The 1-320th Field Artillery Regiment, part of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, assumed control of Arghandab District from the 82nd Airborne Division in June. The first few weeks were rough going; the unit suffered numerous double and triple amputations from anti-personnel IEDs hidden in the footpaths and compound walls along the vegetated northern flank of the Arghandab River, a place the soldiers refer to as the “green zone.” The devastating IED attacks slowed the pace of the 1-320th’s movement into the green zone, but they have gained ground from the Taliban in the two months since their arrival. They have built two new combat outposts and one new patrol base in a former Taliban stronghold. The Taliban attack the 1-320th’s COPs daily, sometimes several times per day, in fact, and the 1-320th soldiers fight from the walls with machine guns, forty-millimeter grenades, and fragmentation grenades chucked over the walls into the dense pomegranate orchards outside.

These are just eight of the many photos I took during my two weeks with the 1-320th in Arghandab, which is in the northeastern part of Kandahar Province.. Now I am back in Zhari District, on the southwestern side of the province, with the 2-502nd Infantry Regiment. I’ve got two weeks or so left of embedded time, and then I’m going unembedded to work on one final story before heading home to the US in late September. I’m looking forward to a clean bed, a well-stocked kitchen and some healthy food, and to seeing my family. I’m also looking forward to attending the Eddie Adams Workshop in early October — I can’t wait!

I say children of Marjah, but they’re mostly boys. During my time in the field in Marjah with the Marines I only saw a handful of little girls, and they usually took off when the patrols came near. I did not see a single woman the entire time I was in Helmand. The women of Helmand are even more cloistered than the women of Wardak, of whom I saw only a few during my stay there last year.

I’m currently working on a multimedia story from my time in Marjah, and it might be a little while before it all comes together, so I wanted to put up a couple of photos in advance from my time there. I wish I could sit down and chat with the Marjah children sometime and see how they feel about everything that’s going on in their little worlds. Marjah is a pretty remote place, hard to get to and mostly devoid of roads. I would love to know how much these kids know about greater Afghanistan, or about the grand plans that the US Marines, USAID, and the UK forces have for their region. I would value their opinions on the likelihood of American success. I would also like to know whether or not they want to go to school, and if so, how badly. Some of their parents are telling the Marines that now is not the time to build schools—the security situation is too bad, they say. I would like to believe that they do want their children to go to school, but now’s just not the time. I would like to believe that.

The Afghan government is just getting on its feet right now. There’s a new district governor in Marjah now. His office is in the barebones Marjah district center, which sounds a bit more than it actually is. It’s a small building surrounded by HESCO bastions—big wire-framed square baskets filled with dirt that serve as makeshift blast walls/barriers. He’s holding office hours every week so that locals can come and voice their grievances and find out about whatever programs the government and the US forces are running.

Right now the local government is busy trying to recruit locals to serve in an Afghan Uniformed Police unit currently under formation. They’re hoping that if they staff the local police force with locals, who have the support of their elders, that the police will be more likely to protect the people and property of Marjah from outside (read: Taliban) influence. If indeed the Taliban are an outside influence. One Marine officer I spoke with told me that he really has no idea if the locals he meets with regularly are Taliban or not. They are shapeshifters, the Taliban.

For five weeks in October and early November 2009, I followed around troops from the 2-87 Infantry and the 4-25 Field Artillery, part of 3rd Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division, as they conducted counterinsurgency operations in Wardak Province, Afghanistan. The photos collected here are just some of the many hundreds of photos I snapped during my trip. I published a long-form story with a photo essay in the Virginia Quarterly Review in April and was lucky enough to get my photo of three American soldiers silhouetted by the setting sun in the Nerkh Valley slapped on the cover of the Spring 2010 issue. That particular photo just pretty much turned out straight out of the camera, though VQR did some slight background alteration for the cover to reduce noise. The photo in this gallery has only been modified to blacken the blacks a little bit—the super high-resolution Nikon D700 has a hard time giving up on shadowy areas, it always wants to stretch the limits of its own dynamic range and even this near-perfect silhouette still had specks of olive drab and brown amid the blacks.

I spent 99% of my time in Afghanistan in the company of either American or Afghan soldiers or both. I regret that I had little opportunity to interact with the Afghan population, and when I did, our encounters were obviously stilted by the fact that I was surrounded by people with guns. But I do not feel too terribly conflicted about the fact that my reporting from Afghanistan does not give voice to the Afghan population, given that I went specifically to report on the military and on the implementation at the lowest, most front-line level, of what I took to be intellectually sound but very difficult counterinsurgency principles. I did not go to report on “Afghanistan,” per se, but to find out where the rubber hits the road in a twenty-first century counterinsurgency campaign that may very well be one of the last the world will ever see. I am beginning to wonder if large-scale deployments of the Iraq/Afghanistan genre will be possible in the post-Iraq/Afghanistan future.

