Stingers & Summits
by Leila C. Nadir
Cary Adams, Stingers & Summits, digital photograph, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Stingers & summits
Leila C. Nadir | FEB 2024 | Issue 30
I was pretty sure I had a handle on what was happening in the world, but around 1987 or 1988, when I was twelve years old, the story switched up on me. For as long as I could remember, the US was good. Afghans were good. Ronald Reagan was great. And the Soviet Union was pure evil. No, wait—back to Reagan. Reagan was off-the-charts excellent. He’d cowboy-punch communism right in the face if that’s what it took to save the world from nuclear disaster. And Afghan Freedom Fighters, on the front lines battling the Soviet Empire, they were most glorious. Reagan loved them so much that he invited them to sit with him on the White House’s white couches while photographers took loads of photos.
I saw the footage on Dan Rather’s news after dinner. Baba sat in his News Chair, I sat on the couch, and I saw mujahids on the couches in chunky sandals, black beards combed and neatened, crispy perhan tumban, spiffy turbans, beside Reagan and his upturned puff of hair and his stiff suit and his shoes black and shiny. Reagan loved his Afghan guests so much that he let the CIA smuggle the mujahideen Stinger missiles, probably across the Pakistani border on the backs of mules who never made it back because they were made to walk across minefields after.
Until the Stingers, the mujahideen had no defense against the Soviet helicopters gunning them down from the air, but now they could shoot missiles with launchers balanced on their shoulders and crater the choppers down from the sky in a burning crash of metal. It was a game-changer. When Dan broke the news, Baba sat up straight in his News Chair and shouted. “Finally the US sends powerful weapons! If the US sends more eh-Stingers, war will be over!” When the first choppers fell to the ground from the sky, the mujahideen cheered, “Allahu Akbar!” and unloaded Kalashnikovs into the charred bodies of dead Soviet soldiers.
That was a few years ago, when all the players were clear. Now I was twelve years old and strange things were happening. All these meetings were being held between Reagan and Gorbachev, the new Soviet leader. The meetings were called summits, which seemed to be a fancy word for meetings between world leaders. There was a summit in Iceland and a summit at the Kremlin. There was a summit in Switzerland and a summit in Washington. At the summits, Reagan and Gorbachev talked about treaties. They talked about nuclear weapons. They talked about when the USSR would finally get out of Afghanistan, withdraw the Soviet military, end the invasion. Reagan wanted Gorbachev to agree to a deadline. The CIA wanted a deadline too. Dan Rather was probably into it. And every Afghan on the planet as far as I knew.
We watched Dan’s reports on the meetings, the summits, all the statements, signings, so many statesmen at desks, holding pens in front of flags, shuffling papers. It was easy for me to recognize Gorbachev because he had that birthmark on his head that looked like the map of a lost island nation. The birthmark made him look less evil than previous Soviet leaders, or maybe I just thought this because sometimes Gorbachev actually smiled. But I wasn’t fooled. I kept my guard up. I knew how Communists could be. Gorbachev hemmed and hawed. He side-stepped and weaseled. He never did what everyone said he should do, which was to withdraw the Soviet military from Afghanistan, where his country never should’ve gone in the first place.
I saw Reagan at the summits patting Gorbachev’s back, shaking hands, like they were best friends or something. It made no sense—Gorbachev was supposed to be the US’s mortal enemy. I could remember Reagan on TV calling the Soviets evil. I remembered him behind a podium at the Berlin Wall. “If you seek peace,” he shouted, “if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union: Come here to this gate, Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” I remembered Reagan saying the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had violated every international law and every law of every decent nation. And now he smiled at Gorbachev, like they were lost loves reunited, and Baba started saying soon peace would return to Afghanistan. He said we’d return to Kabul to live for real this time, or at least to visit relatives.
I watched Reagan and Gorbachev and Dan Rather on TV, I listened to my father in his News Chair, and I had a bad feeling about where this was going. All these men acting like it was so easy to end wars. Like you could just reverse direction. Make up, withdraw, retreat. March away. I didn’t trust sudden affection between former enemies. It reminded me of my parents.
Leila C. Nadir is an Afghan-American writer and artist working on a memoir that examines the global geopolitics that invade our living rooms and the intimate violences that reverberate across the planet. She has received awards and fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Bread Loaf, de Groot Foundation, Tin House, Aspen Summer Words, and Maine Arts Commission. Her writing has appeared (or will soon) in Michigan Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, Khôra, Shenandoah, North American Review, Asian American Literary Review, Aster(ix), and ASAP/J.
Cary Adams is an interspecies kin-maker, folk-punk musician, environmental artist, and creative-critical researcher investigating a modern memory disorder that he and his collaborator Leila Nadir call “industrial amnesia.” His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum and has been supported by awards, fellowships, and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Franklin Furnace Fund, and the Maine Arts Commission.