Transcript
WEBVTT
00:00:00.979 --> 00:00:03.544
So welcome guys.
00:00:03.544 --> 00:00:11.926
Eric Mike, we have our first interview podcast, our first guest podcast, and it is going to be my dad, michael Silver.
00:00:12.348 --> 00:00:14.292
Hello Love that.
00:00:14.814 --> 00:00:15.596
Thank you for joining us.
00:00:15.957 --> 00:00:16.137
That's it.
00:00:16.137 --> 00:00:17.079
Thank you for being here.
00:00:18.260 --> 00:00:32.780
He has a lot of stories, many different topics that we can go down, but the topic that I want to focus the most on today is his adventures in pakistan in the 1970s and he has written up most of them and he'll talk to us about it.
00:00:32.780 --> 00:00:50.094
But it was he I don't want to spoil some of the good parts of it but basically, on a whim, ended up flying out to pakistan, didn't have a passport yet, hadn't been outside of north america, hadn't climbed any mountains, to do a reconnaissance trip up Nanga Parbat, which is the second tallest mountain in Pakistan.
00:00:50.094 --> 00:00:53.990
It is one of the top 20 in the world.
00:00:54.259 --> 00:01:03.347
There's 14 peaks that are over 8,000 meters, which is a magic number, and they're all in the Himalayas.
00:01:03.347 --> 00:01:06.009
Nanga Parbat is number nine out of the 14.
00:01:07.021 --> 00:01:10.930
so ninth tallest mountain in the world to do a reconnaissance trip.
00:01:10.930 --> 00:01:13.262
It wasn't to to summit it, unfortunately.
00:01:13.262 --> 00:01:22.182
Well, or fortunately yeah, or fortunately, and this was in the 70s, so a very different, very different world.
00:01:22.182 --> 00:01:36.736
So I think the first question I want to start off with what was the main drive to put down your PhD at the time and just jet off to Pakistan for a mountaineering trip that you never really mountaineered before?
00:01:38.840 --> 00:01:47.935
Well, I wasn't really a deep member of the Pittsburgh Explorers Club.
00:01:47.935 --> 00:01:54.653
I was living in Pittsburgh at the time, going to the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School in Physics.
00:01:54.653 --> 00:02:03.903
But a lot of my friends were members of the Explorers Club and it had quite a history.
00:02:03.903 --> 00:02:34.694
It had started right after World War II like 1946, 1947, by at least one veteran I can't remember his name anymore and they had done a lot of things and they decided that for America's bicentennial, which was 1976, for those of you who have forgotten your civics lesson they would climb one of the tallest mountains in the world in celebration of America's bicentennial.
00:02:34.694 --> 00:03:04.062
Now, as it happened, there was this Pakistani living in Pittsburgh who several of them were friendly with, and they thought, well, having this person give them introductions to various officials in Pakistan might make going to Pakistan easier than going to Nepal, which is the other obvious place you would go, which?
00:03:04.483 --> 00:03:07.281
for most mountaineering now that people see in the himalayas.
00:03:07.281 --> 00:03:08.443
And everest goes through nepal.
00:03:08.484 --> 00:03:14.429
But nepal didn't really open to outsiders until well, in the 50s they were, they were open then but it was still.
00:03:14.508 --> 00:03:19.669
It was a newer concept to go to nepal, to climb the himalayas, then pakistan or through china and tibet.
00:03:19.669 --> 00:03:27.931
Not really not at that point it was normalized yeah, it had been normalized In the 50s.
00:03:27.991 --> 00:03:28.993
Nepal opened up.
00:03:28.993 --> 00:03:48.213
After all, hillary, when he climbed Everest was 53, with Tenzac Norgay, his Sherpa, and, by the way, many years before Tenzac Norgay had gone to Nanga Parbat with a group.
00:03:48.213 --> 00:03:53.489
And, yeah, most of Nepal opened up in the 50s.
00:03:53.489 --> 00:03:55.252
Pakistan as well.
00:03:55.252 --> 00:04:30.541
The one thing that kept it a little bit closed was Pakistan and India were continually fighting over a couple of the frontier provinces, namely Kashmir, and one or the other country would close the mountains that were close to that border, which included Nangarparbat and K2, or the two probably most well-known mountains in Pakistan, and they had just opened it up again like a year or two before we went to Mountaineers.
