Refusal of the Call

“Coward,” The youngest fighter said as he left my workshop. He was the last one out. I shrugged, wiped my forehead, and picked up the hammer, continuing where I left off.

Warrior, warrior,

Choose the hammer, not the sword.

Visions of battles fought years ago flashed through my mind.

Some were as vivid as the day they’d been seared into my memory. I could still feel the grit of sand in my teeth, still smell the sun-baked ground. I’d accepted that those base sensations would never leave me, that when I lay down to sleep and dreamed of charging through a door into another dark room, the taste of the desert would permeate everything. Some dreams seem entirely made of taste.

Other dreams were simpler, maybe just the sound of an AK emptying its magazine, or the bright flash of an RPG round as it slammed into an old Soviet helicopter. Those were too vague to tie to specific memories; I’d seen too many instances of those acts of violence.

A sword may only cleave,

While a hammer may make union.

The soldiers who’d briefly taken shelter in my shop were part of a garrison. They were on “my side,” which was to say, the muhajideen I had fought for decades ago. They were the “lesser of two evils,” to be sure. I hadn’t kept up with their progress, but when I had fought with them, they had mostly left the villages alone.

Not that there hadn't been occasional talk of taking food or water from the poor Tajik and Uzbek urchins working subsistence farms, especially when we were on the run. We were thirsty. We were dying. We could have justified it to ourselves in the moment.

Many of my men deserted when I threatened to finish for them what the Taliban had started. Some of them only had one eye left with which to give me their angry glares, or one remaining hand to point at me in accusation.

The war, for you, will one day end,

A younger pawn will take your place,

And we will harvest the fruits of your mind,

Never again the blood, yours, or the enemy’s.

And now, after too few years away from that mindless morass of terror and slaughter, the forever war had followed me home, carried on the backs of teenagers it had sunk its claws into. They’d eyed the Jamait-e Islami flag on my wall and the broken AK in the corner. I could see the hope return in their eyes, then die again, when they realized I wouldn’t lead them. They’d have to leave as leaderless and desperate as they had arrived.

“Coward,” They’d called me, after they begged me to make them 6, rather than 5. I knew their thoughts; I’d had the same fury for my decrepit, faithless parents when I chose the gun, rather than the plow.

“They’re coming. They’re coming to murder you, steal everything you own and burn down your home.”

“You fought once. You were brave, you were ferocious…what happened to you?”

And I’d abandoned them to their fates with the same cold dismissal.

“Fine. Die here, you tired old beasts of burden.”

And so they had. And so would I.

Hero, you were, and you are.

Human, you are, and you will be.

It was a terrible poem. I had sworn to myself that I’d sit down and work on it, but there was always so much to do. This village, never far from the front lines, always had new holes from bullets, mortars and grenades, and so I was never wanting for work.

“Choose not the sword, but the hammer,” I’d named the poem, promising that I’d rename it later, but judging by the Toyota Hilux pickups charging unopposed down the dusty road to our village, there wouldn’t be a “later.”

“You, there! Come with us!” Shouted a young man with an AK in the bed of one of the pickups. He looked just like the teenagers on “my side,” and had even said the same words, the only difference being that his rifle was pointed at me.

There were others like me in the back of the truck they sat me in. They believed the words of the young guard: that we’d be held in Mazar-i-Sharif until the end of the conflict, then returned to our homes. Then again, maybe they just felt a desperate hope. They had to know that the Shiite Hazaras were the latest of the Taliban’s scapegoats, and there’d be something horrible waiting for us in the city…if that was even where we were going.

War will never end, but you will.

Add to life above the ground;

You’ve added enough to the death below it.

One can only fight so long, before all that remains is the fight itself.

******

Mazar-i-Sharif was the site of a conflict between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban which lasted 15 months. The city was taken over by the Taliban in May of 1997, recaptured by the Northern Alliance, then taken again by the Taliban in August of 1998. Tens of thousands of civilians, including ethnic Hazaras, were killed in some of the worst ways imaginable.

It was one of many regional conflicts fought in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.

Mazar-i-Sharif would be the first city captured by the U.S./Northern Alliance joint assault in November of 2001. It was retaken by the Taliban in 2021.

Dedicated to all those caught in the crossfire of war.

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