Here and Far

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2010-04-14T08:09:00.004-04:00

By Molly

Matt is home. I picked him up from the Atlanta airport early on a Thursday morning, many weeks ago now.

I meant to write this post sooner. I meant to write it just after Matt arrived, during the week I stayed at a nondescript highway hotel while he went through the requisite “redeployment” paperwork at Fort Stewart.

I wanted to write about a specific moment, actually—the one where I stood among a group of military wives, girlfriends and mothers at the airport Arrivals gate. The moment that came after the long, early-morning drive from Savannah in the pouring rain. The one that included peering over heads and around ‘welcome home’ signs for hours filled with jittery excitement. The moment when I finally recognized Matt’s face atop a uniformed body. That, right there. That was a wonderful moment, one that I’ll always remember. Matt emerged from the top of the escalator wearing his fatigues, looking fatigued, and I shimmied under a dividing rope to attack him with a hug.

I’m so happy he’s home.

In the weeks since, however, I haven’t written a word. Well, that’s a lie. I’ve written a lot. The first draft of my book was due March 31, and until then I didn’t have a moment for anything else. I was buried in work. So buried that at times I hardly remembered to eat or sleep. So buried, in fact, that I couldn't join Matt for his first full week back with his family in New Orleans. Instead, I worked alone in New York.

This consequent, sudden separation came with mixed feelings on both sides. As a result, I’ve been struggling with a host of questions. Namely: How do I balance career with relationship? Where do I draw the line, and what does it mean when I do? They are big, complicated questions, ones to which I’m not sure I’ll ever have the answer.

In any case, I submitted the first draft of my book manuscript to my editor before the deadline and before Matt came back to New York. Then, as soon as he got here, we hopped on a plane and spent a week in the Caribbean with my mother and my brother and their respective significant others. In St. Barth’s, a small, ritzy French island near the Dutch Antilles, we swam in the cerulean-hued ocean, read on the beach and drank barrels of wine. We avoided the Internet, the phone, and our collision course with reality.

But one thing is very real: Matt is home. He is no longer a disembodied voice on the other end of the phone as I walk through Manhattan’s Union Square on weekday afternoons. He’s no longer little notes stuck into packages or e-mails sent in the middle of my night. He’s real, whole, here. It’s pretty fantastic. And kind of overwhelming.

Matt and I are now sharing my tiny studio in Brooklyn until we figure out what comes next. He takes up drawers in the dresser, and hangers in the closet. He talks in his sleep and hogs the left side of the bed. He eats chocolate crème drops and turkey sandwiches drenched in hot mustard. He smells like shaving cream and Gillette deodorant. Just like before.

I’ve been reading literature on the “readjustment” period after a deployment – the tenuous months when boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives and children must get used to each other again. During this time, I’ve learned, some have to let go of the absence and fear of a deployment; others the responsibility of command. I remind myself often: We all have to reorganize our concept of normal. Matt’s return is strange and scary, sparkling and joyous all at once.

One night before we went on vacation – the first night that we were both in New York, together but without plans – I decided to cook. It was the first time I cooked a full meal in my kitchen in months. Living alone, it just never seemed worth the effort. But as the sun set over the pear tree just beginning to blossom in the back yard, I pulled out my sauté pan and cutting board. I roasted sweet potatoes and, later, asparagus with a touch of butter. I sautéed chicken breasts and reduced a sauce with mushrooms and marsala. The execution wasn’t flawless. I set off the fire alarm and spilled flour all over the room. I even slipped on the kitchen floor, landing with a resounding thump on my hip, which sported a bruise in a neon shade of blue for over a week. But the food on our plates tasted damn good. And it came punctuated with laughter.

We are here, now, together. I’m ready for this kind of change.

On the Returning

2010-03-09T22:34:00.003-05:00

By Matt

On Friday afternoon, I left Gardez, the city where I have spent the past nine months, for the last time.

The departure was routine and unceremonious. Few people came to see us off. I experienced no cathartic moment, no final revelation about all that my time here has meant. The mountains surrounding the base, whose contours I have memorized, never revealed their secrets.

We boarded a helicopter and flew away. That was it.

I had wanted it to be a Hollywood moment, one where all the memories of the last year came flooding back at once. One in which I would see the war and my small part in it in a new light. I wanted to be moved. All I got instead was a pair of earplugs and a broken seat.

Still, I can’t complain. My tour in Afghanistan is officially over. I am coming home.

I, and the handful of soldiers with whom I’m traveling, will spend the next few days base-hopping our way to Kyrgyzstan, the final debarkation point from the “theater of operations.” By mid-March I'll be back in the United States, where Molly will be waiting for me in Savannah. Before month’s end I’ll be a civilian again.

***

I find I’m more excited for the future than I’ve ever been, even if that sentiment has been a long time coming.

I spent a lot of time this year dwelling on all the things I was missing out on back home: friendships I might have cultivated, places I might have traveled and strides I might have made in my nascent journalism career. There were tough stretches last summer and fall when I felt downright sorry for myself. But I shouldn’t have.

I now recognize that this experience has proved fulfilling on all those counts and more.

First, several soldiers with whom I’ve served in Afghanistan have become close friends, people I hope I’ll keep in touch with for years to come. Other friends and colleagues back home have written to me extensively throughout my tour, giving me an insight into their lives – and mine – that, ironically, I might never have gained if I weren’t halfway around the world.

I’ve gotten to travel, too, even if it’s not the kind of travel I envisioned. This deployment has carried me across a breathtakingly beautiful yet utterly shattered country. In the devastated cities of eastern Afghanistan, I’ve been deeply affected by people whose faces reflect the trauma of perpetual war. In rural mountain villages, I’ve encountered extremes of poverty and piety that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

Finally, my time in Afghanistan has rejuvenated my passion for writing, largely as a result of “Here and Far.” To be sure, composing this blog with Molly was the best decision we made this year, and it has immeasurably strengthened our bond. But as someone for whom writing had become more of a chore than a pastime in recent years, I have rediscovered its power to lift me up and to help make sense of my world.

***

My return home from Afghanistan means more than just the end of a deployment. It coincides with another major milestone in my life. This coming June, having completed my eight-year "military service obligation," I will resign my Army commission for good. My military career will be over, and I will never again be recalled to duty.

My resignation will be bittersweet. It will mark the end of a remarkable journey that began at West Point in 1998, when I was only 18. I showed up that year full of idealism, enamored of the academy’s timeless traditions and its promise of producing men of character and integrity. However, the romanticized expectations I held of the Army I would one day enter were dispelled by the realities of the coming decade.

For me, the national distress and tumult of the last 10 years – 9/11, Iraq, Katrina, Afghanistan – have been intensely personal. Because of the Army, I’ve spent the greater part of my twenties in and out of war zones. I was marooned in Iraq throughout the tortuous recovery of New Orleans, my hometown, in 2005 and 2006. And at the beginning of 2009, just as I was settling into a new life as a journalist in New York, I had to put it all on hold for one last duty. I regarded my recall as an ignominious way of concluding a commitment to my country that I once made so willingly.

And yet despite all that, there are aspects of my time in the service that I will always look back on with fondness and pride.

Thanks to the Army, I’ve spent most of my adult years living or traveling in Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia, places I probably never would have gotten to see. The Army has pushed me to my mental and physical limits, challenging me in a way that no other institution could. And I’ve made life-long friends whose loyalty I wouldn’t hesitate to stake my life on. Above all, the Army has been my family: providing shelter and protection, instilling discipline and fostering an unparalleled sense of belonging.

I can honestly say that my years as a soldier have been the best of my life. And I’ll be sad to have them end.

***

For now, I plan to spend the next few months getting my life back in order.

In April I’ll take some time off to decompress: a trip to St. Barth’s with Molly and her family, followed by a week in New Orleans during Jazz Fest with mine. I look forward to long runs with Molly through Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and to watching dozens of movies at home with my dad. This summer I plan to cycle solo across America, a feat I’ve wanted to perform for years.

Beyond that, however, I’m unsure of what the future holds. In the coming years, I envision myself doing any number of things. I may return to journalism or go back to school or even become active in politics – maybe all of them. Time will tell.

I learned long ago that the experience of war has a way of wiping the slate clean and rearranging one’s priorities. My tour in Afghanistan has been no exception. It’s taught me that life is fragile, short and often spent at the mercy of forces beyond our control. It’s reminded me of dreams I once had for my life, dreams that were stifled by professional responsibilities, financial concerns or frivolous distractions.

And for all the turmoil this year in Afghanistan has brought into my life, it has, in the end, made up for it. I’ve been given the kind of chance a person rarely gets in life, especially at my age.

To start over.

Translation

2010-03-06T07:18:00.001-05:00

By Molly

I called a member of the Family Readiness Group, or FRG, last Tuesday night before dinner. This group, based outside Atlanta near the headquarters of the National Guard battalion with which Matt has served this year, is made up primarily of military wives. Like thousands of similar organizations across the country, its purpose is to keep those here informed about those far away, or “downrange,” as Matt tells me to say.

I called because Matt is coming home soon and I plan to be there when he arrives. I wanted to make sure I am in the right place at the right time to welcome him back. But between the acronyms and Army speak, I had absolutely no idea how to make that happen.

It was the first time I’ve ever made a call to Georgia, actually. Physically, I’ve only been to the state once, when I traveled to Atlanta to report on a high school robotics competition. Then, I was ferried back and forth from a nondescript hotel to the Georgia Dome for three consecutive days. We ate at McDonalds and Starbucks. I don’t think it counts.

On Tuesday, while a pot of tomato sauce simmered on my stove, I threw my questions at an almost uncomfortably friendly Army wife, who spoke with a lilting southern accent. She spouted esoteric Armyisms that have become moderately familiar thanks to Matt, terms like HHC and ADVON, yellow ribbons and redeployment and IRR. I tried to follow along, though Army is ultimately a language I do not speak. I smiled when she called me ma’am.

On the phone, we covered a range of unintelligible details: The timetables and phone trees, abbreviations and organization of the days to come. She told me told me about the FRG’s use of Twitter and Facebook to get messages to members of the group. I wrote some things down, though remained relatively confused.

But not everything we talked about was unfamiliar. Some things made total sense: The macaroni and cheese at Paula Deen’s restaurant in Savannah, for one—a dish, she said with a charming giggle, that is so creamy that strings of melted cheddar can be pulled from plate to mouth a mile long. She told me about her husband, and about the hordes of women and children who would be waiting outside the gates of the base, raring with excitement, when their soldiers arrived home.

I eventually ran out of questions to ask. But I didn’t want to hang up.

I’ve felt very isolated this year, something I’ve written about here many times before. I didn’t anticipate the loneliness of loving someone deployed, of having a long-distance relationship to Afghanistan until it became a defining feature of my day-to-day life. Here, family and friends have surrounded me with unflagging support. But there is hardly anyone I know who has experience with this war. How could they understand?

As the days of Matt’s deployment dwindle, however, I have begun to realize the good that has come out of something so difficult. Knowing Matt has widened the aperture of my worldview, and that of every member of my family. The newspaper headlines, the ones that have always been disturbing but never tingling with fear, no longer exist on a different plane. The disparity between here and far, them and us, together and apart has taken on a greater significance.

But none of that has made me fluent in military-speak. It hasn’t made the logistics of being at an Army base in rural Georgia at an unknown hour on an undetermined day any less daunting. It was refreshing to have a cheerful woman from the FRG kindly try to explain what has been so incomprehensible this year. It was surprising to be understood, even if it wasn’t mutual. After all, as an Army wife, she is living it, too.

“So how long have y’all been together?” she asked before we hung up.

“About two and a half years.”

“Wow,” she said. “And he’s been gone for almost a whole one of those…”

“Yeah.”

I sighed.

“I’ll bet you’re ready for him to come home.”

“You have no idea.”

“Oh,” she said. “But I do.”

A Winter End

2010-02-21T22:15:00.003-05:00

By Matt

Her skin was cold. As cold as the snow I later used to scrub her blood from my trembling hands.

She was a teenager and pretty. She wore a blue-gold dress and earrings that dangled with little pink peppers. Hours earlier, she’d been celebrating the birth of a neighborhood boy with scores of other villagers.

Now, she was a corpse. She lay on the floor of a storage room along a muddy road outside of town.

I’d been up since dawn, jarred awake by a soldier rapping on my door. “Sir, they found some bodies,” he said without emotion. He might just as well have announced that breakfast was getting cold. “Better get up. Don’t forget your camera.”

We’d shouldered our way through hundreds of scowling men surrounding the compound. Somewhere far off, I could hear women wailing.

The details of what occurred were unclear. What is certain is that this girl died some time during the night. She died in a hail of bullets that pierced her belly and tore through her larynx.

Four other bullet-riddled bodies splayed out on the concrete floor beside the girl – two men and two women, presumably family – were covered by blood-soaked wool blankets. But she wasn’t. Her death shroud was a burka. A blue one.

Peeling back the heavy fabric from her head and shoulders, I began to snap away. I only had a few minutes before the mob of mourners outside would carry her off. By sunset she would be in the ground.

Her eyes were empty. Lifeless. Her silky black hair fell lightly across her face. A plastic tiara lay crushed nearby.

I noticed a piece of ripped cloth, tied in a bow, which bound her big toes together. Her jaw was clenched shut by a rag fastened around her little head and beneath her chin – like Jacob Marley in “A Christmas Carol.” “That’s a funeral ritual,” someone said. “I saw it when I was here in ‘02.”

2002, I thought. Eight years. This war consumed half the girl’s life. Now she was its latest victim.

I tiptoed from corpse to corpse. The room was cramped, demanding all of my concentration not to step on hands or to smear the blood that was splattered on the wall. As I lifted back the blanket from each body, I covered my mouth and nose to stifle the sweet, sickly smell of death.

I never asked their names. I didn’t want to know them.

Forget them, I urged myself. The world already has.

An Improbable Notion

2010-02-09T17:59:00.004-05:00

By Matt

27 January 2010
Patrol near Shinki Village, Paktika Province, Afghanistan
(20 minutes south of Gardez by helicopter)

I lifted my rifle to the ready position and moved forward slowly. Already I was gasping for air.

Halfway now.

I was trudging up a rocky hill, desperately trying to keep up with an Afghan soldier ahead of me. The light-footed enlisted man peered back every now and again to make sure I hadn’t slipped and slid back down into the valley. Clutching a rocket propelled grenade launcher in one hand and two more rockets under his armpits, he seemed amused that this ascent was kicking my ass.

You’re not wearing 50 pounds of armor and ammo, I wanted to say – and might have if I weren’t wheezing.

Moments earlier, I’d stopped briefly to try and catch my breath. My chest heaved as my lungs drew in what oxygen was available in the thin mountain air. Damn, I thought, why is this so hard for me? I’m in good shape. I turned my head back to see how far we’d climbed. I searched the dry river bed below, trying to spot our massive armored vehicles. When I did, they looked tiny. Bad place to sprain an ankle, I thought.

My gaze was drawn to a moving figure on the side of a hill across the valley from mine. Another American soldier. He, too, struggled up an equally steep rise. A hundred feet above him, at the crest of the hill, the Afghan squad with whom he’d been tasked to provide overwatch for the mission had already settled in and started a fire. Jesus, I said to myself, wearing a ton of gear or not, these people are hardy.

By the time I finally reached the top of my hill, the Afghan soldier I was following had already made it down the other side and was now dashing up another. I soon saw why. At the top of the next rise an Afghan man was slowly descending the hill while frantically gripping the handles of a wheelbarrow full of small trees and brush. Though young and seemingly agile, the man was fighting gravity, and gravity was winning. Just as the wheelbarrow appeared ready to break free and tumble down out of control, the soldier leapt in front and deftly guided it the rest of the way down.

I finally caught up to the two just as they reached level ground. When I approached them, still panting, I was struck by the fearsome intensity of the young man. He had feral green eyes, a goatee, and shoulder-length, curly black hair that poured from beneath a Qandahari colla, a bejeweled hat popular among Pashtun men. His hands, which remained gloveless in the icy wind, looked rough and his fingernails were painted orange, another regional male tradition. All that protected the man against the cold was a faded blue Police jacket with missing buttons and a filthy white scarf cinched around his waist.

While I trembled in the frigid morning air, stamping my feet to keep my toes from going numb, the man stood there grinning, unmindful of the weather. More than anything, he seemed touched by the generosity of this unfamiliar soldier, who had just saved him the loss of a morning’s worth of collected firewood. As the two laughed and chatted in Pashto, I couldn’t help but smile. It was the kind of exchange I have rarely witnessed in an otherwise dark and inhospitable country. And I considered an improbable notion.

Maybe there is hope.

***

In the week since my return from Shinki Village, I’ve been rereading my previous blog posts from this year. The negative tenor of my feelings regarding my circumstances and surroundings in Afghanistan did not surprise me. After all, my natural tendency toward the morose has been coupled with resentment at having been recalled to duty. Still, reading the posts gave me pause.

And I want to set the record straight.

Deployments are not all doom and gloom. Sure, they are challenging: living conditions are unpleasant, hours drag out like days and danger is ever present. Yet amid bouts of fear and long stretches of intense boredom, my three years at war have been punctuated by unanticipated moments of discovery. Indeed, it is in these moments that I’ve summoned the will to carry on.

I believe this sentiment to be true for any American soldier in a modern combat zone. Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan find themselves in exotic regions of the world most Westerners will never see. In Iraq, it’s easy to take for granted the country’s profound historical significance, to overlook its justifiable claim as the “cradle of civilization.” In Afghanistan, rural villages and urban centers alike offer a captivating glimpse into the lives of the colorful characters who embroider this fractured land.

I was a 23-year-old lieutenant when the U.S. invaded Iraq. I was naïve, untraveled, and untested in war or the world. 2003 was the year I grew up. Today, seven years on, I find that my memories of that time are shaded by a restrained nostalgia.

For instance, I will never forget what it felt like to happen upon a mural of Saddam Hussein for the first time. The image of the hand-waving, sunglasses-wearing tyrant, somewhere on an empty desert highway southwest of Baghdad, was so arresting that I felt as if I’d come face to face with the dictator himself. Throughout my teens I’d been conditioned to hate this man, who lorded over his people with a particularly diabolical brand of despotism. For me, this crude, isolated portrait of Saddam reinforced for me the suffering of the Iraqi people. It reminded me that their torment was real.

In June of that year, after months of continuous operations in central and western Iraq, my company set up camp along the Euphrates River to rest and refit. We found a secure location atop Anbar Province’s awe-inspiring Haditha Dam, a commanding yet elegant 190-foot structure with a Soviet design. On a map, this section of the river, and the man-made lake formed by the dam, resembled a python that had just swallowed a pig: skinny on two ends and bulging in the middle. In the afternoon heat, we soldiers plunged like children into the warm water of the Fertile Crescent’s ancient lifeline. In the evenings, we washed our soiled clothes and wrestled each other down under the water while magnificent sunsets painted the lake gold.

