Customer Reviews

Night Letters: Inside Wartime Afghanistan

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I always used to wonder why Rob Schultheis was obsessed with Afghanistan. He had so much else going for him. The Afghani thing was a little eccentric.
In addition to being a prolific columnist on regional current events, a gifted essayist on diverse topics of environment, culture, adventure, and sport, and the author of a couple of great books, Schultheis is also a long-time friend and champion of the Afghani mujahedin. From the good old days. From the days of the old civil war and the Soviet invasion. Of course after the Russians withdrew, Schultheis remained involved with the plight of the Afghan people as they plunged again into civil war, this time to be quelled by a group so beastly and humorless that they could only be from somewhere else. That’s right. The Taliban.
Of course now we all know who the Taliban are, but last year (and the year before and the year before) when Schultheis was telling us scary things about these deranged religious nuts in Afghanistan called the Taliban, we had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. No one doubted his sincerity, but no one I knew had much sympathy. Who cares about Afghanistan? What can we do? Why is Schultheis obsessed? I knew he had been a war correspondent in Afghanistan in the 80’s and I wrote off his rantings to a nostalgia for the front line.
Now after the events of September 11, I look back on his rantings as a prescient warning, a call for help from Afghanistan. "Something terrible is happening there. Something very terrible." He really was on to something. I wish I knew a way I could reach back and make someone listen, make someone do something.
While a well-told story about the "Afghan war of liberation against the Soviet Empire" would be an enjoyable read any time, it is the timely new introduction that bares its teeth in this book. Therein, Schultheis lays out the timeline and the players involved with the fall of democratic dreams, the rise of the Taliban, the nefarious ethnic cleansing carried out by Osama bin Laden’s crew, the rape, the torture, the destruction of cultural artifacts, the dictatorial edicts outlawing culture itself.

Night Letters begins by accident with Schultheis traveling overland from Europe to India in 1972. His route takes him through Afghanistan. The borders were open then all the way to Kathmandu, and the "road back and forth was crowded with young Westerners, hipsters, pilgrims, vagabonds. Everyone seemed to have a story about Afghanistan: wacky tales of caravans, blind bards, wandering dervishes, horsemen, and gunfire in the night."
The portrait of Afghanistan back then is the most touching part of the book. The past 500 years is palpable on the street, but the bribes you have to give the border guards are quite original and modern. Even though the country was very poor on the UN’s per capita scale, there was "little or none of the squalor or misery usually associated with the third world." Absentee landlords, the "bane of most peasant societies," were largely absent. It had "grandeur, richness." It was, in Robert Byron’s words, "Asia without the inferiority complex."
The mayhem begins immediately, but so do the stunts. There are bombs flying and guards searching luggage, but our protagonists are in disguise and no one seems to notice. They can be hidden under mattresses while their hosts sit upon them, or sent running while someone stays back to cover. It’s an adventure movie. The characters are all likable, strong, affable, humorous, good storytellers. Really, the fun never stops.
Except for the Soviet helicopters– gunships–the MI-24s, and the bombing raids of course. And then there’s the repeated strafing of Automatic-Kalishnikov-47s. The massacres. The atrocities. The betrayals. The privations. The illnesses. Well it really goes on from there.
Night Letters could have been a very different book. There is so much that is grim, so many sorrows and losses that a wallow could easily be made. But somehow the repeated absurdities and pranks carried out by the Afghans and Rob’s comic twist on a great (if gruesome) story keep the mood light and keeps your interest high. I managed to learn quite a bit about Afghanistan that endless hours of CNN coverage could never reveal.
We see the war correspondent (almost) shattered, unable to turn away from the horror and atrocities, unable to get the rest us to listen:
"I felt as if a great secret had been entrusted to me in Afghanistan, but that I had no one to tell it to. I felt estranged, alienated; my old life in America didn’t make sense anymore…. To my surprise I found myself thinking of going back, wanting to go back to the war".

This book provides an unforgettable reading experience. A simple review cannot do it justice, but in this thin volume Mr. Schultheis provides a rich assortment of simply unforgetteable stories. I have never had a book move me to experience so fully anger, pity, sorrow and, remarkably, laughter. The overall feeling I felt after reading this is a respect for the suffering and strength of the people of Afghanistan and a hope that Mr. Schultheis will write more of his Afghan experiences.

Mr. Schultheis' mother, Eugenia Shultheis, is also a great writer of exotic places, and he has learned the family craft well.

Evocative, beautiful, terrible and short. The madness and evil of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, in which the clumsy terror and brutality of the modern totalitarian state meets an ancient yeomen/warrior tradition of independence and honor. Modern, brutal, indiscriminate, and total thuggery versus the mercurial but brave cavalryman/tribal warrior. The miracle is that anything at all (garden, tree, house, family) survives in Afghanistan.