00:04:30.622 --> 00:04:41.485
To go back to Pakistan, I don't quite remember the political, what was going on politically between India and Pakistan at that time.
00:04:41.485 --> 00:04:51.189
I remember Pakistan had a prime minister by the name of Ali Bhutta who was sort of Western in his orientation and his behavior.
00:04:51.189 --> 00:05:02.826
His daughter later became prime minister as well, benazir Bhutta, and she was assassinated some years later I can't remember the year.
00:05:02.826 --> 00:05:15.108
Yeah, so at that time Pakistan was a little bit more Western-oriented than it had been in the past under Bhutto, and that was the prime minister when we went.
00:05:15.108 --> 00:05:28.944
So it all made Pakistan a more obvious choice for our group than Nepal, and those are really the well.
00:05:28.944 --> 00:05:36.369
Bhutan has a mountain that's also in the 14 or less, or the 14 that are over 8,000 meters.
00:05:36.369 --> 00:05:43.533
But it's basically Pakistan's got several and Nepal's got most.
00:05:45.540 --> 00:05:52.249
Now that you said that, I do want to throw something out there for those that may not know, and I had to look this up because I didn't know off the top of my head.
00:05:52.249 --> 00:05:57.029
So it's over 8,000 meters, you said right.
00:05:57.110 --> 00:05:57.411
Correct.
00:05:57.620 --> 00:06:01.288
Now that's over 26,000 feet, which is just about five miles.
00:06:01.288 --> 00:06:03.572
That's massive.
00:06:03.853 --> 00:06:22.742
Correct and to put that in perspective, the tallest mountain in north america is denali, which he had summited a few years later, which is 21 000 20 320 so the tallest mountain in north america is 20 320 feet and all these that are over 8 000 meters are over 26 000 feet.
00:06:22.742 --> 00:06:24.728
It's's a different geography.
00:06:30.362 --> 00:06:37.507
And they're all in that same arc of the Himalayas where the Indian plate hits the Eurasian plate, and up went the mountains.
00:06:39.880 --> 00:06:44.031
And then that 8,000 meters up is what they call the death zone as well.
00:06:44.031 --> 00:06:54.170
If you look at the Everest climbing videos, where it's entering the death zone is 8,000 meters and over, and that's where lower oxygen concentrations make people do rash things.
00:06:54.170 --> 00:06:57.685
So you end up going to Pakistan.
00:06:58.208 --> 00:06:58.408
Yes.
00:06:59.521 --> 00:07:00.927
How was the journey to Pakistan?
00:07:02.880 --> 00:07:15.175
Well, I guess it was my other than Canada, my first time outside the United States, so that always makes it interesting and I went by myself.
00:07:15.175 --> 00:07:27.547
Well, what happened is one of the people in this Explorers Club and there were 14 of them that ended up going to climb nangarpa about the year after we did our reconnaissance.
00:07:27.547 --> 00:07:32.504
Well, one of them had volunteered to do the reconnaissance, but he wanted somebody along with him.
00:07:32.504 --> 00:07:41.567
He was a good friend of mine in the physics department, um, but he couldn't talk anybody else in the club to go with him.
00:07:41.567 --> 00:07:48.303
They went down to the Andes and did some practice climbs, but he needed somebody.
00:07:48.303 --> 00:07:53.824
He just wanted somebody along and he had already had all his plane reservations and everything.
00:07:54.007 --> 00:07:55.233
I couldn't get everything together.
00:07:55.233 --> 00:07:56.841
I didn't have a passport at the time.
00:07:56.841 --> 00:08:14.668
I got one real quickly, of course, otherwise I couldn't have gone at all and so I went, maybe three, four, five days after he went, and I met him in what were we?
00:08:14.668 --> 00:08:15.668
At Lahore?
00:08:15.668 --> 00:08:38.101
That's where we met up, in Lahore, which a major city in Pakistan, not the biggest Karachi's the biggest but Lahore is in what's called the Punjab, which is close to the Indian border, and Punjab means five rivers.
00:08:38.101 --> 00:08:47.008
There's five big rivers coming down from the Himalayas full of snow melt every year, and that's what Punjab means.
00:08:47.008 --> 00:08:59.216
It's the most populous and fertile of the provinces of India, and then Pakistan has its own Punjab, and so does India.