Later that summer, while on a mission south of Baghdad, our company took a detour to the ruins of ancient Babylon outside the modern city of Al Hillah. Babylon’s crumbling city walls enclosed a 3,000-year-old statue of a lion mauling a man as well as the room where Alexander the Great is thought to have died from typhus. I tried to envision what the great Mesopotamian city might have looked like in its heyday – the Ishtar Gate, Nebuchadnezzar’s palace, the Hanging Gardens. It was here, in one of the greatest cities of antiquity, that generations of architects, intellectuals and great military minds converged. I believe there are few places in the world where a person can feel so connected to the wisdom and accomplishments of our forebears. Babylon is certainly such a place.

And then there’s Afghanistan, a country so shattered by decades of brutal war, it’s as if it has no history at all. The acute hatred, ignorance, and raw survival that characterize Afghanistan’s rural areas place its civilization as close to a state of nature as anywhere I have ever seen. But therein lies its morbid appeal. It’s nothing at all like Iraq, yet for a curious mind Afghanistan holds thought-provoking treasures of its own.

What strikes the foreigner most in this “country of 40,000 villages” are the peculiar anachronisms present in everyday life. Here in Paktya Province, less than a hundred miles from the raucous capital of Kabul, donkeys trot along dirt roads outside of brightly colored cell phone shops. Shiny new motorcycles buzz through bazaars in villages with no electricity and raw sewage running in the streets. And poor villagers with rotten teeth and plastic sandals are greeted by government officials wearing turtlenecks, blazers and gold watches. Traveling through Afghanistan can be as disorienting as a room full of funhouse mirrors.

In his book, “The Forever War,” journalist Dexter Filkins poignantly illustrates this indelible aspect of Afghanistan by recounting an execution he witnessed at a sports stadium in Kabul in 1998. In his chilling account, Taliban leaders prod the brother of a man killed in an irrigation dispute to shoot an 18-year-old condemned for the crime named Atiqullah. Filkins writes:

“Just then a jumbo jet appeared in the sky above, rumbling, forcing a pause in the ceremony. The brother stood holding his Kalashnikov. I looked up. I wondered how a jet airliner could happen by such a place, over a city such as this, wondered where it might be going. I considered for a second the momentary collision of the centuries.”

Similarly today, the introduction of modern machines of war into what is – by most measures – a medieval society may be Afghanistan’s most enduring feature.

Nothing is more dramatic than the sight of our helicopters, which have become a permanent fixture of the landscape. Without a coherent road system connecting the country’s important regional centers, helicopters are an essential part of travel for U.S. Forces here. (Last fall I traveled by ground to Gardez’s closest city, Zormat, some 15 miles away. On a bomb-scarred dirt path, the trip took three and a half hours.) Not an hour passes when one cannot see a Blackhawk or Chinook swooping low against the backdrop of baked-mud, mountainside hovels. Sometimes helicopters fly near villages so isolated that their residents believe the Soviets have returned.

Traveling Afghanistan by air has been one of the most stirring experiences for me this year. On repeated trips to Paktya’s mountainous neighboring provinces of Paktika, Ghazni and Khowst, I am always mesmerized by the raw physical beauty of the countryside. In some places, the mountains – often resembling giant mounds of dirt – rise sharply out of vast expanses of desert, as if they were atolls jutting up from a sea of sand. In others, jagged brown peaks stretch clear to the horizon. Scanning the draws of roadless canyons, I discover clusters of qalats that point to a brutish and unforgiving existence. When the helicopters skirt hazardously close to sheer, vertical cliffs, I can occasionally make out the blue or red or gold dresses of women moving along goat trails.

On one memorable trip in August, I was flying back to Gardez from a U.S. outpost in Khowst. An Afghan Army sergeant hitching a ride sat two seats over from me on an otherwise empty flight. At one point, over the treacherous Khowst-Gardez Pass, the sergeant tapped my shoulder and pointed to a jumble of buildings below.

He said something, but I couldn’t hear him over the helicopter’s roaring engines. I just shrugged my shoulders and smiled dumbly. When he said it again, my hands went up.

“I don’t understand!” I hollered, shaking my head.

He drew a pen out of his chest pocket and scribbled something in his palm. Then he reached over the seat that separated us and put his hand directly in front of my face.

“mayAngL,” it read.

That must be the name of the village, I thought. So what?

“Mayangl?!” I yelled.

He nodded vigorously.

“Taliban!” he said with a toothy smile. Then he ran his finger across his throat.

***

Once the man with the wheelbarrow headed home at last, our patrol took us into Shinki Village, which was known to be “friendly” to U.S. Forces. We greeted and solicited grievances from village elders whose replies were typical: the mosque needed repair, the well’s pump was broken, the closest school was miles away.

It may seem callous, but I was uninterested in listening to the usual gripes. This was likely to be my last patrol in Afghanistan – in less than a month, I’ll be back on U.S. soil – and I wanted to savor it. So as our mission commander continued to engage the growing mass of men and children, I slipped away quietly to survey my surroundings.

A light snow began to fall as I walked among the simple, mud-walled dwellings that have become so familiar to me this year. I marveled at the spectacular mountains encircling the town. I found the village well in a courtyard and pumped the handle a few times to see if it was really broken. It was.

Four adolescent girls squatting along a wall giggled at me. When I glanced up at them, they coyly ran away. Other children darted about barefoot in the freezing cold. And a teenager approached me to try out his English.

“How arrre you?” he said.

“Verrry good,” he replied, before I could respond.

Three days later, I boarded a helicopter bound for Gardez. We swept past the familiar towering mountains, which were now, for the first time this year, cloaked in a fresh blanket of snow that evoked the Alps or the Rockies. It seemed impossible that the same mountains that provided sanctuary to Al Qaeda, the Taliban and generations of hardened Pashtun fighters before them, could appear so peaceful.

As the peaks turned from lacy white to soft pink in the sinking afternoon sun, I wondered how I would ever be able to explain such a place to people back home. I imagined telling tales of my experiences to my grandchildren one day and wondered if they would grasp what it was like to come of age in such heady times. I wondered whether I could ever attenuate the dread and uncertainty my parents have endured this decade by reassuring them that my time at war has made me a better man.

Most of all, I wondered whether I would ever be able to revisit this place, in another life, many years from now. Will it one day be possible for me to bring my own family to Gardez – or Haditha, or Babylon – the way thousands of World War II and Vietnam veterans have returned to the battlefields of their youths?

I wondered all that. And I hoped.

The Hurt Locker

2010-01-25T20:15:00.004-05:00

By Molly

Last Wednesday evening I went to a movie. I saw The Hurt Locker on a tiny screen at Quad Cinema, an unassuming theater on 14th Street. I walked there from a pub a few blocks east, where I'd just eaten a dish of shrimp and grits and drank a dark mug of rye beer, which was sharp and bitter, like the sudden burst of cold air outside.

The Hurt Locker, the film by Kathryn Bigelow that is gaining momentum this awards season, is an intense and fabulous film about an American bomb squad in the middle years of the Iraq War.

War movies have never been my thing, so I'm not sure why I decided to see this particular film. But I went to the movies because I was in desperate need of a break. I've been working nonstop since Christmas, scrunched over my computer trying to write, grasping at sentences that burrow far into my brain like worms.

My anxiety, always my companion in one way or another, has been overwhelming of late. It's spiked as a result of my approaching book deadline, coupled with news of the escalating violence in Afghanistan. It makes it hard to sleep, hard to eat, hard to function like normal. Just yesterday I had a minor panic attack on the fourth floor of the Museum of Modern Art, where I went with friends to relax on a rainy afternoon. Standing there amid hipsters wearing funky clothing and the found-object art of Gabriel Orozco, I felt wild and mentally unkempt. I soon went home to work.

Matt's time in Gardez is quickly coming to an end -- an event I've been dreaming about for the last year, one that I plan for, can't wait for -- but even that brings with it the stress of change, of displaced normalcy. And of a singular question: What comes next?

Anyway. The Hurt Locker, while breathtaking in its raw delivery, didn't exactly qualify as a break. It did nothing to help repeal my anxiety. If anything, the movie made it worse. I woke up the next morning sore from two and a half hours spent holding my body in a permanent state of physical tension.

The film follows the story of three soldiers who make up an explosive ordnance disposal team in Iraq. Their job is to diffuse "improvised explosive devices," or IEDs, the signature threat against American troops, on Baghdad's streets, in its schools and in rural desert towns. Throughout the film unruly bravado is on display in the face of confusion and impending death.

The characters are strikingly real: Flawed, tortured and emotionally complicated but ultimately driven by the shared desire to save lives. Every day the men wrestle with the murky ethical boundaries between protecting and killing, honor and recklessness, courage and fear. Adrenaline soaks the screen.

When the closing credits rolled, I felt like I'd learned a little more about Matt, who spent two year-long tours in Iraq as a combat engineer officer. For the first time, I could visualize the places he's been and the things he's seen. "I fucking hate this place," says Sanborn, one of the bomb techs. It's a line I hear from Matt almost every day.

I e-mailed Matt about the movie as I walked to a subway station in the West Village, passing bundled groups of college students and a lone gray-haired man walking his dog near Washington Square Park. I typed on my iPhone with numb fingers, trying to get out my thoughts, trying not to trip. "Terrifying," I wrote. "Good. Superbly directed." I knew that he'd watched it on his laptop in Gardez just the day before. "How realistic is it?" I asked.

The next morning, I woke up to his response:

yes it is like that in iraq. the production sets were so real (it was all filmed in jordan near the iraq border) that i felt like i was back there again. the scenes where there would be gawking iraqi civilians who would disappear all at once brought back memories. it's just like the animals who flock away from the site of an impending natural disaster. either they have a sixth sense or they've been tipped off. even today at some points, when we stand around the vehicles for hours on guard, every car that passes, every puffy jacket you see, every guy riding by slowly on a bicycle could be a bomber and the last thing you ever see. it's disturbing to think about, but you put it out of your mind. still, you don't forget that any moment could be your last

i have rarely seen an iraq movie (or any war movie) that gets every single little detail of the military right. this movie did it perfectly. from the uniforms to the language to the sets to the ambiguous morals of the story's protagonists (the way most soldiers -- and people -- really are).

I continue to think about one of the final scenes in the film. In it, the main character, just home from Iraq, is grocery shopping in a massive supermarket somewhere in the United States. At one point, he stands next to his shopping cart, contemplating the rows of bright cereal boxes, which appear to extend for miles. It's a stark contrast to the sand and the sun and the life-and-death minutes he packed and passed in Iraq. And as I watched it, I pitied him, and still I wondered: What comes next?

A Day in the Life

2010-01-11T10:42:00.006-05:00

By Matt

On Dec. 15, one month to the day after I returned to Afghanistan from leave, a bomb exploded in downtown Gardez. The device, which ripped through the metal shipping container that was hiding it, had been smuggled into the guarded compound of an NGO for development. Five civilians were blown to pieces in the blast; seven others were seriously wounded.

The next morning, I walked through the courtyard filled with twisted metal, splintered wood and large pools of dark standing blood. Broken glass crunched beneath my boots, and I stifled an urge to gag at the stench of exposed, pulverized flesh. Nearby, two Toyota Land Cruisers were splattered with dried blood and tiny brown chunks of skin and hair, the little details that weren’t yet swept up in the Red Cross’ recovery of the larger remains that morning.

I didn’t realize it that day, but the explosion had set off the beginning to a very eventful winter.

A week later, heavily armed Taliban insurgents assaulted the Gardez police station where our soldiers mentor the Paktya provincial police force. That one didn’t turn out so well for the assailants, who ran to a hotel across the street to hide after their attack was repelled. Our troops immediately began firing a relentless barrage of rifle grenades and machine guns into the building’s façade.

I watched a live video feed of the action from our tactical operations center on base. I was surrounded by 20 or so other officers and NCOs, who cheered as each volley of lead slammed into the building, producing balls of fire and sparks. It was as if we were watching the last tense minutes of a close Super Bowl. When the shooting finally stopped, two bearded, Kalashnikov-wielding insurgents lay crumpled in a single room, their heads half gone, their pants soiled.

On Dec. 30, our base in Gardez went on high alert following reports that a jihadist had blown himself up at another base’s gym in neighboring Khost Province. That night we learned that seven CIA agents had been killed by a Jordanian informant they’d invited over for a debriefing on Al Qaeda leaders.

And just last week, yet another suicide bomber detonated his vest of explosives packed with ball bearings in front of a Gardez bank. In all, three militiamen, one policeman and six ordinary Afghans lost their lives – among them were four children. All that was left of the bomber were his legs, the news reported the next day. I guess one nearby roof went unchecked. Because that evening, one of our interpreters who witnessed the slaughter proudly displayed to me a photo he snapped on his cell phone. There it was: the bomber’s fat, severed head. His tongue was sticking out.

This winter was supposed to be quiet; it’s been anything but. The heavy snowfall in the mountain passes, it was assumed, would halt the enemy’s ability to conduct operations. And to be sure, the frequency of attacks has petered out since last summer. Yet each one has become more deadly. And the ceaseless drumbeat of carnage has become disturbingly routine.

It is said that one should know his enemy. I’ve tried hard to identify with him, to put myself in his shoes. I have even forced myself through a macabre intellectual exercise in which I attempt to rationalize the deliberate mass murder of innocent civilians to achieve a political end. But this is Afghanistan, a place where reason does not exist and probably never has. I’m increasingly resigned to the notion that all of this – the emboldened enemy, the brash killings, the inexorable spiral into madness – is completely beyond our control.

I just don’t understand this war.

So I try to push it out of my mind. I “dissociate,” as Molly puts it. To do this, to stay sane, I concentrate on what I can control. I’ve built a routine. I’ve ordered my daily schedule around a familiar rhythm of events that makes each day seem almost identical to the last. Here on base, I pretty much know what to expect during every hour of every day. This scheme has a dual benefit: It distracts me from the dreadful bloodshed all around us, at least a bit. And it makes the time pass.

So, not counting the times I am “outside the wire” or traveling to various other bases, the following is a summary of a typical day in my deployment to Afghanistan.

0830
I stumble into my uniform and boots and head across camp to my office in a mud-walled compound. (The qalat, which is privately owned by a local Afghan family, has been “leased” by the U.S. military for the last few years and now houses the unit’s offices and a few living quarters.) Plopping down into my chair next to two other officers with whom I share a working space, I check my e-mail as I devour two pre-packaged bowls of Special K.

0930
I attend a briefing with the battalion’s other staff officers in the tactical operations center, a vast room full of glowing computer monitors, mission maps and squawking radios. We take turns briefing the commander on the significant events of the previous 24 hours and what work we’ll be focusing on for the next 24.

1030
I’m back in my office sipping black coffee –a vaguely coffee-flavored sludge, rather – from a tall Styrofoam cup. The office at that hour is always buzzing with activity, and I tackle what little work I can before lunch time rolls around.

1130
The office empties and everyone heads across the base on foot to his mid-day meal. Everyone, that is, but me. I walk briskly back to my room, tear off my uniform and put on my ARMY-emblazoned PT uniform, a gray shirt and black shorts. It’s time for the gym, the best part of my day.

My exercise strategy is simple and synchs well with my obsessive routine.
Day 1: Chest and back
Day 2: Abs and cardio
Day 3. Biceps and triceps
Day 4. Abs and cardio
Day 5: Shoulders and legs
Day 6: Abs and cardio
(Repeat)

More than any other activity, my workouts offer the best time to detach, to escape this place, if only for a couple of hours. On run days, I listen to hour-long segments of On the Media, This American Life, or 60 Minutes on my iPod. In the weight room, it’s shorter pieces: Talk of the Nation or BBC documentaries. These programs, particularly those from NPR take me home. They remind me of cold winter mornings with Molly at our East Village apartment in New York, when the friendly voices of WNYC – Brian Lehrer and Soterios Johnson – caught us up on the news of the day.

But I digress.

1300
I take a shower in a nasty little trailer with fickle plumbing. Sometimes the drains get clogged, causing foamy water to slosh about my ankles. At the stainless steel sinks, an occasional placard posted next to rusting mirrors cautions that the water is not “potable.” It’s only to be used for personal hygiene, we’re warned. This always confounds me: does that mean I can brush my teeth with it or no? Then I remind myself of a recent rumor that toxic traces of arsenic had been found in the water supply. Pass. A water bottle always does the trick.

1330
I’m back in the office answering phone calls, sending e-mails and preparing for an afternoon of planning meetings.

1400-1700
Miscellaneous meetings. (Stuff I’m not supposed to talk about.)

1700
I head to dinner with a fellow captain and friend from Milledgeville, Georgia, named Paul. A hopeless dreamer, Paul is good conversation, talkative but interesting. He’s among the more worldly people I’ve met on my deployment with the Georgia Army National Guard. During cold, dark walks to supper, Paul tells me about his Russian wife back home, about his annual trips to visit her family in a provincial town in the Urals, about his prized sail boat and about his plans to become pilot one day.

1730
We sit down to dinner in a vinyl tent that shudders violently from a continuous blast of heat passing through a low-hanging inflatable duct just above our heads. Television screens in the corner deliver the incessant drone of football or Fox News. The processed food we eat – the menu rotates every seven days – is served on cardboard trays along with wrapped plasticware. Friday night is Surf’n’Turf – dry steak and fried shrimp – the best night of the week.

1830
We head out into the now frigid night, back to the qalat. On most days, we’re trailed by stray dogs who are no doubt attracted by dinner’s odor clinging to our clothes.

1900
I’m in yet another meeting, this time conducted by teleconference with our units spread across Paktya.

2030
I’m free for the night, but I spend two hours or so wrapping up what work is left to be done.

2230
Now, all alone in the office, I settle down at my desk. A pair of bulky, noise-canceling headphones feeds me Chopin and Mozart and Tchaikovsky while I write or read well into the night.

0000
I take a break to call Molly in New York, who also uses the time to take a momentary pause from writing her book. I prop my feet up on the desk in my office and lean back in my chair. Molly walks north on Broadway toward Union Square and the Farmers Market. Sometimes, the harsh sound of honking horns, police car sirens or a brusque winter wind will briefly muffle Molly’s voice. On cold, snowy days, she ducks into a Whole Foods Market, where jabbering customers and ringing registers virtually drown her out. The sounds of the city, which I, as a transplant to New York, have often found so disagreeable, remind me of how much I miss it there.

0030
We hang up and Molly returns to her book, I to my thoughts.

0200
It’s time for bed. With a flashlight in hand, I walk back to my plywood-walled room in a “B-hut” about 200 meters away. As quietly as I can, I yank off my boots, hang my uniform on a crooked nail in a two-by-four next to my bed and set my alarm for morning.

Then I tick off another day in the worst place on earth.

A New Year

2009-12-31T14:49:00.006-05:00

By Molly

I took a bus to Boston a few days before Christmas. It was a long ride. We bumped slowly along the highway toward my mother's home while a vent at my elbow blew hot air into my face. I meant to spend time writing my book, but I was feeling anxious and tired after too many late nights and early mornings. I sunk into my seat and just didn't want to worry about work. I didn't want to worry about Matt or about the approaching holidays. I wanted to disengage. So I did, as I often do: In a book.

