Photography Class Field Trip to Afghanistan

I wasn’t even taking photography when Mr. Keating announced his class field trip to Afghanistan in the spring of 1978, but I added my name to the roster anyway. Coach Ross got so mad when he heard about it, he threw me off the track team.

“You’ve got to get your priorities straight,” he growled.

If I stayed behind at our high school in Isfahan, Iran, I’d be hyperventilating around a dusty track every day while Ross lambasted me. If I went, I’d be exploring an exotic country with my friends.

“I do have my priorities straight,” I replied. “I’m going.”

A few weeks later I found myself on a chartered bus hurtling east across Iran towards the Afghan border.

The school administration probably orchestrated our first stop, which was on the Iranian side of the border. We toured a museum that showcased failed drug smuggling operations. They displayed everything from a men’s shoe with a hollowed out heel to an entire oil tanker truck that had been filled with contraband. The point was clear. Every hiding place has already been discovered. Don’t try to bring anything back.

And indeed, as we waited at the checkpoint, some men were tearing the seats out of an Audi parked over a pit by the side of the road. Every few minutes they would toss another brick of hashish into a bin.

“The dealers get paid twice,” one of our chaperones said, “First they sell the drugs, and then they collect a bounty when they inform on the buyers.”

“Then they buy the hash back from the border guards, and the cycle starts over again!” quipped another.

We had a more immediate problem, as it turns out. My friend Sherman’s yellow World Health Organization immunization card didn’t show that he had gotten the typhoid vaccine. The authorities were holding up the bus until he could prove that he had, even though there was no legal requirement. They escorted him to a back room in the border station, where a man in a white lab coat showed off a rusty medicine cabinet, and proposed that they could vaccinate him on the spot. A guard stood rubbing his palms together behind this “doctor,” who was probably just another guard in costume.

Sherman got the message: he slipped the men a few bills. They immediately relented and let us pass.

Our Route

Herat was the first decent-sided town in the far west of Afghanistan. Originally we hadn’t planned to stay there, but all the night busses to Kandahar had been cancelled due to “massacres.”

“Massacres?” we worried. Were the day busses any better?

It was now mid-afternoon, and I was hungry. Sherman and I walked down the main street looking for a place to eat. Along the way kids were hawking earrings and necklaces made of pewter, silver and lapis lazuli. The necklaces were rough but pretty, and I thought I'd buy one for my sister. I bargained like I would in Iran, ending up at a price that was about half of what one of the kids had originally asked. I pocketed my purchase and continued walking down the street, pursued by more kids waving their wares in the air.

A boy ran up and pushed an identical necklace in my face. I brushed him aside, showing him the one I had already bought. Undeterred, he blurted out a price. Since it was higher than what I had paid, I congratulated myself. Then he yelled a lower number, and then another. His final offer was about a third of what I had just paid the other kid. Feeling humiliated, I kept walking without a backward glance.

We weren’t having much luck finding a restaurant that was open in the mid-afternoon, but we could hear music coming from the second floor of one building. We decided to investigate. Climbing a flight of stairs, we found an entry hall. Stacks of cooking pots were scattered across the floor, along with several pairs of shoes. Beads hung from the doorway that separated us from the room where the music was blaring. We dutifully slipped off our shoes and stepped inside.

Both Afghans and western hippies slouched on cushions along the far wall, facing the band to our right. Most were wearing Afghan clothes.

We sat down on a couple of unoccupied cushions near the door. Soon a boy who looked to be about twelve came up to us to ask whether we wanted tea. We nodded, and he poured us two cups. Then I glanced at the crudely printed menu on the low table in front of us, and ordered one of the dishes.

“No have,” he said.

So I picked another.

“No have,” he repeated.

And then another. Still no luck.

“So what do you have?” I asked, exasperated.

“Veg-e-tab-les with rice,” he responded.

That hadn’t even been on the menu, but I was just glad that I could get anything at all.

“Sure, I’ll take it,” I told him.

The boy disappeared through the beaded doorway. Meanwhile the tempo of the music picked up. The hippies began passing a hash pipe around, and thick smoke hung in the air.

I just wanted my veg-e-tab-les with rice. After what seemed like an eternity, the boy reappeared and put a plate in front of me. The food was room temperature, but I didn’t care; I devoured it. Since we weren’t ready yet to commune with hippies who had sold all their western possessions, I paid as quickly as I could and we left.

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“What’s wrong with this bus?” I complained, as it plodded south along the empty highway towards Kandahar the next day. I was used to the Iranian busses, which flew down the road at full throttle. Our Afghan bus driver never exceeded 75 kilometers per hour all day long, even though we only encountered another car every hour or so.

