Last Oct. 23 in a guerrilla camp hidden in a canyon in rugged, desolate northeastern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border, two Americans climbed out of their sleeping bags at dawn.
After a meal of hot tea and fried nan, a flat bread that`s a staple of the Afghan diet, they began packing their camera and sound equipment for the grueling hike up steep, boulder-clogged ravines to the guerrilla positions on the other side of the mountains.
They were edgy and expectant; they could feel the adrenaline already pumping into their bloodstreams. This would be a day of intense pressure and danger, but a day they had been waiting for.
The two were cameraman Hamilton Keddie, 24, and sound technician Karin Wimberger, whose 29th birthday would come in 10 days. They were one of three American camera teams then in Afghanistan that were under contract to CBS News.
In a few hours, the mujahedeen guerrillas with whom they had been traveling would mount an attack on a Soviet-backed Afghan government military garrison, which guarded the strategically important highway to Pakistan.
Several kilometers away near the town of Sarobi, another guerrilla group, accompanied by a second camera team, would move simultaneously against a government post on the same highway.
The guerrilla objective was to close and hold the shell-pocked, two-lane, asphalt road as long as possible, thus impeding a key source of food and supplies to Kabul, the Afghan capital and government stronghold.
The third camera team was in Kabul with Afghan-government and Soviet units. The goal was to show the conflict from both sides and to record the two-pronged offensive against the highway, which the guerrillas billed as their largest combined operation of the war.
As it happened, both the mujahedeen and the camera teams were successful. The guerrillas seized the two government installations and, despite heavy, sustained bombardment from tanks, artillery and aircraft, halted traffic on the road for two weeks, the longest period it had been closed.
The film and videotape shot by the camera teams was shown in a four-part series from Dec. 5-8 on the CBS Evening News.
With anchor Dan Rather narrating, the program devoted an extraordinary 6 minutes and 10 seconds on the first evening to the assault on the Kabul-Pakistan highway.
The segment met the standards of first-rate combat footage. It was compelling and shocking, giving the viewer a sense of the random terror and deadly anarchy of battle.
But the triumph was stained by tragedy.
At the conclusion of the report, the photograph of a dark-haired young woman appeared on television screens across the nation, and Rather disclosed that Karin Wimberger had died before she could be evacuated to Pakistan for medical treatment.
She was not a victim of enemy bullets or shrapnel but of infectious hepatitis caused by impure water or food and aggravated by an absence of medicine, a frustrating delay at a mujahedeen village and a difficult journey by foot, horseback and truck over unforgiving terrain.
Her death is testimony to the commitment of those who place themselves in peril for causes that appear to have little or nothing to do with their lives. They do it for reasons that are perhaps impossible to explain entirely.
Indeed, in the case of Karin Wimberger, there may not be a satisfactory answer as to why she came to be on a mountain in Afghanistan on Sunday, Oct. 23, 1988.
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A few weeks ago, Hamilton Keddie stood in the backyard of his parents`
house in Yuma, Ariz. A neighborhood cookout was in progress, but he took a visitor aside and directed his attention to the sky, which on this clear desert night was luminous with stars and the stark light of a full moon.
On nights like this in Afghanistan, he said, he and Karin-her name is pronounced with a soft ”a”-would lie in their sleeping bags, gazing upward and talking about what they were going to do when they returned home.
She had fallen in love with Michael Graber, a TV cameraman and freelance photographer she had met a year earlier during one of her four previous trips on similar assignments into Afghanistan. She was eager to settle down and do normal things; she was through, she said, with wars.
So was Keddie, even though this was only his first. He`d put it on his resume: I do not do wars. He was repelled by the bloodshed and violence. At times the fear could be almost paralyzing.
There was something else. It was evident that this war was essentially over and that the Soviet Union had lost, which made the risks they were taking seem to them all the more foolhardy. Last May, the Soviets had announced the withdrawal of their forces, which was to be completed by February of this year.
