Buzkashi (My Foreign Legion Days)

Lyrics

[Intro]

You, my VAB, dented shell from the dunes,
parked at the edge of that field near Mazar-i-Sharif,
May 2002, 1:00 PM, sun at 85 degrees,
holding me in your metal belly while the world played.

[Verse 1]
I leaned against your hatch, cool steel on my skin,
watching the chapandaz charge, horses foaming,
Abdul Rashid Dostum's men in the fray,
their whips cracking like rifle shots.
The boz, that headless goat, soaked overnight,
stuffed with sand to weigh it down to seventy pounds,
dragged through the dust, a prize no one owns long.

[Chorus]
Oh, my armored confidant, you saw it too—
war's first draft, this game without lines,
hooves pounding the same earth we patrolled,
each rider a soldier, the carcass their flag.
Buzkashi, the original team sport,
where strategy hides in the chaos,
like Legion maneuvers in the Hindu Kush.

[Verse 2]
From your shadowed interior, 75 degrees inside,
smell of horse sweat and charred kebabs drifting in,
I traced the arcs, the feints, the sudden turns—
brains firing fast, hippocampus mapping the raid,
neurological warfare on horseback,
predicting the grab before the dust settles.

[Bridge]

You vibrated with the engine's idle hum,
my hands on your frame, feeling the game's pulse,
cortisol flooding veins, just like in ambush drills,
the body knows the score before the mind calculates.
War dressed as play, or play as war's echo—
Dostum's quote lingers: 'the spirit of our people.'

[Verse 3]
That small strange fact, the sand in the hide,
making strength the only math that matters,
no Nash equilibrium here, just brute probability,
from your back, I quantified the falls,
each collision a theorem proved in blood and sand.

[Outro]

My VAB, you carried me through that spectacle,
whispering how every tournament starts in conflict,
the universe's longest match, played on fields like this.
Rest now, old friend, the game's never over.