Hyena Road: le chemin du combat

Pete: Alexander the Great marched into this graveyard about 2,500 years ago. Easy to march in, hard to march out. His words. He and his mother wrote to each other all the time. One day, he got a letter from her saying: "What the hell? You conquered most of the known world in a day and a half, what are you doing bogged down in Afghanistan?" He grabbed a bag and shoveled it full of dirt and had it sent back to Greece with a message to his mother: "Take this dirt and dump it around the palace, see what happens."

Pete: So Alexander's mother spread the dirt all around the palace. Later that night, a couple of attendants showed up to make sure she was alright. One says: "Go ahead, after you." And the other says: "No, after you." And the first one says: "No, I insist." And the second one says: "Don't you tell me what to do." They pull their swords and go at it till they kill each other. Alexander's mother watched all this and wrote a note to him saying: "Okay, okay, now I get it." And he wrote back saying: "Even the dirt is hostile." In Afghanistan, dogs fight dogs, birds fight birds, men kill men.