Ghosts in the Mountains: The Soviet-Afghan War – Part 2
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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it. Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcast Network, and as always, I'm your host, Zach Cornwell. You are listening to part two of a multi-part series on the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, which

which took place from 1979 to 1989. Now, if you haven't listened to part one yet, it would probably be a good idea to go ahead and do that before diving into this one. But hey, you're an adult. If you want to eat flaming hot Cheetos for breakfast or listen to history podcasts in a random order, that is your decision, and I respect it. But just in case you need a refresher on what the hell happened last time, let's take a quick second to run through the highlight reel.

When we last left off, Soviet tanks were rumbling into the Afghan capital of Kabul, just a few days after Christmas 1979. The brutal communist leader of Afghanistan, Hafizullah Amin, was dead. An elite team of Soviet special forces, the infamous Spetsnaz, had murdered Amin in the night. And the truth was, the assassination had been a long time coming. Amin may have been a fellow Marxist, but he was a loose cannon –

And the Kremlin had grown tired of his incompetent and bloodthirsty style. Since their takeover of Afghanistan's government in 1978, Amin and his fellow homegrown communists had managed to provoke a full-scale insurgency in the countryside, mainly by enraging the rural, conservative Islamic majority with socialist reforms at the point of a gun. As many as 50,000 Afghans were murdered by Amin's government in an effort to make the changes stick.

But to no avail. Land reform, equal rights for women, and compulsory atheist education programs had given rise to the Mujahideen, soldiers of God, who vowed to topple the Afghan communist government at any cost, even if it took them a thousand years to do it.

Back in Moscow, the hawks and the doves bickered over the best course of action, but eventually the hawks gained the upper hand. Afghanistan was way too valuable of a Cold War chess piece to surrender without a fight, they argued. The leader of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, emphatically agreed. So on December 12th of that year, the Soviet Union decided to kill Amin, invade Afghanistan, and prop up a new, more compliant regime.

Two weeks later, the invasion began with the spectacular raid on Amin's palace and the systematic seizure of strategic objectives throughout Afghanistan. As New Year's Eve of 1979 became New Year's Day 1980, the Soviets believed the country was firmly in their grasp. And they did not expect to stay very long. They would be there, at most, six months. Just long enough to help the new government find its footing and put down the Mujahideen guerrillas in the mountains. It was

It was going to be easy, annoying, inconvenient, but easy. Well, reality unfolded very differently. The Soviet army would not leave Afghanistan for another nine years. From 1979 to 1989 they would find themselves ensnared in a geopolitical bear trap that they were not prepared for in any way, shape, or form. But at the end of the day it was the ordinary people, everyday Afghans, who would pay the ultimate price.

Today's episode is going to be much longer and much less linear than part one. Because honestly, the Soviet-Afghan war is not really a linear conflict in the sense that there are no big decisive battles that help propel the story forward. There's no Stalingrad or D-Day. There's no Waterloo or Culloden. There's no Agincourt or Hastings or Kenney. It's just two sides bleeding each other physically, psychologically, spiritually.

It's a slow, painful arm wrestling match that kind of sways back and forth over a decade. And honestly, I'm not all that interested in focusing on the red arrows zigging and zagging across topographic maps, troop movements, offensives and counteroffensives, all that kind of stuff. I mean, as interesting as that stuff can be on the page, it could also make for some pretty lousy podcast listening. This episode is about people. Good people, bad people, ordinary people, the people who fought, died,

Welcome to episode 25, Ghosts in the Mountains.

The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, Part 2. It's March 1980. All across America, young men and women are training for the greatest physical challenge

of their lives they came from big cities like philadelphia and small towns like white haven florida they were all young hungry and at the absolute peak of their physical prowess in the spring of 1980 the athletes of team usa were preparing for the summer olympic games in moscow in just a handful of months they would journey into the heart of the soviet union to represent their country in front of the entire world it would be the culmination of years and years of arduous training

a thousand excruciating hours of pain, sweat, doubt, and self-discipline. As a gymnastics champion named Ron Gallimore remembered, quote, End quote.

The games were especially important to a young basketball player named Carol Blazejowski. Carol had tried and failed to qualify for the team in 1976, but in 1980, she made the cut. And when she saw her name on the list for Team USA, it was a dream come true. This was her time, and she was confident she would medal in Moscow. Quote, By that time, my game had really matured as one of the best players in the country, if not the world.

It was captain of the USA team. Everything was humming pretty good." End quote. 458 American men and women from Portland to Puerto Rico were set to compete in the 1980 Summer Games, but when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December of 1979, everything changed. Four months of uncertainty and anxiety passed. How would America respond to the Soviets' occupation of a sovereign nation? Would we still go to the Olympics? What would happen now?

Well, that spring, it became abundantly clear. On March 21st, 1980, the President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, addressed a packed room in the White House. Quote, The Olympics are important to the Soviet Union. They have made massive investments in buildings, equipment, propaganda.

As has probably already been pointed out to you, they have passed out hundreds of thousands of copies of an official Soviet document saying that the decision of the world community to hold the Olympics in Moscow is an acknowledgement of approval of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union and proof to the world that the Soviets' policy results in international peace. I can't say at this moment what other nations will not go to the Summer Olympics in Moscow, but ours will not go. I say that not with any equivocation.

The decision has been made. End quote. In the space of a single press conference, the lifelong ambitions of 458 world-class athletes evaporated. A champion wrestler named Gene Mills remembered decades later, quote, Basically, he crushed my dreams. At the time, it felt like he had crushed my life.

End quote. For Gene and dozens like him, 1980 had been the year. The brief window when their exhaustively trained bodies could be expected to perform at a level that might earn them a medal. And now, they weren't going. Just like that, their big chance was gone. Probably forever. As journalist Henry Bushnell writes, quote, "'Dozens of them, world-class competitors who'd circled July 19th on calendars, who'd been told four years earlier 1980 would be their moment.'

who'd slept on basement floors and quit jobs, who'd deferred school and delayed marriages, who'd endured abuse and broken records and pushed their bodies to untold limits for hours every day with one irreplicable goal, never participated in sports again. End quote. For President Jimmy Carter, the decision had been an agonizing one, but the thinking behind it was clearly laid out by a domestic policy advisor named Stuart Eisenstadt. Quote, There was one other thing that was in the back of our minds.

It was never really clearly enunciated, but it was always there. And certainly for me it was. And that is what happened in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, hosted by Adolf Hitler. We let Hitler basically tell us we couldn't have Jews on the team. Jesse Owens, an African American who won several track and field events, was not given a gold medal by him because of his racist policies. And Hitler got a great public relations boon out of those Olympic Games.

The president didn't want the same thing to happen here. He didn't want the Soviets to be able, while they were invading another country and fighting a war with 85,000 troops, to get the public relations benefit by showcasing these Olympics to demonstrate how great the Soviet Union was.

End quote. Well, that all sounds well and good and logical, but it was cold comfort to the hundreds of athletes who'd lost their shot at glory. And Team USA was not alone. Canada, West Germany, and Japan joined the United States in their boycott of the 1980 Summer Games. For the Soviets, it was a stinging, if somewhat expected, rebuke. But as irritating as the Carter-led Olympic boycott was, Leonid Brezhnev and his glorified sewing circle back in Moscow had more pressing concerns.

And the source of those concerns was a place that very few Americans, or Russians for that matter, could have even pointed out on a map. Four months before Carter announced the boycott, the Red Army had descended upon Afghanistan in a massive display of force. Hundreds of tanks, gunships, armored personnel carriers, and jeeps carrying thousands of men had swarmed into the country. The elite Spetsnaz commandos had performed their task perfectly, assassinating Hafizullah Amin and clearing the way for a successor hand-picked by

by the Soviets. Before Amin's blood was cold, the voice of that successor came over the airwaves of Radio Kabul, and the Afghan people learned what had happened at the Tajbeg Palace. Quote, "...today the torture machine of Amin and his henchmen, savage butchers, usurpers, and murderers of tens of thousands of our compatriots has been broken. The Great April Revolution, accomplished through the indestructible will of the heroic Afghan people, has entered a new stage."

End quote. And with that new stage came new faces. White faces. From a faraway land to the north. As they entered Afghanistan by the thousands, many Soviet soldiers were fascinated, even charmed, when they saw exotic Kabul for the first time. As one remembered, quote, "...the first sights of the city were impressive. The people were dressed in strange clothing. The women went around with veils on their heads."

and the children were incredibly beautiful. It seemed as though we had traveled back in time to medieval Asia." A Soviet journalist named Artyom Borovik was also fascinated by Afghanistan's unique "stuck-in-time" quality. "It isn't so much a geographic boundary as a border in time.

a line between two social and economic systems, between two philosophies, between war and peace. On one side, they live in the late 1980s under the socialist system, and on the other side, they live in 1366 by the Muslim calendar, under a feudal system with tribal vestiges. You don't need a time machine to experience the difference." And while the Soviets saw Afghanistan as an exotic and anachronistic destination, all the Afghans saw were heavily armed tourists.

Godless communists who'd sponsored, armed, and funded the regime that had caused them so much pain and suffering in recent years. And they made it abundantly clear just what they thought of their visiting Soviet friends on February 22nd, 1980. As night fell that evening, the Soviets began to hear a strange noise coming from the rooftops of buildings all over Kabul. It was a chant.

The same two words over and over again, emanating rhythmically from the throats of tens of thousands of people. Allahu Akbar, or God is great. Almost half a million people saying in one voice, we don't want you here. Historian Mir Tamim Ansari described the uprising generally as, quote, "...an emotionally intense sense of mass intention, an exhilarating sense of a unified us mustering to fight against a massive evil them."

