Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar Read Free

not just that I enjoy food; I am needy. For me, food becomes like alcohol, and consuming it is a diversion that helps keep me sane. I eat partly in hope of forgetting what I’ve seen, and remembering what pleasure feels like.
    On the morning after the meal in my darkened apartment, I am out reporting in San Salvador with a colleague when his pager buzzes: six priests have been murdered overnight at the nation’s preeminent university. We race across town and arrive before the police. Four of the priests are lying facedown ontheir front lawn, their arms splayed at weird angles. Two of them are draped in their nightshirts; the others have on T-shirts or pajamas. They’re wearing slippers. One priest is tall; his white gown is crumpled, its hem bunched at his thighs. Just beyond him lies a second priest—dark T-shirt, lighter pants. A third is to the left, and a fourth is nearly skull-to-skull with the third. Two more are inside the house.
    On the lawn, the brains of two of the men have been blown cleanly from their heads by the impact of assault rifles fired at close range. Their skulls, emptied of their contents, are sallow, deflated, and misshapen. I stare, then turn away and squeeze my eyes shut tight. I am dizzy and breathless.
    Just a few months earlier I’d been in Washington, D.C., living with my girlfriend, wearing bow ties to work, trying out a beard, playing hoops on weekends, cooking elaborate meals—soufflés, Chinese pot stickers, chicken Kiev. I was a dandy, self-absorbed; I’d seen nothing very terrible. Now I am here on this lawn, with these dead priests, staring, looking away, my mouth so dry I can barely swallow.
So this is what evil looks like
, I think.
    The priests were Salvadoran leftists, liberation theologists, men of peace. They were the most famous intellectuals in the country—one the university’s rector, another the vice-rector, another a noted sociologist whom I’d interviewed weeks before, a kind man, self-effacing, intelligent. They had been taken from the beds where they slept, dragged into the yard of their residence, and executed by Salvadoran army troops. The army brass, fierce anti-communists, have long hated the Jesuits, whom they regard as the guerrillas’ intellectual godfathers.
    By mid-morning, the sun is blinding. The bystanders at the Jesuits’ house, standing like sentries and gawking at the bodies, cast stocky shadows. The sun has etched dark shadow-rims around the bodies, too, delineating them. It is hot, suffocating.
    We get another pager message, this time about a Mexican cameraman, a colleague, who is missing. We set out in a convoy of media vehicles—Jeepsand Land Cruisers with “TV” in big letters taped to the windows like a talisman to repel bullets. There is shooting everywhere—the guerrillas have stormed the capital, capturing chic neighborhoods and slums—and the city is a mess. Shattered glass carpets the sidewalks. The streets are an obstacle course of fallen utility poles and tangled bouquets of power lines. No one knows which wires might electrocute you.
    We pile out of our cars in the neighborhood where the cameraman was last seen—a rundown school with its trash-strewn playing field, some abandoned-looking small apartment buildings—and start looking around. It is spookily quiet. We see no one. Then gunfire erupts.
Fuck!
I throw myself to the pavement and roll to the curb, the only bit of cover available, and my colleagues do the same, all of us piled up, panting, cursing. We can’t tell where the shooting is coming from, whether we’re the target or simply caught in the crossfire, but the bullets are just over our heads, buzzing like angry hornets. My teeth, my fists, my jaw, my eyes, my ass, my whole body is clenched in terror, and I press my face into the dirt and dog shit at the curb. I have never been religious, but now I am praying:
Pleasegodpleasepleasepleasepleasegod
.
    My