The word "disengage," I know, sounds cold and technical, like a term used by a doctor or in a lab. My mother is a psychoanalyst whose influence follows me to more places than I often realize. But when I say I want to disengage, I do mean it in a cold and technical way. I want to shut off my brain and no longer register my emotions. For just a few moments, an hour or two, I want to float off into the netherworld of a novel, a movie, an afternoon concentrating on a recipe in the kitchen. I don't want to think about my book or about Matt in Afghanistan. I do want to leave all feelings of warmth behind, because they are what gets me so anxious and afraid.

So, as the bus crawled over the George Washington Bridge, I picked up a novel, a heavy hardcover called The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher, and I disengaged. I didn't put it down until we pulled into South Station five hours later. Set in an industrial city outside London, it's an intense, epic story of two families that sprawls over three decades. It's dark, evocative and exactly what I was looking for. Yet I hardly made a dent in it, despite the hours on the bus. I sat crushed between the window and a large woman who, after a brief pit stop at a Connecticut McDonalds, ate her Filet-o-Fish in such excruciatingly small bites that the scent of fry oil and tartar sauce seemed to stick to my jeans and nestle in my hair.

Still, I got to read a lot this week. I escaped further into Hensher, as well as into Mary Karr's memoir Lit. I lost myself for hours under the lights of the Christmas tree with a mug of coffee and a hardcover book--the kind that creaks deliciously when opened--positioned on my lap.

This week I caught up on e-mails and went on long runs through the melting snow banks around Jamaica Pond. My mother, her boyfriend, my brother and I opened presents under the tree, fueled by homemade sticky buns and champagne. We baked cookies and listened to music. I slept later than I have in months. It was a relaxing and festive week. But stressful, too.

The holidays, as I've written before, are hard when someone you love is away at war. There's an undertone of sadness and fear to every moment of fun. I can't help but feel a twinge of guilt with each smile, with each cookie fresh from the oven, with each plate passed over the table that was laden with roast pork and smashed potatoes. There's a part of me that wants to disengage all the time. This week I was happy to have that chance.

Aside from my books, I often escape in the kitchen. And this week I cooked a lot. For me, cooking comes in easily manageable steps, like the eight-count sequences of a choreographed dance practiced hundreds of times. It relaxes me to stand over a simmering pot, to watch a chocolate souffle rise gracefully in the oven. When I'm cooking, I don't have to think. It's all about the physical present--the sound of meat hitting the pan, the scent of tomato sauce bubbling away.

This week I fried eggs for my brother to eat for breakfast. I stirred a thick beige pot of cauliflower soup. I made a sweet potato pie studded with a coconut streusel and a lasagna thick with spinach and ricotta cheese. Late on Christmas Eve, as the clock moved on toward midnight, I kneaded the sticky bun dough, which would rise overnight in the fridge. It was soft and supple, like whipped cream. I rolled it out into rectangles, and then into tight rounds filled with butter and pecans. I slept deeply, and the next morning I baked the glaze-lined pans, which filled the house with the scent of cinnamon and brown sugar.

I took the bus back to New York a few days ago. I sat next to my brother, who watched episodes of The Office on his computer while I read my book. I stuck with Karr's Lit on this ride, which is a tough and honest memoir about her struggle with alcoholism and a traumatic past. She is an eloquent and brutal writer--brutal about herself and those around her--and I began to feel a bit uncomfortable as I read. Am I lacking some sort of honesty with myself if I so often want to disengage? I wondered. But I only worried for a moment. Mainly, I just read.

Yesterday I went grocery shopping in Brooklyn. I'm cooking a New Year's Eve dinner for a few friends tonight, and I spent that morning delighting in the menu planning, in the meticulous timing of steps needed to cook several dishes for a crowd. I've never been a huge fan of New Year's. I find it hard for the evening to live up to its hype. But I do want to celebrate in my own way, quietly and sincerely. 2009 has been a difficult year and I'm ready for it to be over.

So I walked down the street from Trader Joe's to Key Foods, nimbly avoiding snow banks while talking to my mother on the phone. I told her about what I planned to cook, and how I planned to serve it. I was excited, and I gabbled nonstop.

When I paused to breathe she asked: "Did you hear about the suicide bomb in Afghanistan?"

"What?" I hadn't looked at the computer in a few hours. "No."

"I saw it on the New York Times website," she said, explaining that several Americans had been killed in the blast. "The bomb was in Khost, and I didn't know where that was in relation to Matt, so I looked it up and it's close."

I immediately grew cold, the fear seeping into my gut like ice.

I knew that Matt probably wasn't in Khost. But I did know that he had been there before. I wondered what had happened. I wondered who had died. I immediately went home to see. Luckily, an e-mail from Matt was waiting for me, reassuring me that he was all right. But as I read it I knew there were others like me out there--others who would not be so blessed.

The holidays have allowed me to escape, to forget, to disengage from much of what has been difficult this year. But as 2009 turns to 2010, the war rages on. People continue to die. Tonight, as I cook the meal that suddenly began to hold much less appeal, I will be thinking about them.

"And Miles to Go Before I Sleep"

2009-12-22T07:51:00.004-05:00

By Matt

When the helicopter door roared open in Gardez last month, I felt a dull, nauseating emptiness. The bleak mountain base camp* that greeted me served as a crushing reminder: There are several months left before this is over. Among soldiers returning from leave this sense of gloom is both common and severe, marking what is typically the lowest point in a deployment. It doesn’t matter how many months remain on your tour. They might as well be centuries.

The experience of my last two deployments has taught me to manage that feeling of emptiness as well as the winter tedium that still lies ahead. I’ll distract myself with books or writing. I’ll find small pleasures, however rare, in an otherwise dim daily grind. And believe it or not, there are pleasures to be found. Spontaneous snowball fights between Afghan workers on break. Sergeant Lawver’s cinnamon-spiked coffee in the tactical operations center. A stray cat we named Dog, who prowls around our barracks in the evening, seeking food and companionship.

These things, however, won’t make my missing the holidays any easier to bear. Thanksgiving was an especially depressing affair, marked by processed turkey, a lackluster attempt at decorating our mess tent and a palpable absence of patriotism among the troops. I celebrated Molly’s birthday a couple of days later by phone – the third time in as many years that I’ve missed her birthday. And here in Afghanistan, it’s most certainly NOT beginning to look a lot like Christmas. There are no Christmas trees or eggnog. No music or laughter. It seems sure to pass with little fanfare.

On Christmas day, I’ll line up with dozens of other soldiers at a phone bank to call my mom, dad and sister, Cara. They’ll be celebrating with my grandmother, cousins, aunts and uncles at the family farm in North Carolina. When I talk to my father, he’ll mutter something about the “goddamn war.” My mother will make her best effort not to cry. Cara will try to be uplifting. Then everyone else will get on the phone. “Come home soon, Matt,” some will say. Or, “We miss you this year. It’s just not the same without you.” I know this, because that is how I spent Christmas four years ago. By phone. From Iraq.

Yet Christmas this year won’t be all humbug. I have much to be grateful for.

Since June, when I first arrived in Afghanistan, scores of people –family, friends, colleagues and even people I’ve never met – have shown support, love and genuine concern for my well-being. My family has remained a constant source of strength for me, answering inconvenient calls in the middle of the night or offering just the right mix of advice and encouragement at moments when I feel I’m about to crack. Molly, too, has handled this separation brilliantly, complaining little and constantly reminding me that when all this finally ends, life will be as it once was – or better. I pity other soldiers here who don’t have a Molly in their lives.

Of course you’d expect, or at least hope, that my parents and sister and girlfriend would be my most committed supporters. And they are. But over the last few months, I’ve been surprised by a deluge of e-mails, letters and packages I’ve received from all over the United States. Many come from people I knew little before this year. Some of them are from outright strangers. I’ve reconnected with friends from my childhood and college, largely through this blog. And it’s ironic, but I’ve gotten to know Molly’s family better through this experience than I had in the two years we’d been dating when I deployed.

So despite the inconveniences and discomforts of another year at war, another Christmas away from home, I don’t consider this experience to be lost time. Christmas this week may not be the joyous celebration it has been in the past, nor will New Year’s or Valentine’s Day. But I can live with that. Because if this year, and the loving people who have endured it with me, have taught me anything, it’s that I am truly rich in life.

I look forward to the day when I will leave Gardez. I imagine it often. With a rucksack on my back and my rifle strapped to my side, I’ll file into a helicopter with a dozen other departing soldiers. The chopper’s beating blades will obscure my last view of this place in a cloud of swirling dust. Then we’ll swoop low over the barren Shahi-Kot Valley for the last time and head toward the miles of mountains that will lead us home.

*Just before my leave began, my unit was transferred to a different base in Gardez about a mile down the road.

Monsters

2009-12-15T22:43:00.005-05:00

By Molly

I’ve written a number of posts for this blog in the last month. I’ve written them and edited them and I’ve come close to posting them only to decide they’re no good.

All of these posts come from the right place: they come from a place that cares, that loves, that wants to be engaged in the act of writing, a place that makes me feel closer to Matt. But it’s a tricky place, one that goes back and forth on how to manage my emotions, hindering my coherent thought and my ability to trust in my beliefs. As a result, my writing has been sparse and cloudy – well-intentioned and occasionally eloquent, but ultimately confused.

I miss Matt; I love Matt. But here at home my long days are consumed by the writing of my book, which I often worry will never be finished, and sometimes it’s too much to think outside of my tiny box, beyond the encroaching deadline.

It’s too much for me to write about religion or death, which I attempted last week, because that’s complicated and depressing and maybe I just don’t want to know what I believe on that subject.

It’s too much for me to write about Thanksgiving, a post that I pondered but didn’t even begin, because I don’t know how to write about Thanksgiving without a recipe, and that just didn’t seem to fit.

It’s too much for me to write about Christmas and the different traditions of Matt’s family and mine because I haven’t yet finished my shopping for gifts or wrapping or mailing them, and, hey, that won’t bring Matt back anyway. He’ll still be alone in Afghanistan for Christmas. And for his 30th birthday next month, surrounded by violence and cold drifts of snow.

Matt’s deployment has made the holidays difficult both here and far. It’s a simple reality, but exhausting to process nonetheless. At times, both Matt and I have forgotten how hard it is for the other. Like this morning, when we fought on the phone, neither of us willing to give an inch, each in possession of only our own perspectives and our own pain. The fight didn’t last long, but it happened. We both need to remember that we’re not alone.

Anyway. Writing. So, I’m in a rut. I hope to soon emerge. Until then, here’s a recipe. I know I said that recipes weren’t appropriate here. But I changed my mind. Today I decided that the place that loves and cares and hinders and hopes and makes writing sometimes such a chore—well that place just wants a cookie. Alright? Alright.

Here is a recipe for my mother’s traditional holiday cookies, affectionately known as “Monsters.” They live up to their name. They are massive things, studded with toasted pecans and chunks of chocolate. My mother and I make them each year, covering every surface of the kitchen in clouds of flour and nibbles of nuts. For me, cooking always helps.

Monsters

Adapted from my mother (and Maida Heatter)

(makes 8 large cookies)

9 oz. bittersweet chocolate

4 oz. (1 generous cup) pecans

1 stick unsalted butter

¾ tsp. vanilla extract

¼ tsp. almond extract

1/3 cup sugar

½ tsp. salt

1 cup flour, sifted

- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

- Line cookie sheets with aluminum foil, (shiny side up!).

- Cut chocolate into chunks.

- Toast pecans in the preheated oven, carefully watching to avoid burning, for around 10 minutes. Once cool enough to handle, break them into pieces, (not too small!).

- In mixer, beat butter until it is soft. Then, add the vanilla and almond extracts. When incorporated, add sugar and salt, and then finally the flour. When the dough comes together, remove from mixer.

- Add the nuts and chocolate. Stir to combine.

- Use 1/3 cup mounds (an ice cream scoop works nicely) for each cookie. Shape them into balls with cold wet hands. It may seem like there is not enough dough to incorporate all of the nuts and chocolate needed. But there is. Have faith. Just keep in mind that these cookies are chunk heavy and dough light.

- Bake 16 – 18 minutes until they have a pale, golden color.

- Remove from the oven, let stand one minute. Cool on rack.

- Enjoy.

In the Land of Birch

2009-11-30T15:31:00.001-05:00

By Matt

Molly and I pulled up alongside a muddy knoll outside the town of Gura Humorului in northern Romania. I cranked back the emergency brake and took another look at the map. It was difficult to tell whether we’d found the right place.

Except for some crows cawing in the distance, the morning was quiet and dreary. A sweeping mist obscured the top of the hill, but we knew we were close. So wearing raincoats and jeans, we decided to continue the search on foot, and after making our way up a winding slippery path, we finally reached the top.

“This is it,” I said. “We found it.”

“Wow,” Molly breathed.

We gazed in silence, our fingers hooked in the chain-link fence that surrounded the lot. Among gnarled trees and tall dead grass, hundreds of tombstones stretched away from us, fading to white in the dense fog.

A small elderly woman emerged from a ramshackle house abutting the graveyard. Carrying a pail of water, she wore a burlap skirt, a brown peasant’s bandana and rubber boots. Smiling behind piercing blue eyes, I had the impression she’d been expecting us.

“Guten Morgen,” she said in German with a slight Romanian accent.

“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

“Nein,” I said reflexively, surprised by the language switch. Then I relented, though ashamed at my pathetic lack of German. “Aber, ein bisschen.” Just a little.

I guessed this woman was a kind of groundskeeper for the cemetery, and I asked her if we could enter. Without a word, she unlatched the gate, turned on her heel and motioned for us to follow. She guided us through an old shed filled with clucking roosters and rusted farm tools hanging overhead. When we emerged into the burial ground on the other side, the lady mock-pushed at us, as if to say, “Go ahead, take your time. I’ll be here.”

Molly and I strolled alone among the jagged rows of graves. The moss-covered headstones leaned this way and that in the black earth. Frozen at dramatic angles, the cemetery seemed somehow alive, as if we’d interrupted an elaborate ballroom waltz. The thick morning haze allowed for only a few yards’ visibility in any direction, intensifying its sense of eternity, and I had difficulty imagining this place ever saw the sun.

We paced along slowly in the soft light, scanning the faded epitaphs of generations of Romanian Jews. All were carved in Hebrew except for the names – Moses Glasberg, Saul Dawid, Josef and Sarah Schmidt. I noticed that the small rocks, which usually adorn Jewish headstones in cemeteries the world over – placed lovingly by family or respectful visitors – were conspicuously absent here. There were no fresh flowers, no candles, no prayer books. No sign of anyone left behind. It seemed the loneliest spot on earth.

Molly and I had come to Bucovina to escape the noise and commotion of some of Eastern Europe’s great cities. We’d planned to spend a few days exploring the region’s painted monasteries, but stumbled upon this abandoned Jewish cemetery on a tip from a woman who is writing a book about the region. Depressing, yes. Morbid, perhaps. But I can’t think of another person besides Molly who would be as thrilled by this gloomy setting as I was.

***

Eastern Europe may not sound like the most ideal place to spend a vacation mid-way through a tour in Afghanistan, but it suited Molly and me. We share a penchant for melancholy and for traveling to places that put us out of our comfort zones. For us, it’s not the creature comforts that matter so much as places and experiences that stir the soul. From that perspective, Bucovina was the crown jewel of our trip.

I have been captivated by Romania ever since I first visited there more than two years ago. I was drawn, as I am now, by the rich cultural history of its land and people. The playground of empires for centuries, Romania has been occupied by Romans, Habsburg Austrians, Ottoman Turks, Nazis and Soviets. As a result, Romania is today one of the most diverse countries in all of Europe – a mish-mosh of ethnicities and languages that boggles the mind.

Orthodox Romanians, who speak a tongue derived from the coarse vernacular of Roman soldiers garrisoned there 2,000 years ago, find their country surrounded on all sides by Slavs and Magyars. Catholic Hungarians, Muslim Turks, Saxon Germans, Ukrainians, Jews and Gypsies. All have weaved their threads through the colorful ethnic tapestry of this land.

And then there is Bucovina – “the land of birch trees” – nestled in Romania’s Carpathian Mountains in the far northeast of the country. I’d first read about the region in Robert Kaplan’s travelogue “Balkan Ghosts” while living in Germany several years ago and before my first trip to Romania. I was intrigued by Kaplan’s description of Bucovina as a place almost lost in time, probably the only place where one can witness how most of rural Europe looked more than a hundred years ago. Largely due to its geographic isolation and inaccessibility, Bucovina, Kaplan explains, was incubated more recently from the worst ravages of the despotic communist regime that impoverished the rest of Romania.

Bucovina is a rich, bountiful land that is at once haunting and seductive. Weather-beaten wooden cottages line narrow mountain roads. Their sagging roofs bear the burden of perennially harsh winters. Men wearing fedoras and leather jackets bounce along on rudimentary wooden carts laden with hay or manure. Powerful steeds pull them along, their red tassles bouncing to the clop-clop-clop of hooves on crumbling roads. And old men sell jars of homemade honey from their Dalias, the car of choice during communist times.

Molly and I stayed in Voroneţ, just down the road from one of Bucovina’s best preserved monasteries of the same name. For $50 a night, we got a room with a balcony overlooking autumn-colored hills. Over the next three days we traveled to the Voroneţ monastery and others with names like Moldoviţa, Suceviţa and Humor.

Similar to one another in construction, each monastery generally consists of a large Orthodox church, a garden, a well and living quarters, all housed within four stone walls. The monasteries are remote and peaceful, the perfect setting for a life spent in decades of prayerful solitude. Today, serious nuns wearing black frocks and little square hats till the gardens that sustain them year round. Many of the nuns are surprisingly young, an indication that devotion runs deep in Bucovina.

The monasteries, most dating from the 15^th and 16^th centuries, must have been a marvel even in their own time. It is the churches within them that are the real reason people visit. Each one bears vibrant exterior frescoes in the Byzantine style. The images, painted in deep reds, blues, greens and yellows, recount the story of the Bible to what would have been illiterate medieval peasants. Most surprising of all is how well the murals have survived the elements for so long.

At Suceviţa Molly and I found ourselves alone in a courtyard with a well and a solitary stone cross. The air was heavy and wet and the faint sounds of brass instruments being played at a wedding in a nearby village could be heard over the monastery’s 20-foot walls. I thought about it only later, but at that moment, Afghanistan must have been the furthest thing from my mind.

“I wish I could just spend a summer here writing,” Molly said.

“Me, too,” I said. “I wish I could do it with you.”

Our stay in Bucovina was both romantic and relaxing. But the region’s secluded culture, unblemished for centuries, will soon be gone. It will be erased by the modernizing effects of Romania’s membership in the European Union, which it joined – along with Bulgaria, its Balkan neighbor to the south – in 2007. As Molly and I drove through village after village, it occurred to me that we were probably among the last people who would see this land as it has existed for ages.

