My new best friend

Officer Qohistanni Naqid is my new best friend.

He kindly served as my interpreter and go-between when I needed to get my passport stamped. But for a while I wasn’t so sure I would survive that bout with Afghan bureaucracy.

You see, by being embedded with the S.C. National Guard’s 218^th Brigade Combat Team, I didn’t have to go through customs or stand in the line at the immigration counter after arriving in Kabul.

We just marched off a Charleston-based C-17 transport plane into a military building at Kabul International Airport. There we waited for a convoy to take us about five miles to Camp Phoenix.

Being a civilian journalist embedded with the military can be tricky. I am free to travel around Afghanistan with the military, visiting towns and bases. But, being a civilian I also stand out from the folks in uniform. As someone at the Afghanistan embassy said, “questions might be asked.”

Also, if I needed to leave Afghanistan on a civilian flight, I’d have to go through the immigration. An unstamped passport could result in delays, more questions and fines.

So we went to the airport to fix the problem.

But it wasn’t easy.

Lt. Col. Charles Kohler, who was my escort, was stopped and not allowed to enter the terminal because he was in uniform. I'm still not sure why he was stopped, but  I was on my own. Kohler gave me a walkie-talkie just in case.

After being frisked at the door, Officer Naqid, sensing I was more than lost, approached. I tried to explain my dilemma, though I feared the language barrier would doom me. Naqid, though, speaks nearly flawless English. He understood my situation and directed me to the immigration counter.

When I reached the area no one was around to help. Feeling lost and a bit scared, visions of the prison scenes from “Midnight Express” flashed through my mind. (Yeah, that's Turkey but I couldn't imagine Afghanistan being better.) I wondered if I should just forget the matter and head for the door. Maybe Kohler and a battalion of soldiers would be waiting to rescue me.

But at about this moment, Naqid appeared and on my behalf started to get things moving. I’d have to wait, he explained, until the officer with the passport stamp returned from lunch.

Naqid sat down in the airport waiting room and invited me to join him. Then a second officer sat down on the other side. With me sitting in the middle, they talked a bit and. From what I could figure out, Naqid explained to the other officer that I was a journalist.

“News media,” the other officer said in English, with a tinge of disdain in voice. He then got up and tended to other matters.

A small man with dark features, beard, moustache and a soft voice, Naqid reminded me of the late actor Bruno Kirby, who was Billy Crystal’s sidekick in “City Slickers.”

He learned English, Naqid said, just from talking to people in the airport. He also picked up a little French and German.

“I’d hear a word, a sentence, and then write it on paper,” Naqid said.

Franky, I thought his English was excellent and the accent seemed more American than British. Perhaps, I thought, he had studied in the United States. He said no.

Naqid and I then talked about being a cop in Afghanistan. He has been a with the border police four years. The good part, he said, was meeting and helping people. The lousy part was the low pay -- $50 a month. From this, he paid $30 for rent and $10 for electricity. Some officers might help smugglers to make ends meet, he said. He preferred to work a second job.

Low pay, though, is fact of life in Afghanistan. About 70 percent of those who work, make about $2 a day.

The officer with the stamp eventually returned from lunch and in a few minutes everything was, as the troops say, "squared away."

Naqid walked with me as I headed back through the terminal.

I told him how much I appreciated his time and effort. I couldn’t thank Naqid enough.

“Tashakor,” I said repeatedly, in what little Dari I knew.

Naqid shrugged it off.

“This was nothing. You are my friend,” he said.