“He doesn’t want to hit a sheep or a goat,” Mr. Keating explained. “From the Bedouins’ perspective, killing one would be as serious as killing a man.”

Village Scene (Matt Johnson)

A slowly changing panorama scrolled by as we rolled south on the only paved road in the country. The flat green fields around Herat gave way to empty arid rolling hills. Then dark mountains loomed to the east, as if in perpetual shadow. Eventually, as we approached a low pass through them, the bare stone and earth faces turned a deep reddish shade of purple. It was if I had slipped on a pair of infrared goggles, or stepped onto Mars. These were not colors I had encountered before in nature.

Occasionally we’d overtake one of a handful of antique trucks that lumbered along the road even more slowly than we did. Their sides were covered in bright hand-painted murals. Some depicted exotic animals; others featured mildly risqué images of women, mountain landscapes, or awkwardly phrased slogans in English. In contrast to the squared-off cabs of modern diesels, the fenders of these ancient lorries curved gracefully past their forgotten British hood ornaments to extravagantly decorated cabs. Pompom fringe dangled above the windshield. Strings of beads swayed from the back, almost grazing the road.

A Wonderful Book on Afghan Trucks by Jean-Charles Blanc (1976)

I immediately fell in love with these rolling folk art sculptures, and kept an eye out for them during the rest of the trip.

I could see now why Mr. Keating had picked Afghanistan for our photo safari. It wasn’t even the folk art trucks, or the rugged psychedelic landscapes that drew him, but the Afghanis themselves. They were incredibly photogenic, with high cheek-boned faces full of character. You just had to be careful to ask before aiming a camera at them, especially when approaching older men and women.

Afghan Man (Mark Hutchins)

Keating taught us that we should blend in with the scene as much as possible when we took photos of people. Then again, he was a silver-haired, urbane New Yorker with round glasses. He stood out in a crowd of Americans, never mind Iranians or Afghanis. Since stealth often failed him, he packed a Frisbee as a fallback strategy. Most people in the region had never seen one, so when he threw it in a long arc back to himself, they were amazed. Ultimately, even his most suspicious subjects were disarmed, and he took a lot of great shots.

Tim Keating (1978 ASI Yearbook Photo)

We stopped at a primitive sort of truck stop in Kandahar for lunch. The locals ate with their right hand, but I didn’t feel comfortable doing that. When I asked for a spoon, the waiter presented one to me with some formality. It was plunged into a greasy glass full of lukewarm water, I guess to signify that it was clean. I decided I would eat with my hand after all.

A few hours later, our bus finally arrived in Kabul, a dramatic capital city surrounded by snow-capped mountains. Here we stayed at a real hotel, and ate in real restaurants. We couldn’t believe the steak filet dinner that the hotel restaurant offered. The portions were modest – and fortunately for our health at least, overcooked to toughness – but they came on a plate with vegetables along with a side salad for about a dollar.

Study (Matt Johnson)

I actually preferred the meat pastries that I could get from the shops a block away. They were savory and filling, and I still crave them sometimes. I also snacked on the figs, dried apricots and roasted almonds that I’d buy by the bagful.

I tried my hand at bargaining again, and picked up two small rugs to take home. Though they were small and rough woven kilims, I was proud of myself for talking the shop owner down to about $30 for each. One is in the front hall of my house 40 years later. In some stores, I saw used jeans and t-shirts for sale, probably sold off by cash-strapped Westerners.

Kilim Bought in Kabul (Matt Johnson)

Bob, a fellow track team member, asked me whether I wanted to tag along when he went running. He had escaped my fate, since he was the long distance star of the team. Ross couldn’t afford to lose him! I still loved to run, even if I was officially done for the season. So we slipped on our shorts and sleeveless school jerseys, and headed out to the street.

We jogged across the center of town to the base of one of the steep hills that ringed the city. There we picked up an ancient, stone-paved path that headed several hundred meters uphill to a shrine. We flew by penitents climbing up the path on their knees, oblivious as always to our intrusion on this solemn ritual. When we reached the top, we barely paused to glance over the city below before hurtling down the hillside on a different path. At the bottom I was amazed that I wasn’t breathless, even though my pulse was racing.

Other students had been discovering a different set of famous tourist attractions in Kabul. One night they passed around some hashish that they had bought. It was soft, oily and almost black. It might have been part opium – very dreamy, and probably addictive. I began to see why some might end up selling off their western clothes and hanging out in clubs like the one Sherman and I stumbled into in Herat. Recalling our border experience, I hoped no one would try to carry any of it back home with them.

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Mr. Keating had arranged for us to attend a Buzkashi match near Kunduz, in the north of the country. To get there from Kabul, we had to drive over the snow-covered Salang pass. The road up the mountain was steep, winding and treacherous. Here the antique, colorful trucks groaned under their loads like pack animals as they inched up the road. Only rarely was the road wide enough to overtake them, so it took an eternity to reach the top of the pass.