Already in the larger towns, one could get a glimpse of Bucovina’s transformation. Construction is everywhere. Flashy new homes of concrete, vinyl and plastic seem vulgar against the backdrop of smoking chimneys and hay bails. Mercedes and Audis careen around horse carts on much-improved roads. Designed to last in a style that is unmistakably German, the new roads are sure to lay the foundation for a robust future in tourism. It won’t be long before monastery bus tours and gaudy hotels invade this sheltered way of life forever.

Which made discovering the abandoned Jewish cemetery at Gura Humorului all the more remarkable. Once at the center of a thriving Jewish culture in Eastern Europe, most of Bucovina’s Jews met their end in World War II, some in the camps, others at the hands of their fellow Romanians. The cemeteries are virtually the only evidence they were ever here. Now lying neglected and overgrown, I had the sense that before long the cemeteries, too, would vanish from the earth.

***

As Molly and I prepared to leave the graveyard that Monday morning, I fished around in my pocket for a 10 lei bill to give the old woman as a tip. But before I could hand it to her, she stopped us.

“Woher kommen Sie?” she asked us, her words tinged with a faint Latinate flourish. Where do you come from?

“America,” I replied. “New York.”

Her eyes sparkled and she stood silent for a moment. I wondered what New York must have looked like in her mind’s eye. I tried to remember what I expected of Bucovina before my first trip there more than two years ago.

Now I was dying to find out about this woman’s roots. Just how had she come to speak flawless German? Though I realized questions of nationality could be explosive in this part of the world, I asked anyway.

“Sind sie Sachsen Deutscher?” I said, betting she was among a small minority of Saxon Germans, descendants of 12^th and 13^th century settlers, who inhabit Bucovina’s neighboring region of Transylvania.

She laughed and shook her head. “Nein.”

“Well Jewish then?” I asked confused, wondering if I had mistaken German for its linguistic cousin Yiddish. But I was wrong there, too.

“Ich bin Österreicherin,” she whispered with a smile that said: “just between us.” Her family, she explained, had moved from the Austro-Hungarian capital of Vienna to this town in 1875, when it was then a far off city at the edge of the empire. Austria-Hungary, I thought. Empire. Something you read about in dusty old history books. And yet it wasn’t so long ago.

I slipped her the tip and thanked her for her company.

“Danke,” she said warmly. “Auf wiedersehen.”

With still a week remaining on our trip through Eastern Europe, Molly and I drove off again into the land of birch trees. The day had begun well. We were together again and in a place where no one could find us.

Our spirits soared.

New Normal

2009-11-21T13:14:00.008-05:00

By Molly

Matt and I took the train from Poland to Ukraine on a Thursday night. It was a nice train, with bunk beds and fluffy white comforters in a tiny private compartment. We fell into a restless sleep as the train bumped along towards the border and we arrived in L’viv, a large city on Ukraine’s western edge, before 6am the next morning.

We lugged our large backpacks into the station’s main hall, groggy after the short night that had been punctuated by unfamiliar noises and multiple passport checks. The sky was still dark and the air, frozen. The station was empty but for a handful of gray-haired men standing by the door, sipping coffee from tiny plastic cups. Matt put coins into the large automatic espresso machine for us while I waited, bleary-eyed, scruffy-haired, and totally confused.

I looked around. All the signs in the station were written in Cyrillic—that strange, symbolic alphabet first used in the 9th century Bulgarian Empire. Matt, who had memorized the pronunciation of each symbol when he first traveled to Russia years before, could at least sound out the words, even if he often didn’t know what they meant. I, however, was completely lost.

We stood outside the station for a few minutes, stamping our feet on the frozen ground. Our breath billowed out in cold white puffs as we tried to figure out the next step. We watched commuters walk by in heavy coats and thick fur hats. Sputtering taxis and trolleys caked in dust ran up and down the street. We listened to the swirls of language around us, what sounded like a back-of-the-throat garble. Crumbling buildings lined a muddy street littered with trash.

Matt and I had purchased a sub-par city map from a confused-looking woman at a kiosk inside, which we peered at in the dark, unable to tell if the city center was too far to walk. It looked like it. Not wanting to be ripped off by a pernicious cab driver, we figured we could take the tram.

We walked over to what appeared to be the bus station and pantomimed with a clerk selling mineral water and cheap cigarettes inside. We thought she understood our question when she smiled and picked up a pen. On a scrap of paper she wrote “57 40” and handed it to us.

“What does this mean?” I asked Matt on our way out. The numbers didn’t seem to correspond to any specific buses or trolleys or times.

“No idea,” he said.

We walked along the road next to the trolley track, asking a chain of commuters, one by one, where to go. Matt used simple English and his rudimentary Russian. I gave moral support. Eventually we found ourselves in a steamy trolley car heading in what we hoped was the right direction. The streets were empty as we rolled past, the sun just beginning to rise. Neither Matt nor I had ever been to Ukraine before. Everything seemed new.

We found our hotel, an imposing building just off the old Town Square with an elegant but weary marble staircase cascading into the foyer. A thuggish-looking bellhop with no neck and humorless eyes took our bags. Then we went on a walk.

The city was still quiet despite the hour. The ground was covered in frost. I thought that the buildings—big classic stone constructions, beautiful and grand in the distance—looked old and neglected up close. We stood in front of the Opera House for a few minutes. Pigeons flocked around a woman wielding bread. Bright yellow buses careened on the curving roads around us. And then, as the streets began to fill with men and women on their way to work, I noticed the masks. Almost everyone in L’viv, it seemed, was wearing a surgical mask. Noses and mouths hid behind light blue cloth, dark eyes peering above. I felt unnerved by the eerie glow they cast upon the city. Is this the Twilight Zone? I wondered.

But then we understood: Swine flu. Unlike other countries that have recently experienced elevated but not alarming levels of the virus, Ukraine was in a crisis. Matt and I had read about it from an English language paper in Poland a few days before. We hadn’t taken it too seriously. Swine flu is everywhere, we thought. No use changing our plans. But we soon realized that in Ukraine everyone was afraid. The opera, we learned, had been shuttered. Half of the restaurants were closed. And the streets were full of masks.

We asked about it in our hotel later that morning. We had just eaten breakfast in an empty dining room, served omelets by a young man whose face was obscured by the light blue of his mask.

“Ukraine hasn’t seen the flu in 300 or 400 years!” said the hotel receptionist, a hyper-bubbly blond woman. “That’s why we are so nervous!”

Matt and I traded glances. Ok, I thought.

That night we entered a sign-less, basement restaurant by knocking on the door and saying the password—Slava Ukraina, or “Glory to Ukraine”—to a masked man behind the peephole. He opened the door laughing and let us in with a wave. Before we descended the stairs, he handed Matt and me each a single raw clove of garlic. He gestured to his mouth. I smiled, confused, and held it in the palm of my hand for a moment while Matt popped his into his mouth and chewed. We walked down into the smoky, crowded dining room.

“Is this normal?” I asked.

Matt shrugged.

“Who knows,” he said.

***

Before I left the U.S. to meet Matt in Warsaw, I wrote about his upcoming leave. I wrote that I was nervous. “My life here, alone, has become normal,” I wrote. “I’m used to sleeping alone, to waking alone. I’m used to setting my own schedule, no longer in possession of anyone else’s needs.” I wrote that the loneliness had become normal, the guilt and the anger had become normal. I no longer remembered the normal that came before this normal, the one where Matt was a presence and not an absence, the one where I wasn’t afraid all the time.

I had been thinking a lot about normalcy. What is it? Where did it go?

I was afraid that seeing Matt again would bring our lack of normalcy into clear focus. I was afraid that being together again in the midst of his deployment to Afghanistan and my year of writing a book in New York would be hard because our perspectives have changed, and our new normals are nothing alike. I was afraid it would be too much.

But we hugged in the Warsaw airport on that last Saturday afternoon in October. And then we laughed when we got on a bus going in the wrong direction. Suddenly, it felt as if we had never been away.

In part, this is because nothing was normal on this trip. That was the beauty of it all. Over the course of two weeks we used four different currencies. We struggled with four incomprehensible languages. The cities were confusing and the local customs at times mysterious. We rode a crowded train filled with the stench of feet and feces through rural Ukraine and tried soup made from the lining of a cow’s stomach in Bucovina, Romania. We stayed in a plush hotel near Warsaw’s Stare Miasto and walked along the Danube River in Budapest one evening close to midnight, watching the lights of the Parliament building shimmering in the water below.

Eating pickles and borscht in an underground restaurant of flu-wracked Ukraine, raw garlic perfuming our breath, the only normal thing for me was Matt. It was wonderful.

***

Early on a Sunday morning Matt and I took a bus over the border into Romania. It was a rickety bus with faded red curtains covering the windows. It smelled stale and musty. The two drivers—one Ukrainian, and the other Romanian—sat us in the very front of the bus. “Amerikansky,” they said, gesturing to our seats. Soon the back of the bus was full of a dozen other passengers, men and women, all carrying large plastic shopping bags filled to the brim. They all seemed to know each other, Matt and I thought. We heard whispering and laughter. The drivers addressed people by their first names.

We were in Chernowitz, a small city in southern Ukraine, and only fifty miles or so from the Romanian border. We drove down narrow roads coated in a thick fog. Matt and I shared some rye bread and yogurt that I had stashed in my bag.

We sat silent as the bus picked up other passengers along the way, all carrying similar shopping bags, all handing over a few bills to the drivers. At the border we watched the nervous shuffle of our fellow riders as the uniformed border officials collected passports. Our drivers followed them inside, bringing loaves of bread along. Back on the bus, we wondered what was happening, smiling at our naiveté.

“Do you think they’re smugglers?” Matt asked.

“Maybe,” I said.

After an hour at the border, the drivers reboarded us passengers and we carried on. After a brief moment of excitement when we passed a police checkpoint on the road in Romania, we pulled over and everyone but us quickly disembarked. They ran to waiting escorts and three cars parked nearby. Once their merchandise was loaded, we watched from the window as they were quickly whisked away.

“Weird,” I said.

For the next 20 miles or so—the final leg of the journey to Suceava, Romania—Matt and I were alone on the bus.

“Do you think that’s normal?” I asked.

Matt shrugged. Probably.

Together Again

2009-11-11T10:11:00.003-05:00

By Molly

I am sitting by the window of a hotel room in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. I can see the red-brick roof of a building across the way, the sun slowly sinking in the luminescent gray sky behind. It smells of firewood, and I can hear a police siren sounding softly in the distance. Matt, who is the same but maybe a little bit different, is lying on the bed nearby. I can see his hand twitch as he falls asleep. We're both tired after a day walking among the markets and museums of this colorful city, which is filled with ornate Hapsburg-style buildings and a language both unintelligible and striking.

Matt was waiting for me in the Warsaw airport when I stepped off the plane on an afternoon almost two weeks ago. I dropped my bag and he hugged me. I could smell his shampoo and, almost immediately, it felt as though we had never been apart.

Since then, Matt and I have done a lot. We explored the old town squares of Warsaw and Krakow, L'viv and Cherniv'tsi and Cluj. We've eaten many bowls of borscht and plates of mititei. We've drunk countless mugs of tangy dark beer and glasses of surprisingly smooth vodka. We stood by the train tracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau, surrounded by crumbling buildings, imposing fences, and a crushing sense of the past. We took a sleeper train to L'viv, Ukraine, where we encountered a mask-wearing population terrified of swine flu and stayed in a hotel with a grand but decaying marble staircase. We took a rickety bus filled with smugglers over the border to Romania and found a bucolic countryside--its medieval monasteries painted in deep blues and reds, its Jewish cemeteries crumbling and covered in moss. We drove a car down winding roads through Transylvania, passing countless mud-caked dogs and weather-beaten farmers guiding horses decorated with red tassels. Tonight we'll see an opera, and tomorrow we will take the train to Budapest. Early next week Matt and I will fly our separate ways. I'll return to New York and Matt to Afghanistan, each with countless stories of this trip, which has been a constant adventure. We will be writing more, soon.

As I sit here watching the quickly darkening sky, I'm happy not to think of that next step. I'm not sure what I expected of this time here in Eastern Europe. I'm not sure what I expected of Matt's leave. But thus far it has been a bright and exciting couple of weeks, ones that have reminded me what it feels like to be close, to be together, to laugh in tandem and sleep at the same time. I miss him again already.

Small Talk

2009-10-28T13:13:00.004-04:00

By Matt

The television set was brand new. I could tell from the half-ripped purchase label on the corner of the screen. A dozen plastic roses in a vase sat on top, making the TV the most decorative -- and expensive -- item in an otherwise bland living room. I wondered if the set was a gift from the Americans. Afghan Colonel Jawid Osmani*, my host and the occupant of the room, is himself fond of giving gifts. But he is fonder of receiving them.

A couple of weeks ago, Osmani, a grinning, white-bearded "religious cultural adviser" for the Afghan National Army had invited me and my colleague, Staff Sergeant Justin Boeck, to his quarters for a farewell dinner. Boeck and I would be leaving the base the next day. We'd been reassigned, along with our unit, to a different mission at another camp close by. For the last four months, we had worked with Osmani on reconstruction efforts and humanitarian assistance projects in Paktya Province of which Gardez is the capital. To our disappointment, we have failed to get much done, partly a result of the unimaginably complex bureaucratic web the coalition has weaved here over the last eight years.

This was not our first dinner with Osmani; he'd invited us before. But I never enjoyed them. Neither I nor Boeck were good at small talk, so we hoped the conversation would be driven by our interpreter, Lafik, and another American trainer, Rick, who had also been invited. Before Rick showed up, Boeck, Lafik and I lounged silently on a long dusty sofa, sucking on sugar-coated almonds and Turkish taffies.

Osmani presided over the gathering from a metal folding chair. The television's volume was turned all the way down, but Osmani watched the program intently as if he were the only one who could hear it. A ticker in the national language Dari scrolled left to right along the bottom of the screen while images flashed by in a continuous five-minute loop: General McChrystal giving a speech, Afghan police standing around on a road, body bags being zipped up, an Afghan policeman having a bullet removed from his lower back, President Karzai giving a speech, Afghan soldiers marching ceremoniously through a square in Kabul, a ribbon-cutting at a non-descript building. This was the nightly news in Afghanistan, courtesy of Voice of America.

Although dressed in his pressed military regalia, Osmani had removed his plastic dress shoes and socks at the door when he arrived minutes earlier. Now he picked at his crusty toes as he narrated each image on the screen to Lafik, who translated. But I wasn't listening. I was fixated on Osmani's feet, gnarled toes at the end of pale, hairless legs.

"My legs hurt," Osmani said dryly, noticing my stare.

Jolted from my trance, I dumbly nodded before turning back to watch the noiseless news. I discreetly glanced at my watch hoping that Rick and his interpreter would get there soon.

***

I don't why I was so uncomfortable with Osmani. In the U.S. Army's campaign to train and fight alongside our Afghan counterparts, American soldiers are encouraged to accept -- indeed, to embrace -- our hosts' particular cultural mores, no matter how bizarre or repulsive we find them. I personally have always prided myself on my ability to slink quietly in and out of environments that are alien to me. Back home in New York, Molly and I share friends from all over the world. I've lived in France, Germany and for a short time in Russia, where I always relished opportunities to experience some new aspect of those cultures whether it be unfamiliar foods, radical topics of conversation or just watching the local news. Even in Iraq, these sorts of experiences somehow made my tours almost worthwhile.

Yet in Afghanistan, it's different. Maybe it's because I am here on the Army's terms now, and not mine. And maybe it's that eight years after arriving here, the United States has little to show for the loss of so much American blood and treasure. Whatever the reason, I can't help but feel revulsion toward the whole society. I've come to resent the way many Afghan civilians make demands of us Americans with a confident air of entitlement. I feel sorry for the millions of enslaved women here whose status in society is one notch below livestock. (Chickens and goats roam the squalid streets unmolested, a freedom rarely extended to Pashtun women.) I'm uneasy when sex-starved Afghan soldiers make subtle overtures to me through gazing, lustful eyes, an occurrence whose frequency has surprised me.

I recognize that Afghanistan, like most cultures, is not a monolith. I have met many good men here who in a different time and under different circumstances I might be happy to serve alongside. But it's been eight years, almost a decade. At this moment, I simply can't think of another society less worthy of our sacrifices.

***

It was another 15 minutes before Rick and his own interpreter arrived. Together, we sat down at the long particle-board dining table, which I noticed was of the same design that we Americans use for our desks and conference tables at our own base not far away. Another gift, I thought. Osmani has been awarded two U.S. Army Bronze Star Medals, for what actions no one seems to know. He performed the Haj to Mecca last year, paid for with U.S. taxpayer dollars. His entire living room was furnished by us. The only thing missing was a porcelain toilet in the lavatory. This colonel, it seemed, like the rest of his countrymen preferred doing business with the old hose and hole.

As usual Osmani was perched at the head of the table, the king on his throne. In the center of the table, Boeck and I emptied our cargo pockets of melting ice cream bars. We'd swiped them earlier from the mess hall on the American side of the base. (Osmani claimed they were his favorite, but I think he just enjoyed watching American officers and NCOs bring him treats.) Then an Afghan soldier brought out three bowls of a mutton stew that contained more gristle and bone than meat. That was followed by a heaping pile of steaming, oily rice. I knew my bowels were going to pay for this later. Happened every time.

As I politely started in on my portion, gristle and all, conversation finally got under way. As usual, it began with Osmani talking about himself. Did we know that he had spent several weeks last year at a training program for foreign military officers in Norfolk, Virginia? We did.

"Isn't dat where tobacco come?" asked Lafik, trying to keep the conversation alive while directing it away from Osmani.

"Yeah, it is," I said. "In fact, for years my family has run its own tobacco farm in North Carolina, just across the border."

"What does dis name mean, Virginia?" Lafik asked me immediately, not even translating what I'd just said to Osmani.

I hesitated, wary of being drawn into a topic I did not want to discuss with Osmani or other devout Muslims present. I shot a glance at Boeck and Rick seeking approval, but neither seemed to think anything of it. I put down my fork and cleared my throat. Osmani continued to shovel mutton and rice into his mouth with his fingers, chasing it all down with a glass of warm, sour milk.

"The state is named after England's Queen Elizabeth the First," I said. "She's known as the 'Virgin Queen', hence Virginia."

Osmani looked up from his plate stunned, having apparently understood what I said. (He spoke better English than he ordinarily let on.) A stern, commanding look came over his face, one I'd never seen before. He looked me direct in the eye as he spoke in Dari.

"In our country, it is customary that boys and girls who marry be virgins," Osmani said. "This is our custom."

I wanted so badly to roll my eyes, but I nodded politely. "Yes, sir," I said.

