A Night in Afghanistan Essay

A Night in Afghanistan Essay

"Shhhh!" my mother whispered as the tanks rumbled by under the cold Afghan night, the stars twinkling above the mountains surrounding us. From our hiding place in the brush along the shoulder of the dirt path through the Khyber Pass, I could see tanks stretching to infinity and, try as I might, I could not find an end to the convoy of trucks. Huddled along with my father, mother, and infant brother and sister, we peered anxiously as the Russian Spetsnaz scouts rolled past us in jeeps ahead of the convoy heading toward the Afghanistan–Pakistan border–the very place our destination lay.







My brother began to whimper. My mother began to pray. It seemed as if the line of tanks would never end. Finally, as the last of them rolled ... Show more content on Helpwriting.net ...He straightened himself and brushed a tear aside with the back of his hand. I was puzzled. We walked on.







As dawn approached with a faint hint of turquoise along the horizon in front of us and we finally sighted Peshawar–the border village in Pakistan–in the distance, my thoughts were not of the next step in our journey, but of the steps already behind us. I knew nothing of war, politics, or Communism. All I could grasp was that I was leaving the only home I had known for the first three and a half years of my life for an unknown, an abstraction, a void that held neither the warmth nor the familiarity of my home in the suburbs outside Kabul. Behind me, just beyond the bend in the road and miles away, were my friends, my teachers, and the only feeling of security I had ever known. Ahead of me lay the worst kind of fear–fear of the unknown. All I knew was that we were traveling to a place called America. After an 18–month waiting period in Pakistan, we were permitted to enter the United States and on March 21, 1983, a plane carrying my mother, father, brother, sister, and myself landed at Los Angeles International Airport, completing our long journey.







Yet through all my experiences, the years have not wiped from my consciousness the memories of the final hours before our crossing of the border that cold September night. My father left behind our property and a

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