00:09:08.280 --> 00:09:10.582
So that's what that name means, if you've heard it before the Punjab, the five rivers.
00:09:10.582 --> 00:09:11.302
So that was 50 years ago.
00:09:11.302 --> 00:09:18.508
But what do you remember from when you get off the plane in Pakistan and start looking around at your first not Western country?
00:09:19.028 --> 00:09:42.424
Well, the plane, the international flights at that time, all went into Karachi, which is the biggest city in Pakistan it's not the capital or anything, and it's down in the southern part of Pakistan and I was supposed to exchange flights to go to Lahore.
00:09:42.424 --> 00:09:44.553
Well, my flight from New York to Pakistan was quite a bit delayed and so I missed my connection to Lahore.
00:09:44.553 --> 00:10:01.807
Well, my flight from New York to Pakistan was quite a bit delayed, and so I missed my connection to Lahore, and they put me up in a little hotel Looked like any hotel from the 50s you would find along US highways and yeah.
00:10:02.028 --> 00:10:23.856
I basically snoozed a bit overnight and caught the plane the next day and didn't look so much different really, because you're in this motel hotel that looks similar to what you would see here at least maybe 20 years before in the 50s.
00:10:23.856 --> 00:10:35.674
You would see here at least maybe 20 years before in the 50s, and at that time now I understand there's a big military presence at all these airports, in these places.
00:10:35.674 --> 00:10:42.379
Not so much then.
00:10:49.908 --> 00:10:53.083
So it wasn't a huge cultural shock, not until I got into Lahore itself, which what?
00:10:54.549 --> 00:10:56.297
was the big cultural shock in Lahore.
00:10:56.297 --> 00:11:15.293
Well, basically I mean you know this before you go the massive poverty People I mean most of the population living in tents, I mean we have that problem now here in this country, but it's still a very small percentage of the overall population there.
00:11:15.293 --> 00:11:17.662
It's a large.
00:11:17.662 --> 00:11:21.125
It's like what you see of refugee camps today.
00:11:21.125 --> 00:11:37.581
That's the way most of the population was living, and the better neighborhoods of Lahore and any of the towns would have these compounds where the better off people lived and you're all walled off from the city.
00:11:37.581 --> 00:11:43.543
Everything pointed towards the inner courtyard and not out to the street.
00:11:47.186 --> 00:11:49.486
I'm curious where were you living at that time?
00:11:50.648 --> 00:11:52.389
I was in graduate school in Pittsburgh.
00:11:52.808 --> 00:11:56.350
Okay, gotcha, and what were you going to grad school for?
00:11:56.630 --> 00:11:56.991
Physics.
00:11:57.892 --> 00:11:59.793
And did you end up finishing that?
00:11:59.793 --> 00:12:00.274
I did your.
00:12:00.312 --> 00:12:00.474
PhD.
00:12:00.474 --> 00:12:00.693
Yes.
00:12:00.714 --> 00:12:03.414
Okay, gotcha, and I actually had my career in that field as well In PhD.
00:12:03.414 --> 00:12:04.196
Yes, okay, gotcha.
00:12:04.635 --> 00:12:07.577
And I actually had my career in that field as well.
00:12:08.158 --> 00:12:08.658
In physics.
00:12:08.658 --> 00:12:20.462
Yes, I don't know how anyone does that, so I applaud you, I bow my head to you, because one class in physics alone is something A PhD in.
00:12:20.462 --> 00:12:23.190
That is its own category.
00:12:23.190 --> 00:12:23.912
That's amazing.
00:12:28.759 --> 00:12:31.639
Yeah, a bit of a yeah different, uh, different, different hobbies for sure physics and mountaineering.
00:12:34.604 --> 00:12:51.206
So then you, you met up with dan in lahore yeah, dan, was was one of the co-leaders of the expedition the following year, one of the the prime driver of organizing this and yeah, so his name is dan bunce.
00:12:51.206 --> 00:12:54.374
He was also a graduate student in the physics department.
00:12:54.374 --> 00:13:04.586
He was a much more serious mountaineer, since I had never done anything and I still don't consider myself anything like that, even though I live in the mountains now.
00:13:04.586 --> 00:13:11.015
But in colorado, um, yeah, yeah.