It seems highly unlikely to me that any “coalition of the willing” composed of NATO allies or any other state allies will rally behind a large-scale deployment for at least two decades post-Iraq/Afghanistan. Governments are teetering and falling all across the European continent now due to current or previous heads of states’ decisions to pitch in to the two major twenty-first century conflicts spearheaded by the US. The costs have been extreme—$1 trillion for the US alone in Iraq, not the mention 5,000+ Americans dead on the two fronts—with nothing to show. By all accounts, both regions where western troops have set boots down are considerably worse off than they were ten years ago, and an entire generation of Iraqi and Afghan children and young adults—not to mention western soldiers—has been traumatized. The armies of the West are exhausted, strung out, and broke. I seriously doubt that many young soldiers who’ve served more than two or three months of a tour in Iraq or Afghanistan have any real faith in the mission—or even knows what the mission is. It doesn’t help that the governments of both countries seem as bent on self-destruction as their enemies seem bent on their destruction. We can carry on for a long time—but to what end?

I’m reading War is a Force that Gives us Meaning right now, published in 2003, written by long-time war correspondent Chris Hedges. An American soldier named David Burdette who I befriended in Afghanistan recommended it to me. He was a freckle-faced blonde kid from Texas who had dropped out of Penn State University halfway through his senior year for reasons that are still unclear (“I was bored,” he said once) and eventually found his way into the active duty Army. Our conversations ranged from the most banal and scatalogical to the downright ontological and existential—and to Chomsky, the favorite of all young radicals (and probably unassailable in terms of commitment and moral clarity; I was there when Chomsky “broke the siege of Gaza” in February 2010 live via satellite and in Egypt a couple of months later when Israel refused to allow him to enter on the Allenby bridge). War is a Force is rhetorical and heady in the first two chapters, as Hedges comes at the only truth about warfare from multiple angles of attack: war is barbaric, war is “organized murder.” War tends to reduce people—good ones and not so good ones and all shades in between—to the lowest primal denominator. Occasionally a bit of love shines through—as in Hedges’ story about a Muslim man who risked his life to bring a half-liter of fresh milk to a starving Christian newborn in Bosnia every day for more than 400 days—but dominance and survival are the only goals in war, and violence, deceit, and evasion are the tools of the trade. In war, honor is a corpse.

In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry explains how, when we send our soldiers to war, we ask them to violate the most universal moral commandment: thou shalt not kill. And when they kill in our name, we prefer not to know too many details. We hate to look in the mirror and ask what we’ve done. As Hedges writes, “The myth of war creates a new, artificial reality. Moral precepts—ones we have spent a lifetime honoring—are jettisoned. We accept, if not condone, the maiming and killing of others as the regrettable cost of war. We operate under a new moral code.”

I would adjust Hedges’ sentence to read, “We operate under a new code.” There is no moral foundation to the new code. There is only a practical code. In that new code, it is acceptable to fire Hellfire missiles from drones at compounds housing women and children, knowing that the collateral damage will snuff out perhaps a dozen or more innocents. Women and children. And teenage boys and Pashtun valley farmers with Kalashnikovs who may not have even known what an American was until they saw an Apache for the first time. And grandfathers and fathers and brothers and uncles. In our own country, it is not acceptable for a police officer to shoot and kill ten bystanders in order to apprehend one suspected criminal. But in the wars we wage now, it is acceptable to level an entire family compound to take out one “High Value Target.” The ends justify the means, or so it seems. Then we get on television and talk about how deeply we regret the loss of innocent civilian life. Do we, really?

Inside our borders, we spend twenty years or more fighting the minutiae of death row appeals, but we will kill dozens of sleeping people in the blink of an eye, based on intelligence obtained from sources who are dubious at best and probably possessed of innumerable ulterior motives. Faulty justice, by all American standards.

Yes, I have to agree with Hedges. “Moral precepts . . . are jettisoned.”

If you scroll through earlier posts in VQR’s blog, you’ll find similar interviews with other contributors to the Spring 2010 issue, which was mostly focused on Afghanistan. So far, interviews have been published from multimedia reporter Jason Motlagh, documentary photographer Louie Palu, and novelist and essayist Ed Falco.

A few months ago I picked up a 1954 Rolleiflex 3.5E off of e-bay and started messing around with it at home in Gaza City, back when I was living there last winter. I took it to Jordan and to India in February just for fun. It has a pretty serious light leak somewhere in the housing (it’s in beautiful condition, but has a dent in the frame on a crucial bolt that I am constantly tightening) and I’m never quite sure how each exposure will turn out. I messed around with some Fuji Velvia and Provia color slide film in Gaza and India, which turned out okay. But the images from Petra I shot with Ilford Delta, and those turned out cool! I actually think I like the fuzz and dust that got into the film compartment—can’t say way, guess it’s just that old-time charm. Like buying faded jeans at a thrift store, I guess. Reminds me that this camera had a long life way before I ever came along.

