A journalist during wartime

American freelance reporter Rob Schultheis’ Night Letters: Inside Wartime Afghanistan is not so much a reportage of life behind the frontlines in Afghanistan during the country’s resistance to the Soviet invaders, as it is a first person testament of the travails of being a journalist during wartime, or how it is to survive in a perilous job in even more perilous circumstances.

Night Letters (Lyons Press, 1992) presents in vivid detail life among the mujahedin for much of the 1980s, during which the partly CIA-sponsored jihad was trying to drive back rampaging Russian forces. Schultheis, in this reprinted 2001 version, writes a new preface that is distinctly post 9/11, and so colors the proceedings in an altogether different light.

He notes rightly that the war that America in part helped the mujahedin win and then abandoned, has now come full circle onto the doorstep of 21st century America, reduced to the rubble of the World Trade Center among other significant deaths fast turning into mere statistics in the global rhetoric against terror.

Schultheis comes from the same breed of new political journalism as the Pole Ryszard Kapucinski (perhaps Cris Yabes’s favorite writer), in that both are gut-wrenchingly lyrical yet with enough sympathy for the devil. Both are aware of the evil omnipresent around them while covering wars and the free-for-all aftermath of crumbling regimes, yet they are able to keep their distance and enough of the objective journalist’s eye.

Schultheis is from a different school as other strangers in a strange land, like PJ O’Rourke and James Fenton, whose writing never lets us forget that they are outsiders and somehow above the craziness of it all.

(In Fenton’s own chronicle of the overthrow of Marcos in EDSA I, there is a passage the authenticity of which is rather suspect – he plays the piano in a newly abandoned Palace, while around him the rest of Manila rioted.)

Well, there are no pianos in Night Letters, rather Schultheis blending with the Afghan crowd, and plenty of rocket-propelled grenades, fighter planes raining death on hapless villagers, a motley group of bearded men in the midst of their jihad against the Soviet invader, and the author trying to make sense of it while still being able to send his dispatches to Time, Mother Jones, etc.

For sure it was a hard, if curious, life. Schultheis relates how he accidentally got to know and fall in love with pre-Taliban Afghanistan while on his way to India to finish his doctoral dissertation. His freelancing for various US-based magazines before the age of the Internet, cyber cafes and real time coverage is in itself a tale worth its vintage retelling, and makes modern-day practitioners of the vocation realize that the convenience of technology can so easily become blasé, and how our tools can change drastically our style of writing because it is directly connected to how we perceive things in increasingly surreal time.

In Night Letters, we get to see all too fleeting glimpses of things we view on CNN or read about in the news wires, about the Khyber Pass and the Tora-Bora mountains, of Peshawar and Kabul and Kandahar, cities in the eye of a constant religious war.

Schultheis never ceases to be amazed by the Afghan people, whom he considers a bit weird but brimming with an enthusiasm and spontaneity that can only do Allah proud. His takes on the various friendships he formed with the guerrillas in their on-the-run existence make us wonder: Was this what Jeffrey Schilling trying to do a version of when he walked into an Abu Sayyaf camp, as if practically asking to be a hostage?

We ponder as well if the jihad has not in fact fallen into a rut or some kind of fixation, since the deaths through the years seemingly become more and more useless, and if the fatwa of our dreams are not merely words laid waste much like the indiscriminate bullets of infidels.

In the papers, too, like fools we read of the escape of a terrorist who must be bent on continuing his holy war, and we can only grimace and pray to God or Allah or the Heavenly Court, or whosoever has the gumption to lend even half an ear, to spare us the violence and rage of a people marginalized both by history and media.

Because of Night Letters’ portrait of the mujahedin, we get to understand more the mindset of the Iraqi spokesman al-Sahhaf, and though his pronouncements may have been hilarious to the conquering armies, they are a lasting inspiration to those who will live to fight another day, for there will always be survivors as long as memory holds true and the invaders fling themselves to die on the gates of Babylon.

Schultheis, too, cannot help but remember and write, write and remember, because there is nothing much a reporter during wartime can do but survive to tell the story, a weird story of our faithlessness and too much trust misplaced in the wrong things, like the use of force and fictional weapons of mass destruction.