The Foreign Service Journal, September 2004

over an ocean of brown swells and troughs. There were no signs of refugees to be seen. If someone wanted to hide, however, never to be found, the Afghanistan land- scape looked like the place to do it. Humanitarian Mercenaries By November 2001, NGOs were finally able to get some workers into Turkmenistan, thanks in large part to substantial U.S. lobbying. USAID had also sent out a special disaster team to help organize ship- ping non-food items, including plas- tic sheeting, tents, wool blankets and coats. The World Food Pro- gram came equipped with people and money. Finally, the first of many humanitarian flights to deliver aid by way of Turkmenistan began arriving, starting with the C-17 from Charleston, S.C., I mentioned at the beginning of this arti- cle. During the first week of November alone, six C-17s landed with humanitarian relief, both food and other necessities. “Humanitarian mercenary” was how Simon, an American relief worker I’d known for some time, described himself. The combination of his small frame and the bushy red beard he’d only recently grown gave him the air of an oversized leprechaun — albeit one with a serious demeanor. The day after he fled Afghanistan, I met him at the embassy. Simon had been living in Afghanistan for the last year and had grown the beard in an attempt to minimize scrutiny by the Taliban, who had issued edicts that men not shave their facial hair. (I remember reflecting on the futility of keeping a red beard from standing out in a world of black beards.) Just two days before that initial encounter, he had been expelled by the Taliban and found his way to Turkmenistan by way of Pakistan. When I next saw Simon, he had shaved his beard. In the coming weeks, he would organize relief convoys of hundreds of trucks that carried blankets, tents, food and medical supplies. The Afghan truck drivers and scores of day laborers that loaded the supplies by hand became his army of humanitarian mercenaries, as USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios saw for himself during a swing through the region. During November and December 2001, USAIDprovided tons of relief supplies and Simon was indispensable in organizing them for shipping on hundreds of trucks. They drove more than two hundred miles over horribly rutted tracks in the desert to the Afghan border. But because there were no news media here, the outside world did not know of this extraor- dinary effort. Things continued to move quickly. The Northern Alliance forces now controlled the upper half of Afghanistan, including the area along the Turkmen and Uzbek borders, and it was clear the Taliban would soon be routed from power. In December, during the month of Ramadan, President Bush personally saw off two American Red Cross humanitarian flights originating from Maryland. The first C-17s carried over 1,600 winter jackets, 1,500 winterized, family-size tents, and 10,000 gift parcels of clothes and school supplies and candies for the children of Afghanistan, funded by donations from American school- children. All of it was flown to Ashgabat and loaded onto waiting trucks headed for the Afghan border. I saw Simon and many of the relief workers togeth- er in the week before Christmas 2001. They had gath- ered for a “last supper” at a hotel that boasted Turkmenistan’s only Italian chef. The relief workers, a diverse group of Americans and Europeans who knew each other from providing assistance after all kinds of disasters, were a culture unto themselves. Many had worked overseas for years, as if they knew no other life. They greeted each other with a carefree camaraderie: “Were you in the Congo? Or was it Kosovo?” Even if they did not know each other, they usually knew the same people. That supper was the last time I would see Simon in Turkmenistan. He and the other “humanitarian mer- cenaries” all went separate ways: some back to Afghanistan, some to Europe to spend a short Christmas holiday. I went home myself for the Christmas holiday, feeling more in the spirit of the sea- son than I could ever remember. F O C U S 62 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 4 By November 2001, NGOs were finally able to get some workers into Turkmenistan, thanks in large part to substantial U.S. lobbying, and humanitarian assistance started flowing to Afghanistan.