ALUMNI OF AN AMERICAN SCHOOL IN KABUL RECALL HAPPIER DAYS

Forget, for a moment, the bombs, the rubble, the refugees, the Taliban
and the decades of conflict that have reduced Kabul to ruin. For
several hundred American teens who once went to school there, Kabul
was paradise.

Most of these kids are now middle-aged, many with teenagers of their
own. Their school, the American International School of Kabul, is gone
except in the "fond memories" of those who claim a part of its brief
history, according to its Web site ( www.sonic.net/~geronimo/aisk.html ).
But those memories are very much on the surface these days.

There was that first taste of gelato, exotic and forbidden by many
parents because the Afghani-Italian restaurant that served it made it
with unpasteurized milk. The only battles in evidence were kite wars:
Some Afghani youngsters rigged their kites with glass shards to slash
the strings of opponents. Adults, meanwhile, were ramping up the Cold
War. But U.S. and Russian teens tried their own form of diplomacy,
trading the only few words they had in common: "Led Zeppelin" and
"Alice Cooper."

These students called themselves the Scorpions, after the school's
mascot. And they still quibble about everything from religion to
politics to how a classmate's bicycle ended up hanging from a Kabul
tree some 25 years ago. What they have in common is Afghanistan. Most
lived in Kabul for just a few years, while their dads did tours of
duty on irrigation and agricultural projects or at the U.S. Embassy.
Though they returned to the U.S. more than 20 years ago, Afghanistan
is somehow always with them -- and never more so than now.

"It was so beautiful in its own way," says Mary Meadows Pyburn, who
arrived in Kabul as an eight-year-old when her father was transferred
there in 1968 as an agricultural consultant. The family stayed for six
years. Sometimes, as she navigates the "clutter and stoplights" of San
Antonio where she now lives, she thinks to herself, "Put me down on a
dirt road in Afghanistan and let me just look. I could pick out
Afghanistan from the color of the dirt and the color of the sky. I
could pick it out from anything."

In the fourth grade in Kabul, Ms. Pyburn decided that if she ever had
a daughter, she would name her Ariana, after Afghanistan's Ariana
Airlines. Ariana Pyburn is now 16. Her mother is 42. And Ariana
Airlines has been crippled by United Nations sanctions prohibiting its
international flights in an attempt to persuade the Taliban to turn
over Osama bin Laden.

Leo Geter's parents had to drag him to Afghanistan when his father
went to work on an irrigation project southwest of Kandahar in 1975.
But the 12-year-old was soon overwhelmed by the "deep mystery and
history" of his new home, on the opposite side of the world from the
small town he'd left behind in Indiana. Mr. Geter, now 38 and a New
York filmmaker, calls his four-year sojourn in Kabul "the most
significant thing that ever happened to me."

"One of the things that's hard about the current bombing attack is
that all we really had was our memories. Everything we remember is now
gone, kind of taken from us. People talk about Afghanistan now and
it's weird ... Nobody ever wanted to hear you talk about Afghanistan,"
Mr. Geter says.

Now, of course, everyone has something to say about Afghanistan. But
the bombing targets on maps flashed across television screens have a
very different meaning to the Scorpions.

Like his former schoolmates, Gerry Geronimo scours the news for bits
of the Afghanistan he remembers from the mid-1960s. A Web developer
for a northern California insurance company, Mr. Geronimo maintains
the Kabul school's site, through which the Scorpions keep in touch
with one another. Recently his thoughts returned to Kandahar, the site
of U.S. bombings and a mission by Special Forces. As a kid, Mr.
Geronimo visited family friends in Kandahar during summer vacations.
His dad taught Afghanis about air-traffic control, and many
expatriates they knew lived in housing near Kandahar's magnificent
airport, built from marble by the U.S.

Mr. Geronimo, 48, has pieced together from press reports that the
expatriate housing he visited was taken over by Mr. bin Laden when he
lived for a time in Kandahar. The airport and surrounding areas have
been bombed by the U.S. in recent weeks.