End quote. The Red Army tried drowning out this Allahu Akbar chant with rockets and artillery, but the inhabitants of Kabul just chanted louder. To a grunt from Ukraine or a journalist from St. Petersburg, it was a chilling sound. When the chants erupted into riots and demonstrations against the invading Soviets, the temperature and anxiety only rose higher. One Russian journalist staying at the Hotel Kabul described the scene, quote,

A dull, strange sound swelled outside. Only a very large crowd could generate such a noise, and I went over to the dark blue drapes and opened them a bit. The sight that met my eyes was truly dreadful. The neighboring pack hotel was already ablaze like a haystack. Two overturned buses smoldered in the middle of the road. The flames cast an eerie glow over a multitude of turbaned men and veiled women, and I feared the knives in the hands of my medieval contemporaries.

In their fear and frustration at the Afghan defiance in Kabul, the Red Army cracked down hard with merciless precision. The Afghan protesters soon found themselves facing a long column of armor-plated tanks and APCs bristling with automatic weapons wielded by spooked, unsympathetic Soviet soldiers. God may have been great, but he was unable to save the protesters from what happened next.

As one man in the crowd remembered, quote, It was scary. Everybody was screaming, pushing, and running to get away from the tanks, which didn't stop. A girl near me who was shouting, Freedom! Freedom! We want freedom! was shot in the head and back. Friends tried to stop the bleeding with the girl's veil. But before they could, the soldier started to fire again. She was hit several more times in the back and died instantly. She was 16. End quote.

When dawn broke the next day, 300 people were dead. Obviously, 300 people dead in the streets sounds unimaginable. But over the next nine years, at least 1.3 million Afghans would be killed in the war.

That 16-year-old girl and her fellow protesters were just the first drops in a very large bucket. This was only the beginning. As they wiped the blood off their boots in the aftermath of the Kabul protest, the Red Army might have been tempted to think that the hardest part of their task was over. A little action and unpleasantness was, of course, to be expected, but now that they'd put the Kabul agitators in their place, the Reds were ready to go.

the rest of the country would fall in line. But as we've said before, Kabul is not Afghanistan. The real Afghanistan was out there, in the wilderness, spread out across 35,000 remote villages, towns, and isolated hamlets. The geography of Afghanistan is 80% mountains. And in those mountains, God was calling. You've probably heard the term jihad before.

In the modern day, we understand jihad to mean a holy war, because, frankly, that's how it's most often used. But in the Quran, which is of course the foundational text of Islam, the meaning of jihad is much more complex and ambiguous. The literal definition of jihad is closer to something like struggle, or effort, or striving. Back in the day, about 1400 years ago to be exact, the Prophet Muhammad talked about two kinds of jihad –

There was a lesser jihad and a greater jihad. The lesser jihad is the one that most people are familiar with, the armed struggle against the enemies of Islam. It's pretty straightforward. But the greater and much more important jihad is the lifelong pursuit of being a good Muslim, of becoming closer to God. A lesser jihad, a holy war, would eventually end. But the greater jihad never ended.

From the moment you opened your eyes as an infant to the moment you closed them in death, you fought the Greater Jihad. A war of spiritual self-examination and reflection. A daily battle to be a better person. A more righteous person. Naturally, the two struggles, lesser and greater, were intimately intertwined. And it was in this deep, introspective emotional state that the rural men of Afghanistan decided to wage a guerrilla war against the invading Soviets.

The Afghan warriors who fought the jihad would become known as the Mujahideen. It means holy warriors, or defenders of the faith, or more literally, the ones who conduct jihad. And there are a few different spellings for Mujahideen, but the one you will most often see is M-U-J-A-H-I-D-E-E-N, Mujahideen.

Now, at first glance, it's very tempting to characterize the Mujahideen as a monolith, a faceless army of interchangeable peasants with turbans and AK-47s. But they came from all walks of life. They were farmers and landowners.

University students, craftsmen, and merchants. Some of them had never left the tiny village where they'd grown up. Others had traveled the world. But when the Soviets invaded, they all answered the call of the mullahs, or Islamic teachers, to wage a lesser jihad against the Russians in service of the greater jihad of becoming closer to God.

Some, of course, were just opportunists or would-be warlords, but the vast majority of the Mujahideen were compelled by an unshakable religious conviction to defend their way of life, to protect their cultural reality. And the truth of it was, the Mujahideen would need every ounce of bravery that they could muster because they faced the

the 40th Army. Created especially for the invasion of Afghanistan, the Soviet 40th Army was a hammer intended to break the mujahideen like a piece of glass. Over 100,000 men. And they came from all over the Soviet Union. Many were Muslims themselves.

But almost all of them were young, completely uninformed about the country they were invading, and armed to the teeth. Just as American teenagers had been dropped into the jungles of Vietnam more than a decade earlier, the Soviet Union sent thousands upon thousands of its own young men into a country and culture they could not begin to understand, hopped up on misleading propaganda, and outfitted with some of the most effective death-dealing hardware that this planet has ever seen. State-of-the-art artillery –

tanks, helicopter gunships, fighter jets, night vision, thermal imaging, even chemical weapons. As an Afghan judge named Omar Babraksi would later say in the darkest days of the war, quote, "...it is as if Afghanistan is a laboratory for the Soviet military to learn their trade. Every single weapon in the Soviet's arsenal, with the exception of the nuclear bomb, has been unleashed on us."

The Mujahideen, on the other hand, were not so well equipped. Initially, many of the Afghans carried rifles that were older than they were. These were family heirlooms, ancient, breech-loading rifles that had been looted from British corpses in the time of Queen Victoria. Some of them even carried old matchlocks, flintlocks. And to quote a fictionalized portrayal of Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson, quote, "...that's basically what Davy Crockett used."

And in a way, Afghanistan was kind of like the Texas of the Muslim world. Pretty much everybody had a gun. And as ancient as they were, those guns still worked. And they could still kill.

It was a fact that made itself known to the soldiers of the Soviet 40th Army as shots from rusty rifles pinged off their state-of-the-art tanks in the wilderness and waste outside Kabul. Initially, the Soviets were unconcerned. And why should they be? The Afghans were bringing 19th century weapons and tactics to a 20th century war. The Soviet Empire had crushed Nazi Germany. Surely a few disorganized guerrillas

wouldn't be a problem. As one Mujahideen fighter admitted, quote, You know, if you put the facts of this war into a computer, it would say that we cannot survive the might of the Russian army for more than a few weeks.

Because you have to understand, in 1979, the entire world was terrified of the Red Army. On paper, they were invincible, undefeated champs since they'd miraculously pulled themselves off the ropes at Stalingrad in 1943. Two years later, in 1945, the Soviets had exacted vicious payback, turning Berlin into a potpourri of cement, metal, and body parts. And they'd been preparing for another large-scale conflict ever since.

But conventional wisdom dictated that anyone who stood up to the Soviets in a hot war was destined to fail. With the exception of the American military, of course, but no one wanted to open up that Pandora's box. But the war in Afghanistan would be anything but conventional. The Mujahideen realized almost immediately that they could not stand up to the 40th Army in the open field.

They didn't have tanks, or jets, or helicopters. In the early days, they didn't even have a formalized chain of command. All they had were their grandfather's rifles, an intimate, almost supernatural knowledge of the local terrain, and the anesthesia of intense religious belief. The Mujahideen decided that if they couldn't defeat the Soviets outright, they would do the next best thing: they would drive them insane.

They would make occupying Afghanistan so costly, so painful, so psychologically damaging, that on a long enough timeline, the Russians would simply give up. Just like the Americans had given up in Vietnam. So, the Mujahideen fled deep into the mountains of Afghanistan. And when the 40th Army tried to pursue them, all that technological superiority meant next to nothing. As one guerrilla fighter named Haran Amin described, quote,

As the enemy goes up into the mountains to claim the high positions, what do you do? Very simple. You go farther up. Up in these steep valleys, the enemy does not have support. Tanks are not able to come up. The enemy does not have armored personnel carriers. The heavy weapons are not with them. Now it is the enemy with light weapons and you with light weapons.

When the Soviets attacked, the guerrillas would hide. But the second those same Russians let their guard down to close their eyes, eat a meal, or take a piss, the Mujahideen would pounce. They would ambush and bomb and snipe and maim and bleed the 40th Army little by little by little. When the Soviets tried to counterattack, the Mujahideen would just melt back into the passes and tunnels of the valleys as if they had never been there at all.

One Afghan guerrilla explained the overall strategy, quote,

and what do you do? You attack points D, E, F, G, and H so the enemy thinks "my god I have an enemy that is invisible and yet I keep losing people". You take the war to the enemy and you do it for a long period of time because it is your land. Your ancestors were born there and you are going to stay there. Time is on your side.

A popular Mujahideen proverb put it much more succinctly. This was going to be death by a thousand cuts, and as the 40th Army settled in for a long, ugly, asymmetrical war against the Mujahideen, their sanity began to crack.

I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Burn the Boats from Evergreen Podcasts. I interview political leaders and influencers, folks like award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien and conservative columnist Bill Kristol about the choices they confront when failure is not an option. I won't agree with everyone I talk to, but I respect anyone who believes in something enough to risk everything for it, because history belongs to those willing to burn the boats. Episodes are out every other week, wherever you get your podcasts.

It's the summer of 1987, and we're in San Francisco. Just after 9 o'clock in the morning, a journalist named Artyom Borovik stepped out of a cab in front of a house near the center of the city. Artyom was a talented young reporter from Soviet Russia. He was only 27 years old with a baby face, a mop of black hair, and a bushy Tom Selleck mustache, but his youthful, borderline goofy appearance

was deceiving. Artyom had seen more death and destruction in the last few years than most people do in a lifetime. Throughout the mid-80s, Artyom had been traveling with the 40th Army as a war correspondent in Afghanistan. He spent that time interviewing countless Soviet soldiers, young men, old men, brave men, weak men, all in an effort to try and understand what the war in Afghanistan was doing to them.

And eventually, he hoped to publish a tell-all book that would reveal the true cost of the war to the people back home. But on this bright, muggy morning on the West Coast, Artyom found himself very far from both his homeland in Russia and the battlefields of Afghanistan. He had come all this way to find and interview someone very special. Someone who did not want to be found.

