The New York City Playwright Who Sneaked Into Afghanistan During the Soviet Invasion
William Mastrosimone survived — and came home to write a classic film.
But something bothered Mastrosimone about the interview. “When I’m done with my questions, then what?’” he asked his contact.
“We have to kill them,” the Afghan said. Then he quoted the Quran. “Attack not your enemy, but if your enemy attacks you, strike off his head.”
Mastrosimone knew he was in trouble.
“They’re going to live as long as I have a few questions,” he told himself. “I don’t want anything to do with this. I don’t belong here.”
Some of the Russians realized their only hope lay in the strange Westerner standing in front of them. “They were all really young,” Mastrosimone recalls.
“They all looked American. Blond hair, blue eyes some of them … one of them was looking at me and he was saying something in English. He was trying to make contact with me and someone hit him with the rifle butt and told him to shut up. The kid pissed his pants.”
Mastrosimone told his contact that he didn’t want anything to do with the Russians. His handlers were angry. They tried to force him to talk to the Soviets. They chastised him.
“What did you think we were doing here?” one asked.
The playwright turned and walked away. “I took one or two steps and the machine guns went,” he says. “I straightened up, thinking I was shot.”
He turned around. The Russians were dead. “I looked and the kids were twitching,” he says. “They finished them off and we went.”
So began his first day in Afghanistan.
“I was never in the military,” Mastrosimone says.
“You need to be trained for that stuff. That’s why they have boot camp. You can’t just go from New Jersey to Afghanistan and not have it affect you. If you’re not mentally prepared for what could come at you … it was tough. It was really tough to get through this.”
“I just thought, ‘This is the first day? We’re going deeper in the country? What else could happen here?’”
The group hooked up with a convoy of pack mules and horses loaded down with supplies and other ammunition. Hekmatyar’s guards returned to their warlord. The physical toll of walking through the harsh country began to wear on Mastrosimone.
“I had trained before I went there,” he explains. “I was in really great shape. Here with these guys, though, it was like I did nothing.”
The group worked their way through the Hindu Kush Mountains. He had trouble keeping up with his contact. “These guys, from birth, go barefoot walking in the mountains,” he says.
“They can sleep on the ground and have half a cup of tea and a handful of rice and they’re good. I was always thinking, ‘Where’s the pizza man?’”
They took water and food where they could. One evening, the group drank water from melting mountain ice. The next morning, Mastrosimone couldn’t get up.
“I could not raise myself off the ground,” he says. “My guy came over to me and said, ‘What’s the matter? You look terrible.’”
Mastrosimone explained that he couldn’t get up. His strength was gone. His contact conferred with the other members of the convoy and returned to the playwright.
“When we’re born,” his contact began, “Allah writes on our forehead what our fate is with his finger. But we can’t see it. It’s invisible. Whatever he wrote on your head, I don’t know what it is. Maybe he wrote that you are to die on this mountain. If that’s true, there’s nothing we can do about it. That’s Allah.”
“But if he didn’t write that. If he wrote that you’re to die in New Jersey or on the other mountain, that’s good. But you don’t know. So you have to live. Whatever happens, you have to accept it.”
Then came the real bad news. “We have to leave you here,” his contact said. “We can’t put you on an animal. They’re already overloaded.”
Mastrosimone was confronted by what he calls the fatalism of Islam. “I’m looking at the peaks of the mountains covered with snow,” he recalls.
“There’s a little bit of snow falling. I’m looking at forever. There’s nothing. You don’t see anything.”
His contact left him an antique pistol. “It looks like it was over 100 years old,” Mastrosimone says. The Afghan opened the cylinder, pulled out four bullets and left the playwright with two. “Not a word why. I guess the second bullets for … compassion. In case you fuck up the first shot.”
Mastrosimone lay on the ground in the middle of a mountain pass, contemplating his death. “I was absolutely calm because I was so angry at myself,” he says. He says he has a tendency to get in over his head.
On that mountain in 1981, he thought it was the last time he’d have to deal with that problem.
The playwright had no food or water and could barely move. He rolled to an alcove on the side of the mountain. “My first instinct was to get out of the wind,” he explains.
There, he slowly used the last of his strength to wall in the alcove with rocks from the path. His makeshift hovel complete, he passed out.
He woke up later when the sun cut into his eyes. Suddenly, the sun was gone and he saw an eye. A small boy bent down next to him. The boy thought he’d discovered a sleeping Russian and he called for help.
It turns out a small village stood at the top of the mountain.
The boy went and gathered the people of the village and they all came to inspect the sleeping Russian, and probably to kill him.
Luckily, one of the villagers spoke English — and that spared Mastrosimone a grisly death.
They pulled him from his alcove and carried him up the road. “I felt so helpless on one hand and so grateful on the other,” he says. “I didn’t know if they were going to throw me off the cliff.”
