Warrior Pose Read Free Page A

to 100 degrees outside, as the midday sun bakes the arid ground on the desolate border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The hospital has no ventilation or cooling system, so the heat is stifling, the air almost too thick to breathe, and it smells like a butcher shop filled with spoiling meat.
    â€œHow did this happen to you?” I ask Mahmoud through my interpreter. He can barely whisper his response, and his body seems to quiver even more as he recalls what happened.
    â€œI was just playing outdoors, all by myself,” he says as his eyes close tightly, fighting back tears. “Then the jets came and everything exploded, and I was on fire.”
    As I stare into Mahmoud’s gentle face, I can hear my deep breath and feel the pounding of my heart. Every cell in my body is trembling with compassion, disbelief, and a sense of outrage that such a thing could happen. What I feel is not a new emotion, but a reignited one. A righteous anger at the injustices in the world has smoldered within me since I was a child, like Mahmoud. It began as I became aware of the violence and discrimination in my own country during the Civil Rights Movement. Then, as I became a teenager, the Vietnam War turned me into an advocate for peace and justice. This indignation continued with me into adulthood, motivating me. This is why I’m a journalist. Making the public aware of suffering and inequity in the world is my passion. It defines what I do, and who I am.
    Mahmoud was simply being a little boy, playing in his remote village high in the mountains of Afghanistan, when Soviet MiGs suddenly roared overhead and began dropping bombs. His horrific wounds are from napalm, a jellied gasoline designed to stick to its victims and burn them to death. As he was running down the rocky clay street trying to escape the attack, the gooey fire stuck to his body and consumed him. Dozens of people in his village were killed, including Mahmoud’s parents. Despite his scorched flesh and terrible pain, he managed to walk through the mountain wilderness for three weeks, cross the border into neighboring Pakistan, and find this refugee hospital just in time, before his wounds became so infected that any chance of survival would have been lost.
    On a bed next to Mahmoud is a boy of similar age from a different village. His right leg has been blown off by a land mine. In the far corner, behind a cloth curtain for privacy, is a teenage girl from a region farther north. Her swollen, lacerated face is peppered with tiny, razor-sharp pieces of metal from the shrapnel bomb that killed most of her family. She’s been blinded in one eye. She stares at the floor with the good eye, an empty gaze of hopelessness.
    This is happening throughout Afghanistan as the Soviets attack villages and drive the people out so that the local freedom fightershave no basis of support. Every bed in the refugee hospital is filled with victims of all ages. Some are infants. Others are more than eighty years old. All have ghastly wounds. Many barely cling to life. The medical staff is in a perpetual state of overwhelm, and more victims are carried in every day.
    I know we have done things like this to one another throughout all time. Knowing it is one thing. Witnessing it is something else. It touches you in places you never knew existed. Gazing at Mahmoud, I can’t help but believe that if I devote my life to telling the world about such atrocities we might wake up one day and stop the killing. I realize this is utterly naïve, but Mahmoud’s eyes argue otherwise. “You must tell the world,” he seems to be saying with his gaze. “You must.”
    â€œYes, I’ll do it,” I say aloud as my cameraman finishes filming. It’s impossible for me to consider otherwise. I feel this at the very core of who I am. And even though Mahmoud speaks no English, his soft smile tells me he understands that I’ve heard his message.
    One Month Earlier
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