Middle East - Travel, War Narratives, Russian & Soviet History, 1917-1991 (Soviet Union) - History, Asia - Politics & Government, Middle Eastern Conflicts, Middle Eastern History, Central Asian History, Africa & the Middle East - Travel Essays & Descripti

Night Letters : Inside Wartime Afghanistan

Name: Night Letters : Inside Wartime Afghanistan
Author: Rob Schultheis
ISBN: 9781585745647

by Rob Schultheis

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Overview

This harrowing account from the front lines of the Afghan civil war can stand comparison with such masterpieces as Michael Herr's Dispatches or George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. Sometimes lyrical, sometimes harrowing, sometimes absurdly comic, NIGHT LETTERS gives an indelible human face to a conflict that few Americans have followed or understood. Rob Schultheis fell in love with Afghanistan in the 1970s, when it was a wild, unspoiled country that had barely changed in the past five hundred years. When this ancient land suddenly plunged into civil war between a Soviet-backed Communist government and implacable Muslim rebels, Schultheis found himself drawn to telling its heartbreaking story. Throughout the 1980s, he reported on the war from the front lines, risking his life time after time as he penetrated into the mountains of Afghanistan with the mujahedin insurgents. NIGHT LETTERS is an impressionistic first-person chronicle that conveys, with frightening immediacy, the nature of a war where men armed with bolt-action rifles squared off against tanks and helicopter gunships-weapons that could, and routinely did, reduce an ancient village to rubble in minutes. Yet the outgunned and outnumbered mujahedin never considered giving up the fight. Ultimately, they exhausted the Soviet occupiers. Not without reason was Afghanistan called "the Soviets' Vietnam."

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In this impressionistic first-person report on the Afghanistan war, emphasis is on the unique character of the mujahedin , the fiercely independent Muslim rebels, and their valiant struggle against the Soviet invaders. Schultheis, who covered the war for several U.S. newspapers, was impressed by the ``incredibly inappropriate sense of humor'' displayed by the Afghans during military operations. Typical example: a tribesman expresses his joy over the return of a friendly detachment by firing a rocket at them. Miraculously, no one was injured. All parties considered the explosive ``Welcome Home'' hilarious. Many vignettes and anecdotes in this entertaining book fall under the category of what Schultheis calls ``runaway craziness rushing into yet crazier craziness.'' Traveling across the bleak mountain ranges of Afghanistan with various guerrilla units including one he refers to as ``a merry band of muj straight out of Robin Hood,'' the author had several close calls, most of which he seems to have enjoyed. In this chronicle of high adventure Schultheis succeeds in conveying his exhilaration to the reader. (Apr.)

Library Journal

Schultheis's obsession with Afghanistan was an outgrowth of his peacetime visits in the 1970s; when war began destroying the country he found himself drawn there again and again, partly as a reporter, partly as a sympathetic witness. Russian involvement brought terrible cruelty and mechanized bloodshed, and the author reports the stories as they came to him with fevered excitement and horror. The things he witnesses himself--rumors of villages blasted to rubble by assault helicopters--are, oddly, more subjective than his personal trial of a dreadful bout with dengue fever and being abandoned on a hillside to die. His descriptions of the many individuals and their savage landscape are unforgettable, and his tales of the desperate yet eager combat by a remarkably resilient people give some of the most vivid images of that war available to us in the West.--Mel D. Lane, Sacramento, Cal.