I was distracted briefly by the television, which I could see playing just beyond Osmani's shoulder. A Hazara soldier was being treated in a Kabul hospital for shrapnel wounds from a Taliban IED. There always seem to be a disproportionate number of Hazaras featured in the news here. As the country's most oppressed ethnic minority, I wondered if there was an effort in the national media to emphasize Hazaras' contribution to the building of a new Afghanistan.

"This is not the way it is in America," Osmani continued, as a voiceless General McChrystal reappeared on the TV screen behind him. "Here our women must be virtuous or they are ruined. In our hospitals, it is even possible for women to have surgery that makes them virgins again."

"Jesus," I thought, almost choking. If the food hadn't ruined my appetite already, then the image of what third-world medical procedure might be necessary to re-flower a woman surely would have. Osmani looked positively smug, pleased at his country's medical ingenuity.

***

At the end of our final dinner together, Osmani presented Boeck and I with two small parting gifts. The first was a pakul, a kind of hat most notably worn by Ahmed Shah Massoud, the hero and revered commander of the Afghan Northern Alliance who was assassinated by Al Qaeda two days before 9/11. The other was a scarf. It was a nice gesture, and I immediately felt bad not having something for him in return. Then again, he had plenty.

Asking me to stand up, Osmani plopped the hat down on my head and draped the folded scarf over my shoulders.

“Mujahedeen,” he said with a smile, despite my discomfort. Everyone laughed.

I turned around with that stupid hat on my head and looked at Osmani. What could I say? I was his guest.

"Mujahedeen," I said.

*Some of the names have been changed out of respect for their privacy

Finish Line

2009-10-12T08:27:00.006-04:00

By Molly

On Wednesday afternoon of last week I sat at a corner table in a West Village café, a glass of iced coffee standing full next to my computer. It was one of those working cafés, where you’re allowed to nurse a small mug for hours, reading or writing or even drawing, like that one man who scribbled with charcoal on the other side of the room. I alternately typed and stared out the window. It was a windy day—unusually so—and I could see paper bags dancing on the sidewalk, scarves flung suddenly from shoulder to ground. When I had walked from my apartment to the subway that morning my hair swirled around my face and above my head like a tornado. I listened to an older, grizzled man hit on the exotic beauty sitting to my left: “Are those real tattoos?” he asked her. “Wow!”

It was just another day in New York, another attempt to carve out a spot in the windy tumult of the city to write. I had been back from Woodstock for almost three weeks. The next day, however, I would pack up and return north for three more. Today I sit alone in a studio surrounded by the leaf-strewn fields of Ghent, New York. I’m deep into the process of writing my book. I’m so deep within it that I hardly know what day it is. I hardly know which direction is up. The minutes flow together, marked only by the passage of verbs and nouns, split between chapters and page numbers. Will it ever end? Will I ever finish? I’m really not sure. The unwritten sentences extend into the future in what looks like a long gray sheet. I can’t yet see the finish line.

When I last saw Matt, standing in his uniform at the airport in New Orleans six months ago, I felt the same way. His deployment—the year, more or less, that he would spend in Afghanistan—stretched out before us. Days, hundreds of them, would pass before we saw each other again. And who knew what would happen in the meantime. Who knew what we would be up against. The time, the isolation and the fear seemed endless. I certainly couldn’t see the finish line. I didn’t even know if I would recognize it when I did.

But now his leave is upon us. The same day that I finish this residency I will hop on a plane and fly to Poland. Matt and I will meet in Warsaw on Halloween and spend the following two weeks exploring Eastern Europe for a little R&R, as they say. When he returns to Afghanistan, we will be well beyond the halfway point. I’m excited. Wildly so. I can’t believe it’s been six months since Matt and I were in the same room. The time has gone by both painstakingly slow and lightning fast.

Poland, I know, is an odd choice. Many have told me so. Matt and I did discuss some other, more “normal” destinations like Hawaii or Costa Rica or even New York. But Matt is a veritable borscht fanatic, has spent months traveling around Eastern Europe during his previous Army years, and, simply, loves it there. “I want to go someplace where it will be autumn,” he told me on the phone. “I want to show you someplace I love.”

My own great-grandmother, Bertha, was smuggled out of Poland in a barrel covered in hay during the pogroms of the early 1900s, according to Birnbaum legend. I have roots there. I’ve always wanted to go. I’m happy with our plans.

I will admit that I’m nervous, though. My life here, alone, has become normal. I’m used to sleeping alone, to waking alone. I’m used to setting my own schedule, no longer in possession of anyone else’s needs. I eat like a vegetarian, and occasionally go to sleep before 9 pm. I have fun with my friends, and have grown accustomed to being a third wheel. The loneliness and the fear, the anger and the guilt that come with having a boyfriend in Afghanistan have become normal. They hum in the background of my life like the soundtrack to a movie, defining for those who watch but utterly ignored from within. I don’t know what it will be like to see Matt again—if I will keep those feelings shut off, or if I’ll have to face them anew.

Right now, however, I am concentrating on the now. “Take it one day at a time,” my mother often tells me, and I’ve become quite adept.

I can sit in cafes and tap away at my laptop, thinking of story arc and reportage on the sense of smell. I can concentrate on writing one word at a time, one sentence after another. I can watch one couple after another walk hand in hand outside the window of that coffee shop in the West Village, unaware how lucky I think they are. And I can imagine the finish line. Today it resembles the streets of Warsaw, cobblestoned and gritty. It resembles a guy in a uniform, the sound of laughter, the touch of hand in hand.

Bikes and Boys

2009-10-01T19:35:00.005-04:00

By Matt

On Friday afternoon, our convoy encountered a rough, bearded man with a motorcycle standing alone in the middle of the desert. In Afghanistan, this can be cause for consternation. On that day, however, the lone biker spelled fortune for three children in a nearby isolated village in Paktika Province.

I was along for the ride as we escorted Afghan National Army soldiers to a faraway outpost. The plan was simple. We’d provide security to one platoon of Afghan soldiers headed to the base and return with an artillery unit they were meant to relieve. The road – which in Afghanistan means a dirt path – had seen some significant IED activity in recent days. Since the Afghan Army’s flimsy tactical Toyota pickups with a six-seater bench in the bed are no match to that kind of threat, our 11-ton armored behemoths were necessary to take the lead.

Luckily we made it through the mission without being attacked. The only surprise, as it happened, was the appearance of the motorcycle man.

“Stop!” said the convoy commander, Captain James Morrow, a policeman back in Georgia with a clean-shaven head, deep blue eyes and a constant scowl that says I’m gonna kick your ass. “I want to see what this guy wants.”

“Cartwright, get down out of there and pull security,” Morrow told his 22-year old vehicle gunner, who snapped his harness loose and marched down the hood of the vehicle. The team’s interpreter and I also went along.

I was wearing more than 60 pounds of armor and ammunition, cabled radio headphones, and was strapped in by a seatbelt harness designed for a race car. It took me a few moments to disentangle myself and climb out the backside of the vehicle. It’s no wonder so many soldiers burn up in these things, I thought.

By the time I joined the rest of the group, the motorcycle man was jabbering away in Pashto and seemed to be bordering on hysteria. Earlier that day, the man said, five boys in his village had been injured by a bomb about a kilometer away, one of them seriously. The old man was impatient, almost frantic, as we tried to determine the exact circumstances of the explosion.

“Where did the bomb come from?” Morrow asked, since enemy might still have been lurking somewhere beyond a dune. “Was it Taliban? Or was it American?”

What did it matter where the bomb came from, the motorcycle man’s eyes seemed to say. Children had been hurt. They were in desperate need of a doctor. And now his village was counting on him to seek help. Approaching a heavily armed column of American armor had been risky enough for a guy with a beard on a bike. “Just help us!” he said.

Morrow radioed his platoon sergeant in the rear of the convoy. “We’re gonna head over to the village to see what happened to these kids,” Morrow said, “see if we can help.” Roger, came the muffled reply.

The village was a small cluster of qalats couched behind a row of shady trees at the end of a dirt path. No sooner had our vehicles shuddered to a halt than a flood of men and filthy children poured out of a break in the tree line. Two men who seemed to be the village elders calmly scolded Morrow while younger, more virile, men held back the angriest in the crowd.

Moments later, grown men with boys riding piggy-back shuffled out of the village toward us. The victims, four boys – the fifth and most badly wounded had already been taken to the hospital in the village’s communal car – were between the ages of eight and 10. Their arms, legs and faces had been punctured, presumably from shrapnel.

The worst off of the four appeared to be in shock. As noise and commotion from the incensed crowd raged all around him, the boy stood there wide-eyed and speechless. He held his dusty, blood-caked little hand out like a zombie, and dark blood ran down his skinny legs.

“Tell Nef to get over here,” Morrow barked at someone, requesting his medic, 28-year-old Senior Airman Andrey Nefsky, who showed up minutes later primed for action.

Nef – as his American comrades call him – dropped his medic’s bag in the dirt and drew out a pair of light blue latex gloves, slapping them on in an exaggerated manner that left no doubt among the Americans and Afghans about who was now in charge. Immediately, he went to work on the boy in shock.

A tall, no-nonsense Russian from Novorossiysk, a Black Sea town founded by Peter the Great near the resort city of Sochi, Nefsky came to the United States in high school as part of an exchange program through Columbia University, before moving to Florida and joining the U.S. Air Force. His muscle-bound frame, strong Russian accent and hardened Slavic demeanor belie the gentleness with which his fellow soldiers and airmen credit him.

To witness the skill with which Nef worked was like watching an expertly choreographed ballet. In a performance marked by precision and speed, his interaction with the wounded boy was firm yet delicate. As the boy quietly looked on, Nef scrubbed away clumps of dried blood and dirt from his wrist with a sterile saline solution. At one point, dark streams of blood shot five feet out of the boy’s wrist in spurts, causing the crowd to jump back in surprise. But Nef kept it cool and continued to work.

Despite the macabre setting, I couldn’t help but smile at the irony: Among Afghans, Russians are almost universally hated, blamed for plunging their country into a brutal war, the lingering violence from which has crushed the will of the people these 30 years. Although it was impossible for the Afghan villagers to make the distinction, I wondered what they might do if they found out Nef was from Russia. I doubt he saw it this way, but I like to think Nef’s actions were a small, if inconsequential, attempt at reconciliation.

Calmly sealing the severed artery with pressure and gauze, Nef went to work on the boy’s legs, where shrapnel had pierced his inner thighs. Then he patched up the other victims with the same skillfulness and care. While Nef worked, Morrow made plans for an Afghan doctor to make follow-up visits.

Hours later, as the sun set below the horizon, it was the first time that day I’d had time to process all that happened. We waited in our vehicles for an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team to come and blow up what was left of the artillery rounds the children had found – and tampered with. According to one of the boys with a deep, gash over his right eye, the friends had found the bombs that morning. He reluctantly admitted to us and the elders present that the boys had decided to make the bombs targets in a rock-throwing competition.

I wondered where the munitions had come from. Could they have been duds fired from the nearby U.S. Airbase? There were no impact holes; they lay on flat ground. Maybe they’d been discarded or “lost” by the Taliban who had stolen them from the Americans. Judging by their conspicuously missing fuses, that seemed plausible. The Taliban would have used the explosive material inside to make an IED.

I thought about the boys. It appeared all of them were going to survive their injuries. I was grateful for that. Yet something didn’t sit right. My mind returned to the chaotic events of that afternoon – the yelling, the anger, the tension and fear. Something just seemed off.

Then it hit me. The children, I thought. The boys were what was wrong. As I replayed the events in my head, I realized that not a single one of them had cried. Their bloody little bodies were riddled with shrapnel, yet not one had shed a tear. They simply stood there in line, obediently waiting for Nef to patch them up, like an American grade-schooler waiting for the lunch lady to serve him his beans.

It was a display of courage and toughness I have rarely witnessed. It helped me to understand a little better our adversaries. What does it take to produce such a people? No wonder these guys are so hard to beat, I thought.

The names of the soldiers in this post have been changed out of respect for their privacy.

Into the Woods

2009-09-21T14:55:00.003-04:00

By Molly

The Woodstock Festival took place over 40 years ago on a farm in Bethel, New York. Longhaired, flower-wielding youths came from all over the country to camp and dance and listen to music on a wide expanse of farmland in the Catskills. They brought guitars and acid and free love. They twirled, they smoked, and they arrived by the hundreds of thousands for three days of promised “peace, love and music.” When I think of that time, images come to mind that are hazy and light, earth-toned and effervescent like a slew of Polaroid photographs baking in the sun.

Just yesterday, a chilly Sunday morning, I was curled up in a studio in the actual town of Woodstock, a small but charming bohemian village. It was my last day of a month-long artists’ residency, which was housed in a rickety old villa up in the hills. I spent my days writing. I spent my nights reading and cooking and eating with nine other artists who were there to write, paint and compose. It was quiet and calm, filled with the sounds of crickets and owls. The landscape was clear and cool, drenched in the burnished greens and reds of a coming autumn.

The distance between Woodstock and Bethel is relatively small. Only 70 miles or so. And though the iconic festival didn’t actually take place in Woodstock, the town bears a legacy that represents a culture that defined the time. Its residue can be seen everywhere. On my late afternoon walks, which I took to clear my mind of excess words and occasionally talk to Matt on the phone, I saw middle-aged men with gray hair cascading down their backs and roadside booths selling more tie-dyed t-shirts than I knew existed. The main street was exploding with yoga studios and Tibetan souvenir shops. Bob Dylan once lived up the dirt road that runs in front of the studio where I worked.

One Friday a few weeks ago I saw a movie with a handful of the others in the residency. We saw “Taking Woodstock,” an Ang Lee film about a family who ran a motel close to the concert and their son, who played a role in bringing it to Bethel. It was fun and happy, but filled with stereotyped characters that grated on me by the end. I can’t say I recommend it highly. It did make me think, though.

In the movie, a young scraggly-haired man named Billy functioned as the token veteran. He wore his olive drab uniform blouse unbuttoned over blue jeans, and constantly sipped a beer. His eyes were glazed and vacant. He thought of going back for another tour of duty, because at least he wasn’t “weird” in Vietnam. In one scene, Billy has a flashback of a battle and wanders through the forest, crouching and looking for enemies.

It made me think about a different kind of distance. One far larger than 70 miles. I know it's not a surprise, but I’ve been thinking about war.

The Woodstock festival took place at the height of the Vietnam War. Young men died every day. Veterans returned with minds and bodies bearing the scars of battle. And in the 60s, men didn’t have a choice. The war touched all Americans because each man’s number might be the next. Anyone could be wrenched from his life, like Matt was from his, and sent to fight an “enemy” who was not clearly defined or understood.

Then, the youth culture came together in protest. The Hippie movement wasn’t born of solely of the war in Vietnam, of course. It was an outlet for many things. But it rose alongside the Viet Cong and the Tet Offensive and resulted in a wild energy, intense togetherness and desire for peace.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that energy—one that perhaps died with my parents’ generation. Now, as our country fights two wars that have dragged on for almost as long as Vietnam, there is a familiar underlying hopelessness. But there’s also an apathy. One that I’ve seen in myself, and one that I couldn’t help thinking about as I walked among the retail shops there in Woodstock selling coffee mugs painted with peace signs.

I protested the Iraq war in 2003. It was a huge demonstration, coordinated in cities around the world. I was a college sophomore and hitched a ride to New York City from Providence with a friend. We marched down First Avenue in a biting winter wind. There were speeches near the UN, which we listened to while eating bagels and sipping cups of coffee. I felt part of something large in that moment. I was proud of myself for making the trip. But then I went back to school and turned my attention to other things. I read the paper; occasionally I attended events like peace vigils on the campus’ main green. When I moved to New York in 2006 the protests were nothing more than a memory. The immediacy of the conflicts abroad had faded bit by bit, for me and my family, for many of my friends.

I know that I was out of touch. There have been many protests. Dissent—and also support—has been voiced and covered widely by the press. I’ve read the books and the editorials. I’ve seen the movies. I’ve seen cars with “Support our Troops” bumper stickers on the highways around Boston. But the wars didn’t touch my life, really, until I met Matt.

Matt volunteered for the Army when he was 18. He chose to go to West Point. He began as a cadet before the Towers fell, yes, and the invasion of Iraq came as a surprise to him, too. But by putting on that uniform and earning his degree he promised to see it through to the end. When Matt invaded Iraq in 2003, right around the time I was eating bagels outside the UN, he and everyone else in the military was there of their own volition. The men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan today made the choice on their own.

The all-volunteer force today means that large swaths of our country have no connection to the wars. It means that it is entirely possible to sit at home in suburban Boston, in Northern California, in Manhattan and to view the conflicts we’ve been fighting for the last eight years as merely peripheral to daily life. For many, war takes place on television and in the newspapers, somewhere incomprehensible and very far away. Before I met Matt, war didn’t cross the boundary of my daily life. The subject hardly ever came up at the dinner table. I could ignore it, and I did.

I spoke to my mother on the phone as I walked into town to get some coffee a few Saturdays ago around 10 a.m. I could see my breath in the air and a group of deer paused to stare at me from the forest nearby. The sun sliced through the trees in sheets, hitting the pavement like painted lines. I told my mom about “Taking Woodstock,” which I’d seen the night before, and what it made me think.

We talked about the striking similarities between Vietnam and Afghanistan. About the length of the war and the endemic hopelessness. My mother remembered the draft.

The climate in our country would be so different if our brothers and husbands and sons had no choice but to go to war, I told her.

Everything would be different, she agreed.

I walked downtown, and bought an iced coffee at a bakery. I wondered what would happen if the young man behind the counter had to go to war. I walked towards the library, and wondered what it would be like if the teenage boys riding skateboards on the other side of the road had an older brother or two fighting abroad. I walked back towards home and I wondered what it would be like if I had to go to war, if all the writers and artists at this residency had to go to war. What if my brother, Ben, was drafted? Or the sons and daughters of our leaders in Congress and the Senate? What if those young men and women were torn from their lives, like Matt was from his, and had no choice but to fly to Kabul and then take a convoy to Gardez. I often wonder what it would be like if this was America’s war.

Fallen

2009-09-14T14:12:00.007-04:00

By Matt

By the time I reached my room in Eisenhower Barracks, the sweat-soaked cotton t-shirt beneath my uniform clung to my back. I had just run from one class in the bowels of Mahan Hall, a long granite structure along West Point’s southeast rim that houses the Department of Civil Engineering. I was late for my next class, which was held at the farthest possible point away on the campus. I only had a few seconds to dump the Structural Steel Design books on my bed and gather up those for Surveying before dashing out again.

In my fourth and final year as a cadet, this was my Tuesday morning routine.

But on that particular Tuesday, when I burst through the door of my room, I was surprised to see Scott Smiley, my friend and neighbor in the barracks, hushed and leaning over my desk. The room was dim in the soft morning light. Scott’s face was inches from the glowing computer screen. He was watching the news – and he didn’t look up.

“Shh,” Scott said, before I even uttered a sound. “My TV card died so I came over here. A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center.”

