Night Letters: Inside Wartime Afghanistan

by Rob Schultheis

Book Overview

A harrowing account from the front lines of the Afghan civil war. Rob Schultheis fell in love with Afghanistan in the 1970s when it was a wild, unspoiled country that had barely changed in the past... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1585745642
• ISBN13: 9781585745647
• Release Date: November 2001
• Publisher: Lyons Press
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.57 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.9" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A Great Read

Rob Schultheis does a great job making you feel the cold, the sore feet, exhaustion and fear while being hunted by armed tribesmen and Soviet airforces inside Afghanistan. A great book to read on your next plane trip across country. I couldn't put it down and neither have the troopers I work with. It has been passed around so much I doubt I will ever see my copy again.

Lightyears From Realpolitik

Evocative, beautiful, terrible and short. The madness and evil of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, in which the clumsy terror and brutality of the modern totalitarian state meets an ancient yeomen/warrior tradition of independence and honor. Modern, brutal, indiscriminate, and total thuggery versus the mercurial but brave cavalryman/tribal warrior. The miracle is that anything at all (garden, tree, house, family) survives in Afghanistan.The writer evokes spiritual and social traditions that survive in Afghanistan to this day. Especially, male friendships that seem strangely important to our modern ears but contribute to a heroism that is irrational but ultimately successful in driving out the Russians (at a huge cost). Likewise, the strict code of honor---when our author was abandoned in mountains at night by a treacherous guide, a local leader promptly sought out the offender to kill him.

Emotive, Harrowing, Comic, and Tragic

This book provides an unforgettable reading experience. A simple review cannot do it justice, but in this thin volume Mr. Schultheis provides a rich assortment of simply unforgetteable stories. I have never had a book move me to experience so fully anger, pity, sorrow and, remarkably, laughter. The overall feeling I felt after reading this is a respect for the suffering and strength of the people of Afghanistan and a hope that Mr. Schultheis will write more of his Afghan experiences.Mr. Schultheis' mother, Eugenia Shultheis, is also a great writer of exotic places, and he has learned the family craft well.

Inside/Outside Magazine review by Todd Thompson

I always used to wonder why Rob Schultheis was obsessed with Afghanistan. He had so much else going for him. The Afghani thing was a little eccentric. In addition to being a prolific columnist on regional current events, a gifted essayist on diverse topics of environment, culture, adventure, and sport, and the author of a couple of great books, Schultheis is also a long-time friend and champion of the Afghani mujahedin. From the good old days. From the days of the old civil war and the Soviet invasion. Of course after the Russians withdrew, Schultheis remained involved with the plight of the Afghan people as they plunged again into civil war, this time to be quelled by a group so beastly and humorless that they could only be from somewhere else. That’s right. The Taliban. Of course now we all know who the Taliban are, but last year (and the year before and the year before) when Schultheis was telling us scary things about these deranged religious nuts in Afghanistan called the Taliban, we had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. No one doubted his sincerity, but no one I knew had much sympathy. Who cares about Afghanistan? What can we do? Why is Schultheis obsessed? I knew he had been a war correspondent in Afghanistan in the 80’s and I wrote off his rantings to a nostalgia for the front line. Now after the events of September 11, I look back on his rantings as a prescient warning, a call for help from Afghanistan. "Something terrible is happening there. Something very terrible." He really was on to something. I wish I knew a way I could reach back and make someone listen, make someone do something. While a well-told story about the "Afghan war of liberation against the Soviet Empire" would be an enjoyable read any time, it is the timely new introduction that bares its teeth in this book. Therein, Schultheis lays out the timeline and the players involved with the fall of democratic dreams, the rise of the Taliban, the nefarious ethnic cleansing carried out by Osama bin Laden’s crew, the rape, the torture, the destruction of cultural artifacts, the dictatorial edicts outlawing culture itself. Night Letters begins by accident with Schultheis traveling overland from Europe to India in 1972. His route takes him through Afghanistan. The borders were open then all the way to Kathmandu, and the "road back and forth was crowded with young Westerners, hipsters, pilgrims, vagabonds. Everyone seemed to have a story about Afghanistan: wacky tales of caravans, blind bards, wandering dervishes, horsemen, and gunfire in the night." The portrait of Afghanistan back then is the most touching part of the book. The past 500 years is palpable on the street, but the bribes you have to give the border guards are quite original and modern. Even though the country was very poor on the UN’s per capita scale, there was "little or none of the squalor or misery usually associated with the third world." Absentee landlords, the "bane of most peasant societies," were

Moving, Insightful, Harrowing

This is one of the best books I've read on Afghanistan since the attacks on New York. It brings alive the area and the people there during the Russian occupation. At times sad, informative, and even funny, it is a highly readable book about Afghanistan.