Always, the Scorpions' thoughts ricochet between the idyll they left
behind and the destruction that came afterward. In Kabul, where many
Scorpions lived in mud-walled compounds, Ms. Pyburn and her brother
played with Afghani boys, whose primary toy was a hoop and stick.
"Winter was awesome because we would have snowball fights," she says.

For older teens, hashish was plentiful, strong and cheap. Some partied
at the 25 Hour Club. They sipped cocktails made of vodka mixed with
the juice of pomegranates, plums or sometimes blood oranges.

Some U.S. families had their big American cars shipped into the
country. "Anyone see those morons protesting in front of the American
Embassy on TV?" asked Harry Alexander on the Web site, just after the
U.S. bombing began. "Those cars they were burning had to be from the
early '70s. . That really brought back memories."

He soon got a response from Dennis Fitzhugh, with whom he overlapped in
Kabul: "Just curious, Harry -- was one of those early '70s cars being
burned in front of the embassy a 1970 Dodge Polara, avocado green with a
dark forest-green rough vinyl top? My dad sold ours before returning
stateside in '72. Man! What a car."

Everyone remembers weekend field trips. Ms. Pyburn recalls standing on
the head of one of two giant Buddhas carved during the fifth century
into sandstone cliffs at Bamiyan, northwest of Kabul. The Taliban
dynamited the Buddahs last March.

"I ache for the Afghanis who will never see what I saw," Ms. Pyburn
says, beginning to cry. "The Buddhas are gone. They're just gone. Here
I am, an American, and I have their memories. I wish I could take what
I know and give it to them."

When Ms. Pyburn recently heard that Taliban forces were moving toward
Band-I-Amir, she worried aloud about the deep lakes with stunning
walls of mineral deposits the area was best known for. "Oh man, if you
are going to bomb that place, don't bomb the lakes." she says.

Compared with their Afghani hosts, the Americans lived a life of
unfathomable luxury. But the teens almost always felt welcome. Eric
Claussen, whose father served as a U.N. civil engineer in Kabul from
1966 to 1973, is now 45 and works for a medical products firm near
Raleigh, N.C. He remembers a Boy Scout hike that followed the retreat
route of British forces vanquished by Afghani troops more than a
century ago.

After hiking all day from Kabul, the scoutmaster, an embassy
intelligence officer, led the scouts to an enclave of huts, where they
were invited in by villagers and served tea. The scoutmaster explained
that his group was on a historical journey and suddenly an elderly
woman pulled something from a chest -- a British flag that had been
handed down from generation to generation.

In the late 1970s, the idyll began to erode. The Soviets began to flex
their political muscle and Afghani factions began to compete for
control. There was an 11 p.m. shoot-on-sight curfew "that actually
forced a situation where we had a lot of all-night parties," recalls
Mr. Geter, now 38.

Things changed forever on Valentine's Day 1979, when U.S. Ambassador
Adolph Dubs was kidnapped by militant Muslim rebels. He was killed in
a Kabul hotel room by Afghani officials in a rescue attempt that
Americans felt was influenced by their Soviet advisers. Mr. Geter
recalls watching the ambassador's body being loaded on to a U.S.
airforce plane, as Afghan soldiers guarded the airport. "We deeply
resented their presence," Mr. Geter, then 16, recalls.

By summer, most of the Americans were gone. Mr. Geter and his family
were evacuated to Nepal. Two years later he chose to study acting at
the University of Utah, in part because the stark terrain reminded him
of Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the Soviets invaded and the American
International School of Kabul was eventually reduced to rubble.

These days, many Scorpions check their Web site almost daily. It is
"the only place I have that I can be whole, where all of the parts of
me fit together," says Ms. Pyburn. She envies those who, with a flight
or a drive of a few hours, can get "back in the place that holds your
childhood in its hands. We can't do that."