“What? What kind of plane?” I said, as I threw down Steel and tipped Surveying from the shelf above Scott’s head, not even giving myself time to glance at the screen.

“I don’t know. They didn’t say,” Scott said, as if in a trance. “A plane. There’s a fire.”

“Damn,” I said, imagining a small collision by a wooden-winged prop plane, the kind King Kong swatted away like mosquitoes. Then I looked at my watch. “Shit!”

Panting and sweating, I barely made it to the classroom in time. It didn’t matter, though. Class had been canceled, something that at West Point just wasn’t done. That’s when I knew it was serious.

On hearing the first reports of an attack in New York, my Surveying professor, an Army major and a New Yorker, had flipped on the classroom projector and turned to CNN. Although my classmates and I were free to go, no one budged. In the three minutes since I’d seen Scott, another plane had hit the second tower. The major leaned forward on a drafting table facing the screen, his arms supported by white-knuckled fists. A few minutes later, we all watched stunned as the towers crumbled onto lower Manhattan.

“They got the fucking towers!” the major shrieked in his characteristic Brooklyn accent. He seemed angry or scared or both. His loss of composure scared me, too.

For the first time since I’d begun at West Point in 1998, the academy went into lock-down. No one was allowed in or out. As the most important military base in the vicinity of New York – only 50 miles down the Hudson River – it seemed reasonable to academy brass that the 4,400 Army officers-in-training might have made an appealing target to would be attackers. The rest of the day was filled with anxiety over what might come next.

“This is gonna be our Pearl Harbor,” was a typical remark heard on campus that day. Other cadets noted it might turn out to be the greatest loss of American life since Antietam. And whether it was said or not, all of us were thinking the same thing: “This is going to mean war.” In our first three years at school, that was a thought none of us had had to seriously confront. Now it was a certainty.

A couple of days later, academy officials held a Taps Vigil for the still-unknown number of victims in New York. Until September 11, these somber ceremonies were reserved exclusively for members of the Corps of Cadets who died while enrolled. It was the highest honor a cadet could receive.

At 11:30 on Thursday night, thousands of us cadets quietly filed onto the pitch-black apron facing Constitution Island across the broad Hudson River. We stood at attention in our Dress Gray uniforms and stared out into the blackness as the ghostly sound of Taps echoed across the plain. Then a lone set of bagpipes played the longing notes of Amazing Grace before we joined together to sing the West Point alma mater.

…And when our work is done,
Our course on earth is run,
May it be said, “Well done,
Be thou at peace”…

Every year, on the anniversary of 9/11, I reflect on that episode in my life. It was a period when the naïve prism through which I viewed the world and my future was shattered all at once by an act of barbarism I still cannot grasp.

This year, observing the eighth anniversary of the attacks from Afghanistan – within kilometers of where Bin Laden and Al Qaeda hatched their evil plan – my memories of that day and my subsequent experiences are particularly lucid. For the rest of my time at West Point, I had lamented that my classmates and I would miss our chance at war. I thought that the vengeance exacted by the U.S. Army on Al Qaeda would be over long before we graduated the next June.

I was wrong.

Over the next decade, my life would be inexorably connected to the events of that day. I have spent most of my twenties either at war or preparing for it. Eighteen months after graduation, I invaded Iraq at the “tip of the spear” with the 3rd Infantry Division. For the next year I would take part in “support and stability operations” there. Later in 2005 I deployed for another year to Ar Ramadi, which by the summer of 2006 had become a cauldron of violence so deadly it was considered the most dangerous place on earth. I was only 21 years old on 9/11, and I’ll turn 30 here in Afghanistan. It’s difficult for me to fathom that this cursed war will ever end.

But my travails are nothing compared to the sacrifices of many of my West Point classmates and comrades. To date, my class has lost nine officers fighting in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The most recent notification came to me just a week after I was recalled to duty. In February, Brian “Bubba” Bunting, a fellow civil engineer who was in my Steel Design class on the morning of Sept. 11, was killed by a roadside bomb in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Like me, Bubba had been recalled from the Individual Ready Reserve to serve another tour of duty. Buried in Arlington National Cemetery, Bubba left behind a wife and infant son.

Drew Jensen was paralyzed from the neck down when in May 2007 a sniper shot him in the neck in Baqubah, Iraq. He had been trying to save one of his soldiers who was pinned behind a Humvee after a bomb exploded. From his hospital bed in Fort Lewis, Washington, Drew donated $10,000 to Walter Reed Army Medical Center to establish a fund to help families cover expenses while visiting their wounded loved ones. Then on Sept. 7, 2007, honoring his final request, Drew’s wife and mother took him off life support. He was 27.

On March 10, 2008, just before I finished up graduate school, Torre Mallard was killed when a roadside bomb struck his vehicle outside Balad, Iraq. I didn’t know Torre personally, but his is the only funeral of a service member I have attended. It was something I had to do. I suppose it was my way of paying respects to all the veterans who in this war have made the ultimate sacrifice.

On that cold, windy day at the end of winter, Molly and I made the hour-long drive to West Point from Manhattan. The simple service was held in the Old Cadet Chapel. A larger one with Torre’s family had been held back in Alabama days before. This was just one final farewell before Torre was buried among other members of the Long Gray Line.

The cemetery at West Point is an open air museum featuring some of America’s great historical characters. Indian fighters, Civil War generals, architects and astronauts make up some of the 7,000 graduates interred on the sleepy promontory overlooking the Hudson. George Custer, Winfield Scott and Ed White all occupy plots, which have been carefully groomed for decades. But the majority of those buried there are not giants of American lore.

In the northeast section of the cemetery, discolored patches of grass stretch from gravestones of every style, from soft white marble to mirrored granite. Freshly laid wreaths, bright American flags and potted flowers give the impression that those buried in this section arrived recently and all at once. Here lay the members of modern West Point classes killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. This exposed fringe of the cemetery overlooks a parking lot, a gas station and a small strip mall with a Subway and a coffee shop. It’s as if West Point expanded the burial ground in haste, unprepared for the sudden return of its sons and daughters in flag-draped coffins.

Just before Torre was laid to rest, I held Molly’s hand tightly as seven rifles barked three times in unison. Then the familiar sound of Taps filled the air. Standing there, I thought about the terrible price America has paid in avenging the deaths of the 3,000 lost in the towers. Today, the wars’ toll is more than 5,000 dead and counting. Tens of thousands more have been wounded – my friend, Scott Smiley, among them.

The last time I saw Scott was graduation day in 2002. A member of the class of 2003, Scott had one more year to go, so I shook his hand and wished him well. I lost touch with Scott after that and heard nothing more about him until one day in 2007 when I came across his name in the news. He’d been named “Soldier of the Year” by the Army Times.

In April 2005, while leading his platoon on a patrol in Mosul, Iraq, a suspicious truck approached Scott’s vehicle. The truck got to within 30 yards of the formation, and Scott fired two warning shots to ward the driver off. But it was too late. A suicide bomber was the last thing Scott ever saw. Shrapnel from the blast sliced through his eyes, blinding him for life.

Scott was one of the finer men I had met in my years in the service. He was the kind of officer destined for greatness, cut from the very fabric of which generals are made. Focused and driven, he would spend hours in the gym at West Point, fine-tuning his intimidating frame. Devoutly Christian, Scott derived his self-discipline from God, he said. He was kind and thoughtful, even to plebes. And I imagine he was the same way with his men. Even before he graduated, Scott was eager to join the infantry. His ultimate goal was to eventually become a Green Beret like his older brother before him.

That would, of course, never happen. Yet despite his wounds, Scott surprised even those who knew him best. He petitioned the Army to let him stay in uniform, and with the help of a general, Scott’s unlikely wish was granted. Since then, he’s toured the Army giving motivational speeches about leadership, faith and perseverance in the face of tremendous adversity. He continues to run, surf and ski. In 2006, he even climbed Mount Rainier. Scott eventually went on to earn an MBA from Duke University and is now teaching a course on leadership at West Point.

“I started to understand that there is something greater than me and there is something better than me,” Scott told a reporter in 2007. “A lot of times, when someone goes through trials and adversities and still manages to have a positive outlook on life and still worships God like I did before, it motivates people.”

That was the Scott I knew. At a time in America when there are few heroes – indeed, few good leaders – people like Scott and Bubba and Drew and Torre remind me that although it was devastating, all was not lost when the towers came down on 9/11. No matter what your stance on the war may be, the fact is that almost a decade since that horrifying day, American men and women continue to fight and sometimes die for ideals greater than themselves.

I am humbled to serve among them.

To the fallen members of the West Point Class of 2002: "Well done. Be thou at peace."

Little Luxuries

2009-08-30T17:22:00.005-04:00

By Matt

It was late in Germany, about 2a.m., when the last of our buses rocked up the curb into a dimly lit parking lot on post. Were it not for the glistening beads of water on their brass instruments I might not have noticed the six-soldier military band shivering in the light winter rain. The band had been ordered to greet our returning battalion with a short military tune, which they sloppily belted out before hopping in their cars and driving away.

It was all the Army could muster that night, and it would be our only welcome home. The date was Dec. 10, 2003. I’d just spent the previous year as a platoon leader in Iraq.

As our bus rumbled away, I shook hands with fellow officers and NCOs whom I’d gotten to know on the deployment. Many of them had become my close friends. As they all went home to wives and children or just cozy flats in the town’s medieval center, I hauled my ruck sack and duffle bag about 200 meters from the parking lot to my assigned room.

Almost a year earlier, in January of the same year, I’d arrived there in the Bavarian town of Bamberg, home station for the 54th Engineer Battalion. I hadn’t had time to find an apartment before the unit was shipped off to the Middle East, so I’d been ordered to drop my bags in a dingy suite of the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters on post.

It took several tries before I found the right key. Then with a click and a kick, the door swung wide. I fumbled in the dark for the light switch. Once I found it, the room flickered for a moment, and a low electric hum joined a fluorescent glow.

The stillness was frightening. The bed’s ruffled sheets indicated the haste with which I had vacated the room on my way to war. Scattered from wall to wall were empty cardboard boxes and other military gear. The tilted refrigerator held a solitary can of Mountain Dew. Everything was exactly as I’d left it, as if I had never even been gone.

I was mesmerized by the silence. It reminded me of how lonely I had felt on arriving in Germany that bitter cold January. During my ensuing year of combat, I would go on to make the best friends of my life. But standing here again in the doorway of this transient room, I was overwhelmed by a crushing sense of isolation.

I didn’t sleep that first night. Indeed, to be back in Europe – in civilization – the idea of combat seemed unreal: the sandstorms and explosions, the stench of rotting flesh and human waste, sleepless nights in the backs of Humvees along the mosquito-plagued Euphrates. Had all of it really happened?

Several weeks passed before I became reaccustomed to the details of “normal life.” Words can’t describe the disorientation felt after a year at war. It’s impossible to explain how every little luxury is amplified a thousand times: the taste of a cold dark beer, the sight of a beautiful woman or the light crunch of virgin snow beneath one’s boot. After Iraq, every one of these otherwise mundane experiences made my heart glow. I felt born again, and my appreciation for tiny wonders never wore off. On some level, I don’t think it ever will.

Returning to Iraq for my second tour in late 2005, I again encountered this bizarre detachment from my life, this time in reverse. There was still the familiar revulsion to the sights and smells of Iraq, which bridged the two-year interim I’d spent living and traveling in Europe. As my tour in Ramadi marched into the summer of 2006, the authenticity of the world outside began to feel distorted, illusory. With rockets and bombings and ghastly violence a fact of life for my unit, my time in Germany seemed nothing more than an oasis of privilege in life’s cruel expanse.

Looking back now, it felt as if I were two separate men living two separate lives. These men shared a common past but lost touch at age 23, when one went off to war, and the other preferred not to think about it. Over the years these men would briefly cross paths. But they began to recognize each other less and less. Before long, as far as they both were concerned, the other’s life was mere fantasy.

***

I have now been in Afghanistan for the better part of three months. By the time I get home next spring, I will have spent three years – 10 percent of my life – at war. When I was recalled to the Army in February, I made a promise to myself that this time, no matter what, I would not allow my new life – my work as a journalist in New York, the freedom I’d come to enjoy as a civilian, my growing love for Molly – to slip away. And it hasn’t – in part because of Molly, who has kept me anchored to a life I long to continue.

During quiet hours at night here in Afghanistan I often sit outside, alone under the stars. The Milky Way, which streaks across a broad swath of the sky here, is visible even on nights when the moon is bright. And each evening, without fail, a shooting star arcs silently through the blackness, flung as if from another world. It reminds me that there is a life waiting for me outside this place.

I sit there, and I remember the chilly day that Molly and I spent riding our bikes through the ritzy neighborhoods of the Hamptons, imagining what it would be like if we were filthy rich. I remember the weekend before I deployed when she and I defiled the Cajun two-step on a dance floor in Acadiana. My favorite memory, though, is when I brought Molly to Bamberg last summer, when she came to visit as I was working as an intern reporter at BusinessWeek’s Paris bureau.

For months, I’d wanted to show Molly the place I had called home for almost five years. I knew it wasn’t her notion of fun, but this trip was for me. I’d been out of the Army just over a year, and the ties to my old life were still strong. I was confused about who I was becoming, where life was taking me. I needed Molly to see for herself the backdrop against which I underwent the most intense changes in my psychological development. I thought if she could see where I’d come from, she might understand better who I really was.

Molly went begrudgingly, preferring the idea of late dinners in Montmartres to beer and bratwurst at rowdy German breweries. I think she also was nervous about how her perception of me might change when she was finally confronted with my military past. But after a week of morning runs near millennium-old castles and window shopping along the cobblestone alleys of one of Bavaria’s quaintest cities, she was happy. I was, too. I’d taken a risk in bringing her there, since our relationship was still fragile and my volatile years in this city still evoked unpredictable emotions.

But with that visit I introduced one profound period of my life to another. It was difficult, but helped me to realize that living is not simply a collection of disparate events. None of them can be canceled out when memories are unpleasant, especially not my years of war. Rather, it is in the juxtaposition of the good with the bad that I am able to find greater meaning in it all.

On our final night in Bamberg, as the sun’s last rays blinked out beyond the city’s main cathedral, Molly and I drank kellerbier outside at a hilltop brewery overlooking the town. I considered the scene: good cold German beer, a beautiful woman. Only the snow was missing.

I told Molly that I could live in a place like this with her for the rest of my life. I knew that my sentiments were intensified by lingering memories of war's deprivations. Yet in that instant, I thought about how lucky I was that I would never have to go back.

Letters

2009-08-23T13:23:00.008-04:00

By Molly

On Wednesday evening I talked to Matt on Skype. The presidential elections were to take place the next day, and he was mentally preparing for some action. It was close to 1 a.m. in Afghanistan, and I could see that the lights in his empty office were dim. The night so far had been quiet, he said. But it was expected that the base would be attacked before morning. Matt was surprised it hadn’t happened yet.

“If we’re attacked I’m going to have to suit up immediately and go to the bunker,” he warned. I could see his rifle balanced on the table behind him. “Just so you know,” he told me. “Just so you’re prepared.”

“OK,” I said.

His evening was still calm when we hung up. But I spent the rest of the day on edge.

I get my news of Afghanistan in real time these days. I read the newspaper every morning, but that feels increasingly like an afterthought. Matt and I are lucky to speak often, and I know basically what is going on. Usually I appreciate this. I like to be in the know. It makes me feel more in control.

Other times, I don’t like it at all.

I hate getting emails from Matt like the one I got on an afternoon while in France. The subject line read: “I am OK.” He told me about an attack that had just happened near his base; he told me about the close call, the deaths that could have been his own. Twenty-four hours later, I calmly read about it in the paper.

I immediately bristled at the e-mail from Matt that I read on my phone one morning a few weeks ago. I was on my way to a meeting in Manhattan, walking quickly past Union Square. The note read: “we just got mortared and rocketed. two of three hit the camp. no one was hurt, though, thank god.” I paused on the sidewalk as the significance of the words sank in, my vision blurred for a moment. I wasn’t quite sure how to react. But I was late for my appointment, so I kept moving, and hastily typed back: “oh man, scary. i don't know if i love or hate knowing everything that goes on there in real time. makes me feel quite shaky.”

I did want to know. I wanted that small wisp of control. But at the same time, it’s the knowing that slams my utter lack of control against my face at regular intervals throughout the day. There is absolutely nothing I can do. I’m unable to influence a thing. The worry nips at my heels constantly and there’s nothing I can do but keep moving.

I often think about what war was like for those left behind before the rise of technology. Before the Internet. How would I have dealt with Matt’s deployment without the ability to talk to him everyday on Skype? Without regular e-mails? Without this blog? I wonder what it would be like if the newspaper was all I had.

I spent a while today on the web, looking up letters that soldiers had written home during the first and second world wars. I drank tea and ate a peach and read letters from soldiers to wives or girlfriends, parents and siblings and friends. I found many sweet ones that declared an earnest, everlasting love. Some expressed an intense desire to know what was happening with family and friends in their absence. Others tried to explain what was on their minds—the fear, the danger, the unknown. And a few tried to detail what they were going through, with varying degrees of success. Many had been censored of much detail and immediacy.

These letters were all received by mothers and fathers and girlfriends in the past tense. They were all composed about events after the fact. They were sealed in envelopes and in transit for weeks and months before finally arriving at their destination. The dialogue between a couple in love, for example, could take seasons to move. Relationships, it seems, were suspended in time.

In Ian McEwan’s Atonement, a beautiful novel about love and loss, memory and forgiveness, a couple is separated by World War II. The woman writes a letter to her lover. It ends: “I love you. I’ll wait for you. Come back.” Then, there was nothing else she could do.

Part of me is jealous. It would be so much easier to get through the day without knowing, without frequently checking my e-mail or my iPhone news applications to see what could go wrong. But, I remind myself, my relationship with Matt continues to evolve on a daily basis now. It has expanded with the shared burden of separation.

On that Wednesday night before the elections, I had an interview to do in Manhattan. It was a hot and sticky evening and I got home late, around 11. As I walked to my apartment from the subway, it began to rain. Wild bursts of thunder startled me. Lightning filled the sky. It was violent weather. Over 50o trees fell in Central Park. But I was tired and worried and went right to bed. I slept deeply, dreamless. I woke up to an e-mail from Matt.

“Things are surprisingly OK,” he said about the progress of the elections. “But it’s not over yet.”

The Other Side of the Wall

2009-08-15T16:34:00.019-04:00

By Matt

"Afghanistan's elections present an opportunity for the country's citizens to create a future of prosperity and peace for their children.” – LTG Karl W. Eikenberry, U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan

"There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state to another.” – Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

Tuesday, August 11, began like many others. I woke at 6:30a.m. and banged around in the still-dark barracks, a narrow-beamed headlamp my only guide. I clumsily kicked my legs into a clean set of uniform pants, then fished around for the fire-retardant gloves and ballistic sunglasses that would be required for the day’s mission. Once I’d suited up – helmet, armor and all – I stepped out into the bright morning sun and headed to the assembly area.

