For two months of cold and ever colder days we lived with the guerrilla fighters in their cave complex on the Shar-i-Safa range. They were hard months in many ways, but our mountain stronghold never came under direct fire, and we were relatively safe. The camp was only fifty crow-kilometres from Kandahar. It was about twenty kilometres from the main Kabul highway and about fifty kilometres south-east of the Arghandab Dam. The Russians occupied Kandahar, but their hold on the southern capital was tenuous and the city was subject to recurring sieges. Rockets had been fired into the city centre, and guerrilla fighting on the outskirts claimed a steady toll of lives. The main highway was in the hands of several well-armed mujaheddin units. Russian tank and truck convoys from Kabul were forced to blast their way through blockades to resupply Kandahar, and that they did, from month to month. Afghan regular army units loyal to the Kabul puppet government protected the strategically important Arghandab Dam, but frequent attacks on the dam threatened their hold on the precious resource. Thus we were roughly in the centre of a triad of violent conflict zones, each of which constantly demanded new men and guns. The Shar-i-Safa range offered no strategic advantage to our enemies, so the fighting didn't find us in our well-disguised mountain caverns.

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