00:13:11.035 --> 00:13:22.028
So we met up in lahore so then now, if you know someone in in the us, or even in in south america, I wanted to go mountaineering.
00:13:22.028 --> 00:13:27.863
Fly into a local airport, you can rent a a truck and go to get to a trailhead pretty, pretty quickly.
00:13:27.863 --> 00:13:38.932
How, how many steps were there from getting from lahore to up into the valley and to nangaparbha, which is one of the easier mountains to access too, I believe?
00:13:39.541 --> 00:13:42.025
uh, nowadays it's easier because there's a highway there.
00:13:42.025 --> 00:13:43.749
That was not at that time.
00:13:43.749 --> 00:13:51.269
Uh, so I'm not sure why we met up in lahore.
00:13:51.269 --> 00:13:52.431
Probably because that's where.
00:13:52.431 --> 00:14:01.140
Well, because there's no government offices in lahore which we would have to deal with to get the permits to go to the mountains.
00:14:01.140 --> 00:14:06.513
Uh, so the steps, the steps were basically after he spent a few days in Lahore.
00:14:06.513 --> 00:14:08.948
Oh, I remember now why we went to Lahore.
00:14:09.639 --> 00:14:17.835
The father of this gentleman, who lived in Pittsburgh, was in Lahore at the time.
00:14:17.835 --> 00:14:28.033
Some of his family lived there and he was one of these people they they call was there at independence.
00:14:28.033 --> 00:14:33.311
Uh, there's, there's this elder generation at that time.
00:14:33.311 --> 00:14:41.850
They're all gone now, but the generation of gandhi and nairu in india, and um, um, uh, what's the name?
00:14:41.850 --> 00:14:45.955
And the Pakistani guy, muhammad Ali, no, not Muhammad Ali.
00:14:45.955 --> 00:14:46.495
Um.
00:14:46.495 --> 00:14:53.783
Well, I apologize to anybody from Pakistan that's listening to this that I don't remember the name of your founder right now.
00:14:53.783 --> 00:14:55.947
Remember his picture, cause it was everywhere.
00:14:55.947 --> 00:15:00.884
But um, uh, but he was a member of that founding generation.
00:15:00.884 --> 00:15:15.000
He was, um, the head of head of the health department before the separation of India and Pakistan in 1948.
00:15:16.682 --> 00:15:19.868
Mr Silver, you're correct, it's Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
00:15:22.123 --> 00:15:23.245
Jinnah, yeah, thank you.
00:15:23.245 --> 00:15:24.206
Chat GBT.
00:15:25.649 --> 00:15:27.230
I'm the Jamie of the podcast.
00:15:27.230 --> 00:15:28.673
Try to help out.
00:15:31.561 --> 00:15:32.302
Jinnah, yeah.
00:15:32.302 --> 00:15:38.788
So I mean he and Gandhi and Nehru were the three big pushers for independence.
00:15:38.788 --> 00:15:41.571
And then the separation as well.
00:15:41.571 --> 00:15:57.244
Gandhi really wanted to keep them together and Jinnah really wanted to be separate from India.
00:15:57.244 --> 00:16:10.863
And Pakistan means land of the pure in Urdu, which is the old language of the area.
00:16:10.863 --> 00:16:14.980
So just calling yourselves the land of the pure sort of makes you not want to be connected to another country where the religion is different.
00:16:14.980 --> 00:16:22.807
Of course India's getting its revenge now, but not to go into modern day politics.
00:16:22.807 --> 00:16:25.657
So from yeah, so he gave us.
00:16:25.657 --> 00:16:34.427
He wanted to give us a tour of the historical things to see in that part of Pakistan and he did this.
00:16:34.508 --> 00:16:41.389
doctor, the father of this friend and he gave us.
00:16:41.389 --> 00:16:44.145
He was a wonderful tour guide, told us many stories.
00:16:44.145 --> 00:16:47.855
Remember we went by a coffee house oh, that's where revolution was plotted.
00:16:47.855 --> 00:16:49.278
And he was a wonderful tour guide, told us many stories.
00:16:49.278 --> 00:16:55.764
Remember we went by a coffee house, oh, that's where revolution was plotted, back in to kick the British out.
00:16:55.764 --> 00:17:17.067
So, and then we went to the capital city and it's a twin city Islamabad is the capital and that's a new planned city and Rallapindi is the old city.