Artyom climbed the stairs to the second-story entrance of the house and rang the doorbell. The man who answered had, according to Artyom, quote, a pale face and two alert, cautious eyes. This man's name was Alexei, and he was a fellow Russian. And after a brief exchange of pleasantries, Alexei invited the reporter inside his home. "'I know you only from photographs,' Artyom said. "'What is it you're interested in?' Alexei asked nervously. He was already chewing on his fingernails."

Your life, Artyom replied. Artyom was a good reporter and an even better researcher, and he was already very familiar with the broad strokes of Alexei's life. Alexei had been a young man when he was drafted into the 40th Army and sent to Afghanistan in 1983. Less than six months later, he'd gone missing in action, or at least that's what the Soviet Army told his mother back in Uzbekistan. But Alexei hadn't gotten lost or separated from his unit...

He'd ran away. He dropped his rifle and ran as far away from the 40th Army as his legs could carry him. Alexei went AWOL. After his desertion from the Soviets, he was captured by the Mujahideen, and before long, he ran from them too, eventually defecting to America and finding his way to New York City.

The U.S. government had resettled him here in San Francisco, where he worked as a cook in the Four Seasons Hotel. This reporter, Artyom Borovik, was here to record Alexei's side of the story, to understand why he had run away, why he had defected to Russia's greatest enemy, and how he liked living in America, the promised land of wealth and opportunity that most Soviets could only dream of.

The two shared a drink, toasting to the fallen soldiers in Afghanistan. But shortly after, according to Artyom, the defector Alexei, quote, sat down on the couch and suddenly burst into tears. He cried like a child, sobbing violently, full of despair. He wasn't embarrassed by the tears and he didn't try to hide them from me. He let them stream down his cheeks and fall on the floor. End quote. Through the tears and the gasps, Alexei told Artyom, quote,

We were all deceived and turned into mincemeat. At least I managed to get out, but the other ones, the 15,000 we drank to, didn't.

End quote. This young reporter, Artyom Borovik, would go on to become one of the most prolific Russian journalists of his generation. And in this modest living room in San Francisco, he was witnessing the collective trauma of an entire fighting force. A trauma that had begun seven years earlier, in 1980, shortly after the 40th Army had pursued the Mujahideen into the mountains of Afghanistan.

Most Soviet soldiers who fought in Afghanistan did not want to be there. Many of them didn't even want to be in the army at all. The Soviet Union filled the ranks of its 40th Army through the process of conscription, which is just a draft, essentially. They knocked on your door, handed you a slip of paper, and told you to report for training.

A few days later, you were on a plane heading to some distant corner of the Soviet Empire. When you landed, they shaved your head, handed you a gun, and taught you how to follow orders, whether that meant pushing a broom or pulling a trigger. A few short months later, you were boots down in Afghanistan. Most fresh recruits were nervous or afraid, but some faced their situation with a grim sense of resignation, as one soldier named Tamarov droned, quote,

End quote.

When freshies like Tamarov asked the older guys why the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan in the first place, they received a mix of scowls and shrugs in response. The average Soviet grunt had no idea why they were in Afghanistan. They did not know all the details and the finer points about Hafizullah Amin, or the reforms, or the cultural powder keg that the Kabul communists had sparked by trying to transform their country overnight. According to the Soviet brass, the 40th Army was, quote,

defending the southern borders of the Soviet Union, as well as the Afghan revolution. Whatever that meant. To some 19-year-old kid from Leningrad or Kiev, it was typical Politburo bullshit. But it wasn't all bad. At first glance, Afghanistan was absolutely beautiful. You looked up at night and saw, as one paratrooper described, quote, "...enormous skies, uncommonly starry, occasionally punctuated by the blazing lines of tracers." End quote.

The mountains were stunning too, as that young reporter Artyom Borovik remembered, quote, During the day, the mountains around Kabul resembled a black and white photograph of a storm at sea, end quote. In the valleys between the mountains, there were rich green riverlands full of vegetation and farms and orchards. The

The black soil was ideal for growing peaches, melons, cherries, apricots, figs, and pomegranates, natural treats that were just as sweet as any factory-made confection back home in the USSR. A Soviet writer named Alexander Prochnikov described the lowlands as, quote, a flowering, fertile plain where settlements built of golden mud bricks spread out among the gardens and vineyards, where cool water filled the handmade wells, where the young rice showed green in

in tiny, carefully cultivated fields, where flowering poppy and yellow sunflower flamed and burned." One British journalist swooned over the landscape as well, saying, "It can feel like Tuscany." In the marketplaces and bazaars of cities like Kabul and Kandahar, the Soviet soldiers found things they could never dream of getting back in the USSR. The shops and stalls offered all sorts of unique treasures.

As historian Roderick Braithwaite writes, quote, Japanese electronics, fashionable Western clothes, sneakers and jeans, cassette recordings of Western and even Soviet music banned back home. For the shopkeepers at least, the invasion was a business opportunity. End quote. But eventually, every new recruit had to leave the safety of the barracks and venture out into the wilderness, up into the mountains in pursuit of the elusive freedom fighters

the mujahideen in those arid passes and ravines the true reality of their situation began to sink in and they became intimately acquainted with the darker side of afghanistan if you were a soviet soldier stepping into the afghan mountains for the very first time you quickly began to suspect that almost everyone and everything in this country wanted you dead the mujahideen wanted you dead peasants and farmers wanted you dead

Sometimes your fellow soldiers wanted you dead. Even the climate wanted you dead. For one soldier named Siminov, the very first thing he noticed about Afghanistan was the altitude. At 15,000 feet above sea level, in the mountains, the air gets very thin. And if you're not used to it, the altitude sickness just hits you like a truck. Siminov remembered literally gasping for air at one point. Quote, I was working my lungs like a fish on the shore works its gills. End quote.

Then there was the heat. For men from the cool climates of Eastern Europe and Russia, it was unbearable. In the summer, temperatures in Afghanistan can top 120 degrees Fahrenheit during the day. One Soviet journalist describes the metal components of assault rifles being so hot that drops of sweat would, quote,

sizzle as they fell on the metal." And where there is heat, there is thirst. Life-threatening dehydration was often just one empty canteen away. Water became as important as bullets or gasoline. According to one soldier, "...with every passing minute, each drop of water becomes more precious."

Indeed, in just half an hour everything but water will have lost its meaning, and then there will be no greater curse than an empty canteen. In Afghanistan, thirst can actually make you stoop to drink from a puddle of camel urine. Every Soviet soldier, in fact, carries a miniature water purifier for just such an eventuality." Another Soviet war correspondent reflected on his time in Afghanistan: "Once I took the freedom to drink water, as much water as I wanted, for granted.

But now I realize that no such freedom exists in the desert." And if the Soviets thought they'd be any more comfortable in the winter, they were sorely mistaken. One lieutenant remembered a very close call with frostbite: "I really thought that my toes would freeze and fall off. Hard to believe, but it's warmer in Russia." Marching and walking through the mountains in those kinds of conditions is so exhausting that it's hard to even really understand unless you've actually experienced it.

It is fatigue at a cellular level. One old soldier named Okhotnikov gave the new guys a few choice words of advice: "It's better not to stop in the mountains. After a rest it is impossible to tear your ass from the ground. Once you pause, you get the feeling that the pull of gravity has increased tenfold."

And a soldier named Zaborov summarized all of this, saying, quote, After Afghanistan, any hardship will seem like a mosquito bite. End quote. And as you dealt with all this physical discomfort, the choking heat, the paralyzing cold, the altitude sickness, the exhaustion, the blisters and the bleeding feet, that is when a bullet would zip past your head. And you knew the Mujahideen had come.

In the early stages of the war, ambushes and surprise attacks were the most common types of engagements. A Soviet convoy might be driving down a dirt road with high sloping hills on either side. Then, suddenly, land mines would explode, destroying the lead vehicle and trapping everyone else behind it. The hills would erupt with gunfire that seemed to come from all directions. Casualties mounted as Soviet soldiers fired blindly in any and every direction, trying to desperately suppress the enemy ambush.

And then suddenly, the hills went silent. When all the smoke cleared, the mujahideen would be gone. Most of the time, the Soviets never even saw who was shooting at them. And these kinds of abrupt, nerve-shredding firefights became the norm for the 40th Army. And as you can imagine, it took a monstrous psychological toll. As one soldier named Sorokin said following a winter ambush, quote, "...you feel yourself not just matured but grown old."

At the very end of the last ambush, everybody was exhausted, soaked, and freezing. I was only shooting so it would end sooner." Before long, the Soviets had invented a slang term for the Afghan freedom fighters. They called them, and I might butcher this pronunciation, so sorry, the "duchy," which is Russian for "ghosts." To the Soviet soldiers, the mujahideen were like spirits or apparitions: there one minute and gone the next.

The war in Afghanistan became a cyclical, Sisyphean exercise for the 40th Army. They would go into an area to clear out the guerrillas, fight for days, take terrible losses, but eventually the Mujahideen would be driven off. But then, once the Soviets left, the guerrillas would just move back into the area again, as if nothing had changed at all. It was like the Mujahideen were a rubber ball, and the 40th Army was a sledgehammer. You

You could hit the ball, flatten it with a terrible blow, but the second that hammer lifted the pressure, the ball would just simply morph back and retain its original shape. In time, the 40th Army grew to hate and fear the ghosts in the mountains, as well as the civilian population that sheltered and aided them. Just like so many traumatized and angry American soldiers in Vietnam, the Russians started to despise all the locals.

not just the ones who were shooting at them. It was virtually impossible to tell if a random Afghan man on the side of the road was just a normal farmer or a Mujahideen scout with a pistol under his shirt. Even the children could be spies and spotters working for the guerrillas. Little kids were sometimes paid fistfuls of cash by the freedom fighters to puncture Soviet oil pipelines with sledgehammers. From a Russian perspective, it was better to err on the side of caution and to

and just shoot them all. When the 40th Army sent squads into rural villages to sniff out information about where the Mujahideen were hiding, they rarely got any cooperation. But they did find hostility. As one soldier remembered, quote,

You watch your buddy knock down a door in a village. And out comes a dark, bony hand with a sickle. It slashes his belly open and his guts fall to the ground. Your buddy is just standing there, looking he can't believe that it isn't a dream. And whenever you see something like that, you don't care who or what's in that house, you just throw a grenade at it, and then another one, and bang, the roof is blown off.

