Travels in epic Silk Road country come with hazards even in the best of times. Dan Terry, a life-long friend and humanitarian, hopelessly besotted by the beauty of Central Asia, moved with his family to northern Afghanistan during civil war: wild country, wild times. Crossing Balkh province solo one day, his jeep marked by a plume of dust, Dan found himself at a roadblock manned by gunmen of a local warlord. Though a veteran of such encounters, none of his savvy could stave off the upshot: Dan was taken hostage to the warlord’s mountain base where the commander set about to turn his captive foreigner into a windfall.
Afghanistan’s gateway to the north. The city is an ethnic crossroads of Turkmens,
Uzbeks, Tajiks and many others. During the time Dan Terry and his family lived
in the city, it was governed by Abdul Rashid Dostum a shrewd and fearsome
political survivor. photo credit: wikimedia.commons
Dan assured the commander that neither he nor his threadbare service organization possessed anything of value. They traded in no Silk Road riches, had no Swiss bank accounts. This the commander seriously doubted. But in the course of time, he came to realize that Dan was, indeed, that bane of desert lands: a dry well. But by then a strange dynamic had taken hold of those within the barbed-wire perimeter. Their hostage had become part of that armed-to-the-teeth community. Seemingly without a trace of bitterness, Dan inquired after their families, talked about their hometowns, mused with them around the evening fires, shared their gritty fare at mealtime. In time, the commander resigned himself to this unsettling truth: that his odd hostage had become – well, a friend.
The day came when the warlord realized there was no further point in holding Dan. He called for a goat to be slaughtered and their friendship was sealed in a kebab meal and by embraces. With that he set Dan free, wincing, no doubt, at his misfortune that no windfall had resulted from this caper, but glad of having an unlikely ‘kafir’ friend, just the same.
Mazar-i-Sharif attracts faithful who come to feed the flocks of white pigeons. It is
said that any gray pigeon attaching itself to these flocks is transformed to spotless
white in 40 days. The region of Balkh is said to be the birthplace of the poet, Rumi.
Alexander the Great also left his mark here as have others like Genghis Khan and
his Mongol armies. photo credit: Paretz Partensky commons
Months later, Dan was traveling with colleagues in those remote ranges, his jeep trailed by dust. From the opposite direction came an open truck bristling with turbaned gunmen swathed in bandoliers. As the vehicles crossed, the drivers had a flash of mutual recognition. Everything slid to a halt as dust engulfed the scene. Before any explanations could be made, Dan and his erstwhile friend, the warlord, danced with shouts into each other’s arms on a gritty Silk Road track as Dan’s colleagues looked on aghast at this encounter with a dreaded warrior. And glaring down from the truck, a band of gunmen wondered at a commander abandoned to the embrace of an ‘infidel’.
Dan’s musing over this experience left his peers in speechless disbelief. He said to them, “In the end, hostage-taking is another form of hospitality.”
*Adapted from the author’s book, ‘Making Friends Among the Taliban’, Herald Press, 2012.
Amazing story. Thanks and God bless.
Yes, Barbara! Good of you to stop by the blog. It’s worth asking how Dan’s family dealt with such shenanigans – his chaotic comings and goings, especially in conditions when one might assume the worst had happened. But it is also true that they survived precarious circumstances because he had forged such a random and profuse network of friendships across the lines of conflict.
Hi Jonathan, Thanks for this amazing story. It sounds a bit like Dann Pantoga’s life in the Philippines.
Wonderful story of our beloved friend.
Hi, Joanna! Using a figure from the story, it is we who sat around the evening fires with him, sharing modest fare, recounting our early adventures – and misadventures – as life-long friendships were forged.
Powerful and profound. Makes the tragedy that followed so devastating. My memories of Afghanistan go back to visits in 2004, in happier times, and then in the tough times of 2014.
Hi, Ron! Having written the story, I couldn’t help feeling I had failed to convey a sufficiently vivid picture of the events. Finally – you say, ‘Well, you had to have been there!’ But, your visits will have filled in the context that makes the story live. Thanks for stopping by and leaving your comment.
Thank you for sharing this well told story again of how Dan Terry turned enemies into friends through love. I had the honor of traveling with him several times to northern Afghanistan and watching him engage Afghans of different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds with a soft respect that brought to the fore the better humanity in all of us.
Hello, Gabriel! And to think that the hearing of these snatches of the story continue to appeal to us, nudging us to walk ‘the road less traveled’.
Jonathan
YES!! I heard that story from Dan on several occasions as we worked together in Afghanistan. It could have been Dan himself telling the tale as you’ve described well how he dealt with such situations. He did not enter them with fear but friendship. Such also was true for the months he spent in prison in Kabul under the Taliban in late 1990s. The whole jail became his friends, and years later when we walked down the street he saw one of the jailers and they hugged. I asked him why several times. “I came to Afghanistan as a missionary. I show my faith by showing love, not preaching.” The Dan I worked with as a colleague was all his life a very special missionary.
Perhaps you have purposely chosen this because hostages are very much in the news these days. I wonder if any of them would be able to say that hostage-taking is a form of hospitality.
However that might be, I believe that it did become something like that when 81-year old Dr. Kenneth Eliott was taken hostage in Burkina Faso in 2016 and spent seven years as a hostage before finally being released last year at the age of 88.
Hello, Norm! Thanks for your note with thoughtful question. Of course, hostage-taking is a wildly diverse phenomenon. The headlines now tell us of hostage-taking as part of geo-politics, a tactic of statecraft. But even in that context, we have the example of Yocheved Lifschitz, the 85 y.o. peace activist who, on parting from her Hamas guard at her release, shook his hand and appeared to say, ‘Shalom’, or as another report translated it, ‘Peace, only peace.’ To dismiss this as ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ ignores the fact she and her husband for decades had been ferrying the sick of Gaza out to hospitals for care. And we know that hundreds of Palestinians are being held in Israeli detention seemingly without charge or prospect of appearing before a court. What bridges of compassion, of friendship are being cast across that cruel divide we will one day hear of. In fact, the very future might turn on just such fragile threads.
You carry us into new places and spaces, Jonathan. Thanks for sharing this story!
James R. Krabill
Yup, that’s Dan. Miss him terribly, especially having recently spent two weeks in Uzbekistan, and in those Dan inspired mystical cities like Samarkand, Bukhara, etc. and looking the opposite direction across the Amu Darya into Afghanistan rather than through the Soviet guard towers into the “steppes of Central Asia” like we did together.