J. Malcolm Garcia - Most Dangerous, Most Unmerciful: Stories from Afghanistan

MOST DANGEROUS,
MOST UNMERCIFUL

STORIES FROM AFGHANISTAN

J. MALCOLM GARCIA

SEVEN STORIES PRESS

NEW YORK OAKLAND LONDON

Copyright 2022 by J. Malcolm Garcia

All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any
form or by any means, including mechanical, electronic,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the
prior written permission of the publisher.

SEVEN STORIES PRESS
140 Watts Street
New York, NY 10013
www.sevenstories.com

College professors and high school and middle school teachers
may order free examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles.
Visit https://www.sevenstories.com/pg/resources-academics
or email academics@sevenstories.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Garcia, J. Malcolm, 1957- author.
Title: Most dangerous, most unmerciful : Afghanistan stories / J. Malcolm
Garcia.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Seven Stories Press, [2022]
Identifiers: LCCN 2021047334 | ISBN 9781644212035 (Hardcover) | ISBN
9781644212042 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Afghan War, 2001-2021. | Afghanistan--Social life and
customs--21st century. | Afghanistan--Social conditions--21st century.
Classification: LCC DS371.413 .G47 2022 | DDC 958.104/7--dc23/eng/20220314
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021047334

These stories first appeared, some in different versions, in Alaska Quarterly Review (Mothers House); bioStories (Farmer by Day); Fourth Genre (In Those Days); Guernica: A Magazine of Art & Politics (Book Lady, Old Guns); Huck (Weight of the World); Latterly Magazine (Grave Digger); The Massachusetts Review (All That Is Yet to Come, Displaced Persons); New Letters (Animal Rescue); Tampa Review (Feral Children); VICE Magazine (A Mercy Killing, Fire in the Hole, Weather Did Not Destroy This House); The Virginia Quarterly Review (Most Dangerous, Most Unmerciful); and War, Literature & the Arts (Maybe One Day).

Some names were changed for privacy.

Printed in the USA.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For David Littlejohn

19372015

Only the dead have
seen the end of war.

PLATO

CONTENTS

NOT THE WEATHER

The man beside me drops a pill in his mouth and swallows it with a sip of green tea, and together, from beneath a thin angle of shade, we stare out at the dirt road and beyond it to the smog-heavy skyline of Kabul. The stony ground beneath our feet stinks of dried dung. Chickens scramble around us and flies dart above our heads.

Your hotel? the man asks me and raises his chin toward Kabul.

Yes, Im staying there.

He nods, says nothing further. A boy urges some cows forward and they pass us wide-eyed and lumbering, their heads lethargically thrusting back and forth with each step forward.

This morning, I woke up and decided to take a bus out of Kabul. Any bus to the first village it stopped at, just to leave the city. Its congested streets and thick layers of smog had begun to bear down on me like a weight. I needed a break from what in my mind was a boomtown in the midst of war.

Near my hotel, the Hazim Supermarket sells washing machines when just months ago it sold only laundry buckets. An Italian restaurant will open soon in a local hotel two doors down from a new Chinese restaurant. International aid organizations pay up to $10,000 a month for housing.

After making several stops in the city, the bus I boarded drove into the village of Bini Sar. I got off and saw a man brewing tea in a kettle over a pile of smoking coals beneath a tree. Behind him stood a closed shop. Other men sat nearby smoking. I offered the man brewing tea a dollar. He waved my money away and poured me a cup. I sat beside him. From an envelope, he shook a pill into his hand and reached for his tea. I drank from my cup and looked out on the road.

English?

American, I tell him. Journalist.

He nods, tells me his name, Nasir. He says he had worked as a translator for American troops in Helmand Province south of Kandahar. He quit two months ago when an Afghan soldier on patrol with American forces stepped on an IED. He heard the explosion and ran over and saw the body lying crookedly on the ground and the blood and torn pieces of flesh like chipped paint strewn about.

Two days later he could still hear the explosion, still see the dead man and the blood and body parts. So he left and returned home to Bini Sar. He continues to hear the explosion, see the body. He takes tablets for depression. He shakes some pills into his hand and shows them to me and then puts them back in the envelope and his pocket. Later in the morning, he will open the shop behind him. He repairs hunting rifles and sells petrol.

More tea?

No, thank you, I tell him and slap at flies collecting above my head.

Most mornings, Nasir wakes up, makes tea, and drinks it with other merchants. Then he changes clothes, opens his shop. He organizes the guns that need to be repaired and inspects his gas pump. At night, he returns home and sits with his wife and five children. They eat dinner. The sky darkens, the day concludes. They sleep. There is nothing more to do. He feels he is wasting his time with his shop but he cant find other work.

Does he know what will happen in our country when the Americans leave? a vendor asks Nasir and raises his chin at me. Nasir translates.

I dont know what he knows, he says.

He takes an apricot from his pocket, splits it open, and tosses the pit into the road. We watch it bounce through the wheel spokes of a cart harnessed to a donkey. Flies buzzing in clouds above the animals head break apart and swarm the pit.

Nasir tells me that as a translator he earned about eight hundred a month. The American soldiers he worked with were involved in mountain fighting. The Taliban would shoot down at them and the Americans would move to the side of the mountain and crouch down seeking cover. Rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, IEDs set beneath bridges. It was very loud. The noise would thrust Nasir backward. The Pakistan Taliban always attacked American and Afghan forces. The Pakistan Taliban trained the Afghan Taliban to fight.

During combat, American soldiers yelled a lot. They seemed very scared. For Afghan soldiers, combat was like a game. After all, the country has been fighting wars since 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded. Then the Soviets left in 1989 and civil war followed and after that the Taliban. For a while, it seemed the fighting would stop when the Americans invaded a month after September 11th and toppled the Taliban, but then as the years passed the war dragged on and the US began seeking a way out and the Taliban became strong again and the fighting continued.

Do you want a biscuit with your tea?

No, thank you.

One time in Nuristan Province two Afghan soldiers were blown to pieces, Nasir says. He thanks god he did not see this. They were put in coffins and taken to their families. The families were given nine hundred seventy dollars apiece and enough food for three days of mourning and no more.

Sometimes when there was no fighting, American soldiers wearing only shorts and T-shirts would visit with Afghan soldiers. The Afghans had to explain that for a man to show so much of himself was a violation of their culture and they would ask the Americans to leave.

Nasir worries that life will become difficult when the Americans withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014. There are places the Afghan army cant reach but the Americans can with their planes and helicopters. You cant do anything without air support, he says.