End quote. Even commonplace items could be a source of death or dismemberment. Soviet soldiers searching Afghan villages would find ingenious booby traps left behind by the Mujahideen. On one occasion, a Soviet war correspondent found a coffee thermos in a house and decided to keep it as a souvenir. But he noticed that it felt unusually heavy, which he casually mentioned to one of the soldiers. He was instructed to unscrew the bottom, where he found, quote, a curious glob of black goo.

It turned out to be a potent contact explosive. End quote. The soldier laughed darkly and told the war correspondent, quote, Tonight you would have learned your lesson. After supper you would have poured some hot tea into your new thermos, expanding the paste and thus triggering an explosion from the increased pressure. It would have been the last time in your life you ever made tea. End quote. Others were not so lucky. Watches, pens, tape recorders, and lighters would often blow up in the hands of men who picked them up.

The 40th Army quickly learned to be suspicious of even the most innocent objects. As the same journalist wrote, quote, End quote. Seeing friends and comrades die randomly at the hands of an invisible enemy was unraveling the sanity of the men of the 40th Army. As one soldier remembered after the war, quote,

Month after month and in combat, day after day, it tormented you with the age-old questions. Why him, Lord, and not me? And when will it be my turn? In five minutes or fifty years?

Staying alive was often a matter of blind luck. One soldier told a story to journalist Artyom Borovik about a scrape with death. As Borovik writes, "...he'd gone into the bushes to take a leak when his unit suddenly came under heavy fire. He swore that if his life were somehow spared, he'd join a monastery. At that very moment, a mortar shell exploded nearby, killing all the other soldiers in his unit."

After spending months and months on the cusp of death with the 40th Army, Borovik beautifully expressed the sense of visceral anxiety that plagued the soldiers out on patrol. Quote, Risk is like radiation. At some point, the dose becomes critical. Ahead, the operation awaits. An

an ambush that can separate you from the rest of your life. It is like the last five inches of a ledge on a skyscraper. You know that the distance ahead is insignificant compared to what is behind, but everything depends on those five inches.

End quote. Death was terrifying enough, but the worst thing of all, the Soviets believed, was to be captured by the Mujahideen. There were chilling rumors of what the guerrillas did to the Russians who they managed to drag back to their camps. As historian Gregory Pfeiffer writes in his book, The Great Gamble, quote, End quote.

Most Soviet soldiers were deployed for two consecutive years before being cycled out of rotation and sent home. To make it through those grueling 24 months with their sanity intact, the men had to employ a variety of coping mechanisms, some healthier than others. The one good thing about Afghanistan, at least in the mind of a scared, lonely, homesick Soviet soldier, was that you could score drugs everywhere.

In towns and villages and on military bases, you could get high whenever you wanted to. And the prices were very affordable. In the mid-1980s, a kilo of heroin cost $1 million in New York City. In Afghanistan and nearby Pakistan, it cost about $100. Hashish and cannabis were plentiful too. The Russians often discovered huge, endless fields of it growing in the fertile valleys. Journalist Robert D. Kaplan wrote, quote,

The going price for a credit card-sized brick of opium is $4 in Dara.

End quote. Faced with the daily horrors of deployment in Afghanistan, thousands of teenagers and 20-somethings in the 40th Army chose to simply numb themselves any way they could. The sweet prick of a needle or a lung full of sticky smoke was the only real escape that they had. The average Soviet soldier was paid almost nothing, but they found other ways to fund their habits. To buy drugs, they sold weapons, ammunition, and medical supplies to the locals.

The majority of those rifles and bullets, of course, just filtered back through the villages into the hands of the Mujahideen. But most guys didn't care. What good was a blanket when you couldn't sleep at night? What good were grenades when you couldn't make it through the day without experiencing a panic attack? And what good was a pistol when you thought more about putting it against your own head than aiming it at the enemy? Drugs were a respite from annoying, complicated emotions like sympathy and grief and anger.

Better to go numb than to face the reality of what you were doing and what was being done to you. As one defector named Kovalchuk explained, quote, It's best to go into an operation stoned. You turn into an animal.

If you drink vodka or dry alcohol that's diluted with water, you can still feel your whole body. But taking a drug is like anesthetizing your soul. You stop feeling altogether. Later, when you come back, you just collapse, like a watch spring that needs to be rewound, and your muscles ache. As long as you're in combat, however, you just get high and run around like a maniac. Hashish stifles emotions, smooths over nervous fits, and there are lots of those, especially in the beginning.

End quote. But it wasn't all drugs, doom, and gloom. Some soldiers found ways of coping that were healthy, productive, even creative. If you walked through any given Soviet barracks in Afghanistan, you would have heard music and singing and the jangling of acoustic guitars in the air. There were plenty of soldiers who were much better at plucking strings than shooting guns, and they created a rich catalog of original folk music that described the

that described their experiences in Afghanistan. One soldier named Kirsanov was especially prolific, as Roderick Braithwaite writes, quote, He and a colleague systematically recorded the sounds of Afghanistan on a small tape recorder, the call to prayer, the rattle of armored vehicles, the noise of battle and the cry of the jackal, and he used them as the introduction to his own songs. These he recorded in quote-unquote studio conditions in the regimental bathhouse where he worked at night. When the

when the electric current was more or less stable and the noise of the war had died away. He composed to express the emotions of war and the soldiers' hope for a safe return. Kirsinov's songs succeeded in doing what the professional artists were unable to do, remarked one journalist. They preserved the real and genuine truth of the Afghan war.

End quote. For the less musically gifted in the 40th Army, jokes and gallows humor were a way of taking the bite out of their worst fears. If you could laugh at your situation, maybe it wouldn't seem so scary. The Soviets, after all, were world famous for their distinctive pitch black sense of humor. One airborne trooper named Semenov had a joke that he liked to tell the new guys. Quote, Do you know what an airborne trooper is? An airborne trooper is an eagle for all of a minute.

And for the next five days, he is a horse. You turn into a horse the minute you jump off the helicopter. So in reality, we aren't the airborne troops. We're the workhorses. End quote. Maybe it's funnier in the original Russian. I don't know.

During his time with the 40th Army, the journalist Artyom Borovik met a soldier named Ushakov, who was famous for a distinctive set of steel teeth and a razor-sharp sense of humor. Borovik remembers hearing him tell the following joke, quote,

Here's how: You drive up to your house and go up to the door, making as much noise with your boots as possible. The old women who sit together on the benches in the street freeze in their places and go quiet from fright. You gather as much air in your lungs as you can and you yell to them with all your might: "So what do you have to say for yourselves, you old whores?" "You think we're whores?" they'll answer. "What about that such-and-such wife of yours?"

That's when you'll find out everything. End quote. But for all the jokes and drugs and music and misery, the 40th Army was suffering in a silent vacuum because the septuagenarian bureaucrats in the Kremlin and the KGB refused to let any information about the war in Afghanistan filter back to the Russian public. And that, folks, is one of the big key differences between America's war in Vietnam and Russia's war in Afghanistan. Media coverage, or lack thereof.

There were no nightly reports from a Soviet version of Walter Cronkite telling the hard truths and the cold stats to the Russian people. Dispatches from the front were aggressively censored and

and redacted. To the average Soviet citizen, the military was just on some vague peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan. Nothing to see here, move along, don't worry about it. And at this early stage, there was really no popular anti-war movement like you saw in America against the Vietnam War, because in the eyes of the Soviet government, the invasion of Afghanistan did not exist. The soldiers of the 40th Army, upon being discharged,

were told that they could not disclose any details about their experiences to the people back home. It was a violation of state security, the authorities said. So just imagine going home with all these experiences, memories, and nightmares rattling around in your brain and not being able to talk about any of it to anyone.

As for the soldiers who didn't make it back, according to historian Artemy Kalinovsky, quote, even the gravestones of fallen soldiers were prohibited from stating how or where they died, end quote. The Kremlin may have wanted to pretend that the war wasn't happening, but there were some people who did want to talk about Afghanistan. A different kind of army, one equipped with pens, notebooks, cameras, and tape recorders,

was also invading Afghanistan. By the mid-1980s, Western journalists were flying into Pakistan every week, sneaking across the border with the Mujahideen and recording what they saw, heard, felt, and experienced. If the Soviet Union wouldn't tell the world what was really happening in Afghanistan, the journalists of the West would risk their lives and reputations to do it themselves. To pierce what one reporter called, quote, a curtain of silence.

And to do it, they would have to travel into the war zone with the Afghan guerrillas themselves. Ladies and gentlemen, it is time to meet the Mujahideen.

In the spring of 1984, a woman named Jan Goodwin was enjoying her cushy job in New York City as the executive editor of Ladies Home Journal. Jan was 40 years old with curly red hair and fair skin. She stood about 5'4", maybe 5'6", and a pair of high heels, but she cut an intimidating figure as she prowled the halls of the magazine's high-rise offices. And by all accounts, it was a pretty sweet gig. As Jan remembered, quote,

End quote. Jan's typical workload at the time consisted of celebrity stories and puff pieces. Quote,

But despite her posh position, Jan had an adventurous streak, a thirst for adrenaline. She'd once bailed on a fancy dinner reservation for her birthday party to go skydiving instead. She'd spent times in the slums of Calcutta,

researching the philanthropic work of Mother Teresa. And in her early days as a journalist, no assignment seemed too rough or too dangerous. Quote, I had covered riots, crime, terrorism, and catastrophes. End quote.

But in the spring of 1984, a tip came across Jan's desk that she could not ignore. While chatting with a friend, an Austrian activist named Peter Rainier, she heard something that absolutely shocked her. Peter told Jan that, quote, 50% of the world's refugees are Afghan, end quote. Jan balked, quote, Are you sure? That is one hell of a story. Why on earth aren't we reading about it?