Salang Pass Road (Scott Sorensen, Wikimedia.org)

On the other side of the pass, the scenery changed completely. We were now on central Asia’s high steppes. Treeless rolling hills were tinted green with sparse wild grass.

When we arrived at the event, we found spectators sitting on a low rise that gave a commanding view of the steppes, which opened before us like a vast natural polo field. Nearby, vendors had set up a tiny makeshift carnival, with snack stands, and even a small handmade wooden Ferris wheel. We bought some nuts and settled in on the grass.

Ferris Wheel in Kunduz (Mark Hutchins)

Buzkashi started as an every-man-for-himself contest to identify a champion horseman. The object is to pick up a goat’s carcass from the ground while riding a horse at top speed, then carry it beyond a large pole about 500 meters out in a field and back to the starting place. The challenge is that dozens of horsemen vie for the carcass at the same time, and do whatever they can to take it away from the rider that possesses it. Injuries are common, and deaths occasionally result from the chaos that ensues.

The tournament we saw was more structured – perhaps as the result of 19^th century British influence – but still dramatic. Two teams of about a dozen riders each, one dressed in blue and the other in magenta robes, lined up side-by-side. At the called start, they galloped towards the carcass in the field, and one rider swung low to the side of his horse so he could snatch it off the ground without stopping. It changed hands several times as riders charged one another; sometimes falling on its own to the ground, other times torn from an opposing rider’s hands.

Buzkashi Action (Sherman Zent)

The photography class darkroom only handled black and white film, so everyone had been shooting black and white pictures for the entire trip. It was the perfect choice to capture the chiseled faces of Afghani men, or the detailed textures of the Hindu Kush Mountains. But I had cheated and brought along a roll of color film as well. The bright colors of the Buzkashi spectacle gave me a chance to use it.

Buzkashi - Gathering for the Match (Matt Johnson)

Later that afternoon, we came upon an Afghan wedding in the countryside. The men danced in circles on the grass, and afterwards posed on a truck that they had decorated for the occasion. It was even more over-the-top than the others I had seen, draped with wool and silk hangings, long necklaces and lots of colorful beads.

Wedding Party (Matt Johnson)

It was a pure, innocent moment of happiness. No one realized it then, but it was to be perhaps the last untroubled time that these villagers would ever know. Only days after we left the country, a communist coup wiped out the central government, and the rural population began the first of what would be decades of revolts against successive bureaucracies and invaders. I had been unwittingly celebrating with the young men who would eventually become the Mujahidin.
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We had barely started our chartered bus ride back to Iran the next day when the driver pulled over to the side of the road and opened the door. About a dozen Afghanis in traditional dress clambered aboard, with what seemed like all of their possessions – samovars, rugs, bags of clothing and food. They filled the aisle from the front to the back of the bus.

“What’s going on?” we yelled.

Our chaperones gathered around the driver, protesting the incursion.

“We chartered this bus. Get these people off immediately,” they demanded.

The driver seemed taken aback that anyone would complain. We all had seats, he pointed out. It seemed like a waste to leave a perfectly good aisle unused if he could find willing passengers. Anyway, he told us, he was just taking these people to the edge of town. “Five kilometers,” he promised.

Everyone continued to grumble, but eventually the door shut, and we lurched forward with what seemed like an entire village standing in the aisle of our bus.

As the kilometers rolled by, the driver showed no sign of stopping. Again we could hear arguing at the front of the bus. It was to no avail. When we finally did stop a couple of hours later, it was so our companions could lay out their rugs on the ground by the side of the road to say their afternoon prayers.

By this time, my annoyance had melted away. The setting was beautiful, near a stream, and the effortless way the group improvised their ceremony fascinated me. The same scene was being played out all over the world, wherever devout Muslims happened to be, five times a day. Then as quickly as they began, the prayers ended, and we climbed back onto the bus.

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A year later, I was in college when I heard that the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan. Their goal was to take control of the country, but having traveled there, I knew that was impossible. The Afghans I met were fiercely independent, and most didn’t recognize any authority higher than their village elders. You would basically have to kill everyone to achieve victory, and then what would be left?

Goaded by the Taliban’s shielding of the Twin Towers attackers in 2001, the US also attacked Afghanistan, and tried its hand at nation building.

The conflict continues. The young men in the dancing bridal party that we photographed in 1978 have become old men, at least those who weren’t killed in the past 40 years of war.

Will I ever be able to return to simply take pictures, eat meat pastries, or admire a brightly painted antique truck? I dream of the possibility, but it seems remote. I can only hope that peace arrives before I become too old myself.