Air quality permitting I try and hold the group sessions outside. When the particulate meter settles into a quasi-quiescent tick-tock metronome, we bundle up the patients into hand-me-down NBCs and stretcher/carry/cajole our charges into the ambulance (an ungainly USMC anti-mine deuce and a half) and head south-east to the poppy fields near the Khyber Pass. Since the mujahideen went synthetic savvy and the UNODC quashed production with the simple expedience of tactical nukes, the endless opium plantations have gone to seed. The orbital feeds now show a more colourful Afghanistan; like an ironic mockery of old empire cartography, the landscape is a startling seasonal scarlet against the otherwise unrelenting high altitude view of the endless browns and greys of the Middle Eastern prairie.
The poppies hide the other prefab I maintain, a quiet place that is tolerably well preserved by fading UN logos and still functioning outer skin chameleon polymers. Ignored also because of its notional salvage value, the prefab offers us a valuable hiatus space, only occasionally spoiled by a few empty beer bottles and rank hobo piss. Appearances aside, I still feel that there is useful work to be done here. We (mostly me) are one small part of what in quainter (more naïve) times might have been called a guilty conscience. But it’s pointless trying to anthropomorphise a corporation, the lesson I’ve learned from fourteen months in field is that WorkSpace is nothing but deliberate. Unencumbered by the human flotsam of pity, or empathy, or consideration, the WorkSpace behemoth moves deliberately and with perfect self-focus.
The Combat Revenue model is a well worn, well practiced algorithm that allows for the faintest expressions of largesse at carefully determined intervals. The CR tacticians noticed early on in shock-and-awe profiteering that they had to allow for a degree of mercy, an amelioration of take, to maximise their returns. It seemed that even the best insulated corporate psyche quailed eventually in the one-way bazaar of war.
This is where I came in—one small articulation (a feeble prosthetic nod to decency) of the post-war official WorkSpace Health and Reconciliation programme. Like a shot in the arm of battlefield stimulant, we had an amazing first year in Jalalabad—epic funding, baksheesh up the wazoo, access all areas—even for a Guardian-reading tosser like myself it was hard to resist local government-sanctioned largesse…
This year’s been rather different. We are no longer the flavour du jour, by October WorkSpace PR had already moved onto a free HIV-immunisation programme for the Cape Town townships, and the scooped torsos and cleanly delineated stumps of the organ-thieved were old news. Funding dropped to less than ten percent of year one, we lost most of the international team, the patient suicide rate soared, we moved to the prefabs in the car park, and I lost the one decent camp bed left in southern Afghanistan.
We still have the poppy prefab though, and on a spring day with the early red petals tinting the view, we make some useful progress with our crippled coterie. Zalmai in particular loves the plantation; he knows that there is nothing to run into, the worst he can expect is a turned ankle in a rabbit hole. It’s become a tradition, as soon as the ambulance hits the bumpier surface of the gravel road leading to the prefab, Zalmai grabs my sleeve and turns his eyeless face to mine (a mute plea I can never resist) and points to the ambo door. I slow the truck and punch the door release.
Zalmai hoots and leaps, rolling easily on his left shoulder, the poppy buds leaving sticky resin on his crappy jacket and brown dust and early sun forming a glowing corona around his thrashing form. Then he’s up, running, arms outstretched, a child’s aeroplane freedom—a thing of beauty compared to the adult fetishism of war hardware that Zalmai unconsciously mimics. The Afgani children that I had met all seemed to share an uncanny ability to imitate the clanks drones rumbles snicks clicks of the American armour they had grown up with all their life. Zalmai wheels, turns, pitches and yaws across the poppy field, filling the air with a pitch perfect echo of an A12 tankbuster on afterburner, punctuated occasionally with the bumblebee gargle of the chin chain-gun.