Across How Many Borders

If there’s one thing going for Matthieu Aikins (going for him in a big way), it’s the dreamlike feel of the narrative:

Matthieu’s friends chicken out. He goes back to Kabul, aching with frustration. His friends will try another way to get out of Afghanistan.

He then ends up making some complicated travel arrangements: Istanbul, Venice, Trieste, Llubljana, Van. He flies out of Istanbul, disembarks in Venice, takes the train to Trieste, spends the night at a friend’s house, then takes the bus to Llubljana, where he catches a flight to Istanbul. At Istanbul, he undergoes some things: he is searched by a man wearing gloves (UGH), he is interrogated and put into a waiting room. He becomes friendly with a man who tells Matthieu that he has been in the waiting room for six months (Waiting Room = Oxymoron, lol). He tries to distract himself by reading Toni Morrison (Beloved) He is sent back to Llubljana.

The “emotion-recording apparatus,” as Robert Graves called it

The author’s companion Omar is having second thoughts, only a day into the journey.

I tried to think of what I could say to rally Omar. He’d once been up for almost anything, but as the years went on, I found him less eager to take risks on our assignments together. He’d had too many close calls and seen too many bodies. Of course it was different when you were doing it for pay instead of glory, but for me, repeated exposure had the opposite effect. I understood that I was probably damaged, but at the time it seemed useful for working in places like Afghanistan and Syria, I thought I could separate feeling from reason. And it was natural, but not rational, for your fear to spike when it came time to act.

— The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, p. 89

Passing Kandahar

Matthieu Aikins can write.

On the bus from Kabul:

It was lunchtime but despite the passengers’ protests, the driver refused to stop. We kept driving west, and later that afternoon, crossed the Helmand River, where the road that forked south to the provincial capital was cut off by the Taliban. I saw another familiar face on a billboard: Commander Hekmatullah, the district police chief killed by a roadside bomb last year. Posters of heroes became posters of martyrs, and their ink faded pale blue in the sun. I had met Hekmatullah in 2014, during the season’s record-breaking opium harvest, which had more than doubled since the year 2000. He’d kindly sent some of his men with me so that I could tour the edges of his district where the poppies started, fields that ran deep into arid wastes cultivated with bore wells and pumps, increasingly solar-powered.

— The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, p. 84

Good Morning, World

Why There Are Words (WTAW) launches its Betty imprint, dedicated to publishing books by women for everyone, today. Read more about it here.

Leaving Kabul

The journey is about to begin! Exciting.

Matthieu Aikins, his friend Omar, and a last-minute addition, Malik (“Malik was the shy neighbor whose father had lost his mind”) take a taxi — a taxi! — through the empty streets.

We were headed to a neighborhood on the western edge of the city called Company. It was the starting point for travel south along the national ring road, Highway 1, which curved down to Kandahar, and then back up to Herat. Company’s main drag, its asphalt shredded by truck traffic, was lined up with cheap hotels called mosafarkhana. Behind them were feedlots and slaughterhouses for livestock, a maze of mud walls by a ravine running with offal.

— The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, pp. 80 – 81

The Naked Don’t Fear the Water, p. 68

This book, which I began reading a few days ago, is about a Western journalist, Matthieu Aikins, who accompanies his Afghan translator on the refugee trail from Afghanistan to Europe.

They set off in 2016.

When the news came on, the headlines that summer of 2016 was no longer about people in boats, but about the British voting to leave the European Union, about the Republican Party nominating Donald Trump as their candidate, and about a truck crushing people in the boardwalk in Nice.

Reading a Book for the First Time

This is the first time I’ve read anything by Ernst Junger — I mourn because surprise is so much part of the pleasure I’m deriving in reading him. Alas, you can’t discover a great author twice.

I’ll always remember what I was doing when I first picked up Storm of Steel — the time of year (late spring), the weather (hot). Anyhoo, absolutely taken aback by Junger’s nonchalance and insouciance, mouth dropping open practically every page, here he is in Flanders field (again)

The total absence of self-pity (“Our army is losing! There’s a good chance I might die here!”) is remarkable:

Fall, 1917, Flanders field:

The morning hours of 26 October were filled by drumfire of unusual severity. Our artillery too redoubled in fury on seeing the signals for a barrage that were sent up from the front. Every little piece of wood and every hedge was home to a gun, whose half-deaf gunners did their business.

— Storm of Steel, p. 197

At eleven o’clock on October 26, Junger is ordered to the front with four men. As he nears the command dugout, “we came under aimed machine-gun fire, a sure sign that the enemy must have forced our line back.”

Stay tuned.

Sentence of the Day, Storm of Steel

At this point, dear blog readers must be asking themselves, Is self ever going to finish this book? It’s taking her aaaages!

The Germans, it turns out, are not all spit-and-polish. One of the commendable aspects of this book is that Junger documents many instances of friendly fire. He describes these incidents with an “oh well, that’s war” detachment, with the result that the reader places absolute trust in his voice.

Regniévile:

• One enthusiast threw in a smoke stick, making any further attack on the place impossible. (Oh, the irony! The platoon was supposed to be providing Junger and a hand-picked few diversionary “covering fire” so that they could take advantage of the enemies’ distraction to advance)

Still Regniéville:

• “Of the fourteen who had set out, only four returned . . . “
• Kienitz had “taken some losses . . . from our own artillery fire.”

The End of Langemarck

Lieutenant Ernst Junger is wounded again. This time he has to wait in a crater for 13 hours, drinking rainwater from his helmet, before help comes.

He’s wrapped in a tarpaulin, a tree sapling is slid through the loops, and two orderlies prepare to carry him to the rear. But they have to dodge shells, zigging and zagging, and once, painfully, they drop him.

Unexpectedly, Junger learns that one of his brothers, Fritz, the one “dearest to my heart”, had taken part in the first wave of attacks against the British line, and was reported missing: “a feeling of appalling, irreplaceable loss opened up in front of me.”

“Then in walked a soldier, who told me that my brother was lying wounded in a nearby shelter.” Junger runs over, and finds his brother gravely wounded: a shrapnel ball “had penetrated his lung, the other shattered his right shoulder . . . We squeezed each other’s hands, and said what had to be said.”

After he himself is wounded, Junger is taken to a hut being used as a field dressing station. “Suddenly, bespattered with mud from his boots to his helmet, a young officer burst in. It was my brother Ernst . . . ” (The author is also Ernst. It’s probably a typo: you can’t have two brothers from the same family sharing the same name, surely?)

They have the briefest of reunions. Ernst is carried back of the line, and there, he slips in and out of delirium. A couple of officers he doesn’t know are in the room, drinking wine “out of tin cups and whispering among themselves.”

The chapter ends with this paragraph:

Mortally tired as I was, a feeling of happiness now sneaked in that grew stronger and stronger, and which stayed with me throughout the ensuing weeks. I thought of death, and the thought did not disturb me. Everything within me and around me seemed stunningly simple, and, with the feeling “You’re all right,” I slid my way into sleep.

— Storm of Steel, p. 179

An Act of Will

What a tremendous act of will to write like this in the midst of the chaos that was Langemarck! Junger must have had extraordinary powers of concentration.

Sentence of the Day (Storm of Steel, p. 173):

• On a rain-slicked pasture, over which the milk-white balls of a few shrapnel hung like clouds, the rest of the regiment came together.