00:17:17.087 --> 00:17:23.691
That was there and Rallapindi was the old army, the center of the army, like the main army base, both in British days and the British raw and for the Pakistani government.
00:17:23.691 --> 00:17:29.250
But that's where we would have to go to get all our permits and find out what restrictions we'd have, if any.
00:17:29.250 --> 00:17:40.413
And so we spent a A good week, perhaps more than a week, dealing with the bureaucracy there.
00:17:40.413 --> 00:17:52.394
Now, many of them were very helpful, they wanted to be helpful, but it takes a while in a third world bureaucracy to get things done.
00:17:52.394 --> 00:18:02.750
And I think one of the interesting parts I remember is, because of our connection, this doctor I mentioned.
00:18:02.750 --> 00:18:08.276
He had given us a letter of introduction to the chief of staff of the army there.
00:18:08.276 --> 00:18:13.492
Name of ZL Hawk.
00:18:14.461 --> 00:18:15.326
Check that out on me.
00:18:15.326 --> 00:18:18.643
Check that out on me.
00:18:18.643 --> 00:18:42.265
And he later ended up deposing the prime minister, who was this Bhutto that I had mentioned earlier, and actually ordering his death, and most of the Western countries of the world tried to get him to stop.
00:18:42.265 --> 00:18:48.624
He later died in a plane crash with the US ambassador on board and under mysterious circumstances that have never been explained, that I've, at least I've never found an explanation for.
00:18:48.624 --> 00:19:02.167
Maybe it was a pure accident, maybe it wasn't, but he sort of reinstituted Sharia law, or a version of Sharia law from the very western approach of Buddha to the more.
00:19:05.106 --> 00:19:19.711
Well, I'll just call it Sharia law, you can decide label it as you wish so it was a very different Pakistan than in the 70s, than it is now, well, for example.
00:19:19.711 --> 00:19:20.553
So it was a very different.
00:19:20.573 --> 00:19:23.259
Pakistan than in the 70s, in the 70s, than it is now.
00:19:23.259 --> 00:19:25.424
Well, for example, I'm Jewish and I had no problem there.
00:19:25.424 --> 00:19:26.469
I don't think a Jew could set foot in.
00:19:26.469 --> 00:19:29.278
Pakistan today.
00:19:30.781 --> 00:19:37.530
And then, on that note, I remember you said there were two words that all the kids knew when you were walking around.
00:19:37.530 --> 00:19:40.596
Two phrases In English.
00:19:41.621 --> 00:19:59.060
No matter how remote a town we went to, they would say American, you know, muhammad Ali, muhammad Ali, muhammad Ali, he's the greatest, and for kids in this part of the world to know Muhammad Ali, he must have been the greatest it just shows you how popular he was at that time, right.
00:19:59.060 --> 00:20:01.229
Yep, Yep exactly.
00:20:03.260 --> 00:20:06.223
So from Lahore you go up to Nanga Parbat.
00:20:06.746 --> 00:20:19.484
Well, from Lahore, we spent a couple of weeks in this twin town of Rallapindi Capital and Islamabad, and the two interesting things that I'll mention about that.
00:20:19.484 --> 00:20:37.894
We did go and visit the headquarters of the army in Rawalpindi because we had this letter of introduction to the chief of staff and while we didn't see the chief of staff, we saw his primary assistant.
00:20:37.894 --> 00:20:41.000
We got into his office and that's something I mean.
00:20:41.000 --> 00:20:42.443
I was in the army as a private.
00:20:42.443 --> 00:20:46.813
I never got into anybody's office of any sort.
00:20:46.813 --> 00:20:54.588
Here I am in in the office of of of the commander, the commander of the armies for Pakistan.
00:20:54.690 --> 00:21:00.195
But anyway, I just found that amazing.
00:21:00.195 --> 00:21:07.047
And let's see, there was something else I wanted to mention.
00:21:07.047 --> 00:21:11.251
I'll get back to it when I remember it, because I'm almost the Trump and Biden's age.
00:21:12.480 --> 00:21:14.125
You can be our president.
00:21:14.125 --> 00:21:15.009
It's a good benchmark.
00:21:15.088 --> 00:21:16.670
I'm only a year younger than Trump.
00:21:16.670 --> 00:21:18.011
It's a good benchmark.
