``I'm a documentary producer,'' says Jeff Harmon. ``What I do is document history.'' During the war in Afghanistan, he did it the hard way _ with one program about the rebels, then another about the Soviet troops. On Sunday, Ted Turner's TBS Superstation, which aired Harmon's first show in 1986 and the other in December, is repeating the second, ``Afghanistan: The Soviet Experience.'' Vietnam vets in particular might find some of its scenes eerily familiar. There's no triple canopy jungle, to be sure. But there are the contour-flying helicopters, the door gunners watching the ground, the dusty hill outposts resupplied by chopper and the convoy-guarding armored personnel carrier rolling along, its young driver listening to Western rock on his boombox. Another deja vu moment, in a Kabul hospital: The wounded Soviet grunt who, according to the show's English translation, complains that in this war, ``you can't understand who are the civilians and who are the enemies.'' The two programs _ the first is ``Afghanistan's Holy War'' _ were filmed three years apart and shown on TBS' National Geographic Explorer series. Harmon, 36, was born in Los Angeles. Based in London, but ``living out of my suitcase now,'' he says he's ``basically self-educated,'' with a year logged at New York University's film school. He did his first Afghanistan war documentary out of plain curiosity: ``The image of these 19th century tribesmen battling a superpower intrigued the hell out of me. And I got sucked into the image and went.'' Bankrolled by the BBC, Harmon and cameraman Alexander Lindsay emulated other correspondents trying to cover the rebels after Soviet troops were sent to Afghanistan in 1979. The two slipped across the border from Pakistan in 1985. His aim, he says, was to show the war from the grunt-level perspective of the Soviet-fighting rebels, the mujahideen, ``the muj'' (pronounced ``mooj''), as some Westerners call them. ``I don't go in with a correspondent or make myself a correspondent,'' he says. ``I tell the story of the people I'm covering. I do it through their eyes. ... I don't whitewash anything. I don't take a partisan view.'' Indeed, he says, some rebel political leaders got upset at his documentary about the rebel troops, including what the troops thought of their leaders and ``their real way of life,'' including that some smoked hashish. The leaders considered all that bad for the rebel image, says Harmon. His opinion of them isn't kind: ``They were like World War I generals. To them, their men ... out on the front lines, were cannon fodder.'' Harmon wanted to film the Soviet GIs' side of the war, but didn't have high hopes. Having been with the rebels trying to kill them, he thought, would not exactly make him welcome, not even in the new era of Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost easing access for Western journalists. To his surprise, he says, the Soviets granted him a visa when he sought to cover, for Britain's Independent Television News, the start of the Soviet troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988. His theory is that Soviet officials had seen his earlier documentary and at least thought it honest. Visa in hand, he hurriedly called National Geographic officials in the United States, got the green light for a full-length documentary and, with cameraman Lindsay, went to work. He says he told Soviet officials in Kabul this: ``I'm not going to make a propaganda film for you. But I'm not going to do a hatchet job on you, either. All I want to do is show the war through the eyes of the ordinary Ivan.'' Word of the unusual travels fast in any army. Most Soviet grunts and helicopter pilots he met already knew he'd covered the rebel side of the war, Harmon says. But he found little, if any, animosity toward him, he says: ``They were fascinated by the fact we'd covered the war on the other side. The soldiers, they were so curious, so `What was the enemy like?' I think they looked at me as a chance to see what it was like on the other side.'' __ Elsewhere in television ... SAJAK'S NEW LOOK _ THE SEQUEL: If you've been watching CBS' ``The Pat Sajak Show'' this week, you might have noticed yet more changes in the struggling late-night series, cut last month from 90 minutes to an hour. The show's couch is gone, replaced by two black leather chairs: one for Sajak, one for the guest. Other changes include new graphics and a roundtable discussion by guests near the close of the show. No word yet, though, on whether an ejection seat is planned for dull guests.
