CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Where the Horses Are Still Running

Wild mustang, after being captured in central Oregon and sold at market. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

I hadn’t expected to go to Greece. Least of all to be invited to meet a man whose life seemed to belong to another era—a life that moved so easily between diplomacy, danger, and odyssey.

The invitation came almost by accident, during an exchange with an old American friend—the same man whose family theatre had staged a play of mine in New York many years ago. We were catching up, trading personal travel fragments, mostly his, when he mentioned his latest visit to Greece and an extraordinary friend of his there.

This man, he said, had spent much of his time in the world’s most troubled regions. A senior figure in a major humanitarian organization, he had worked across conflict zones for decades and had even been asked to return from retirement to help oversee operations in Afghanistan after the Western withdrawal.

There was, my friend suggested, a project he and I might work on together.

I replied, of course, that it would be fascinating to meet this man, though I probably said this more out of respect than expectation. But my friend did not see it that way. On the contrary, he suggested I should come out to Greece and meet him.

Then came the detail that lingered. Long before Afghanistan became synonymous with war, this man had first travelled there in the days of the king, before the Soviet invasion of 1979. At one point, my friend said, he had even brought two Afghan stallions back from there, eventually to Greece.

It was the sort of story that might easily have remained just that—a tale, half-absorbed, then set aside. Instead, within a matter of days, it had become something else entirely.

And so, before I had quite understood how or why, I........

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