00:21:18.051 --> 00:21:21.394
I'm only a year younger than Trump.
00:21:21.394 --> 00:21:26.557
How do you transport from Rathapindi to Nangaparbha?
00:21:26.698 --> 00:21:27.018
All right.
00:21:27.018 --> 00:22:02.515
So we found a transportation company, or a travel agent, if you will, and it was one of the perhaps the only woman owned company in all of Pakistan, you know, a Muslim country, almost 100% Muslim and very rare, and so they arranged well, did you know the significance of that then, or was that more in hindsight?
00:22:02.555 --> 00:22:03.175
than it was.
00:22:03.175 --> 00:22:14.461
No, no, we had been given her name, and so we met her and learned all this in real time.
00:22:14.461 --> 00:22:23.465
But the government, one of the restrictions the government put on us was not to travel alone but to travel with another expedition that was going there.
00:22:23.465 --> 00:22:49.885
But I think Miss Davis was no longer with us by this time, or Mrs Davis, and so we met up with them.
00:22:49.885 --> 00:22:52.650
We were staying in another hotel in Rallapindi.
00:22:52.650 --> 00:22:59.292
I think Mrs Davis's was the traditional place for Westerners, western adventurers, to stay.
00:22:59.292 --> 00:23:09.299
We had been given the name of another hotel, which we later learned was probably not the best place to stay when you're dealing with government agencies.
00:23:09.299 --> 00:23:15.365
It had a reputation for having a brothel upstairs, it sounds it the title itself the City Hotel.
00:23:15.385 --> 00:23:16.491
Yeah, it sounds it the title itself.
00:23:16.974 --> 00:23:17.719
The City Hotel.
00:23:20.772 --> 00:23:20.953
Yeah.
00:23:25.260 --> 00:23:28.955
But anyway, we never saw any evidence of it, but that's what we were told, so we met up with them.
00:23:30.619 --> 00:23:32.548
The Japanese expedition, the Japanese expedition.
00:23:32.548 --> 00:23:45.166
They had rented a large truck, a lorry, and if you've ever seen, if you look through some of the pictures I have over there of the trucks in Pakistan, they're all gaily painted.
00:23:45.166 --> 00:24:10.911
And so, this very gaily painted truck, they loaded all their stuff, a little bit of our stuff, and then we had a van, a normal van, that we all went into Like I don't know what it was right now, and we took that from.
00:24:10.911 --> 00:24:17.112
Oh yeah, yeah, oh yeah yeah.
00:24:19.199 --> 00:24:19.400
Oh yeah.
00:24:22.587 --> 00:24:25.702
Oh, they were all British trucks, they were all British manufactured trucks.
00:24:25.702 --> 00:24:40.618
I remember that Bedford, maybe, bedford, belford, belford, bedford is the name of the truck, the manufacturer of the truck company, the manufacturer of the truck company.
00:24:40.618 --> 00:24:59.651
And so we took this route into the mountains and it went through this town called Abbottabad, which had no significance to me at that time, but that is the town where Osama bin Laden hid out and was found and was also where Pakistan had its West Point.
00:24:59.651 --> 00:25:10.055
So that sort of implied to me that the Pakistani government knew where Osama bin Laden was.
00:25:10.055 --> 00:25:24.652
Maybe that's a bit of a stretch, but if their West Point is just down the street from where his compound was, here's a picture of a bus that has Bedford as a logo on the side.
00:25:25.141 --> 00:25:29.711
So yes, you were right Bedford Yep.
00:25:35.563 --> 00:25:42.634
The other interesting thing, that same sort of idea of Abbottabad being famous.
00:25:42.634 --> 00:25:47.759
Later, when we were in Islamabad, Rolopindi, we went to visit the US Embassy.
00:25:47.759 --> 00:25:51.590
It was our independence.
00:25:51.590 --> 00:25:53.246
In fact, it was over July 4th.
00:25:53.246 --> 00:25:59.011
Unfortunately, I had gotten heat stroke and I was in a hospital, which is another great story.
00:25:59.011 --> 00:26:04.247
I think it was heat stroke, they thought it was malaria, the doctors.
00:26:08.521 --> 00:26:16.170
So Dan went to the July 4th at the embassy and I had been to the embassy earlier in the week and maybe later.