I had the negatives and slides processed at a lab in Jerusalem. I’m not sure if they did a great job or not, since I know next to nothing about film developing. After my first experiment with slides, however, I can say that they are finicky. You have to be spot on. The black and white seemed more forgiving. I also found a way to make a kind of weirdly colored (perhaps old film) slide into a great black and white image—desaturate and turn into a duotone with photoshop. The scans aren’t great for these images, and the shop didn’t really take good care to line the slides up perfectly, so I even lost some resolution when I cropped the images into web-sized bits. Anyway, it’s a learning process and I sure am having fun toting around my Rollei!

Assorted photos from my prolonged stay in Egypt during the autumn of 2008 and winter of 2009, while I was studying Arabic at the American University of Cairo and shuttling back and forth between Gaza and points east. In the middle of the gallery you’ll find some shots from the Duweiqa rockslide of September 2008, which killed over 100 people in the Moqattam Cliffs area on the southeastern outskirts of Cairo, close to the Citadel of Salah Ed-Din Al Ayubbi. The government blocked reporters—foreign and domestic—from approaching the scene of the rockslide, instantly imagining the bad press that would stem from their failure to move families in danger areas at the cliff’s edge and their equally sad failure to respond with an adequate relief effort. I snuck behind a group of police officers and made my way up into the hill area, then shot down on the scene from above.

I sold some of the photos and two stories from the event to the Daily News Egypt, Cairo’s English daily, distributed with the International Herald Tribune. It was my first taste of foreign reporting—hard to believe it was a little less than two years ago. The story piqued my interest in Cairo’s economic underclass—composed mostly of internal migrants from agricultural areas in the Nile Valley—which lives in the urban villages on the city’s periphery. It was immediately clear that the government had a callous attitude toward the safety of the residents of these areas, or perhaps just didn’t know what to do with all of them. I wrote a story about a housing project commissioned by President Mubarak’s wife, Suzanne Mubarak, that was completed several years before the rockslide with the intent of moving thousands of cliff dwellers into safe housing, away from the cliffs. At the time of the rockslide, only a few of the thousand or so apartments in the housing project were occupied. The government officials in charge of setting up the cliff dwelling families with new free digs had been charging an unreasonable premium for the places, selling the deeds to other corrupt officials or wealthy community members. Several days after the rockslide, the government gave up on trying to remove the several-ton boulder that had crushed a city block of the slum. They declared the area of a mass grave site. The death count hovered over 100, and the final number remains unknown.



I owe whatever success I’ve had and whatever gains I’ve made as a writer largely to Ted Genoways. He has turned VQR into a one-of-a-kind catchall for great non-fiction writing and photography, as well as criticism, poetry, and graphic art. His awards speak for themselves: VQR has repeatedly won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence in recent years, and Ted just won a Guggenheim grant for his scholarship on Walt Whitman. On top of that, Jason Motlagh, a fellow UVA graduate, just won the National Magazine Award for Online Journalism for his VQR web exclusive about the 2008 Mumbai bombings, “Sixty Hours of Terror.”

I’m thrilled and honored, but mostly grateful to have had the opportunity to spend so much time in Gaza at such a critical juncture in the territory’s history, and to have benefited from the generosity, hospitality, and friendship of Gazans on so many occasions and during such trying times. I left Gaza on 12 April, having concluded my year-long assignment with CARE International. It was bittersweet, but it was time to go and I’ve got exciting things lined up for the summer. I’ll be traveling to Egypt on behalf of VQR during the month of May, and then I’ll be returning to Afghanistan in July. For now, however, it’s time to live it up in the Big Apple.

I had been itching to do one last story from Gaza before I left earlier this month, and Easter in Gaza gave me the perfect opportunity. The ceremony was pure magic, and it was truly bizarre to find such a colorful and festive undertaking happening in the middle of the night in the Old City of Gaza, just a stone’s throw from the Al-Umari Mosque, a bastion of Hamas supporters.

VQR spurred me to go out and cover it and write a blog entry with a couple of photos for the web site. I have a tendency to be a bit longwinded—I got carried away and wrote nearly six thousand words. VQR was kind enough to release the whole story as a “web exclusive.” You can read the whole thing and check out the photos—which turned out great, as photos of people in costumes with dramatic lighting and stage props usually do—on the VQR website here: “Easter in Gaza.”

Check out the video I posted to the VQR’s blog of a counterinsurgency patrol through the Tangi Valley with 2nd Platoon Apache Company, 2-87 Infantry Regiment 10th Mountain Division. The platoon is profiled in my story, “The Path to Yaghestan.”