We're it.

As our two-vehicle convoy kicks dust toward Tehran, I ponder the value of our efforts here. Scribble our Iranian output in the best Bridgette Jones Diary I can muster: Ten days, 20 videophone live shots, 240 minutes worth of video tape, 0 interviews with government officials, 1 minor police detention, dozens of meat kabobs eaten, millions of rials spent, 54 units of illicit alcohol consumed. There will be no time to buy dates, caviar or Persian carpets. Aside from our reports, I barely have proof I have even been to this place. But I know what I saw. I know what I will remember. I will remember little things like the dried cranberries in my rice and disturbing things like the outdoor Iran-Iraq War exhibit, complete with with dozens of life-sized mannequins depicting suicide soldiers boarding the buses that will take them to battle, to their deaths. I will think fondly of the spirited Iranian girls from the University, brave enough to speak to us on camera, even though their headmaster told them not to, even though they could be expelled. And I will recall how our hotel manager, Ali, covered the beer we gave him with a sheet of paper, afraid, even in the hotel, of being caught by the religious police.

More on the alcohol. No intention here to defend the substance as some sacred right of man. The choice is sacred. Not the substance. The substance was provided by our driver, Sayid (not his real name). He is a man who knows how to get things in post-Islamic Revolutionary Iran. His business card reads, "25 years experience working with foreign journalists." Poor bastard. Nonetheless, Sayid procures two cases of beer and and four cans of vodka (easier to smuggle in a can, apparently). It is, I believe, a small reward at the end of the day for a crew working 16 hours shifts in a place very far from home. The stockpile costs me $200. But when Sayid unloads it, we're all a bit surprised to note the alcohol level, five percent. More malt liquor than beer. My crew, all Brits, pass politely on the beer. However, Ali (not his real name, either), my local Iranian fixer, does not. And will not for the rest of our trip.

We hire fixers to help us translate, interpret an expedite the process of covering news in a foreign land. Ali seems to do just the opposite. Although I understand only a word or two of Farsi, I can tell by his body language and tone with Iranian bureaucrats, he's blustery when deference is called for and submissive when we're looking for muscle. He's tiny and bald, 110 pounds in boots, smokes Winstons and in a nation, which forbids alcohol, is drunk whenever the opportunity presents itself. His father was a general in the Shah's army. Ali himself, was considered quite a journalist in his day. Sadly, alcohol has turned his day into night, and because of that, we're all in the dark. Babes in Islamabad. Infant infidels. Unable to communicate even our most basic needs without him. We're flailing. We're driving back to Tehran, rather than flying, in part because Ali had passed out when we needed to him make flight reservations with Farsi speaking ticket agents. By the time he sobered up, every flight was booked. He's riding in a separate vehicle, the equipment van, solely for his own protection. If he were any nearer to me, I would strangle him.

This road trip will take us 12 hours. A thousand kilometers. A long time at the craps table of Iranian roads. Iran has the worst accident rate in the world. Two-hundred thousand reported each year. Five-thousand deaths. The right of way belongs to whoever is willing to take it. Which is everyone. We pass the carcass of an old Mercedes, which hit a metal light post in the center median. The grill is folded around it, like an embrace.

We'll finally reach Tehran at midnight. Our flight is 7 AM. After wrestling 60 cases of gear and paying thousands in excess baggage charges, we will lift off. All of our Iranian support staff paid off in crisp Bens and Toms. We'll fly west, over three thousand miles in the opposite direction of our ultimate destination. We will pick up our visas in Frankfurt Main Airport. Then we will hop another flight. We will fly east, three thousand miles back to Tashkent, the capital city Uzbekistan. American Army troops from the 10th Mountain Division in Fort Drum, New York are flying in almost the same time as us. After traveling. on the periphery, we feel now, a little closer to the story.

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Moral Ambiguity in Uzbekistan

It is a small and personal irony, a nuance really, within this sweeping epic. A swift realization soon after arrival here, that when it comes to Uzbekistan, my government and I are using the same playbook. We both have missions to accomplish in this corrupt and gangster-ridden land. We both aim to get them done by starting with cold hard cash. Buying off the locals. The U.S. wants to use air bases in this former Soviet Republic to press its war against terrorism in neighboring Afghanistan. I need a base of operations in southern Uzbekistan to cover them. To that end, we will both do something morally ambiguous. The U.S. will get into bed with a brutal and sleazy regime. I will evict a half-dozen tournament tennis players from the house I want to rent.

Money doesn't talk in Uzbekistan. It shouts. Moments after landing in the capital city of Tashkent, we are already wheeling and dealing with a squat , nasty Boris, the post Soviet capitalist incarnate, to organize a posse to move our equipment out to our waiting mini van and convoy of taxis. Our shooter, Howard, makes a deal for $50 bucks for the lot. Within 30 seconds of seeing the gear, Boris the baggage boss, has his hand out for more cash, although he's yet to lift a piece of luggage. Outside things aren't much better. After passing through the toll gate leaving the airport, our taxi driver motions to the woman in the booth. Then he pulls a worn leather organizer off his dashboard, and tries out this phrase "You would like to have her," he asks?

This is how it works here. How it works in most war frontier towns. High bidder takes all. I've come equipped to play the game. I started this odyssey with two-inch high stacks of hundreds. My bosses know that this is not a world of do-gooders. That sometimes the most unsavory characters are the ones who can get you what you need. But their game is clear, their motives obvious. Sometimes more than ours.

After two hours sleep in Tashkent we hire a truck and mini-van to drive six hours south toward the former Soviet air base, where our sources say, the American troop will land. We're working on rumors and hunches. We have no press passes, no credentials, no letters from the Uzbekistan Ministry of Defense or Foreign Affairs. Our fixer, a student, we'll call Dimitri, is a bit nervous at our cavalier attitude. It was not so long ago that Uzbekistan was a complete and total police state. Now it's softened to merely authoritarian.

In Karshi we're directed to what locals say is the best hotel in town. All the rooms are taken. But the boy at the front desk tells me they also have great house nearby. Too bad, he pauses, that it's filled with eastern European tennis players in town for a tournament. We're all exhausted from three days of continuous travel. I tell the boy that for such a wonderful house, we'd be willing to pay a premium, to help relocate the tennis players to other accommodations. In the back I meet the boss. She stands no more than five feet high and has a mouth full of solid gold teeth. A ubiquitous smile, I've discovered, in Uzibekistan. Her name is Izra. Despite our lack of common language, we get along famously. After some tea she agrees to rent me six bedroom house, a cook and daily laundry service, for $120 per day.

The tennis players look dejected as they move their belongings out, and we move our gear in. I give the boy from the front desk twenty-thousand soumas to bring them over a case of beer at their new location.

Since we're the first NBC presence in Uzbekistan, everyone wants us on the air immediately. But with Howard's camera missing, we have to use a Mini DV-camcorder with the videophone. We set up outside a solid two miles from the base where the Americans are stationed (confirmed by the site of C-17's flying overhead), yet with just minutes to go before we hit air, we're surrounded by nearly two dozen Uzbeki police, soldiers and immigration officers. They want to take us somewhere for questioning, but relent when we pack up our gear, quickly. They tail us for a mile or so, before peeling off. Dimitri and our driver Rustan (not his real name) are visibly shaken and rightfully so. Only then do I begin to think again about the potential consequences for the locals who help us when we parachute into a foreign land. This incident could eventually cost Rustan his license and ability to make living for his wife and two small boys. Dimitri could lose his slot at his University and with it, a promising future. We decide to set up the videophone within the tranquil enclosed courtyard of our new digs. The war begins tomorrow.

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