Before he left, though, Gul Muhammed formally adopted me into his clan and tribe, so I would have protection and be a real person. It was Wazir who convinced him to do it, a big deal among Pashtuns, so now I had two fathers and a brother.

Then he was gone and Wazir and I went to the school and were more or less looked after by the clan. The teacher was a half-deaf old man named Bazgar, and our education consisted entirely of memorizing the Qur’an, in classical Arabic, which none of us understood. I once asked Teacher Bazgar what it meant and he said, “It’s the word of God, that should be enough for you,” and swatted me for insolence.

Then came the endless winter-we huddled around the fires while old men told us stories of former wars and revenges-and after that the spring, wildflowers lighting up the slopes around the camp with color. When the passes and trails were clear of snow, an air of heightened feeling ran through the camp, for now convoys and caravans could be organized, to move supplies and reinforcements north to battle. Gul Muhammed came to see us one night to say farewell. He was armed, dressed for the mountains in boots, a quilted jacket, and a felt Pashtun cap, and carried an immense backpack.

“Why can’t I go with you?” Wazir complained.

“Because I say not,” his father replied. “Stay here and grow strong. This war will last a long time.” Then he gave instructions about what to do if he should be killed, threading through his vast cousinage in succession, with contingencies: if such a one should die, go to that one, if he should die, then the next. With that, he gave us each a rough embrace and was gone into the night.

There were hundreds of similarly deserted children in that camp, yet we were all cared for in the manner of the Pashtuns. Our clan took care of us, and the clans of the others did the same. We formed wild bands, fighting battles in the rocky hills around the camp, practicing ambush, assault, escape. We hung around the mujahideen training grounds, yearning; we hitched rides into Peshawar and strolled the arms bazaars, ogling the wares like boys my own age in the States did in back rooms of magazine stands; pistols were our Penthouse, rifles our Hustler, weapons of all the world’s armies over nearly a century: Mausers, Garands, Tokarevs, Enfields, Nagants, and, prized above all, the Kalashnikov AK-47, drool-making object! The bazaaris complained that prices were plunging disastrously, weapons were flooding in from all over the world; the Saudis were shipping, the Americans, the Pakistanis most of all. But the prices were still too high for boys with no money at all.

Summer, and the camp was a stove, it became unbearable to sit in a hot courtyard and chant suras, so we ditched school entirely. Refugees from the war continued to pour into the camp, and the crowding became insane, all the better accommodations taken by families with young children. We slept under a sheet of plastic propped up by sticks. In July the monsoon rains came, and the whole camp became a steaming mire. We found work building duckboards for a local guy and did that for a couple of months. We were restless and bored, and one day Wazir came to me saying, “I am tired of this life. We are not of the menial tribes, you and I, and this work disgraces us. But listen: there is a convoy leaving tonight. We can sneak onto one of the trucks and by the time they find us it will be too late. We will be in the jihad.”

“But they’ll send us back.”

“They will not. I have spoken with men who have returned. They use Afghan boys just like us for carrying and for lookouts and for spies. We can do the same.”

Wazir cleverly chose a truck loaded with blankets and medical supplies, or we would have frozen to death on the trip over the mountains. The mujahideen organizations supplied their fighters via a skein of caravan trails from their Pakistani bases, always switching routes to avoid patrols. We went north from Peshawar to Chitral and then took the Dorah Pass into Afghanistan, although at the time we had no idea where we were. It was cold. I was a kid from tropical Lahore and didn’t know what cold was until that trip; winter in the camp had been nothing compared to it. We burrowed down in our nest of blankets in a tight embrace and pissed into jars. The convoy had to make several detours into side canyons and wait while patrols from the government army, the DRA, went by. It took us nearly a week to get to our destination, by which time Wazir and I would’ve fought for the Russians, almost, if they had given us something to eat or drink. We’d only brought enough food for a few days.

Anyway, they found us among the blankets when they unloaded our truck, and we got roughed up a little and cursed, and then we were taken to the leader of this particular band of mujahideen, Murad Habib, who was called the Colonel, because he had been one in the old Afghan army, before the communist coup. He looked us over and poked us to see if we were worth keeping as pack animals. Wazir was fairly well built at fourteen but I was a skinny little thing-I probably didn’t weigh over seventy pounds at the time-and they were going to take him and send me back as baggage with the trucks, but Wazir said he wouldn’t leave me and he told our clan lineage to them, and it turned out that the Colonel was a Barakzai just like us and he was distantly related to Gul Muhammed. So it was decided that we could stay with them and wash pots and carry things and dig holes, but if they ever ran into our father they would dump us with him and let him deal with us.

Wazir became a bearer, which meant that at least he went out on ambushes and raids, but I stayed in our village of Gumban and watched the unit’s sheep. We had a flock of several hundred, for meat and milk and sheepskins, and also a herd of donkeys for haulage. The shepherd was Zorak, an older man, formerly a fighter, who had one eye and one leg. The first day he asked me if I wanted to hear how he lost them and naturally I did and he said he had been an RPG gunner and in the midst of a hot fight with a Russian column, he had fired so many rockets that he had fouled the tube of his launcher, and when that happens the tube kicks back when you shoot the next one and the rear sight rips out your eye. I asked him if it had hurt and he said he hadn’t much felt it until later, but the blood had gummed up his other eye and while he was stumbling around in the open, a Russian machine-gunner had blown off his leg.

He was a friendly enough guy for a Pashtun and seemed glad of my company, and after a few unsuccessful attempts he left my young ass alone and resumed the love of sheep. Every day was the same. We both lived in a one-room stone hut at the edge of the village. At dawn we would eat our breakfast of bread and ewe’s milk and, after morning prayer, feed the donkeys and drive the sheep up to pasture on the slopes of the Babur Valley and pray at noon and eat our lunch of bread and dal, then bring the sheep back at dusk, and pray again. When it snowed, we would feed them on hay and sit around the fire and sing songs and tell stories. Zorak knew the usual tales of kings and their clever daughters, of deos and fairies and man-eating devil-women, and I replied with what I could remember of the Arabian nights and Kipling and the plots of films I had seen. He was particularly fond of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. And we sang, to each other at night and to the sheep in their pastures. He knew a lot of traditional Pashto songs, mainly about love, and I responded with renditions of the ghazals I’d heard at Laghari Sahib’s parties. The sheep seemed to like it. Actually, at the time I had a good, clear boy’s voice and Zorak must have said something to someone in authority, because after a while I was invited to the celebrations the unit used to have after successful operations, to sing the ghazals of Ghalib and Mir and Nazir.