How I Survived Afghanistan
For many years, I worked as television news correspondent, first with CBS and later ABC, blasting off to wherever stuff was happening. Often it was bad stuff: troubles in Northern Ireland, revolution in Iran, wars in the Middle East, famine and civil war in Somalia.
Hairiest of all, perhaps, was Afghanistan, and when the Russians invaded in 1979, it became even hairier. One of my first assignments with ABC was to accompany Afghan rebels in an attack against a Russian convoy. It was a fiasco. The rebels couldn't shoot straight but the Russians could and began raining mortar shells on us. We tucked ourselves under giant boulders as shells exploded around us. Fortunately, the day was nearly over. When the sun set and the light grew dim, we scrambled out of our cover and began what was the longest, most agonizing march of my life.
Our destination: a mud village whose residents supported the rebels and where we could seek refuge. But it was many miles away and the landscape was treacherous, pitted with rocks, boulders and unexploded arsenal which made walking sheer torture. Plus, it was pitch black. I could hardly see and was dead tired. That's when wine saved the day, or night.
To take my mind off things, I sought refuge in my wine cellar. I tried to picture where every single bottle was and began counting, Sauternes and sweet wines from the Loire over here, Rhones and fine Burgudies over there. Many of my wines were from Bordeaux. All in all, there were more than 1,000 bottles. My cellar was not really a cellar, however. It was a huge glass-tiled cubicle set in a 17th century barn which was once used for storing apple juice. Our farm had once been the largest apple-growing estate in Normandy but, over the years, had been whittled down as parts of the property were sold off.
Anyway, back to the long march. Concentrating on all my wines and doing a mental inventory of where every single bottle was helped take my mind off the agonies of our never-ending trek. I could see Gaston Huet's 1919 Vouvray tucked in the lower left side corner of a wine rack. It was just a few slots away from a 1898 Château d'Yquem. On another rack was a 1937 Romanée-Conti, hailed as "magnificent" by wine critics and one of the greatest wines ever made. On the opposite side of the cellar was a bottle that stared out at me, begging me it seemed not to forget it. Well, how could I? It was a Bordeaux from the 1929 vintage and one that is no longer made: Château Laburthe-Brivazac. Michael Broadbent in his Great Vintage Wine Book described it this way: "Like a reincarnation, tasting a wine from a château long since overrun by suburban sprawl. A fine deep classic colour but a touch of death on the nose, fungi and acidity, but dry, silky texture, rich yet austere. More graves than Graves, but fascinating."
That rather summed up how I was feeling for we had been marching for at least ten hours and it was still dark. I was numb, ready to give up. My wines had carried me this far but I was ready to drop.
Until, there it was. Finally. A flicker of light in the distance, a candle or lantern in someone's mud home. We'd made it, and I promptly collapsed.
To this day, I have no idea where we were or how far we marched for it was a long time ago. What I do know is that if it weren't for my wine, picturing every single bottle and recalling where each one had been lovingly placed, I might not have made it.