End quote. In the early months of 1984, anyone who could flip through a magazine or a newspaper was fully aware that the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan and were entangled in a nasty war against the Mujahideen. But what a lot of people did not know was that the Soviet strategy had fundamentally changed. After years of being constantly harassed by the Dukhi, the ghosts in the mountains, the Soviets had had enough.

The 40th Army, addled by drugs, disease, and tactical failure, had come to the conclusion that the only way to defeat the Mujahideen was to cut them off from the local populations that fed, sheltered, and funded them. As Mao Zedong had once famously said, "...the gorilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea." Well, the 40th Army decided that to catch the fish, they would simply drain the sea.

As Mir Tamim Ansari writes, quote,

Thus began the most terrible phase of this terrible war, a phase that should never be allowed to fade from the annals of infamy. The Soviets launched a deliberate effort to depopulate rural Afghanistan. They bombed countless villages. Flying over the farmlands, they scattered landmines, which still litter Afghan soil and have made much of the land difficult if not impossible to cultivate.

End quote.

The 40th Army, through the use of airstrikes, minefields, gunship raids, and artillery strikes, endeavored to make the Afghan countryside as unlivable and inhospitable as the surface of the moon. The result was something that has been referred to as, quote, migratory genocide. As Jan Goodwin researched the raw numbers from her 36th floor office in Manhattan, she was shocked.

5 million Afghans had been forced to flee their homes and seek shelter in squalid refugee camps across the border. In a country of only 19 million, that is an unimaginable level of death and displacement. As Jan pointed out years later in her book on the Soviet-Afghan War, quote, "This is the equivalent of 76 million Americans being confined to camps in Mexico or Canada."

End quote. 3.5 million of those refugees were in Pakistan. At the time, according to Jan Goodwin, quote, they are the largest single group of refugees in the world, equaling the population of Israel or New Zealand. End quote. Then, of course, there were the 2 million internal refugees who stayed in Afghanistan but had to move from place to place to stay one step ahead of the Soviet gunships and kill squads. As Jan wrote with horror, quote,

It is not uncommon to find families who have been bombed out of as many as six homes. End quote. And as one Afghan refugee said, quote, We move from place to place. If our children are lucky, they attend school for a few months. But then the school is bombed, or we have to move to another place. How can they learn anything? End quote. As she dug deeper and deeper, one question burned in Jan's mind like a cattle brand.

How was everyone on the planet not writing and talking about this? Quote, End quote.

Well, the truth was most people just didn't care or were content to let the backwards, barbaric, women-oppressing Afghans suffer the fate they deserved. As Alexander Cockburn of the Village Voice wrote in 1980, Afghanistan was, quote, an unspeakable country filled with unspeakable people, sheep-shaggers and smugglers. I yield to none in my sympathy to those prostrate beneath the Russian jackboot, but if ever a country deserved rape,

It's Afghanistan. End quote.

Well, Jan Goodwin decided that neither she nor the publication she ran would remain silent. Quote, three months later, which was July 1984, I flew to Pakistan to do a story for Ladies Home Journal on what life was like for Afghan women refugees. End quote. And what Jan saw in those camps stuck with her for the rest of her life. Quote, I had never seen so many child amputees as I saw among the Afghans.

The children had been maimed and frequently blinded because they had picked up the small "anti-personnel" mines, many disguised as brightly colored toys.

End quote. Now, mines that look like toys sounds cartoonishly evil, but it's true. In their depopulation campaign, the Soviet army dropped hundreds of thousands of what are called butterfly mines. And they were called butterfly mines because they would slowly flutter down to the ground on little plastic wings dropped from planes. And they looked just interesting enough to be mistaken for a toy. Afghan children would pick them up out of curiosity and boom.

Of course, there's a lot of debate around whether or not the Soviets were intentionally disguising mines as toys, like stuffed animals, choo-choo trains, that kind of thing. Some people swear they saw mines like that. Others dismiss it as hyperbolic propaganda. It's hard to know for sure. But either way, lots of little kids were getting blown up by Soviet landmines in Afghanistan. That is a fact. On the 35-hour journey back from Pakistan, Jan Goodwin could not get the images that she had seen out of her head.

The millions of innocent people driven out by an angry, vengeful, and exhausted 40th Army who just wanted the war to end. The Soviet soldiers were hurting and hopeless and didn't care how many kids they had to blow up to get back home. Somewhere in the air over the Western Hemisphere, Jan Goodwin decided that she had to go back, but not to a refugee camp. She needed to get inside Afghanistan. She needed to see the real war, combat with her own eyes.

And the only way to do that was to make contact with the Mujahideen reps in Pakistan, to sneak across the border into the war zone. The Soviets had made it crystal clear what would happen if they found Western journalists with the Mujahideen. As the Soviet ambassador to Pakistan said in a chilling press conference, quote, I warn you, and through you, all of your journalist colleagues, stop trying to penetrate Afghanistan with these so-called guerrillas.

From now on, the bandits and these so-called journalists accompanying them will be killed." People in Jan's personal life practically begged her not to go. Male journalists had been traveling in-country with the Mujahideen for years, but in a culture where women were essentially invisible and had no political influence, the idea of a female journalist tagging along with fundamentalist freedom fighters terrified Jan's friends and family. As one of her friends, a U.S. military veteran, warned her, quote,

"Traveling with the Resistance, you'll have to follow orders as if you were one of them or risk getting your head blown off. You're far too independent, endlessly curious, constantly challenging, all traits that make for a lousy foot soldier. I can see you following orders for a week for a story, but for three months." But all the fuss and patronizing warnings did was deepen Jan's resolve. "The more they tried to dissuade me, the more determined I found myself becoming."

In the summer of 1985, Jan Goodwin arrived in Peshawar, the frontier town in Pakistan that became a lightning rod of Cold War intrigue during the Soviet invasion. And we actually talked briefly about Peshawar at the top of Part 1. If you recall, Peshawar was a common pit stop on the journey into Afghanistan, the Cold War Dodge City, or Deadwood, remember? As Steve Cole writes in his book, Ghost Wars, Peshawar was, quote,

End quote. Jan Goodwin was jet-lagged and exhausted as she stepped out of the cab and checked into her rough-and-tumble hotel in Peshawar. And she was extremely aware of the danger that she was in, even by being there at all. According to Jan, Peshawar was, quote,

a city that could have been invented by Ian Fleming for one of his James Bond books. It challenges East Berlin for the title of World Spy Capital.

End quote. Arms dealers, drug lords, CIA assets, KGB handlers, and Pakistani intelligence agents were waging a constant, covert battle to push their own agendas and rub out problematic interlopers. At one point, Jan was picked up by the ISI, Pakistan's version of the KGB. They gave her the full good cop, bad cop routine and questioned her for days. At one point, they asked, quote,

Jan laughed innocently, quote,

End quote. As Jan came to find out, Peshawar was populated by a huge cast of eclectic and dangerous characters, thrill-seekers and adrenaline junkies who traveled from all around the world to get a taste of the war. And some of them weren't even journalists at all, they were just here to join the Mujahideen and fight Russians for a variety of personal reasons. And one of the most interesting and odd was a Japanese man named Koshiro Tanaka, as Robert D. Kaplan writes in his book, Soldiers of God,

Quote, Koshiro Tanaka, a struggling Japanese businessman in his late 40s who had a sixth-degree black belt in karate, believed that, quote, "...since World War II there has not been an honorable way for a Japanese man to die in the true samurai spirit."

So, he exchanged his cubbyhole in the Tokyo trading office for a bare room and a sagging jute bed in the Kyber Hotel. This was Tanaka's base for going out on Rambo-style combat missions with the Mujahideen. He also trained hundreds of guerrillas in hand-to-hand combat. The only medical supplies he brought with him on his missions inside were three elastic tubes to use as tourniquets. "Three is enough," he explained to me. "If all four of my limbs are cut, then I'm finished."

Tanaka always carried at least two hand grenades, one for throwing at the enemy and the other for killing himself. "I can't be taken alive, because if I'm captured, big diplomatic problem for Japan." And though he had killed quite a few Soviets with grenades and his AK-47 Kalashnikov rifle, he still had not attained his ultimate goal: killing a Russian with his bare hands.

Then there was the British window cleaner from London, who had flown to Peshawar and told the guerrillas that he had "always wanted to kill someone." As Kaplan writes, "He went on a mission with an obscure guerrilla group whose members let him pull the trigger of a rocket launcher aimed at a tent full of regime troops. After the explosion, in the distance he saw two bodies lying on the ground. The window cleaner then went home to London. His wife paid the airfare.

End quote. But as scary and weird and hostile as Peshawar seemed, Jan Goodwin from Ladies Home Journal eventually made contact with the Mujahideen. And a few weeks later, she was riding in the backseat of a car with her face covered, crossing a Pakistani checkpoint into Afghanistan. And somewhere along the way, the reality of what she was doing fell on her shoulders like a 50-pound boulder. Quote, I realized that for the next three months,

"Beginning tomorrow, I would be solely in the company of men, and men, for the most part, who were not used to being in the company of women except for those in their immediate family, and certainly not on the battlefield. Normally, as any soldier knows, friendships are formed very rapidly during war. But these were men who had never had women as friends. And although this was hardly the time for thoughts of sisterhood, I was a woman who had been born assuming I had equal rights with members of the opposite sex.

Even when I was a child, no one had ever told me the world was circumscribed because I was a female. How would I respond if this all-male Muslim movement designated me a second-class citizen and decided that I was not worthy of their acceptance based on my gender alone? And if we got beyond that hurdle, how would they react to me? We would be living in such close proximity that privacy would be non-existent. Would I inhibit them? Would they avoid me? Or would they resent me?

Jan didn't know it yet, but over the course of her time with the Mujahideen, she would grow extremely close to her companions. She had worried, understandably, that her gender and her cultural background would be an impediment. But ironically, these young, zealous Mujahideen let her in and opened up to her in ways that she never expected. Quote,

"As a woman, I was able to see a different side of the guerrillas from the one that is normally shown to male journalists. With me, the freedom fighters could almost allow themselves to be vulnerable, and in turn I came to respect and care for these men." But that was later. This was now. When she initially crossed the border into Afghanistan, Jan was terrified. The most pressing concern was the physical challenge of simply keeping up with these guys.