Each night before he fell asleep, Keddie would think to himself, ”I can`t go back in the morning. This is insane. I don`t have to be doing this.” But in the morning, he would force himself to pick up his camera and go back to work.
At first when he came under fire, he`d had a tendency to push a trigger that stopped the camera. His survival instinct, he realized, was overpowering his ”shoot-it” instinct. His partner seemed far braver, and the guerrillas teased him about being shown up by a woman.
As the days passed, however, he became more seasoned. He learned to identify various types of enemy projectiles, developing an appreciation for the whistling sound of rockets, which served as a warning: As long as the whistle wasn`t too loud, you were all right.
He dreaded tank shells, which did not announce themselves. Traveling faster than sound, suddenly they were there. POW! And if you were in the wrong place, there was nothing you could do.
He became increasingly able to suppress his fright. Once, he was startled to find himself totally removed from the fury that was unfolding around him.
He was riding in a captured Soviet jeep through a minefield after the mujahedeen had overrun a government post. Minutes before, a guerrilla scout had stepped on a mine and lost his leg. A fellow guerrilla held up the scout`s severed limb, and Keddie caught the moment on tape.
He felt absolutely immune to the horror. It was weird, and he was ambivalent about it. On the one hand, it scared him; he didn`t want to feel that way. And yet he also knew that it worked for him.
He was demonstrating a truism of journalism. Every reporter knows that the best photographers are at least a little crazy, that they will do anything to get their pictures-climb tall buildings, hang out of airplanes, ignore people who are firing guns in their direction.
This goes for all ”shooters,” whether they take still or moving pictures. The earnest, intense Ham Keddie, who swore he was through with war, and the cheerful, driven Karin Wimberger, who had made the same vow, each displayed acute symptoms of this professional condition.
”You get into a mind frame that you`re invincible, which is both helpful and dangerous,” Michael Graber said later. ”I remember in `87 when a rocket had come over a hill and exploded close to Karin. Some shrapnel had gone into her pack and had cut up her water bottle. She was worried only that her sound equipment was damaged.”
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The three camera teams had been assembled by Michael Hoover, 45, an independent documentary filmmaker who had become a mujahedeen supporter in 1983 while shooting a mountain-climbing episode on the Afghan border for ABC`s ”American Sportsman.”
Since then, he had made 20 trips into the country and been wounded twice; for his 21st visit, he had finagled permission from the Afghan government to shoot from Kabul.
Hoover found Keddie through a friend who headed the film department at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif. Keddie, the `88 valedictorian in film, was the first student to get his friend`s endorsement. Keddie was among only a handful of students interested in documentaries;
most were drawn to the production of TV commercials, particularly the 30-second spot, a high art form that was the school`s speciality.
”Mike told me to bring a sleeping bag, a head lamp such as miners wear, a spoon, maybe some soap if I wanted,” Keddie said. ”I asked about a towel. Hoover said it wasn`t necessary because there was no water for bathing.”
Jeans were out; they would tag him as an American. In Pakistan, he was fitted with the dark gray cotton garb of the mujahedeen, which resembled pajamas-a long blouse and baggy trousers tied with a drawstring. His cap was a turban of rolled wool.
”Hamilton didn`t know from nothing,” Hoover said recently. ”He and Karin stumbled into some very serious fighting. The Soviets called in Backfire bombers. They went through a lot, but they did a great job. I looked at Hamilton`s tape, and he`d still be shooting while the mujahedeen, who are some very tough people, were hitting the ground.”
Wimberger was a Hoover veteran who had lived for two years in India and Pakistan and become fluent in Hindi and Urdu before being attracted to making movies upon her return to this country.
She had grown up in Seattle, the daughter of a physician and his wife who came to this country from Austria, an honors graduate of Connecticut College and someone with a zest for life.
”Karin had an unbridled enthusiasm,” Graber said. ”She didn`t dwell on negatives. She always found the humor or the irony in frustrating situations. She wasn`t tall, but she walked with a bounce; she was spunky and always upbeat, which made her an exquisite person to be with.”
