I have been a youth worker for the last two years. My efforts to make a difference in some of these youths lives, if I am to be honest, seems to me pretty pathetic. The cycle of abuse and violence in our society is so strong I'm astonished at its powers. I feel like a failure against such an unbelievable force.
William Vollmann as a Young Man tried to go to Afghanistan to help them fight the Russians. He failed miserably and pathetically.
I find the honesty and complexity of this story seriously beautiful and real. So much more real than all the simple narratives that we love to digest (in book, tv, movie, or even in our interpretations of our lives).
I find his efforts to do something, and his shame at being so useless (and his honesty in facing this shame) extremely touching and personal. ( )

[A]nd the Mujahideen fired in this long moment that was the reason I came; I don't want or need to say much more about it; they were fighting and I was not; they were accomplishing the purpose of their lives in those endless night moments of happiness near death, no fear in them as I honestly believe; they had crossed their river so long ago that I could not really comprehend them as anything except heroes shining like Erica on the far side of the water; they were over the red hill and nothing mattered.

Vollmann, in his first book written and seventh published, calls himself only The Young Man here, perhaps to distance himself from that other foreign country known as the past. Here he is a wee twenty-two years old, with his head full of Wittgenstein and blind idealism, frail of body, speaking no Pashtun and not knowing how to fire a gun. With this set of assets and liabilities, he soldiers off into Afghanistan to try and Save the World. No doubt many timid intellectual types have had feverish misguided dreams of becoming Che or some heroic martyr-general, but here's one foolish devil who tried to make these dreams come true. Vollmann's ironic historical self-awareness starts to bud here. He notes György Lukács and his futile efforts in the Hungarian Revolution, watching politics and force sweep aside the tender debates of the fine points of ideology.

What Vollmann does have here are a camera, a 'what-the-hell attitude', forty rolls of film, and a tendency to make friends. Enough material to write a book, but hardly enough to help people.

So off he goes. He sojourns from Karachi to Peshawar, and interviews some locals and reliable sources. The refugees - they are easy to find, as the city of Peshawar doubled in size after the war began - tell him their stories, and eagerly buy him Pepsi and Fanta with their little savings. At times, he might be guilty of a feelings of Orientalist exoticism towards the Afghans, making them into Others, but he tries to break down this self-built wall, talking to people first, suffering the heat, eating the food, genuinely listening to them, writing little Pynchonian ditties about the city. To be fair, the Afghans and Pakistanis have their own images of him and America too. They'd like guns. They'd also like to visit America, the promised land of guns, gold, and Cadillacs. They'd most like to be listened to, and ask the Americans for eager help and assistance, with increased bitterness as their pleas are selectively ignored. He talks to a few refugees who were lucky enough to get to America, and they are blandly pleased.

And here, Vollmann drifts between the literary to the political. There is a vast chronology in the back of the book, starting from the first Russian conquests against Khiva and the Kazakhs in 1734, and ending in 1989, with the election of Benazir Bhutto, the withdrawal of the Soviets, and the Final Victory over the Evil Empire two years to come. In his interviews with warlords, politicos, NGO workers, and the Muj, Vollmann was able to uncover that the US was giving aid to the Mujahideen via Pakistan by 1982. But of course, there was a real chance that if he had died in Afghanistan and the Soviets could have picked through his camera and his notes, then he could very easily have sabotaged the remaining American efforts there.

Another, post-modern fascination of Vollmann's is human perception and how nonobjective our gazes can be, especially decades of war and propaganda have made institutionalized lies about each other. The Soviets believed, or their institutional apparatus did, they they were bringing their own brand of communist liberation to the Afghan people, freeing the women from the veil, teaching children how to write, and molding them into international citizens who appreciated civic virtues of class-consciousness. But we know the difficulty of applying ideology through praxis without a biased viewpoint. In this way, the Soviets appear as ludicrous as FEMEN, who believe that showing your breasts to a lecherous gaze of the news-media will somehow solve systemic oppression.

Perhaps the first problem with the book is that it was published too late. At this time, Vollmann was something like a respected novelist, and this awkward exploring memoir seemed out of touch in many ways. In 1992, we were already celebrating our Final Victory over the Soviet Union and had announced the End of History, whereas Afghanistan would soon be seized by the Taliban some four years later. In my brief research for this essay, I found one review in 1992 who smugly predicted "the resolution of the Afghan situation" was coming soon. History, of course, will not slow down or disappear because it is ignored by the powerful.

Vollmann's little efforts were a total failure, by his admission. The picture exhibitions he set up when he returned barely covered the cost of the rooms he rented. Vollmann, technologically proficient yet morally naïve, is a cipher for those who ape the motions of trying to aid others without understanding the complex circumstances they live in, is only too relevant today. He is an American Abroad, a well-intentioned Ugly American narrative character. His early childhood fantasies, of Alaska, mix with the red hills of Afghanistan and its landscape. His narrative is about failure, and perhaps he hopes his honesty and self-effacing modesty will atone for it. The secrets of Afghanistan and the World do not arise simply because he asked nicely.

So whither Afghanistan today? We want so much only to help, but there has been little unity, and there remains little today. Pakistan has its own issues, and justly resents our drone usage, and if their varied peoples are said to have any unified interest, it is survival and peace. The way forward is murkier. The eternal forges of hell burn the corpses of the good-intention, the ideal, the person who wants most desperately to change human nature. ( )

I couldn't finish this. Vollman is interesting when describing, sometimes rather wryly, his efforts to find a way to aid the Afghans who have engaged his sympathies. He is sometimes deeply torn as to what he can and should do: sponsors refugees? However, he veers off into irrelevant and uninteresting autobiographical details. I quit during a lengthy description of a miserable hike with a martinet. There is overall an air of depression hovering over the book. ( )