The English-speaker was a doctor named Mohammed Mohammed. He was a dual citizen of England and Afghanistan who spent a few months out of the year back in his home village, using the medicine he’d learned in the West to help his people.
He chastised Mastrosimone for drinking the mountain water and told him he had all kinds of things wrong with him.
“I was on his floor and he was doing what he could for me,” the playwright says, his voice trembling. “An old woman came in. She had a black goat with her. He explained that this woman lost her husband, her sons, all her brothers. Everybody in the war.”
“The woman asked if she could make some food for me,” Mastrosimone says. “Some rice. Some soup. Something.”
The doctor told the woman the American could only eat yogurt and drink green tea. He was still a few days away from handling a hearty soup. She promised to make him soup when he felt better.
She made good on that promise. “It was a fantastic soup,” Mastrosimone says. He asked Mohammed what was in it and the doctor didn’t know. There was some kind of meat in it that neither could identify.
“That soup really picked me up,” Mastrosimone says. “It made me feel strong.” A few days later, he felt well enough to explore the village. He found the old woman outside of her hut, sweeping. On a tree next to the hut, a goatskin dried in the sun.
He knew then what she’d used to make his soup. “That is Afghan hospitality,” he says. “That’s it right there in a nutshell … they will give you whatever they have. If it’s the last thing they have, they will give it to you.”
Mastrosimone was so moved by the woman’s kind gesture that he made a promise. “I said to myself, ‘One day, I’m gonna do something for this country. For this woman, this village.’ That’s why, years later, my wife and I decided to adopt a girl.”
The adoption is a touchy subject for Mastrosimone. “It was not easy. There’s things I can’t talk about,” he explains. “Nothing illegal. Nothing like that. It’s just there’s some sensitive issues I vowed I would never talk about.”
A week into his recovery, Mastrosimone’s contact came back through the mountain. He was happy to see the playwright alive and well.
“Ah,” the contact said. “Allah did not write that you would die on this mountain. At least you know that.”
A lot of people would be furious if their handlers left them half-dead on the side of a mountain. Mastrosimone was not. He laughs as he recalls the reunion.
His contact was on his way to Pakistan, but Mastrosimone was still too weak to travel with him. It was a few more days before the playwright could walk long enough to make the journey back to Peshawar.
Before Mastrosimone left for Afghanistan, he had written a first draft of the play Nanawatai, about a Soviet tank crew and its desperate battle with the mujaheddin. “I wasn’t sure if I’d ever come back,” he explains.
When he got home, he knew exactly what to do to fix the first draft. He rewrote the play. It played in Norway and Los Angeles. Director Kevin Reynolds contacted him. Reynolds said he could imagine Nanawatai as a film.
Mastrosimone agreed and adapted his stage play into a screenplay. He called it The Beast. Reynolds and Mastrosimone began filming it for Columbia Pictures. Halfway through production, ownership of the studio changed.
The new executives weren’t interested in Mastrosimone’s take on Afghanistan. Sylvester Stallone had approached them with an idea for Rambo III, another film set in Afghanistan that the execs at Columbia thought had a better chance of making money.
Just like that, they buried The Beast. To meet a contractual obligation, Columbia released the movie in two theaters in New York City and Los Angeles. The movie ran a few weeks and withered away.
That’s not the end of the story for The Beast.
Mastrosimone has gone on to have an incredibly successful career. He’s written more plays and screenplays for television and film. He’s won Emmys. But he still thinks about The Beast and Afghanistan.
“It’s my best work,” he says. “I don’t care if it’s an Academy Award [winner]. I just want the movie to get its due some day.”
Thanks to home media and America’s renewed interest in Afghanistan, the film finally is getting its due. There’s no better American movie about Afghanistan. Slowly, steadily, it has become a cult classic.
And in Afghanistan, it’s a smash hit.
“I’m big in Kabul,” Mastrosimone says. “I’m like Elvis over there.”
“On the 20th of April, they play the movie on a loop around the clock. They celebrate the day the Soviets retreated from Afghanistan. It’s their unofficial official movie.”
Mastrosimone attributes the film’s success to director Kevin Reynolds.
“Kevin’s eye … finds the poetry in all things,” he explains. “In a face. In a landscape. In the dogs. In the rock formations. He has a very poetic nature.”
I say that the power of The Beast comes from the writer and his experiences in Afghanistan. Mastrosimone’s deep empathy for both the Afghans and the Russians is evident in every frame.
“You have to come to a place where you want to understand,” he says. “I feel that the movie does that. People can see the point of view of these Afghans that have been put upon. You can see why they did what they did.”
This first appeared in WarIsBoring and was originally published in 2014.
Image Credit: Creative Commons License.