The Foreign Service Journal, September 2004

F O C U S S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 61 camouflage. Alongside it were a couple of dozen heli- copters whose rotors had been removed. I looked twice to make sure the rotors had not been left off ours. Inside were bench seats with two 100-gallon auxiliary fuel tanks on either side. I thought to myself, “Yes, please; take all the fuel you need. Don’t want to get caught short near the Afghan border.” The windows looked like port- holes that had been removed from a ship. On takeoff, the intense noise, vibration and smell of aviation fuel combined to start an immediate headache. “Only a couple more hours of this,” I told myself. The landscape was a flat, arid waste covered by a dirty white sky heavy with heat and sand. Dusty hills rolled on to the horizon. There were no signs of refugees. The land formed a natural barrier that seemed incompatible with human beings. Occasionally in the middle of this vastness was a shepherd herding a flock of black-haired sheep. We landed at Kushgy, the southernmost point in Turkmenistan. Our hosts drove us through the small town, past a whitewashed Russian Orthodox cross on a hilltop that had marked the southernmost point in the Russian empire. At the border checkpoint we looked across two red- and-white wooden gates into a small cluster of buildings. That turned out to be the village of Turgundi in Afghanistan. An irregular ridgeline of tan colored moun- tains loomed in the background. A set of train tracks, a branch line of the Trans-Caspian Railroad that originated in Mary, ended about a kilometer inside the border. It was all strangely quiet. There was no activity to be seen on the Afghan side of the border. Over the ridgeline, 80 miles down the road, was Herat, where some of the heaviest bombing had taken place. Somewhere over there, Americans were already fighting the Taliban and al- Qaida. It was a drama that we could only imagine. We flew along the Afghan border before banking west toward Mary. The terrain was beautiful in its rugged des- olation. On the Turkmen side were several patches of wild pistachio trees. Looking into Afghanistan, the smooth, undulating hills made it look like we were flying