”Karin impressed the guerrillas,” Keddie said, ”because she refused to let anyone carry her gear. She was very strong-willed. She insisted on carrying her load.”
She and Keddie joined some 50 mujahedeen fighters in Peshawar, Pakistan, on Sept. 25 under the auspices of the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, a coalition of guerrilla groups, crossing the border by truck. On the second day with the road impassable, the caravan proceeded on foot, using mules to carry equipment.
After 15 days that often were marked by fierce fighting and included two close calls, one involving Soviet helicopters that pinned everyone to the ground, the two returned to Pakistan for three days in early October.
Keddie called home. After talking with his older sister and mother, he broke down while on the phone with his father and wept. ”I told him that each person`s voice was making me more and more homesick. I said I was sorry I couldn`t suck it up and keep from crying.”
His sister asked why he couldn`t just quit. His father told him to do what he felt he must do. His mother, filled with despair, burst into tears off and on for days afterward.
Keddie and Wimberger went back to Afghanistan on Oct. 13. ”I felt an obligation to finish what I had promised to do,” he said. ”And we had agreed to tape the attack on the highway.”
Soon both were sick. ”Karin was in much worse shape. She had diarrhea, stomach cramps and nausea. On the trail, she would sometimes have to stop four and five times to vomit.”
But she never believed her illness was life-threatening. Her main concern was that it would interfere with her work. ”It`s easy for me to picture her very ill but pushing on with that relentless drive for the project,” Graber said.
She and Keddie purified their water with iodine tablets, but there were occasions when they drank untreated water. And there was no way to ensure that the daily ration of rice and goat meat was untainted.
”With her experience in Asia, it was incredible to me that Karin got sick,” Graber said. ”But it`s a tough situation. In a desert climate with temperature in the 80s during the day, you`re tortured by thirst, and there`s so little food that you sometimes have to compromise the rules of hygiene to survive.”
Both Keddie and Wimberger were weak when they started on foot for Pakistan on Nov. 1. But the next day-Karin`s birthday-when their guerrilla escort reached Zowa, a mujahedeen village, the decision was made to wait for Ron Peers and Walt Shipley, the other camera crew, who hadn`t been heard from for two weeks.
One of the last captions in Karin`s diary was ”Prisoners of Zowa.”
”We sat in the village for 10 days, waiting,” Keddie said. ”We ate what we could stomach, and Karin tried to walk a little every day. We didn`t want to ask for horses, which were in short supply, and we couldn`t see walking. We didn`t have the strength.”
Peers and Shipley arrived on Nov. 12. An Afghan doctor with them, alarmed by Karin`s yellow skin, urged an immediate departure for Pakistan. They left the next day, Nov. 13, with Keddie and Wimberger on horses, and at camp three days later, Karin became delirious, then comatose.
The guerrillas held a prayer service for her. She was given fluids intravenously and placed on a stretcher atop a horse.
They walked all day the 16th to a contingent of waiting trucks, leaving at midnight for the day-long drive to Pakistan. The trek was maddeningly slow and treacherous. At one point, the truck`s headlights failed, and Keddie used the faint light from his head lamp, holding it outside, for illumination. Once they narrowly missed plunging off a cliff.
”At 4:45 a.m. on the 17th, her breathing stopped,” Keddie said. ”Ron Peers held his eyeglasses under her nose. There was no breath. We tried CPR and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but she was gone.”
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Karin`s survivors include two brothers, Peter and Jacob, the latter her twin. ”Karin was a wonderful daughter, loved by everyone,” said her father, Herbert.
”It was doubly tragic that Karin died because she was so in love with Mike, and they had so many plans,” Hoover said.
”We became very close. It`s hard to get over what happened,” Keddie said.
”I went through anger. Then I wondered whether it would have been different if I`d been there,” Graber said. ”Somehow I`ve come to remember Karin as a shooting star who blazed across our lives. She burned furiously and brightly, and now she`s gone.”
