Salisbury Patch Editor Remembers Afghanistan

The news of Osama bin Laden’s death brought back memories of the time I reported from Afghanistan eight years ago.  Afghanistan was not my original assignment. It was March 2003 and the United States had just invaded Iraq. Afghanistan had been knocked off the front page, the nation’s attention was focused on this new war and we had a new public enemy. Afghanistan, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, that was old news.

I was working for The Morning Call at the time and was selected to be embedded with a Pennsylvania National Guard unit based in Allentown. After months of preparation, we were all set to go to Iraq. I had been sent to train with British soldiers for a week. That meant learning what to do in a poison gas attack, how to behave at check points, how to fix impalement wounds, how to avoid landmines and other useful tidbits should you find yourself in a war zone or other hostile environment. Make no mistake about it. This was serious stuff. Reporters were dying in Iraq.

Then President George W. Bush, dressed in a flight suit, stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier and announced, “Mission accomplished” (it wasn’t and the worst was yet to come, of course). That was May 1, 2003. Eight years later to the day, President Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed. 

The National Guard unit, which had been training for months at Fort Dix, N.J., was told they might be going home. Normally, that might be cause for celebration but these were not normal times. These were the early days of America’s involvement in these wars, the military had had relatively swift successes, few casualties and patriotic fever was running high. The men and women in this unit were tired of waiting, they were trained and ready. They wanted to go to where the action was. The colonel pulled some strings and off we went to that other theater of war: Afghanistan.

So I made the shift and redirected my research on Afghanistan, which was just as fascinating as Iraq. True, Afghanistan was not the story anymore. That’s what I liked about it, which may seem counterintuitive to a reporter’s instincts. Media outlets had removed their reporters and sent them all to Iraq. Afghanistan was off the radar. Maybe it was even a little bit safer than Iraq. I remember thinking the story was unfinished in Afghanistan. The U.S. hadn’t finished the job and now it was redeploying resources to Iraq.

We forget what it was like in 2003. The U.S. wasn’t war-weary yet, it hadn’t spent more than $1 trillion or lost more than 6,000 soldiers in two wars. The country’s attention was on Iraq and Saddam Hussein, not the hunt for bin Laden or the reconstruction of Afghanistan. It would continue that way for years.

So while the world focused on Iraq, I left for Afghanistan that June. It occurred to me I’d have the story of the century if they found bin Laden. We didn’t know it would take eight more years.

Sometimes I’ll come across a notebook that I used in Afghanistan and the fine talcum powder-like dust that remains on it brings back memories. The dust that was omnipresent, infiltrating clothing, tents, nostrils and lungs. I remember sandstorms and pale, leggy camel spiders that darted around and could make a grown man scream. Or my helmet and my Kevlar vest with metal plates that I ordered from bulletproofme.com. Sometimes I’m back riding with the windows rolled up in an unarmored SUV in 110 degree heat, sandbags on the floor to cushion the shock in case we hit an IED. The soldiers riding with me held their fingers in the ready position on their rifles. Roadside bombs were exploding in Iraq, but I remember thinking they would come here soon enough. Each time before we set out on the road, the commander would orchestrate a careful game plan using rocks on the ground, in case we got attacked.

Then there was Kandahar, the stronghold of the Taliban, with its stark  difference from the North where children ran along our SUVs giving a thumbs up and shouting, “How are you?” Here, when we drove along crowded streets, past the colorful Pakistani jingle trucks and open markets with fly-covered carcasses hanging on meat hooks, we encountered long, wary stares from Afghan men dressed in shalwar kameez. Invisible women dressed in ghostly, billowing blue burqas walked along the crowded streets. Back at the base, I watched as surgeons worked feverishly to save the life of an Afghan man, one of 16 worshippers who had been injured by a bomb that went off  during evening prayers at a mosque.

I can’t tell you the number of times people asked me before I left for Afghanistan, “Aren’t you afraid?” At least three male colleagues declined the embed. I remember I couldn’t take in enough with my eyes, with all of my senses, with how wonderfully different Afghanistan was, how at times it felt as if I had been plucked out of modernity and landed in antiquity, without electricity and running water.

Among the soldiers I wrote about was a National Guardsman in the unit who was a New York cop who drove towards the burning Twin Towers on Sept. 11. Weeks later he sifted through the dusty debris looking for human fragments and vowed to seek revenge on bin Laden.