Free Soldiers of God by Robert D. Kaplan

remember how dark and muddy it was. Anyway, because of the mud I did a stupid thing. I slid a few centimeters off the path, something I never did before. Then I saw my boot fly up in the air in front of me. It was like I was dreaming. I was wounded fourteen times before, but this time I really felt nothing at first. I tried to take a few more steps, but then the rocks crushed against the exposed bone and nerves of my right foot and suddenly I got dizzy and fell. I told the major behind me that I needed a tourniquet. When he saw the blood pouring out on the snow he started screaming and all the others came. You see, they were all afraid to touch me because I was their commander. We had no doctor or medical supplies. We Afghans are so stupid sometimes.
    “So what did we do? We started arguing. I argued against going back. I said I must write a letter explaining how the operation is to continue without me. But it was difficult to write because it was so dark and cold. I must have been completely delirious.”
    The men made tourniquets out of a turban and tied them above and below his knee. Haq, who weighed over two hundred pounds, was carried piggyback for almost a mile until someone found a horse. Even with help he had trouble putting his good left foot in the stirrup. “By now there was so much blood and it was snowing harder,” Haq said. “All I could think of was how cold I was. On the horse I started vomiting so I hadto get off and be carried again.” Strangely, he recalled, the pain was less vivid than the cold and the nausea.
    Four hours later, Haq was lying on a jute bed in the house of another mujahidin commander in the town of Maidan Shahr (twenty-five miles southwest of Kabul), and the pain was “everywhere.” The guerrillas found a local doctor with some sort of knife, but he had no anesthetic and liquor is prohibited under Islamic law. A piece of bone hanging from what remained of his right foot had to be cut. “When the knife hit the bone, that was a bit difficult for me. Mujahidin rubbed my palms to take my mind off the pain. It didn't help much.” Haq laughed when he told me this.
    Someone took a snapshot of the commander five days later, after he had been transferred to a medical compound in Wardak province run by Médecin du Monde, a Paris-based relief group. Part of his foot had just been amputated by a French-trained Hungarian doctor, a refugee of the 1956 revolution against the Soviets. (This time an anesthetic was available.) In the photograph, Haq is pointing his exposed stump toward the camera and smiling. “Because I knew I lost part of my foot for a logical reason, I felt less depressed,” he said to me. “I pity such people who lose limbs in car accidents and other stupid things.” Haq was lucky. The mine that wounded him was a pressure-pad mine, a powerful antipersonnel weapon that would have blown off his whole leg or killed him if he had stepped on it directly rather than slid down on it at an angle.
    His pain seemed to grow day by day. I rarely saw Haq when he wasn't in some physical discomfort. Always, he would be taking off his Reebok running shoe, fitted with a special plastic shin support, to massage the ball of his foot. I met him for the first time a week after the snapshot was taken. He was drawing deep, wheezing breaths against the pain and sweating in streams. Fie had just been jammed into the back seat of a car, without any drugs, for a three-hour trip to Islamabad in orderto meet with the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel, before being flown to a hospital in Pittsburgh at the U.S. government's expense. There he was to have a second amputation, to remove more bone fragments and damaged nerves. When he got to Pittsburgh he was given painkillers for the first time since his accident.
    I sat in the front seat of the car and asked him how he felt. He was told only a few minutes earlier that I was a journalist who wanted to ask him some questions. He had a huge round head