They, quote, seemed to have bodies made of steel. Exhaustion was a word that didn't seem to exist in the Afghan vocabulary. End quote. Before they'd agreed to take her inside, one Mujahideen commander had openly doubted her ability to keep up. They'd met many male journalists who'd completely failed to endure the rigorous treks with the 20 to 30 men groups of guerrillas crisscrossing the mountains. As the Mujahideen commander told Jan, quote, many of them turned back, one after another.

And those who did told us all before they ran 15 kilometers a day. Several of them were running every day in Peshawar. There was a woman with them. She cried from the physical hardship and asked to be sent back.

Another guerrilla expressed his disapproval at Jan's presence. Women don't go on jihad. American women must be crazy. Still, Jan was defiant. All I know is that what I lack in physical strength, I make up for in determination. The Mujahideen regarded her with amusement. One of them tried to assure her that they would keep her safe from Soviet mines and bullets as best they could.

Quote, we haven't lost any journalists yet and we don't want to spoil our record. End quote. Jan was optimistic during her first few days in country, but suddenly she began to feel exhausted, bloated, uncomfortable. She felt stabbing cramps in her lower abdomen and then it hit her. Are you fucking kidding me? She thought. Quote, just then I began to feel the first twinges of menstrual cramps. Great timing, I thought. End quote.

Just when I needed all my physical strength, I was going to feel innervated for the next couple of days. How, I wondered, do you tell a guerrilla leader it's the first day of your period and you'll be fine tomorrow? End quote. The cramps eventually passed, of course, but Jan Goodwin's ordeal was only just beginning.

In 1897, a 23-year-old Englishman wrote in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph that the people of Afghanistan were, quote, "...amongst the most miserable and brutal creatures of the earth. Their intelligence only enables them to be more cruel, more dangerous, more destructive than wild beasts. Their system of ethics, which regards treachery and violence as virtues rather than vices, has produced a code of honor so strange and inconsistent that it

that it is incomprehensible to a logical mind." That angry young man was named Winston Churchill. And while the old bulldog never did think very highly of the Afghans, he might have felt differently if he had traveled, lived, and struggled alongside them, as Jan Goodwin, the 40-year-old executive editor of Ladies Home Journal, did in the summer of 1985. At first, Jan felt like a fish out of water. Here she was, thousands of miles from home,

in the midst of a strange, proud, almost alien people. The Afghans were, according to one Western observer, quote,

A tough people who can live on bread and goat's milk. And most who have known them have commented on their extraordinary personal dignity and love of freedom. The Afghans believe that the greatest of all virtues are revenge and hospitality. They never forgive an injury. Yet paradoxically, they do not turn away a guest, even if he is a tribal or personal foe. And these qualities are particularly associated with the Pashtuns.

End quote.

Jan Goodwin traveled all over eastern Afghanistan with a small contingent of Mujahideen guerrilla fighters. They crossed rivers and mountains and minefields. They slept in huts, bombed out villages, and on the cold ground under the open sky. Jan learned how to load and shoot an AK-47 and hide from Soviet gunships. She learned how to endure a level of physical hardship that she never imagined possible for herself.

She learned how to survive, when necessary, on a few ounces of bread a day and a couple hours of sleep a night. But as a journalist, the most valuable thing she learned was who these men really were. And the answers completely surprised her. Being a woman, Jan had expected best-case scenario to be treated as a pest, a nuisance, a burden. The Afghans, and especially the ethnic Pashtuns, were said to have a deep disdain for women.

even their own. As one Pashtun proverb supposedly went, "Women belong in the house or in the grave." And in a kind of bizarre cultural paradox, women were both sacred and a source of shame. Journalist Robert D. Kaplan elaborated, "A Pashtun won't even tell you the names of his wife and mother. To ask him is an insult. It would be like asking him to undress in front of a crowd."

As a result, Afghan society was completely dominated by men, where simple values like strength and resiliency were prized above all others. Asmir Tamim Ansari writes, "Afghan culture is, to be sure, a macho culture. From the earliest age, boys are expected to be tough. They think nothing of taking beatings from their fathers and elder brothers. They learn to laugh off such beatings, and even take pride in how hard they've been hit.

by the people who care about them the most. It's all part of becoming a man.

End quote. But despite all that, Jan Goodwin was shocked at the level of acceptance the Mujahideen displayed towards her almost immediately. They were friendly, warm, even protective, like a gang of machine-gun-wielding big brothers. Even the conservative, fundamentalist villagers who often sheltered their group were obliged to respect Jan's special place among the guerrillas. Quote, "'Normally, as a woman, I would never have been permitted to sit and eat with the men,'

But since I was dressed as the mujahideen and was traveling with them, the village elders who had joined us for dinner seemed prepared to overlook that fact." Still, the mujahideen couldn't help but steal the occasional glance at her strange, exotic looks. "When I removed my turban, revealing my red hair, I received the kind of attention that a skilled striptease artist would get elsewhere."

Their fascination with her pale skin and curly red hair didn't stop them from giving her shit as she sweated through her jacket and struggled to carry heavy backpacks and supplies on the long, 12-hour marches. At one point, Jan collapsed, and one man affectionately teased her, quote, She's not a good goat, nor is she a good donkey, end quote. The gorillas teased Jan constantly, even about bug bites, quote,

"It was hard to find a part of my anatomy that wasn't adorned with angry red welts. I'd been bitten so often on the face that one eye was swollen shut, making me resemble a prize fighter. The itching couldn't have been worse if I'd spent the night wrapped around a poison oak tree. The mujahideen laughed when they saw my appearance." "Looks like the flies found a good deluxe foreign restaurant." But the longer Jan traveled with the mujahideen, the more they began to open up to her.

They told her where they had come from, who they cared about, and why they had decided to join a hopelessly outgunned resistance movement fighting against a world superpower. Slowly but surely, the men who the Soviets called the Ghosts began to take shape. And they weren't demons, or spirits, or mountain apparitions, they were just ordinary guys in an extraordinary situation. One of the men that Jan grew closest to was named Torr.

T-O-R, Tor. And when Jan met him, Tor was probably in his late 20s. He had thick black hair, a short beard, and kind brown eyes. Before the Soviets invaded, Tor had dreams of studying to become a doctor in Kabul. But after December 1979, Tor saw his hopes and aspirations disintegrate. He realized that he would not be allowed to study at Kabul University unless he joined the Communist Party. As Tor told Jan, quote,

That's when I became a mujahideen. The only other choice was conscription into the army and I wasn't going to fight my own people." End quote. Tor's story was representative of a lot of young Afghan men, guys who had big plans for the future, who wanted to live in cities or travel abroad. And when the Soviets took away their future, they found refuge in the only avenue of purpose available to them, the lesser jihad.

Tor never did become a doctor, but he did seem to have some rudimentary medical training, and he became the de facto physician for the group of Mujahideen that Jan traveled with in 1985. On one occasion, Jan listened to Tor break down in anger about the futility of bandaging a group of young children whose village had been bombed by the Russians. "There's very little I can do. I just don't have the right medications. But even if I did have medicine, I could cure these children, and then the bombs would kill them."

End quote. Another Mujahideen fighter who Janby came close with was named Wakil. Before the war, Wakil had been a university student in Pakistan, and he was engaged to be married. But when the Soviets came, everything changed, and he broke it off. Quote, I knew I couldn't get married if I was joining the resistance. I mean, if I died, what would happen to my wife? I made a decision that I wouldn't think of marriage until the war was over. You know, I haven't seen my parents in eight years. End quote.

End quote.

Many of the Mujahideen had to leave their families behind to wage jihad against the Russians. But those loved ones were always on their minds. One man who couldn't stop missing his children confided in Jan, "Sometimes I think my babies will forget me." The freedom fighters came from far and wide. One man told British journalist Peregrine Hodson that he had spent time in the United States. When the Soviets invaded his homeland, he rushed back to Afghanistan to join the resistance.

He was only 25 years old and he missed his life in America. Quote,

The longer Western journalists like Jan Goodwin spent with the Mujahideen, the more they began to understand why they were fighting. As one fighter candidly told Hodson, "Many of us are brave, although there are also cowards. But even the cowards fight, because this is a jihad. In the West, you think we are fighting because the Russians invaded our country and we want to be free. But that is only half the truth. The Russians bomb our mosques and religious schools.

They try to teach our children communism and tell us that Islam is a backwards way of thinking. It is true that Afghanistan is a poor country but the most precious thing we have is our faith. Without it we have nothing. We are fighting to protect our religion.

End quote. The Russians may have had state-of-the-art jets, tanks, infrared goggles, and sniper rifles, but the Mujahideen's secret weapon was their belief. As one freedom fighter named Mustafa Can explained, quote, "...one thing the Russians do not understand is our religion. A man who believes in God is stronger than a man who has no religion."

10, 20, 30 years from now the Russians will grow tired of the war. Like the American people tired of the war in Vietnam. Communism began 100 years ago and already it is old and confused. But God is eternal. Perhaps now you understand why the jihad can only end in victory. We are fighting because we believe in God. If all the country is burnt, all the trees are dead, and all the rivers dry,

We will still fight." As Jan Goodwin and other Western journalists traveled with the Mujahideen, they talked about everything. They talked about religion, philosophy, food, music, politics, even sex. In this stoic, lonely, uber-conservative culture, Jan couldn't help but wonder, quote, "...how did they handle sexual feelings, or just plain desire for affection?"

End quote. One 20-year-old freedom fighter shyly answered Jan's questions about the nature of courtship and sex in Afghanistan. Quote, No, it is better if I don't dream.

Another young man told Jan that he had been beaten severely by his father as a teenager for flirting with girls at school. I learned not to talk to girls. Of course, it doesn't stop our feelings, we still have them. But as a good Muslim, I don't make love to a woman until I am married. That may not be true for all the Mujahideen, but it is true for the ones that I know.