Earlier the previous day I’d caught wind of a planned foot patrol through an Afghan village that hugged our base’s southwest wall. It was to be the first of several planned patrols through the village, and I volunteered to record the event for posterity. After all, I don’t have the chance to get out much. This seemed like a good way to become acquainted with our less fortunate neighbors. Or maybe I just miss being a reporter on assignment. Either way, it was a welcome break.

Called “Kuchi Village” by the soldiers here on base, the collection of mud and straw structures next door is more a squatter settlement than an organized municipal entity. (Despite some of their claims to the contrary, the residents of Kuchi Village are not affiliated with actual Kuchis, who are nomadic herdsmen that annually traverse the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in search of seasonal grazing land.) As recently as five years ago nothing existed in the space that the settlement now occupies. But as the joint American-Afghan army base here has grown, so too has Kuchi Village, like barnacles on wet wood.

The village’s residents were and continue to be lured to the base by the prospect of steady work. For a few dollars a day they clean latrines and construct barracks needed for the ever-increasing influx of soldiers here. As a result, Kuchi Village’s population has ballooned to an alarming 2,500 by latest estimates, a stunning number given the slum’s abhorrent living conditions. Our patrol that day was an attempt to survey the infrastructure – there is none – and to project some sense of security to the people who live, work and sleep right outside our gate.

So after test-firing our rifles at the local shooting range, we Americans awaited a rendezvous with our Afghan army counterparts who would join us on the patrol. As we loitered on a hillside adjacent to the base I spent a few minutes by myself taking pleasure in the opportunity to finally be outside away from my desk. Dry, barbed grass, crunched beneath my boots. Lizards scurried away as I paced about in the dirt. I miss simple pleasures like this: the freedom to roam along a dusty mountain road, unhindered by barbed wire and guard towers. When you live in a world of electrical generators and gravel, just the sight of prickly desert vegetation has a way of lifting the spirit.

The desert hills reminded me of my impromptu trip to Argentina with Molly a few months ago. Soon after I’d gotten the call to return to duty we’d thrown together a plan for a short vacation – destination: Anywhere.

“Let’s go somewhere neither of us have ever been,” I said, as we spun the world around like a top on Google Earth.

“Let’s go somewhere where it’s summer,” Molly added. Excellent idea, I thought.

In Argentina we spent several days exploring the villages and vineyards of the country’s arid northwest. On one particularly hot day we’d ridden rented bicycles up a punishing mountain road, far above the provincial wine town of Cafayate where we were staying. When we could go no further we dropped our bikes next to a stone wall in a vineyard overlooking the one-time Spanish garrison. We collapsed on a covered stone well in the shade of a solitary tree and had a picnic of salami, goat cheese and fresh bread. For dessert we ate sweet Malbec grapes that I’d broken off a vine nearby.

“You can’t do that,” Molly had told me as I gnawed at the stiff stem.

“What are they going to do to me?” I replied, looking up at her. “Send me to Afghanistan?” Molly just shook her head and laughed.

That was in March. But it felt like another lifetime.

Now, I sat down on a large rock, my M4 rifle resting across my knees. A gentle breeze carried away the sounds of distant gunfire. Then my eyes turned to the west, and I strained to get a view of the mud hovels that made up Kuchi Village below. From my vantage point it looked tiny and deserted.

“I don’t see how twenty-five hundred people can even live in there,” I said out loud to one in particular.

“But they do,” chimed the battalion sergeant major, as he thumbed a wad of tobacco into his lower lip and spit.

I brought my arms across my knees and rested my chin. How miserable, I thought.

I was eager to see the settlement up close. Many years have passed since I was a young lieutenant leading similar patrols in communities along the Euphrates River in Iraq. In the weeks since I’d arrived in Gardez I had formed an image of Kuchi Village that mirrored the poor but functioning villages of rural Iraq. Until Tuesday morning, the only interaction I’d had with the “Kuchis” involved rocks hurled over the wall at me by children, a typical response to refused demands for candy and chocolate.

As we began our patrol down a long dirt path toward the village, 10 or so children were alerted to our presence by a herd of goats that swarmed our formation. As the children careened toward us down the hill, I noticed they were smothered from head to toe in dirt, just as they probably were most of the time. We ignored them, however, and continued to a row of low-slung mud huts that formed the settlement’s southern boundary. Then we paused for a moment for one last personnel check before continuing on.

What I encountered in Kuchi Village shocked me to the core. Hundreds of filthy children played in trash-filled courtyards that were concealed from the road by torn, dirty linens that swayed in the wind. Women reflexively darted into the nearest entryways to avoid the scrutiny of soldiers’ wandering eyes. As we walked I was taken aback by the pervasive stench of animal and human excrement, a dried mix of which littered the village’s dirt roads. A dead chicken that looked as if it had been crushed by a passing car lay rotting in the sun, its blood-soaked feathers and bulging eyes providing a temporary feast for dozens of flies. Plastic wrappers and soda cans floated in gray, fetid water that filled huge potholes in the alleyways. Beyond one wall I caught a glimpse of a mother washing an infant boy in a metal bucket with water of the same color.

I have witnessed extreme poverty many times in various parts of the world – in the Indian villages of northern Argentina, in the gypsy encampments of Romania’s Carpathian Mountains and in the isolated desert towns of Iraq. But this was a level of squalor I had never seen. It made Iraq look like Western Europe, I thought. There was something almost Biblical about it. I imagined that invading armies from the Greeks to the Mongols to the British must have been greeted with images not unlike this one. Only now, people had cell phones.

After about half an hour we at last came to the end of the narrow road. Here the village opened up into a dirt-filled space enclosed by a couple of small stores selling bare necessities. To the left sat a squat brown mosque. With broken windows and pile of cinder blocks out front, it was distinguishable as a place of worship only by two loudspeakers elevated by a pole cut from raw poplar wood.

We chatted for 15 minutes or so with some adults in the village who had greeted us with caution. Their chief complaint was the lack of clean water available to them for cooking and bathing. The mosque, too, was inadequate, they said. As we talked children swarmed the gathering. They competed for our attention, yelling and shoving one another. At one point during the commotion a disheveled, black-haired man stumbled by the assembled group showing no apparent interest in our visit. With a wild, bushy beard and popping eyes, I thought he bore a terrifying resemblance to a mug shot of Charles Manson.

“How do you like that?” one soldier said to me smiling. “They have their very own Grizzly Adams.”

I thought the man must be the village idiot, judging by the laughter of several children who were amused at our reaction. “He is crazy man,” a boy said in English as his friends curiously inspected my gear. I remembered to button my back pocket, where my wallet might be easy pickings for a quick-handed thief. But I felt sorry for the man and for these children to whom such disturbing scenes were a normal part of life.

Soon, our mission complete, I and the other soldiers headed back to base where a hardy lunch and a hot shower awaited us. Just before we crossed through the steel gate I turned back for one last look at Kuchi Village. The women had emerged from hiding and were again moving briskly down the crumbling streets. They balanced red plastic jugs, presumably filled with water, atop their covered heads. The jugs were similar to the kind I once used to fill the family lawn mower with gasoline each summer as a boy.

Then oddly, I was seized by other childhood recollections. Of muggy New Orleans summers when I would ride my bike barefoot along the banks of the Mississippi. Of eating pina colada snowballs on the curb of a quiet, oak tree-lined street. And of barbecues and fireworks on the Fourth of July. I felt privileged to have such memories of my youth, of a classic American upbringing.

As I marched quietly back to my room on base I thought about the children of Kuchi Village. Disease, hunger and fear will surely plague them for much of their young lives. The Afghan national elections next week are being promoted as an opportunity to bring democracy, and with it prosperity, to this sorrowful land. But what chance do they really have? When they become my age - if they make it that far - what memories will they cling to?

Hidden Treasures

2009-08-11T14:47:00.003-04:00

By Molly

I walked up the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sunday morning around 11. It was hot and humid. The sky hinted of rain. I was there with my brother, a commercial real estate broker who lives in Manhattan, and my mom and her boyfriend, Charley, who had come to the city for a weekend visit. We had just finished breakfast across the street at Café Sabarsky: soft boiled eggs and brioche toast, cappuccinos and orange juice.

As we approached the museum I noticed a large sign hanging down its front: AFGHANISTAN, it read.

It announced an exhibition that I had heard nothing about. Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul. I was surprised, and pleased. I had planned an hour or two of wandering among the Monets and Rodins, maybe the Egyptian mummies or the collection of arms and full sets of armor. But this seemed fitting.

We entered the dark chain of rooms constituting the show and were immediately greeted with a large map of the country. “There it is,” said Charley, pointing toward the middle of the map. Gardez.

We walked slowly through the displays beyond, which held the collection of art that had been found in boxes in the presidential bank vault in Kabul in 2003. The works had been bravely rescued and hidden by National Museum workers fourteen years before, as civil war raged around them. “A country can stay alive when its culture and history stay alive,” said one man in the accompanying documentary.

The show had little to do with the Afghanistan of today. There were no images of American soldiers, no camouflage or newspaper headlines. There were small pieces of ancient buildings, softly lit, delicate carved rock. There was a statue of a man, standing proud despite the years of wear and war that have left cavernous marks across his face. Pictures of the Afghan landscape filled the walls: Rolling dunes and craggy mountains, men with camels and turbans, lots of sand.

In the final room of the exhibition there were cases of gold jewelry that had been found buried with women from the 1^st-century nomadic population of Tillya Tepe. There were thick gold ankle bracelets and delicate baubles meant to dangle from the hair. Earrings and necklaces, sparkling and symmetrical.

The beauty of the work there surprised me. Despite hearing Matt’s tales of the gems he’s found at the bazaar, I have had a hard time imagining anything pretty in that war torn country. I have a hard time imagining a history there that is anything but violent and lonely.

But there was a crown perched behind a plate of glass right before the exit. It was made of thin gold leaves, delicate and layered, a shimmering honey-hued tower. It was so beautiful I couldn’t help but reach out my fingers towards its case. I wanted to feel it. I wanted to make sure it was real.

A Day at the Bazaar

2009-08-06T20:04:00.014-04:00

By Matt

Every Saturday and Sunday an otherwise empty corner of our camp, which is enclosed by sand-filled blast barriers and coiled razor wire, comes to life. Beginning at 8 o’clock in the morning, about 20 local tradesmen and their sons, brothers and cousins filter into the quarantined quad to set up. Within an hour, canvas canopies hover atop four vertical poles to provide shade throughout the hot afternoon. Beneath them, white-clothed tables bow under the weight of a litany of wares. By noon, blue smoke billows from a nearby grill, where kabobs of mutton, rice and raisins sell like chilidogs at a county fair.

Such bazaars are common on other US installations here in eastern Afghanistan, but ours is considered among the best. Hand-made antique jewelry, oil lamps, Persian rugs, and tsarist-era Russian bank notes are displayed next to bootlegged DVDs and knock-off Rolexes. Wearing US government ID badges and speaking just enough English to turn a profit, the vendors who sell their merchandise are part of a program that, intended or not, does three things well: it introduces soldiers to Afghan culture, provides relief from the seven-day work week and injects American dollars into the local economy. Thousands of them each weekend.

I wandered into the market Sunday morning with no other purpose than to get away from the desk where I’d worked virtually 18 hours a day for the last six weeks. I needed to clear my head.

***

This isn’t the deployment I expected. The stress of that realization has been weighing heavily on me. It’s not that I have it bad; many others have it far worse. But I’ve been literally working myself sick. I’ve gradually cut out activities that ordinarily bring me joy, like reading books or going on long runs. Until Saturday night, I hadn’t spoken to my parents in three weeks. Worst of all, I’ve been neglectful of Molly, who just ended a trip to southern France where she spent two weeks reporting for her book. It sounds nice, but Molly dealt more with the stress of gathering information than enjoying blue-water beaches. She needed me, and I haven’t been there.

On Saturday night, it all came crashing down. I’d just finished an uninspired blog post, a big ideas piece on who pays attention to war, which I sent to Molly for editing. The moment I hit SEND, I knew I’d made a mistake.

“i don't know,” Molly replied in an e-mail not long afterward. “i am obviously biased, but it seems odd to me, balance wise, that i'm pouring my heart out on the blog and you aren't even mentioning my existence. which, i KNOW, you aren't doing purposefully.”

The point was made, and Molly was right. From the get-go, this blog was not meant to be about me. I wanted it to be about us. By chronicling our parallel experiences during this deployment, the blog was meant to examine what challenges couples who are separated by war endure.

Feeling guilty, I called my parents. They were on vacation at their small summer home in Johnson City, Tennessee. We made small talk at first. My father asked about the weather, as he always does. (“It’s hot, Dad. I’m in the desert.”). My mother told me that my recent piece in Columbia Journalism Review was enjoyed by the family and friends to whom they’d forwarded it.

Other things weighed on my mind, however. Once I’d worked up the courage, I told my mother that my West Point ring had been stolen a week earlier in the camp’s shower facility. The ring had been my most precious possession. I’d worn it uninterrupted for the last seven years, including both tours in Iraq. For a week I’d searched all over camp, posting fliers, asking after it, brooding about it for hours. But it was gone.

Almost as soon as I mentioned it, my mother burst into tears.

“No, Matt. Not your ring!” my mother said through sobs. “I can’t take it.”

The loss had been devastating enough. Now, I was crushed to hear my mother’s reaction. It revealed to me in an instant that the worry my parents were experiencing over my current deployment was more deep-rooted than they’d let on. Overwhelmed, my throat turned to wood.

“It’s OK, Mom. I can get another one,” I said, my voice quivering. Then, trying to reassure her as much as myself, I said blandly, “Don’t worry, the insurance should cover it.” But it wouldn’t. Nothing could. It was priceless.

I’ve only been in Afghanistan for six weeks. But between Molly’s sense of abandonment, the theft of my ring and my parents’ distress, Saturday night was a low point.

***

When I woke up Sunday, I needed an escape, if only for a morning. And what better place to do that than a genuine Afghan bazaar, a curious anachronism on an otherwise dull Army outpost.

I was immediately accosted at the market gate by three men who tugged at my uniform and beckoned me to their stations. “Captain Mabe, please sir, won’t you come see my movies?” “Captain Mabe, sir, you need sunglasses, sir.” “Captain Mabe, you need rug? I have beautiful Afghan rug.”

“No, thank you,” I said assertively, parrying one of their hands off my sleeve, “just looking.”

I was in no mood to be yanked around.

“But, sir, you must…"

“No!…Thank you! I’m not interested,” I shouted. My reaction surprised even me, and I felt worse.

Once free, I came immediately upon a middle-aged Afghan man lying prostrate on a tattered rug and swatting away flies. He kept bored watch over his table, which was covered in gold jewelry and loose gems common in this part of the world. Still frustrated and upset from the night before, I couldn’t help but imagine this sweaty man with rotting teeth stooped over an open flame, smelting a fat gold West Point ring down to its natural elements. In my vision he smiled, delighted at his fortune. “You got my ring didn’t you, you sly son of a bitch?” I wanted to say. It was easier than accepting my own neglectfulness.

What is wrong with me? I asked myself. This is not how I am. I took a moment to regain my composure. I was ashamed at my callousness, and I scolded myself. Forget the goddamn ring, Matt. Get over it. No matter what it meant, there are worse things. Just try and enjoy yourself.

I took a deep breath and continued through the bazaar. I was amused by the eclectic mix of artifacts and kitsch that were displayed like so much junk at a Louisiana yard sale. It must have taken a lifetime to collect all this stuff, I thought. Armed U.S. soldiers chatted or haggled with merchants dressed in the traditional garb that their ancestors have worn for generations. One soldier handed over two sweat-soaked twenties for a tarnished silver amulet. The object was encrusted with a bright blue chunk of lapis lazuli, a native Afghan rock that has been mined here for some 6,000 years.

I ran my fingers along wooden muskets and brass-handled sabers decorated with the elaborate, swirling calligraphy of Arabia. I fondled pieces of money imprinted with the likeness of Alexander, or at least cheap tin replicas of them. Suddenly, my eyes were drawn to a bejeweled chain-link belt and matching headdress. Each was studded with sparkling red and blue gems and sagged under the weight of tasseled medallions.

I held it up to the light, and it jangled in the soft summer breeze. My thoughts wandered to Molly, as they often do throughout each day. I wondered how she might look adorned with this intricate treasure, the coins dangling across her forehead. I laughed under my breath.

“Seventy dollars for the set!” said a merchant selling them as he approached.

“No,” I replied reflexively, without looking him in the eye. “I don’t have any need for this.”

“Sixty.”

“No,” I said, sternly. But as he turned away, I hesitated. “Well…what are they?”

He must have anticipated this, because he spun back around. “They worn by Kuchi woman. Very beautiful,” the man said smiling.

“Yes.” They were.

I’d read about the Kuchis recently and was intrigued. Nomadic Pashtun herdsmen, the Kuchis have for centuries made an annual migration across what is now the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. An insular, superstitious people not unlike the gypsies of Europe, they observe a mystical form of Islam and are generally despised and ignored by their Afghan neighbors.

I imagined what it would be like to live such an existence. Constantly on the move, they are a nation without a homeland, with only one another to rely on. What did the idea of home even mean to such people?

Where was home for me? I asked myself. Who do I rely on?

I had struggled with these questions many times over the last few years, but they now seemed so simple. The answer to both of course was Molly. Having moved myself five times in two years across three continents, Molly has been the only constant in my life. She has kept me grounded, connected somehow to a comforting if ethereal notion of home. Molly has been a rock.

And she is what matters most right now. Not the work, which will mean little in seven months. Not the ring, which can be replaced. What’s important is that I do better at letting Molly know how much she means to me, how I couldn’t do this without her, how everything reminds me of her. Even the most exotic oriental headwear from a far-off desert land.

Photos by Master Sergeant Ronald J. Raflik

Here

2009-07-30T00:59:00.005-04:00

By Molly

On Saturday morning I took the train from Grasse, a small town in southeastern France, to nearby Antibes, which buzzes with beaches and bikinis on the Cote d’Azure. I walked through the cobblestoned streets and bought a small tub of raspberries from a market where vendors sold ripe rounds of cheese and crusty baguettes. I spent time in the Picasso Museum, which is housed in a chateau overlooking the sea. Later, I walked along the beach, sinking my feet into the Mediterranean and shielding my eyes from the sun. I felt very far from New York.

As I write, I have been in France for a week and a half and will remain for a few days more. I’m here for work, researching and reporting on the sense of smell for the book on the subject that I am in the midst of writing. I’m here to attend an intensive course on smell at the Grasse Institute of Perfumery.

Perfume school, I’ve found, is both fascinating and odd. Ten of us students sit in a sunlit classroom up on the hill overlooking Grasse and, for nine hours a day, we smell things. We’ve smelled a few perfumes and colognes, but mainly we smell raw materials, the building blocks of fragrance. They have poetic names like benzoin, opoponax and cistus. Some are familiar, like lemon or patchouli. Others, like floralozone or cis 3 hexenyl acetate, are completely new. Each scent, carefully sniffed and studied and dissected in class, brings new memories, new images and associations, all of which dance somewhere beyond my eyelids with each inhale. I arrive home each evening exhausted.

