Sweet tea, scorpions and the savage horrors of war

IT HAS been a week when memories of war have been much in my mind. This is down to an unusual confluence of factors: three-and-a-half hours spent watching Saving Private Ryan, a gift of Anthony Beevor's masterful book Stalingrad; but more than anything else the looming possibility of air strikes against the Serbs.

All week, as I've listened to the threats grow louder on both sides, I have found myself repeatedly forced into contemplation of war. Not the academic analysis, or the politics, but the blood and fear of it, war as experienced by the fighting men and women, and the unlucky civilians swept up in its savage claws.

My thoughts have run back to a trip I made to Afghanistan about two years ago. The country was in the throes of civil war between the ultra-fundamentalists of Taliban and an opposition coalition which, at the time, was laying siege to the capital, Kabul. And so, on an autumn morning under the most beautiful of blue skies, I stood on the flat plain outside Kabul watching one group of men trying to kill another group of men.

The battle had been going on for weeks with little ground gained either way. From a position behind us, rockets went screaming in the direction of the enemy lines. The Taliban replied in kind, but their rockets invariably seemed to fall short of our positions. It all seemed to me a ritualistic affair. Certainly, there was no sense of urgency on the part of the attackers.

The commanders and troops sat around drinking sweet tea and smoking. Orphan boys, who acted as runners for the Mujaheddin, were sent off to bring huge watermelons which we sliced into chunks on the dusty floor of a bombed-out building. Indeed, so bored were the warriors that one of their number decided to liven things up by collecting a few scorpions and throwing them into the middle of our group. The brave war correspondents shrieked and jumped like circus clowns. The building echoed to the loud laughter of the fighters.

The man who threw the scorpions was, in fact, the local commander. He was short and stocky, with a handsome face and jet-black wavy hair: more of an ancient Greek, a descendant of Alexander's armies, than a typical Afghan warrior. Yet, for all his boisterousness, he was a sensitive man. During one quiet moment, he produced a wallet and showed me a photograph of his young son. He explained that the boy and his mother were trapped in Kabul behind Taliban lines. He hoped to get home to them soon, he said. But I knew from the expression on his face that he didn't believe his own words.

The battle was stalemated. Winter was coming. When the snows fell, they would have a choice of digging in or retreating. Yet this man clung to the remote possibility of a breakthrough. In war, men hold on to hope as long as they can, until the promises they make to themselves vanish one by one. That was the quiet, lonely face of war.

It was later the same morning that I saw the other face. The guns and rocket launchers had gone silent. Both sides were resting in the midday heat. There was more melon and more tea. And then we heard the sound of a jet in the skies. It is an everyday noise. Like the sound of passenger jets in the skies over west London. But, on a battlefield, it is the sound of terror. You are an insect racing to hide from stamping boots, but you cannot find a hole deep enough. Then, from further up the valley, came the thump of helicopter rotors.

The anti-aircraft guns on our side opened up. But the noise of jet and chopper came closer. There was a series of powerful explosions. I ran to the roof of the command post with my cameraman. In front of us, clouds of smoke and earth erupted along the trench lines of the Mujaheddin. "Cluster bombing," explained one of them. For those unfamiliar with the technology of modern warfare, the cluster bomb is in fact made up of lots of small bombs which explode in every direction. It is a truly vicious killing- machine. It went on like that for an hour.

When the aircraft eventually disappeared, the Mujaheddin dispatched some empty trucks towards the frontline. About half an hour later they returned, laden with wounded. The first truck arrived in a cloud of dust. On the back were two wounded and one dead man. I remember his two pale feet coated in dust, sticking out from under a blanket.

The wounded man beside him was covered in blood, and groaning. His eyes rolled backwards in their sockets. But it was the eyes of the survivors, the undead and unwounded, which made the strongest impression. They were not the eyes of men: more like those of trapped animals. Their faces were white with shock, and their bodies were still shaking.

When we raised our camera to film they screamed at us and raised their rifles. We backed away. These men had passed out of the world of the rational. The air raid had driven them into a zone of fear that those of us behind the lines could never understand. The commander apologised. "Their friends have been killed and wounded. That makes them upset about the camera," he explained.

If we do go to war in Kosovo, it will not be a battle in the style of Afghanistan. Nor will it be like the trenches of Ypres, the ruins of Stalingrad, or the beaches of Normandy so powerfully reconstructed in Saving Private Ryan. From Nato airbases and aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean, cruise missiles and bombs will be directed at Serb targets. It is hard to imagine ground troops being sent in to engage the Serbs in hand-to-hand combat.

It is a particular irony that the feats of bravery and sacrifice celebrated in Spielberg's film - and lauded by the American public - would be unthinkable today. America's political and military establishment would not contemplate the deaths of so many young men, no matter how noble the cause. After Vietnam and, more recently, the debacle of Somalia, it is hard to chide the Americans for their reluctance to send troops to foreign countries that have no obvious strategic importance for the US. The British are less reluctant. Now that the calls for action in Kosovo have become impossible to ignore, British armed forces are being asked to prepare ground troops for possible intervention. By this time next week, we will know whether Nato is at war with Serbia or not.

These are days for sombre reflection, for hoping that Milosevic comes to his senses, and negotiates a peace in Kosovo. If he does not, then who knows where this will end? No sane person who has experienced war would ever regard it as something good. Yet military intervention to prevent gross abuses of human rights is justified. This is a lesson we have learned in the hardest of ways in the 20th century.

But, as we contemplate action against Serbia, it would do well to remember the true face of war. In the days of Normandy, the horror was censored out. That will not be the case in Serbia. If Nato bombs fall on civilians, the cameras will be there to show the mutilation and death. If British troops go in to police a ceasefire or - the nightmare scenario - confront the Serbs, the images will be in our sitting-rooms every hour of every day.

And men who are bombed and shot at become less human, whatever uniform they wear. The wild eyes I saw after that air bombardment in Afghanistan were windows to the savagery of battle. I looked into them and was reminded of Siegfried Sassoon's lines on the horror of trenches: "Go home and pray you'll never know, the hell where youth and laughter go."