Salman Rushdie once said that those who are displaced by war are the “shining shards that reflect the truth.” With so many people fleeing wars and ecological collapse in our world today, and more to come, we need acute truth-telling to deepen our understanding and recognize the terrible faults of those who have caused so much suffering in our world today. The Mercenary, journalist Jeffrey E. Stern’s account of a bond he developed with a cab driver during the early days of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, has accomplished a tremendous feat inasmuch as every paragraph aims to tell the truth.
The Mercenary: A Story of Brotherhood & Terror in the Afghanistan War
by Jeffrey E. Stern
Public Affairs Books, 352 pages.
Publication Date: March 21, 2023
Stern takes on the appalling disaster of war in the country, and in doing so, extols the rich and complicated possibilities for a deepening friendship between two men to grow in such an extreme environment. Stern’s self-disclosure about his motives, experiences, failures and hopes challenges readers to acknowledge our limits when we build new friendships, while also examining the terrible costs of war.
Stern develops the two main characters, Aimal, the friend in Kabul who becomes like his brother, and himself, in part by telling and then retelling particular events. We first learn what happened from his perspective and then, in retrospect, from Aimal’s substantially different point of view.
As he introduces us to Aimal, Stern lingers, crucially, over the relentless hunger afflicting Aimal in his younger years. Aimal’s widowed mother, strapped for income, relied on her innovative young sons to try and protect the family from starvation. Aimal gets plenty of reinforcement for being cunning and becoming a talented hustler. He becomes a breadwinner for his family before he reaches his teen years. He also benefits from an unusual education, one that offsets the mind-numbing boredom of living under Taliban restrictions, when he ingeniously manages to gain access to a satellite dish and learn about the privileged white people portrayed in Western television, including the children whose fathers prepare breakfast for them, an image which never leaves him.
I recall seeing a brief film shortly after the 2003 Shock and Awe bombing of Iraq, that depicted a young woman teaching elementary students in a rural Afghan province. The children sat on the ground, and the teacher’s only equipment was chalk and a board. She needed to tell the children that something had happened very far away, on the other side of the world, which destroyed buildings and killed people, and because of it, their world would be severely affected. She was telling the bewildered children about 9/11. For Aimal, 9/11 meant that he kept seeing the same show on his rigged-up screen. Why did the same show come on no matter what channel he played? Why were people so concerned about descending clouds of dust? His city was always plagued by dust and debris.
Jeff Stern tucks into the riveting stories he tells in The Mercenary a popular observation that he heard while in Kabul, characterizing expats in Afghanistan as either missionaries, malcontents, or mercenaries. Stern notes he wasn’t trying to convert anyone to anything, but his writing changed me.
In about thirty trips to Afghanistan over the past decade, I have experienced the culture as though looking through a keyhole. I have visited just one neighborhood in Kabul, and I mainly stayed indoors as a guest of innovative and altruistic teens who wanted to share resources, resist wars, and practice equality. They studied the writings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas K. Gandhi, learned the basics of permaculture, taught nonviolence and literacy to street kids, and organized seamstress work for widows manufacturing heavy blankets, which were then distributed to people in refugee camps. Their international guests grew to know them quite well, sharing close quarters and trying hard to learn each other’s languages. How I wish we had been equipped with Stern’s hard-earned insights and honest disclosures throughout our “keyhole” experiences.
The writing is fast-paced, often funny, and yet surprisingly confessional. Sometimes, I needed to pause and recall my own presumptive conclusions about experiences in prisons and war zones, when I had recognized a defining reality for me (and other colleagues who were a part of peace teams or had become prisoners on purpose): we would eventually return to privileged lives, by virtue of completely unearned securities related to the colors of our passports or our skins.
Interestingly, when Stern returns home, he doesn’t have that same psychic assurance of a passport to safety. He comes close to emotional and physical collapse when struggling, along with a determined group of other people, to help desperate Afghans flee the Taliban. He’s in his home, handling a barrage of Zoom calls, logistical problems, and fundraising demands, and yet is unable to help everyone who deserves assistance.
Stern’s sense of home and family alters throughout the book, but with him always, we sense, will be Aimal. Through The Mercenary, I hope a broad and diverse number of readers will learn from the compelling brotherhood of Stern and Aimal.
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Editor’s note: A version of this article was previously published at WorldBeyondWar and elsewhere on the Internet.