00:26:16.170 --> 00:26:19.222
I went to the embassy again earlier in the week and maybe later.
00:26:19.222 --> 00:26:30.781
I went to the embassy again and it's way on the outskirts of Islamabad, like two miles from the rest of the government, things right at the very edge of the city.
00:26:30.781 --> 00:26:51.734
They were building, and then a few years later, there was a problem at the main mosque in Mecca, which the Saudi government blamed on the US, and so there was a mob that attacked the US embassy in Pakistan and burned it down.
00:26:52.200 --> 00:27:06.135
I mean, it was a brick building, but a couple of people were killed, I think a couple of the rioters and a couple of maybe a Marine defender and a couple of the Pakistani employees, not a small handful.
00:27:06.135 --> 00:27:12.752
But from my experience I knew the Pakistani government said there was nothing they can do.
00:27:12.752 --> 00:27:21.799
This was a spontaneous riot and and we couldn't get any police protection there in time or army protection there in time.
00:27:21.799 --> 00:27:28.750
Well, I knew how far it was from everything else in Islamabad and I knew it would take quite a while to march all these marchers down there.
00:27:28.750 --> 00:27:33.498
So I knew that was a lie.
00:27:33.498 --> 00:27:41.280
Whatever it was, something the Pakistani government wasn't coming uh, completely truthful about.
00:27:41.280 --> 00:27:53.733
This is what happens when you have local information, even though it's so, not rare, I would call it, but such a happenstance and you just happen to be to the embassy.
00:27:53.773 --> 00:28:00.865
You knew it was far from town, so if there was a bunch of rioters there, that it was organized and it took a while to get there.
00:28:00.865 --> 00:28:06.270
So anyway, that was uh.
00:28:06.270 --> 00:28:39.775
So we took the uh, our, our um van, with, with the, with the japanese climbing club, and our uh and ourselves and our truck, and we went as far as the paved road would go and at that time we transferred into Jeeps and the Jeeps were all Toyota's versions of Land Cruisers and we took the Jeeps for a day or two up this valley called the Kagan Valley.
00:28:39.775 --> 00:28:52.132
It is a place where, a few years ago, the Taliban tried to foment a lot of trouble and fought the army.
00:28:52.132 --> 00:28:55.696
The Pakistani army finally crushed the Taliban there.
00:28:55.696 --> 00:29:07.800
It was okay for them to be in afghanistan and do their thing, but not okay even though the pakistani armed forces and secret services were the main backers of the taliban.
00:29:07.800 --> 00:29:19.375
But only in another country, not in ours, um, which I think know growing up hearing some of these stories.
00:29:19.394 --> 00:29:30.627
That is another, just another thing detailing how unique of a time it was in a place to be when you were able to be in Pakistan, in those valleys at that time, being Jewish, being a small expedition from America.
00:29:31.800 --> 00:29:32.343
And another.
00:29:32.343 --> 00:29:34.769
Well, two other interesting things.
00:29:34.769 --> 00:29:49.395
My jacket that I wore because in the mountains it's going to get a little chillier, was my old Army field jacket from when I was in the Army, with my name tag still on it.
00:29:49.395 --> 00:29:50.838
I think I took off.
00:29:50.838 --> 00:30:07.296
I did take off the US Army name tag on it, but that's kind of stupid in retrospect on a country that well, at that time, as I said, buddha had a Western orientation and Kissinger was actually in the country when we were there.
00:30:09.240 --> 00:30:15.854
Henry Kissinger, our Secretary of State I don't know if he was Secretary of State yet Is he 76?
00:30:15.854 --> 00:30:20.510
Yeah, he was Secretary of State, I think, of State yet Is he 76?
00:30:20.510 --> 00:30:29.828
Yeah, he was Secretary of State, I think, and he was at that time setting up secret talks with China so Nixon could go to.
00:30:29.828 --> 00:30:38.844
Now Nixon was Let me get this straight Now Nixon was gone by then.
00:30:38.844 --> 00:30:43.222
So one of his setting up some trips between US high officials and self with China, he did through Pakistan and he was in Pakistan while we were there.
00:30:43.222 --> 00:30:49.874
So, yeah, completely different vibe then.
00:30:49.874 --> 00:30:59.473
So we took the Jeeps as far as we could and then it was walking.