End quote. Physical affection from women was a rarity for young unmarried Afghan men, a fact that Jan realized after one particularly death-defying jeep ride around the edge of a mountain cliff. She had been terrified that the driver would roll the jeep over the edge, but they managed to get where they were going without dying. As Jan wrote, quote,

End quote. As she traveled more and more with the Mujahideen, Jan Goodwin saw that these die-hard warriors were capable of profound tenderness and introspection. Quote,

In this mostly oral culture, I found the Afghans loved nothing more than to talk." One night, Jan listened to her new friend Tor recite poetry for a large group of freedom fighters. "I couldn't understand a word, but his voice was as honeyed as Richard Burton's at its best. He held his audience spellbound. 'You want a poem about jihad?' he asked the gathering of mujahideen. 'No, about love,' came the response.

"Ah, don't ask me about love. My heart is so full of love it will explode. You want to put mines in my heart. I am lovesick." He quipped before launching into a Persian poem full of romantic imagery that would have put Byron to shame. End quote. As they traveled throughout the valleys and the villages dodging Soviet patrols and evading artillery fire, the Mujahideen became fiercely protective of Jan.

At 40 years old, she had a good 15 years on most of them, and they started calling her Mommy as a joke. Well, the nickname stuck. One night, Jan's friend Tor opened up to her. He had recently learned that a close friend of his had died while fighting the Russians. The dead man was the last of six friends that Tor had joined the Jihad with at the outbreak of the war.

and now they were all gone. He said, quote, Mommy, I feel very sad. I loved him. I loved all six like brothers, and now they're all dead, and I'm left. I keep trying not to think about it, otherwise I will go crazy, but last night I dreamed about Sikander. In my dream, he came to me and he put his arm around my shoulder and said, Don't be sad, I'm not dead. But I knew he was, and then I woke up.

And Tor continues talking to her later in the chapter, quote, I think I will die in the jihad. I mean, why should I live? I have no parents, no home, no education. I was going to be a big doctor, a surgeon. I was always the first in my class and now I have no future.

You know, mommy, I'm never afraid in the jihad when we fight. I want to be martyred. I died five years ago when I left Kabul. My soul has gone to heaven and this is just my body. If it dies, it is finished. And people will say he was a brave freedom fighter and we can be proud of him.

End quote. As complacent as they were about their own fates, Tor and the other freedom fighters worried about Jan's safety all the time. They couldn't understand why she would come here, to a country that wasn't hers, to a war that didn't involve her, to risk death at the hands of Russian invaders. Quote, "'Why are you here? Why did you come? Me? I don't have a good life. This is all my life. If I die, it's okay.'

But you have a good life. All the time, I think, I don't want you to die. End quote. The Mujahideen in general had a very unique relationship with the concept of death, and it all flowed from their belief in an all-powerful God. The Mujahideen believed their deaths were essentially predetermined.

There was nothing that they could do to change what God had in store for them. They might have their foot blown off by a landmine, they might be ripped apart by a Soviet gunship, they might be popped by a Spetsnaz sniper, or they might die in their beds as old men. Whether they died in five minutes or fifty years was completely out of their hands, beyond their power or influence. So, why worry? Why be afraid at all? The natural endpoint of that train of logic is that you are basically invincible, and

until God decides to take that invincibility away and call you back to heaven. If you lived, it was because God wanted you to live.

We've talked about this before on previous episodes, but Islam literally means surrender in Arabic. And the Mujahideen tapped into a bottomless reservoir of strength by surrendering control of their individual destinies to a creator who would keep them safe, keep them bulletproof, for as long as they had a purpose to serve. At least that's how it worked in their minds. As one Mujahideen confided to the British journalist Peregrine Hodson, quote,

End quote.

Hodson later reflected, quote, "...the struggle in Afghanistan was a battle between a dying political system and a living religion. The Russians were mad to think that they could conquer a people who were under the protection of God." End quote. That, ladies and gentlemen, is why the Mujahideen eventually won. Why they were able to endure such mind-numbing hardship, hunger, pain, and misery. They believed, with absolute bone-deep conviction, that God, time, and history were

were on their side. But in an unexpected twist of irony, many soldiers in the Soviet 40th Army developed this same kind of indifferent attitude to death and a placid acceptance of an unchangeable fate. As one soldier named Novikov said, quote: "Death is a bitch. Why should I be afraid of death? What happens will happen. For me, death is irrelevant. While I exist, there is no death. When it comes, I won't exist."

End quote. The prolific Soviet journalist, Artyom Borovik, who had watched that young defector Alexei sob into his living room couch in San Francisco, was amazed at how numb the soldiers of the 40th Army had become to the gruesome sights in Afghanistan. Quote, "...if death had a mind and such attributes of intelligence as pride and vanity, the old witch would have certainly been outraged that the soldiers had become so accustomed to her presence."

But as the war ground on and the body count climbed, the Russian soldiers of the 40th Army became indifferent to not only their own deaths, but those of innocent Afghan civilians. Women, children, old men, anyone who got in their way, crossed their path, or looked at them funny. And before long, a tragic pattern of atrocity and criminal violence emerged that would scar the souls of reporters like Jan Goodwin for years to come.

In some ways, it was inevitable. This stuff seems hard-wired into human nature. It was a fact of life that even the Prophet Muhammad had acknowledged 1.5 millennia earlier. Quote, "...the devil flows in mankind as blood flows."

One day in 1985, Jan Goodwin was strolling through a village in Afghanistan. At one point, she walked past a small courtyard and saw two little kids playing. They were smiling and giggling, kicking a ball back and forth between them. And Jan thought they were adorable, so she went to say hello. But then, this happened. Quote, The older child, a girl of about four, took one look at me and began to scream hysterically. End quote.

Jan was, of course, taken aback. She didn't understand why this little girl would be so terrified of an unarmed 40-year-old woman. Her Mujahideen friend who was with her, Wakil, explained, quote, she thinks you're Russian.

End quote. The little girl had taken one look at Jan's white skin and European features and instantly saw an enemy, someone who was there to hurt her, to do bad things to her and her family. Now, if that's not the most potent and succinct illustration of the Afghan civilian population's relationship to the Red Army, I don't know what is. And the truth was, the Afghan civilian population had every reason to hate and fear Soviet soldiers.

Now, before we get into this, I just want to add a little caveat. War crimes and atrocities get a lot of ink and attention in modern discussions of past wars. As they should, it's very important to document, discuss, and revisit those crimes in the hope that we can prevent them from happening in the future. But sometimes we tend to focus on war crimes so much and so often that it almost becomes fetishistic.

It becomes empty shock value, misery porn for that gross, voyeuristic side of ourselves. But that said, while we don't need to belabor and wallow in it, we do have to talk about it. At least for a little bit. To ignore what the 40th Army did to the Afghan civilian population would be a disservice to the people who died, suffered, and carried those experiences like lead weight for the rest of their lives. Many of these people are still alive. Their kids are still alive.

And the memory of what happened drives their perception of not only the Soviets, but the Western world in general. But it's also very important to acknowledge that the Mujahideen committed what would be considered war crimes too. Torture, mutilation, murder. And I am absolutely not trying to say that one side was better or worse than the other. I'm not trying to set the bar higher for the Soviets and lower for the Mujahideen at all. Like I said in part one, there are no good guys in this story.

Just people. But with that said, let's rip the band-aid off and spend the last section of today's episode talking about this stuff. Suffering exists on a spectrum, obviously, but the Soviet war crimes in Afghanistan can be separated into a handful of distinct types.

And they happened throughout the entirety of the 40th Army's nine-year stay in Afghanistan. The first of which affected almost all of Afghanistan's 19 million inhabitants, in some way. When the 40th Army decided to depopulate the countryside and deprive the Mujahideen of its civilian support networks, they deliberately and methodically unleashed an ungodly amount of firepower on the rural population.

Even from a distance, it was staggering, as Peregrine Hodson remembered seeing on his trip inside with the Mujahideen, quote, There were explosions in the distance, and the horizon was flickering like a candlelit room. And

End quote. Up close, it was horrifying. The mud brick buildings that made up the mainstay of Afghan villages melted and fell apart like wet tissue paper when bombarded with artillery ordnance, tank shells, and napalm. Not to mention all the human beings inside. One villager recalled a time when an artillery shell had burst near his house, quote, "'Metal from the shell hit my son Jamal in the back and came out the other side. He didn't say a word. He just sank to his knees and died.'"

End quote. One Afghan civilian told a Western journalist, quote, This is our life now. Any day the jets can come and more of us are killed. End quote. It was obviously a terrible sight from the ground, but up in the sky it just looked like a beige blur and a pretty light show. Soviet journalist Artyom Borovik wrestled with the conflicting feelings of guilt and exhilaration when he was allowed to ride along in a Soviet jet during a bombing run. Quote,

The 39 minutes and 42 seconds I spent aboard a MiG-23 in June of 1986 cut into my memory like a sharp knife. At the time, the combat flight seemed strange, intoxicating, exhilarating. Imagine riding on a supersonic roller coaster in hell. As time passed, however, the exhilaration wore off, and it was replaced by a cold, gray emptiness that gradually gave way to a vague sensation of anguish and guilt.

Amujahideen, who Jan traveled with, simmered in anger about the bombing runs. "I would like to capture one of these pilots and bring him here and show him what he had done. I'd like to ask him, 'Do you have a child of your own, a mother of your own? What do you think of when you release the bombs?'" But the real bad stuff happened when Soviet patrols and convoys went into the villages on foot. The bombings at least had the cold remove of distance.

But eyeball to eyeball, face to face, the violence took on a stomach-churning intimacy. One story that came out of the war was from a 29-year-old farmer named Shakir Jamagul. Quote, "'We thought that they had come to conscript the men. This had happened before, so I hid in the storage cave at the back of our house. I thought my wife and children would be safe. Seven Russians came into my house armed with machine guns. I could see that they were laughing as they searched the house.'

