In 1981, an American writer sneaked into Afghanistan following a dream. He survived — barely — and wrote a play that eventually became a movie. The Beast, which debuted in 1988, is about a Soviet tank crew that finds itself all alone in hostile Afghanistan.

It’s a masterpiece — one inspired by a terrible, terrible war.

The Soviet Union invaded landlocked Afghanistan in 1979. The campaign would last eight years and kill nearly 15,000 Russians … and more than 80,000 Afghans.

At the time of the invasion, New Jersey native William Mastrosimone was 34 years old and a playwright. He had graduated from Rutgers University a few years before. He didn’t know much about Afghanistan.

In 1980, a New York City theater staged his first play. The Woolgatherer is a dark comedy about two desperate people searching for love in South Philadelphia. Critics and audiences loved it.

“It was the first time I made a living as a writer,” Mastrosimone tells War Is Boring.

One day during rehearsal, Mastrosimone grew restless. “I got to walking around and reading The New York Times,” he says. He noticed a picture of an Afghan tribal leader and read the accompanying interview.

“‘We’re going to fight to the last man, to the last bullet,’” Mastrisomine quotes from the interview. “‘Right now, my men are eating tree bark to stay alive.’”

The playwright saw something in the mujaheddin leader. “It just reminded me so much, of the men who followed [George] Washington,” he explains. “I was really keyed into the psyche of that leader.”

His interest became an obsession. “It wasn’t too long after that that I became less interested in [The Woolgatherer] and rehearsal than I became in Afghanistan.”

The obsession affected his sleep. “When I’m really hooked on something — on an idea or a script or a story — I dream about it,” he says.

One night, he awoke from a dream and scribbled a drawing on the back of a yellow legal pad.

“In the center of it was a very simple tank,” he says. “It’s surrounded by stick figures throwing spears and shooting arrows at it. I woke up in the morning and I had no memory of doing this.”

“And I just knew I was going [to Afghanistan]. I felt like I had to witness this fight between a superpower and a 12th-century power.”

One problem, Mastrosimone had no idea how to get there.

“I went to this restaurant called the Khyber Pass,” Mastrosimone recalls. The Lower East Side restaurant serves traditional Afghan food. It’s still there.

“I went in and I partook of the food and I started to get a little chummy with some of the waiters. I said, ‘I want to go to Afghanistan, how do I do that?’”

The waiter told Mastrosimone to call a travel agent. In other words, he blew him off.

He didn’t give up. He returned to Khyber Pass over and over again until one of the waiters broke down.

The Afghan explained that the staff thought Mastrosimone might belong to the CIA or the KGB. Either way, they didn’t trust him.

Mastrosimone told them he was a playwright, that he had a show in a theater right now. “I want to go to Afghanistan,” he told them. “I want to write about it.”

To prove his story, he invited two of the waiters to watch his play. They weren’t convinced until they saw a six-foot-tall marquee advertising the play. It was a giant copy of The Woolgatherer’s review in The New York Times.

The two Afghans explained to Mastrosimone that they didn’t feel Afghanistan was getting a fair shake in the media. The Soviets were murdering their people and America didn’t care.

“‘If this guy will write a play and The New York Times will come and see it and it’s just about two people — a trucker and a girl — imagine if he wrote about the war,’” Mastrosimone quotes the Afghans saying. “‘What would The New York Times do then?’”

“That was my real ticket to Afghanistan,” the playwright says.

One of the men from Khyber Pass told him what to do. “Go to Pakistan,” he said. “Go to Rawalpindi. There’s a hotel there. The Intercontinental Hotel. Get a room. We’ll come get you.”

Mastrosimone wanted to know how long he would need to wait in Pakistan. The Afghan told him he didn’t know. He would get there when he got there.

“You’re saying I’m going to go to Pakistan and wait around for you?” the American told the pair. “I need something solid.”

“This war will be won by faith alone,” the Afghan told him. “If you have no faith, then you have no business being there.”

“Fuck that,” Mastrosimone replied.

The war continued and Mastrosimone followed it obsessively. “The more I read, the more I knew I had to go no matter what.”

He called his contact and told the man he would go to the hotel. Then, he went to a travel agent. “I wrote a check for $5,000 for a round-trip to Pakistan,” he says. “That was all the money I had in the world.”

It was an incredible leap of faith. “There were times I really thought the guy made a fool of me,” Mastrosimone says.

“I have no idea who he is. I pictured him laughing with his friend, ‘That guy we sent to Pakistan? He’s still waiting in the room probably!’”

But the man rewarded his faith. He met Mastrosimone at the hotel, just as he’d promised, and put the American on a train.

“They wouldn’t even tell me where it was going,” he says. The train stopped in Peshawar and Mastrosimone knew — again — that his contacts hadn’t jerked him around.

Before the group crossed the border, Mastrosimone needed to jump through one more hoop.

“My guy came in,” Mastrosimone explains. “[He] said, ‘Okay, we’re ready to go. We have to go see the warlord.’”

Mastrosimone wanted to know why. His contact explained that they needed permission to enter the country.

“You mean I came all the way here and this guy could say no?” Mastrosimone said. “Nobody told me this before.”

“That’s the way it is,” his contact said. “He’s the warlord. This is his territory. We can’t do what we want. We have to get permission. He wants to look at you.”

The warlord was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

Hekmatyar is one of Afghanistan’s most controversial figures. In his youth, the warlord studied engineering at college in Kabul. His university career ended after he murdered a fellow student.

He grew in prestige and power in the years leading up to the Soviet invasion. He was one of the warlords the CIA counted on to supply the mujaheddin with weapons and ammunition during the war.

Mastrosimone found all this out later. “I had no idea who he was,” he says. “It’s a guy in a black beard. He’s my age. He’s in a tent. They take me there. He looks at me. We shake hands.”

Hekmatyar spoke halting English. Mastrosimone knew only a few words in Pashto.

“All he wants to talk about is America and politics,” Mastrosimone recalls. “And he liked me. He sent for food.” The two sat and talked for hours before Hekmatyar allowed Mastrosimone to leave.

It wasn’t until the playwright returned to the U.S. that he discovered just how dangerous the warlord really was.

“He gave standing orders to throw acid in the faces of women who weren’t covered in the marketplace. He’s a monster, but while I was there I thought he was a great gentleman.”

Hekmatyar granted the group his permission to enter Afghanistan and assigned two guards to Mastrosimone. They sneaked across the border with vague plans to connect with some people running arms to Afghan fighters.

The first night was harrowing. “We heard a lot of fighting,” Mastrosimone recalls. “A lot of explosions that we could see that would light up the night for a split second.”

For the first time, the reality of the war hit the playwright. “Do I belong here?” He asked himself.

“I didn’t think it was the library. Like I was researching a war. But I really felt that … like Hemingway had to go and drive an ambulance in World War I. I thought of it in that way. If I’m going to write about it. I’m going to write about it truly. And this is what I have to.”

The next morning, Mastrosimone woke up scared yet determined. Then he learned what had happened during the night.

“We were told that the Afghans ambushed a tank column,” he explains. “[The Afghans] put [down] enough dynamite … to destroy the first tank and the last tank on a narrow road. All the other tanks were trapped.”

It’s a tactic familiar to American veterans of Afghanistan. After the fighters disabled the Russian vehicles, they rushed the tanks and took 11 prisoners.

Mastrosimone’s handlers knew he was there to write about the war, so they offered him an interview with the Russians. One of the mujaheddin spoke Russian. He’d translate to Pashto then the playwright’s contact would translate to English.