The writer evokes spiritual and social traditions that survive in Afghanistan to this day. Especially, male friendships that seem strangely important to our modern ears but contribute to a heroism that is irrational but ultimately successful in driving out the Russians (at a huge cost). Likewise, the strict code of honor---when our author was abandoned in mountains at night by a treacherous guide, a local leader promptly sought out the offender to kill him.

Rob Schultheis does a great job making you feel the cold, the sore feet, exhaustion and fear while being hunted by armed tribesmen and Soviet airforces inside Afghanistan.

A great book to read on your next plane trip across country. I couldn't put it down and neither have the troopers I work with. It has been passed around so much I doubt I will ever see my copy again.

Rob goes into Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan war, and realizes how plastic and robotic his life is.

There he falls in love with Afghanistan...the people, the land, the animals. Rob goes on to chronicle many parts of the war, from 1984-1987. The really unique piece, was the eye witness accounts of men and figures that I have read about in texts on the war.

This in itself could have carried the book; but he goes on to do more. For those of us sleepwalking through life, many will find this book a breath of fresh air. The book chronicles his many adventures, tales of the absurd, his fear of being killed, his bouts of depression, and the many hilarious situations that can only occur in war-time Afghanistan.

I think Rob found a piece of his soul in Afghanistan and in turn, he allows the reader to witness some of it. I for one, thank Rob for the oppurtunity.

This is one of the best books I've read on Afghanistan since the attacks on New York. It brings alive the area and the people there during the Russian occupation. At times sad, informative, and even funny, it is a highly readable book about Afghanistan.

On the back cover of this book, one reviewer compares this book to Dispatches. I have to agree. This book is a great read about the Soviet Occupation of Afghanistan. The author is a stringer journalist who fell in love with Afghanistan in the early seventies and then went back to cover it during the Soviet War. This book is his personal memories of the war. Not only does this book giving a loving portrait of the country and the people, but is shows the brutal results when a totalitarian, clumsy superpower tries to exert its power over the people.
This is a relatively short book at 150 pages. A reader will find interesting portraits of both the terrain, different tribes, and some of the characters who waged the guerrilla war.
As with all wars, there is death and destruction. The one story I will retain about this book is the sense of honor among the Afghans. The personal story where Rob was left in the mountains to fend for himself because of a mistrusted guide. When Rob finds the town he wanted to go to, the Afghan muj find out about the errant guide and go off to kill him. To the muj, the guide did an evil act by leaving a visitor in the hills and needed to be dispatched.
Overall a great read about the war in Afghanistan in the eighties. Highly recommended.

I've read a dozen or more books on Afghanistan and found this one the most uninformative. It's mostly about the author, not the country or the war against Soviet occupation; a good choice for a "soldiers of fortune" armchair adventure reader who likes accounts of blood, shooting, and "I was there like a hero" stories.

Typical prose: "No one was going to come out of this unscathed, unmarked; we were all going to get it in the end, dead, wounded or damaged in the soul, our love and laughter invisibly poisoned forever." Or this: "It was another nightmare day like the last, but even worse, a rerun of the same fear, fatigue, anguish, only now we were traveling straight toward the advancing enemy. My feet squelched in their own blood, blazing with pain."

For a far better account of the same period -- the Mujahadin fight against the Soviets in the 1980's -- go to Jason Elliot's "An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan", which gives great insights about the people of Afghanistan, the religion, and the war.

In this story of Schultheis' experiences in Afghanistan during the war against the Russians (Shurovee), the reader sees events on a personal level, yet with a national scale. He tells of people and events that were in the news, yet here they are real, normal people. Yet normal by entirely different definitions than Americans or any other people.

The horrors of war are documented but not dwelt on. Schultheis describes the need for some journalists and other observers to "be there, Inside," something most of us cannot even begin to understand. In spite of the pain, fear, and privations -- or perhaps because of them -- these individuals cannot stay away and will work as hard to get there as they do in reporting what they experience.

One of the greatest gifts of this book is the way it subtly drives home how different the Afghan people are from us in the States. From his descriptions and interactions, surely any reader will realize that we have no way of understanding them and their part of the world. Their societies are varied, their mixture of tribes and beliefs is volatile. And their courage and strength are enough to keep them fighting.

This book does not try to document everything about Afghanistan in this time period. Schultheis gives a glimpse of the humanity of the villagers, tribesmen, soldiers, and even a little glimpse of the places that make up Afghanistan. There are several other books on the Taliban that came to power afterward, the plight of women, and the wars that followed. It's an interesting and dangerous place in Night Letters, well worth visiting.

Can those guys with the weird hats and AK's living in the dirt on TV be real? Smiling all the time. Just for the cameras or what? Well, this book is evidence that those TV people really are real. They really do smile all the time. They laugh at stuff that would prove your insanity on this side of the planet. But over there it's really - different - and more real than just about 100% of our lives. And apparently it's not possible to go there just once.