The NISA was a comparatively liberal organization, as things went in Pashtunistan. It attracted former Afghan army officers like the Colonel and other educated people. Their religion was the traditional mild Sufi-influenced Islam of the region. They loved music. Some of the younger guys had tape players on which they listened to Pashto pop songs from Pakistan, but the senior people liked the old ghazals and the old way of hanging out on a Thursday evening for a concert. I would come in from the sheepfold, wash, put on my one good shalwar kameez, wrap my turban neatly, and perform to the beat of the tabla and the plinking drone of the rubab, singing to my audience of rough, violent men about hopeless love and the great cosmic questions of life and death. I guess I became a kind of pet, especially of Colonel Habib’s. He would ask for particular ghazals; I remember he liked the one that goes:

We are bound by life and bound by grief,

It is the same binding cord,

Why should we look to be unbound from sorrow

Before the day of death?

Once I asked the Colonel how long he thought the war would last, and without hesitating he said, “Ten years, just like Vietnam,” and then he had to explain to me what Vietnam was and what had happened there. I got a good strategic education from the Colonel; he spent a lot more time with me than colonels typically spend with shepherd boys.

This connection helped ease my loneliness, because aside from Zorak I didn’t talk to anyone for days on end, and often when I was in the high pastures I didn’t even talk to him. Wazir had more or less dropped me, which is to say he would have given his life gladly to defend me, but he was a fighter and I wasn’t. He’d moved up from bearer and now carried an Enfield-this was maybe in the spring of our second year with the mujahideen command-and he treated me with a condescension I found hard to take.

I was a shepherd for something like two and a half years, the first phase of the Russian war. When I started out I was the coddled, maybe even spoiled, child of a wealthy Lahori family and at the end I was a Pashtun shepherd, tough as the roots of a camel thorn, uncomplaining, rainproof, snowproof, uncaring of the cold or the heat, master of the hills. It was the work that did it, I think. It’s no mystery why shepherds have featured so much in the great religions; being out in all weathers, under nothing but the sky, you can feel the eye of God on you all the time, and also the stupidity of the sheep, the constant worry over what they’re getting into, makes you think you should try your hand at fixing the stupidity of men. That, and the land itself, the bony country of the Pashtun: looming hills, red and tan and black above the evergreen forests, and other colors I can’t name, depending on the light and the season; and the softness of the floodplains, their green more gracious and lovely for the contrast with their setting of flint. The white of the apricot trees in spring, and in early summer the whole valley would be red with poppies, and in their midst you could see from the heights the glittering, braided river. And the air of the place, sharp as glass shards in the winter, like breathing live flame in deep summer, and the nights, ear-hissing silent except for the imbecile moaning of the sheep and the eternal wind in the stunted thornbushes, and overhead a million stars wheeling over the black rim of our canyon.

And I hated the Russians for stepping on my land and I hated anyone who wasn’t us, and a month or so before my thirteenth birthday I got my chance to fight them. I started as a bearer for an RPG team, carrying bags full of rockets and booster tubes. On an ambush, I would hang back a little from the team and hand a rocket and a booster to the loader. The RPG-7 is a terrific weapon and guerrilla warfare would be nearly impossible without it, but it has the disadvantage of being fairly slow to reload and of leaving a trail of blue-gray smoke that points right back to the shooter’s position, which means you have to change position after you fire. But it’s also hard to get a one-shot kill on an armored vehicle at any range and so we always had one team with two RPGs; its leader was Mirzal, our best shot with the weapon, and there was a loader, Bohrum Khan, and now I was a bearer.

“Are you bored yet?” I asked Gloria.

“I’m riveted.”

“Why? I wasn’t riveted when I was doing it. War is pretty boring, especially guerrilla war. Most of it is hanging around and waiting for the other guys to send a convoy through so you can blow it up. And hiding. We did a lot of that.”

“Okay, did you do any heroics? Let’s cut to the chase here.”

“Oh, heroics. The problem with heroics is that it all goes down so fast you can hardly remember what happened. Other people have to tell you what you did, after. Why do you want heroics?”

“Women love heroes; it’s the secret shame of women’s lib. We want our precious eggies to get sprayed by guys who can defend us. And also, you have all these scars on you. Don’t you think I’m curious about how you got them? Surely you’ve been down this road before, the seductive powers of the hero and all.”

“Not a lot. I’m not that experienced with women, to tell the truth.”

“What? I thought soldiers were the horniest creatures on earth.”

“Yes, soldiers, but I wasn’t a soldier, I was a mujahid. A Pashtun mujahid. We didn’t mess with the local women. It would’ve torn the jihad apart.”

“So you were, like, celibate for the whole war? All of you?”

“No. There were plenty of sheep. Some of the big shots had boy harems. Others… well, for example, me and Wazir were an item after I became a fighter.”

“You were gay?”

“That’s the wrong language. I loved him and he loved me and we were warriors together. We shared our blankets. It was part of our war. It’s hard to put in an American frame. He was a terrific person, a terrific fighter, much better than me, a real leader and smart as shit. It was very intense, a kind of love-hate thing going on there too.”

“Because you thought he was smarter than you and a better soldier?”

“No, I admired the hell out of him for that. No, it was my mother at first. She sort of took him under her wing, spent a lot of time with him, and I wanted her for myself. “

“Why was she interested in him?”

“I don’t know. We never talked about it. I was embarrassed, I guess, and she didn’t volunteer anything. She was a very strange woman-is, I mean. They wouldn’t-I mean the family wouldn’t-really let her raise me; I was the eldest son of the eldest son, the heir. I guess that made her want to have someone of her own to form. You would’ve thought that Gul Muhammed would’ve objected, but for some reason he didn’t. They had a funny relationship too, practically never talked, but he would stare at her when she walked by, like she had two heads. I never could figure it out. So then later, because I could sing and knew a lot of poetry, ghazals and Rahman Baba and all that, I became a favorite of the Colonel, and Wazir got crazy jealous.”

“Why, did you do the Colonel too?”

“Of course. He was a great man. It was an honor to be asked. And Wazir found out about it and we had a knock-down drag-out fight and he kicked my ass. That was just before the Tsawkey operation-”

“Wait, what happened to him?”

“Wazir? I don’t know. If he survived the war and the Taliban afterward, he’s still up there. He might even be fighting against us.”

“How come you left?”

“I’ll get to that. Do you want to hear about my heroic deed?”

“After I pee,” she said.

I was still humping rockets for Mirzal and Bohrum Khan. We’d been hitting the outlying posts pretty regularly, shooting them up, killing DRA and stealing weapons, but now the Colonel wanted to take out the main post, which was set up in the two-story brick high school in Tsawkey town. We had about fifty mujahideen, with Kalashnikovs, Enfields, RPGs, and two PK light machine guns. They had a company of Democratic Republic of Afghanistan troops and a few Russian advisers.