Then, without saying anything, they raised their guns and fired, shooting my wife and four children. My youngest was 16 days old, my oldest child 7 years old. It happened before I realized what they were doing, there was nothing I could do but pray. Before they left, the soldiers took my wife's clothes and jewelry, our lanterns, they even took soap and candy. I left. I couldn't stay there. Outside, I found our animals dead. The

The soldiers killed our village's cows, goats, ducks, everything alive." A man named Muhammad Fazir told a similar story to Jan Goodwin, as she wrote in her book, "...his hands shook as he told me the names of his five children, aged six months to ten years." And then this is the man speaking to Jan, "...they rounded up the villagers and said, if you believe in God, where is your God now?"

then they shot them they shot my wife my daughters and they burned my two sons alive i couldn't bury my family my relatives did it i left my village i could never go back at night i cannot sleep the memories come i am so lonely for my wife my children the russians killed my soul that day

End quote. These kinds of village massacres were very common during the Soviet-Afghan war, but they evoked visceral memories of the much rarer but equally shocking American atrocities in South Vietnam. A military analyst named David Ishii wrote that in Afghanistan, quote, civilian massacres like the one at My Lai were the norm rather than the aberration.

But it was more than just the killing. It was the cruelty. Some men in the 40th Army developed a sadistic streak. They would toy with their victims and derive amusement from their pain. One Russian helicopter crewman named Paishkov remembered a time when he and his crew had been flying a peasant informer to a Mujahideen base. The deal was really simple. The peasant would point out the buildings where the Mujahideen were hiding, and then he'd get paid.

Well, on the flight, along the way, the peasant saw his own house, and he pointed it out to the Soviets as a, hey, look, there's my house kind of thing. The chopper's gunner, without thinking, destroyed the man's home with rockets, and presumably all of his family inside. The peasant clutched his head and started screaming. The Russian soldiers just laughed and shoved him out of the helicopter. And not to editorialize too much, but I hate that story. It just puts a pit in my stomach every time I read it. Anyway, moving on.

Then there was the sexual violence, which, as all students of history know, is inevitable in wartime. But that didn't make it any less awful. One Islamic teacher named Abdul Rahman told Jan about when the Soviets had taken his sister away in a raid. Quote, End quote.

On another occasion, Soviet soldiers abducted four girls from a village and took them away in helicopters. As Jan Goodwin writes, quote, End quote.

The Soviet soldiers also took young boys away, although less for sexual gratification and more for conscription into the Afghan Communist Army. A mujahideen named Farouk told a Western journalist that he had been forcibly conscripted by the communists when he was 17. "I was grabbed on the main road. I told the soldiers that I was a high school student and I showed them my exemption card. They laughed and tore it up. I was thrown in the back of the truck with the other boys."

Farouk eventually ran away and joined up with the Mujahideen, but while he was briefly a conscript, he saw things and heard stories that haunted him for years. "While I was in the army, they brought in a forced recruit who had been press-ganged while his wife was in the hospital giving birth to their third child. She needed blood.

and he had been sent to go get it when he was stopped by the soldiers. He pleaded with them to let him go. He explained that he had also left his two children, ages 2 and 3, at home alone because in the emergency he hadn't had time to find anyone to watch over them. For eight days, he kept telling the authorities why he needed to go home, but they watched him constantly. Finally, he fled, and when he got back to Kabul, he found his wife had died in childbirth, and his two children were dead from dehydration.

The authorities caught up with him later and brought him back to the base. He was almost out of his mind. End quote.

As journalists like Jan Goodwin and Peregrine Hodson listened to stories like this from Afghan civilians, they sometimes encountered resentment from people who felt like the writers were making money off their misery. As one man sneered at Hodson, quote, "...there was a time when I thought that Europe and America would help us. Several foreigners have visited the town since the war began. They stay for a week or so, take photographs of planes and smoke, and then they leave."

I know that you can receive a lot of money from the pictures that you have taken. But what will we receive? Nothing. Each time we ask such people for doctors and medicine, we wait and no doctors come. Your people come and look at our suffering and sell it for money in their own countries.

End quote. Despite the widespread pattern of atrocity unfolding across the countryside, many Soviet soldiers were repulsed by the cruelty that they saw in the 40th Army. One man named Garak Dzhamalberkov was so desperate to get away that he went AWOL and surrendered to the Mujahideen. He was still a POW when Jan sat down with him for an interview. Garak told her, quote, There are many ways to kill a man in war. The clean way…

and our way. And from what I witnessed in my six months in the army, I knew I didn't want to be a part of it. I was disgusted by what I saw. We were killing people. We were killing animals in Afghanistan. We were covering the country in blood.

End quote. Garrick also told Jan about a time when he'd watched his fellow soldiers round up a group of Afghan villagers and run them over with tanks as they were tied up and prostrate on the ground. Quote, "'I watched them do it. I couldn't move. It was an inhuman act. I couldn't understand why they did it. They didn't even know if they were freedom fighters. They could have just been men living in the village. I was ordered to bury them, but there wasn't much left to bury.'"

Soviet journalist Artyom Borovik caught up with another defector named Kovalchuk in New York City, and he expressed a similar feeling. Quote,

In the course of two years, I carried out all the orders that I was given. And then I told myself, I can't live like this anymore. I can't live this lie. God, I thought this lie will haunt me for the rest of my life. I can try, of course, to drown it in vodka, but I'll never be able to find myself. I decided to desert when there were only 10 days left on my mobilization. I spent four long years in a rebel detachment. And now I'm here. That's it.

Another ex-Soviet soldier named Nikolai told Jan Goodwin, "...I couldn't stand what we were doing. I saw villages destroyed with heavy bombardment. Everyone and everything was destroyed. I couldn't stand it. When we caught Afghans, I saw an officer cut off a man's nose, cut off his fingers. Somebody asked him what he was doing and he replied, I'm playing."

When I defected, I thought the freedom fighters would let me join them. I thought they would let me fight. Now all I do is sleep all day and think all night. Sometimes I think I will become an old man here. Other times I think I'll be dead in three years or mentally deranged. I've thought of suicide.

At this point in the interview, Jan asks, quote, Have you thought of escape? And Nikolai answers, quote, Escape? Escape to where? If I escape in Afghanistan, I'll only get caught again by the Mujahideen. There is no escape for us. End quote. But one of the most nuanced takes on Soviet cruelty came from a Russian soldier named Alexander Gergel. Quote,

End quote.

At the very beginning of this section, we talked about those two little kids Jan Goodwin had watched playing in the courtyard, how they had screamed hysterically when they saw her because they thought she was a Russian. A few weeks after that incident, Jan learned from some local villagers that those two little kids had been killed in a Soviet bombing attack. In fact, nearly all of the villages that she had visited in recent weeks had been attacked and leveled by Soviet gunships.

Any town that sheltered the Mujahideen suffered vicious reprisals from the 40th Army, and with a sickening sense of clarity, Jan realized that she was leaving her own trail of death and destruction across Afghanistan, just by traveling through it. When Jan Goodwin eventually flew back to New York City, she did so irrevocably changed. Like all the Western reporters who snuck in to cover the war, she had not emerged from Afghanistan unscathed.

While she was there, she had contracted dysentery and developed a corneal ulcer, the former from bad water and the latter from dust constantly getting under her contact lenses. But the real mileage was on her spirit. It broke her heart to have to leave friends like Tor and Wakil behind to an uncertain future. Because while Jan's part in the story was over, for the Mujahideen the ordeal was far from finished. But they would not be fighting alone.

All across the world, from Langley, Virginia to Saudi Arabia, the wheels of a colossal money machine were beginning to turn. The Soviet Union had many, many enemies, and those enemies wanted to see them go down in flames over the mountains of Afghanistan. In one of the most expensive covert ops in CIA history, in cooperation with the Saudis, the Pakistanis, and the Chinese,

The American government would funnel billions of dollars of advanced, cutting-edge weaponry to the Mujahideen in an attempt to turn the tide of the war. The Soviets didn't know it yet, but their empire's days were numbered.

Well, guys, that is all the time we have for today. This was a long episode and a bit of a depressing one. So if you're still here, thanks for sticking it out. This episode was, by my own admission, a bit of a mess structurally. It was nonlinear with lots of jumbled accounts and evolving themes.

But in some ways, that was by design. I wanted to at least try and convey the chaos and confusion of what it was like to live through the war. For everyone involved, for the Soviets, the Mujahideen, the Afghan civilians, and the journalists who courageously cataloged it all. It's a messy story, and sometimes telling it can get equally messy. But next time, in the third and probably final part of this series, we're going to completely switch things up.

We're going to zoom way out and shift our focus back to the realm of geopolitical intrigue and covert operations. More specifically, we're going to be looking at America's role in the Soviet-Afghan war. And let me tell you, it is hugely consequential. We'll look at how the CIA became involved in the conflict, how they covertly funneled billions of dollars to the Mujahideen through Pakistan, and how those weapons eventually turned to the tide against the Soviets.

But all that money flowing into an unstable part of the world had unintended consequences. The different factions within the Mujahideen had to compete against one another to get that funding. And that competition exacerbated existing tensions between two rising schools of thought within the guerrilla leadership.

One faction simply wanted to free Afghanistan from the Soviets and form a government that would rule the country in peace. The other faction wanted to take the war far beyond the Soviets, beyond the Middle East, and conduct a transnational jihad against imperial powers the world over. Two men, two rival Mujahideen commanders would become locked in a bitter existential struggle. And only one of them is alive today. And their clashing interpretations of what was best for their country

shaped the present in ways that are still coming to light. So, long story short, we've got a big finale on the horizon. Look out for that third and probably final installment of Ghosts in the Mountains very soon. And as always, thank you so much for spending your valuable time with me, and I hope you have an awesome day. This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening.

Coming up on 5-Minute News, I'm Anthony Davis. You might think it's partisan because maybe it's critical of one side or the other, but it's not. It's just the truth. And I think that's also something that's kind of unusual for Americans listening to the radio or to podcasts because the news landscape in the States has been so partisan forever.

for so many decades. So 5-Minute News is verified, truthful, independent, unbiased and essential world news daily.