Warrior Pose Read Free Page B

the NBC affiliate in Boston. I’m the new reporter here, hired just two months ago and bent on making my mark. This morning, as I sit at my desk in the newsroom leafing through The Boston Globe , a photo jumps out at me. It shows a young girl with a white cloth wrapped over her thick black hair. Her dark, haunting eyes are staring straight into my Soul. There is no story, just a caption below the picture saying, “Free Afghanistan Alliance.” That’s it. No details, no phone number, no way to contact the organization.
    It’s 1986, and the war in Afghanistan has been major news ever since the Soviets invaded seven years earlier, and I think this might be a “local hook,” a Boston connection to an international event.
    Nobody in the newsroom has ever heard of the Free Afghanistan Alliance. The phone company doesn’t have a listing. It makes me all themore determined to contact them. I finally get hold of someone in The Globe advertising department and I beg, cajole, and schmooze them for all I’m worth. It works. They break the rules and give me the name of the person who bought the ad. His name is Charles Brockunier. He owns a Persian rug store just across the Charles River in Cambridge. I ring him immediately, telling him I’m a reporter and that his ad caught my eye. He gives me an overview of his mission to help the Afghan people by smuggling badly needed medical supplies into the country. As we speak, it’s clear that he’s brilliant but also eccentric, totally locked into his mission. I’m completely intrigued now and know I must meet him. I get his address, jump up, and tell the assignment editor I’m off to investigate a lead on a possible story.
    Brockunier’s shop is hard to find, tucked away on a side street near Harvard Square. The air inside smells ancient, and with so many dusty, antique carpets piled everywhere there’s barely room to pass through. The place is empty, and I have to call out several times before Brockunier appears from behind a stack of rugs. The founder of the Free Afghanistan Alliance is tall and lanky, clad in worn, wrinkled khaki trousers, a drab, collarless Nehru shirt, and a rugged vest that looks and smells like it was made from the wool of a wild goat. He is sporting a matching brimless, woolen hat like the ones I’ve seen Afghan freedom fighters wearing in network news reports. He has a heavy, poorly trimmed reddish beard, ruddy complexion, and glasses so thick his eyes look like they might jump out of their sockets.
    Brockunier insists that we sit down, cross-legged, on a stack of elaborately patterned burgundy, gold, and earthy brown Persian rugs to sip Afghan tea. I’ve always been stiff. Sitting like this is a pain. It makes me impatient. It’s not even that cold outside, so I don’t feel like drinking hot tea. I just want to pepper Brockunier with questions and get a full understanding of what he’s up to. But this is his world and he’s clearly not going to be rushed.
    As he settles in with his tea, Brockunier tells me he is a native of Cambridge, went to Harvard but never finished a degree, and has spent years traveling to Afghanistan to buy rugs for his shop. He’s in love with the Afghan people, a self-taught expert on their culture andhistory, and fluent in their languages of Pashto and Dari, along with being conversant in several other languages of the region. When I ask for an example of a few dialects, he rattles off sentences with ease. I can’t understand a word, but I can tell he isn’t faking it.
    â€œI had to flee Kabul in 1979 when the Soviet tanks rolled in,” he explains in a deep, scratchy voice. “Otherwise, I’m sure they would have arrested me, tortured me, accused me of being a spy, and locked me away in prison.” Back home in Cambridge, Brockunier founded the Free Afghanistan Alliance and dedicated himself to raising money to support the Afghan