From Vietnam to Afghanistan: Not winning hearts and minds

We were putting up the tents when Pakistani police pulled up and told us we might get killed if we camped there.

Four guys in a British lump of a car, they'd driven out from Peshawar to warn us. No "fees" or "permits" were demanded, though doubtless they worried about the political implications of a dozen or so British and American corpses showing up between Peshawar and the Khyber Pass, where we were headed in our decrepit little Mercedes bus.

"Very dangerous to camp here," one said.

"Why?" I asked. It looked okay to me -- farmland and trees, green in April but turning dusty as the rains got further behind us. A lovely evening in 1969, a peaceful year in that part of Asia.

"This area is not under government control," he said.

What an amazing notion, I thought -- not under government control.

"Tribal territory. Very dangerous. Much fighting."

What were they fighting about?

"They fight."

I paid attention. In Vietnam I'd learned how easy it was to get killed in some of the most beautiful landscape on Earth.

The Brits on the bus did not pay attention. With the confidence -- defiant naivete, really -- that had once conquered the world, they began muttering: Preposterous . . . rubbish . . . to think we'd strike the tents on the basis of some rumor . . .

So we stayed. That night, I woke to the venerable music of a firefight -- rifles, machine guns, grenades -- maybe 500 yards away. It went on for a while but came no closer. It ended. I went back to sleep.