***

I wrote the first three paragraphs of this post, above, on Monday evening this week, when my head ached with the vestiges of synthetic aromas and all I wanted was a glass of wine. I wrote much more, too: about France, about Antibes and about school. I described the scent of the ocean, and a salad I ate for lunch. I wrote about my life purely in this moment, which was a challenge in this blog’s context, but Matt and I had talked about where we want this to go, and agreed that I can’t write only about missing him and about being afraid every time that I sit down to type. I am here, and he is far, and there is more to my present than anxiety and love. But as soon as I sent him a draft of my post, I immediately wanted to erase it all.

“Are you sure you don’t want this blog to be just for you?” I asked him over Skype.

I reread what I had written. I felt silly. I felt inadequate. I felt very guilty. How can I write about my day in France when Matt is risking his life in Afghanistan?

Matt and I talked about it a lot on Tuesday night. We went back and forth, back and forth. I felt confused. He even emailed a former professor to ask her opinion. She wrote:

I understand Molly's concern. I don't think it's self-indulgent to describe her day, but I understand why she might feel that way. But the fact is you're in two different worlds trying to stay together at a distance. It is that aching gulf that people will most respond to. It's heart breaking and it's what drives a lot of couples apart but you are determined to stay together.

The aching gulf. I repeated that phrase to myself throughout the next day. It rings true.

The gulf between Matt and I, and perhaps others in a similar situation, goes beyond physical distance. It’s a gulf that picks at values and at honesty, at raw emotion, especially fear. It’s a gulf that brings some feelings bubbling to the surface and keeps others buried under layers of guilt. It’s a gulf that can be accentuated by daily routines and by small problems, by the often-burning question: how can I compare my life to his when I am not risking my own?

I don’t know how to address these feelings in my daily life. Not yet, anyway. My first reaction was to stop writing because I was embarrassed. But when Matt and I began this blog, we said it was to illustrate the experience of both fighting a war abroad and of being left behind. I never thought that being here would be so complicated. But, as my mother often tells me, “all you can do is be honest.”

***

So, on Saturday afternoon in Antibes I took myself out to lunch. I sat at a table in an outdoor café, just steps away from the Picasso Museum. It was sunny and hot and I drank a bottle of Perrier through a straw. I ordered a Nicoise Salad: fresh lettuce, hardboiled egg, tuna, green beans, radish, tomato and anchovy. I finished the book that I had begun only that morning on the train—a silly novel on both cooking and love. I sipped an espresso and watched the people walk by. The air smelled of lemon, and of salt. I thought about Matt.

It had taken almost a week before I told anyone in Grasse that I have a boyfriend in Afghanistan. My fellow students are from around the world and our language barriers are at times steep. We don’t talk about war or politics, newspapers or books, family or friends. We generally stick to smell.

But on the Thursday afternoon of my first week, I stood with a classmate from London during our break for lunch. She is a trained aromatherapist and was telling me about her work. She spoke of clients who had experienced shock or pain, and which scents she could use to help. Once a man came in for a massage when she was working in a department store in London, she said. He had asked her to massage his stomach with essential oil. He had been injured there, he told her. He was an American, a soldier, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. She used neroli oil, she explained, “because it’s good for trauma.”

At the end of the massage, she told her client: “You’re a survivor.”

“Yes I am,” he replied.

“I wish I could do more for you,” she said.

When I told her, somewhat awkwardly, that I have a boyfriend who is in Afghanistan right now, she looked taken aback.

“I can’t believe I just told you that story,” she said.

“It’s OK,” I said.

And it was.

Summer's Final Lesson

2009-07-24T14:21:00.005-04:00

By Matt

The rusted blue gate was open when we got there. It was 8:30 in the morning and already hot. A tall, leathery-skinned Pashtun man with deep hazel eyes and a long dark beard waited for us at the entrance. “The headmaster,” my interpreter whispered to me as we approached.

“As-salam alaikum,” the headmaster said, shaking my hand before covering his heart in the Muslim way. “Wa alaikum assalam,” I replied, trying clumsily to find my own heart beneath an armored plate. He smiled at this, then stepped aside. Like a pendulum, his long arm waved us into his sanctuary.

Three buildings and a tree-filled courtyard that made up the school were concealed from the barricaded street by an eight-foot-high crumbling concrete wall. Razor-sharp concertina wire spiraled along the top. On the opposite side of the school’s north wall the provincial police headquarters buzzed with activity. Caddy corner to the school gate, two armed, humorless Afghan soldiers guarded an equally fortified Army medical facility. The school’s enclosure in this military compound was intentional, and it sent a powerful message: Nobody is getting into this place.

For good reason, too. With 1,650 enrolled students, the Halima Khazan Girl’s School is the only institute of learning for girls in Gardez. Across Afghanistan, Taliban militants have been known to beat or kill the headmasters of such schools, chop off the heads of girls who dare attend them or splash acid into their faces, disfiguring them for life. As targets for violence go, the girls at this school are no exception. Such are the challenges facing a brave new Afghanistan, to say nothing of the decadent conditions under which the girls study.

But that was where we came in. I and two of my NCOs, Staff Sergeant Justin Boeck and Master Sergeant Ronald Raflik, had come to the school that morning, backed up by a small security force, to perform a site survey for what should eventually become a NATO-funded refurbishment project. In one section of the schoolyard, the corrugated metal roof of one building had been ripped off in a recent storm and lay crumpled on the ground. Plaster fell from the walls of the main schoolhouse in fist-sized chunks, almost to the touch. The uneven dirt of the schoolyard caused pools of mosquito-infested water to accumulate each spring and sit stagnant for weeks. The problems went on.

As the headmaster continued to dictate, through my interpreter, the school’s litany of problems, I became distracted by significant activity in the schoolyard. Little girls darted gleefully about, laughing and chasing one another around trees and benches. After a few minutes, I couldn’t help but notice that the commotion was meant to draw our attention. How strange we must look to them, I thought. Here we were decked out in helmets, armored vests, sunglasses and automatic rifles in probably the safest place they know. As we continued to walk with the headmaster, I caught the eye of two girls no more than 10 years old sitting under a tree. In unison, they stood up and curtsied. “Salam,” they said with a giggle. It caught me off guard, and I blushed.

Across the schoolyard, about 40 older girls in their teens wearing either white or black headscarves sat facing the same direction in blue plastic chairs, the kind you might find at a backyard barbecue. All of them were hunched over, scribbling furiously in stapled packets of paper they held in their laps. I pulled my interpreter away from the headmaster for a moment and asked him what the girls were doing.

“Dey take final exam,” he said. “Tomorrow dey start vacation, 10 days.” I wondered why they should take a year-end exam outside in the heat like this.

When we finally entered the main schoolhouse, I understood. There was no electricity, the walls were badly damaged, windows were shattered and saucer-sized holes had been punched into doors. This was no place to study. And yet there they were, out in the yard, diligently scrawling answers to their exams as if this were the last thing they would ever get to learn.

I wasn’t supposed to, but as we wrapped up our inspection, I turned to the headmaster and looked him in the eye. “I promise we are going to fix this,” I said. Boeck and Raflik nodded in agreement.

The day before going to Halima Khazan, I’d read Thomas Friedman’s recent column in The New York Times about the importance of our efforts in providing education for Afghan girls. In it Friedman argues that this one good cause in a country mired in misery might just be worth America’s sticking it out a little longer. After seeing the hopefulness in the faces of these girls, I felt the same way.

But later that morning, less than half an hour after we’d left the school to head back to base, suicide bombers disguised as women wearing burqas detonated their vests in that very compound. More than 10 people were killed and several more wounded. When I found out, I trembled at what a close call my soldiers and I had had.

The attacks were soon all over the news. The mention of Gardez as the primary target for the bombings prompted me to shoot a quick e-mail to Molly. “I feel very grateful to be safe right now,” I wrote. “It really makes you think, you know? Anyway, I am OK, and I just wanted you to know. I love you so much.”

Thankfully, no one at the school was physically harmed. I later heard that a government office on the opposite side of the school's west wall was the target. Far enough away for the girls' safety, but close enough to cause plenty of damage, the invisible kind you just can't see.

I don’t presume to understand the depths of fear the mothers of these girls must feel everyday as they send their children off to school, hoping that education will liberate them from the bondage they themselves have endured. And I cannot fathom the courage these children possess. But I like to think that one day their daring individual efforts to build a more just society will pay off. Because hatred, violence and grisly death have plagued this unfortunate little country for far too long.

They deserve a vacation from it all.

Photos by Master Sergeant Ronald J. Raflik

Candy and Care

2009-07-21T13:08:00.000-04:00

By Molly

Matt and I talked on our computers over Skype one night last week. His Internet connection was moving unusually fast—fast enough to connect to video—and, as a result, we saw each other for the first time in a while.

It was late in Afghanistan, close to midnight. Matt sat in his office, which was empty but for a dim light and long gray shadows. He looked tired and unfamiliar in his uniform. I felt almost shy.

It was mid-afternoon where I sat in Brooklyn. My apartment was sunny and bright. I was drinking iced coffee from the bakery down the block; NPR hummed low in the background.

On the computer, Matt showed me his rifle, which was sitting on a cabinet behind him. He took it apart, clicking metal on metal. He showed me an open cardboard box: the package my father and stepmother had sent him from Massachusetts a few weeks before. It had arrived that morning, full of magazines, of cinnamon Altoids, of Oat and Honey granola bars, of chocolate fudge.

It reminded me of summer camp.

When I was in elementary school I went to sleep-away camp every summer. Most years it was one up in Maine, at a bohemian-flavored establishment where I learned how to make pottery on a wheel and walked barefoot until my feet were crackly with calluses. I was shy and developed friendships slowly, often hiding behind either a book or my mane of frizzy hair. I loved when my mother sent me care packages, as they were always filled with fresh novels for distraction, and candy to eat and share with my bunkmates, a giddy reminder of home.

I’ve sent a few packages to Matt in the last month. The first one arrived late last week, after a 17-day voyage. The second left Brooklyn just a few days before. I haven’t really known what to send in these boxes. My only experience with care packages is at camp, when they were deposited into my sunburned arms battered and heavy, addressed in my mother’s spindly handwriting. For Matt, I am mainly working by request: Gillette deodorant, disinfectant hand wipes, reporters’ notebooks and mechanical pencils with point-5-sized lead. “Point-3 if you can find it,” Matt had asked, nicely. “I like to be precise!” (Duane Reed, alas, was out of stock.) I added some backlogged mail and magazines like The Atlantic, the New Yorker, and the Economist. I threw in some books—one on the history of Tabasco Sauce and a copy of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov because, hey, why not. And, of course, I added candy.

Last year for a few days in the frigid weeks surrounding Christmas, Matt and I drove to North Carolina to visit his family. One afternoon we went to a general store near his grandmother's house in the college town of Boone and found ourselves in a room filled with candy. Candy of all kinds, filling dozens of wooden barrels to the brim. Feeling giddy and slightly child-like, the sugar fumes gone straight to our heads, Matt and I bought gummy frogs, Sugar Daddies, chocolate crème drops. We ate some before going to meet his family. We ate some on the drive back north. The remnants are actually still in my apartment today.

Two weekends ago I was in North Carolina again, but this time in Chapel Hill with some friends. On that Saturday afternoon I found myself yet again in a candy-heavy store. I bought gummy peaches, salt-water taffy and Sour Patch Kids, which were displayed in large glass bottles on a shelf. I bought little sugared raspberries and individually wrapped caramel. I paid $6.99 a pound and brought them home in a bag that smelled of childhood. I packed it next to the notebooks and mechanical pencils in the cardboard box heading to Afghanistan.

Sometimes I find it strange to be thinking so much of care packages, of deodorant brands, mechanical pencils and the emotional content of candy. In the newspaper every day I read about the violence and danger, the influx of troops and the Marines’ surge into Helmand Province, the pain of the soldiers and civilians on all sides of the conflict in Afghanistan. Just today six members of the Afghan security forces were killed in Gardez, the result of a coordinated attack by suicide bombers. I read the stories with fear, but I also read them intensely, almost greedily, hoping that perhaps they will give me some clue as to what it’s like to be there. Even though Matt and I regularly speak and I occasionally see him in the grainy pixels of my computer screen, it remains incomprehensible and obscure.

I find it much easier to concentrate on packages, on back issues of the Economist and on Saltwater Taffy than it is to think about the harsh click of metal on metal. It’s easier to write about Sour Patch Kids.

The Continuing Cost of War

2009-07-18T01:42:00.000-04:00

By Matt

A few weeks ago, Tom Ricks, a veteran journalist and author of the best-selling books Fiasco and The Gamble, asked me to contribute to his blog on foreignpolicy.com. The first installment -- of what I hope will be many more to follow -- deals with an experience I had upon beginning my journey to Afghanistan and one I have not been able to stop thinking about. Please take a look.

Gardez

2009-07-09T06:01:00.001-04:00

By Matt

A sandstorm rages outside my makeshift office on a U.S. military outpost in eastern Afghanistan. Soldiers lean into the wind, their noses pressed into the crooks of their elbows, squinting as they scan for shelter from the stinging wind. The rocky desert mountains surrounding the camp are now all but obscured by the enveloping haze. Eventually, the dust will subside and tonight’s full moon will emerge, casting a glow over our base that in any other setting would seem peaceful. Here, however, the illumination offers would-be attackers an opportunity, and it can be deadly.

This is Gardez, eastern headquarters of the Army’s task force charged with training the Afghan military and police to one day provide security for themselves. It will be my home for the next nine months. I arrived here 10 days ago on a three-and-a-half hour convoy that began in urban Kabul. A paved road—one of only a few in the entire country—winds south past towns and “qalats” that rise up out of the dry mud, through the impossibly beautiful Tera Pass, to this dusty mountain valley where the asphalt ends. It might as well be the end of the earth.

For years I’ve marveled at images I’ve seen and stories I’ve heard of this scorched land and its stunning remoteness. But it almost didn’t seem real until I saw it all for myself. Here in the heart of Pashtun country, women wearing burqas glide along in the markets like apparitions. Their robed torsos twist like soft taffy to face us as we rumble past in our armored vehicles. Men with black hair and fiery eyes gaze at us through the bulletproof glass with both curiousity and menace. It’s difficult for me to imagine the collective horrors those eyes have witnessed.

Gardez is a bewitching place, hardened, like its people, to the elements. It is steeped in a history of violence that has repeled the most determined of marauding armies. Only a few miles to the east and south lies the border with Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, an inconsequential demarcation from a bygone age of empire to which the tribal Pashtuns here pay no mind. Indeed, it is in the infinite caves and canyons of this sliver of Pakistan that the Taliban now launch daily attacks against us.

Yet despite that constant threat, the scenery here inspires me. On clear days, the mountains all around are bathed in shadows cast by their own craggy walls. The elevation is 8,000 feet, high enough that a quick walk across our base leaves one panting. A small mud-brick citadel of indeterminate age sits atop one hill close by.

“That was one of Alexander the Great’s fortresses,” one soldier told me on the day I arrived.

“Really?” I said. I pictured the young warrior-king gazing down from the ramparts at his army, their helmets and spears shimmering in the sun.

“You can’t go up there now, though,” the soldier said. “The Soviets put mines all over it. Only goats go up there.”

I made a mental note to check the validity of his claim, then thought better of it. I guess I just want it to be true. With all the sandstorms and full moons yet to come, why not?

Independence Days

2009-07-09T05:44:00.000-04:00

By Molly

Last Saturday afternoon I sat on a blanket in Prospect Park with friends, not three blocks from my little Brooklyn apartment. We ate homemade bread with jam, noodles with peanut sauce, and a big salad with basil vinaigrette. There was wine and for dessert, a cake made with blackberries and plums. It was the fourth of July and the park was packed. The sun was shining and it smelled of smoke from the grills laden with burgers and hotdogs. A group of twenty-somethings played guitars nearby.

Before we began to eat, we lifted our plastic glasses and said cheers. We said cheers to Independence Day, and we said cheers to Matt, who was probably already asleep in Afghanistan.

Earlier that day he had written me an email. In it he said:

don't you find it ironic that soldiers at war are probably the americans most aware of the poignancy and significance of independence day, yet they are the only ones who don't really get to "celebrate" it? i thought about that all day. hundreds of millions of americans eating burgers and swimming and lighting sparklers. and here in our region today we lost one american killed in action and five wounded. it won't even make the news.

I ate and I drank and I felt guilty. I know that’s not what Matt intended. But I felt it all the same. And then I felt angry.

Lately I’ve been feeling a lot of emotions that I don’t want, emotions that I know Matt doesn’t want, and that my friends and family perhaps don’t understand. I feel guilty often. I feel angry a lot.

The anger doesn’t come because Matt left. He had no choice. This situation is entirely out his control. It’s out of my control. Sometimes I think it’s even out of our government’s control. I don’t feel angry because I’m alone. I’ve been alone before and I like to think that I’m independent enough to handle it. Perhaps I’m angry because this war is happening at all. I’ve long felt opposed to the action in Iraq and Afghanistan. But I know myself, and I know I’m not the type to feel such consuming anger about something general, about something as large as a country or as a war. I can feel disappointed and depressed, yes. But I think I’m angry because I’m afraid. Someone I love is somewhere quite dangerous, and I’m very afraid.

This evening I took the subway home from Manhattan. I was reading a book by Diane Ackerman called “An Alchemy of Mind,” which is about the magic and the mystery of the human brain. She has a chapter dedicated to emotion and how our feelings have developed throughout evolution. She writes:

We evolved to feel anger in familiar arenas, where we could act to make changes and defend ourselves. What we didn’t evolve resources for was long-distance anger, fury at potential danger half a world away, and at a level of such complexity and sheer size one can’t resolve it single-handedly or even with the help of one’s kin. We can feel the requisite anger, we just can’t discharge it in useful ways. It’s both our privilege and peril to have the brain our hunter-gatherer-scavenger ancestors did, one suited to their equally emotional but simpler world.

I hardly noticed as my train passed over the sunlit Manhattan Bridge. I almost forgot to get off at the 7^th Avenue stop. I like the idea that I can blame my anger, which feels both helpless and useless, on evolution. My brain just isn’t made to feel this terror for a danger that resides half a world away. I’m not programmed to think of such opaque realities, of such theoretical monstrosities.

Instead I sit in the park and think of how much I hate the way my fork sounds as it scrapes against the plastic of my plate. I think about the way my sandal is rubbing against my heel and how it hurts and how that makes me seethe. I think of my credit card bill and, oh man, I’m furious.

Sometimes I have to remember to breathe.

And I have to remember to be aware. I need to be aware of my anger, and of my fear. I don’t often know where these feelings come from, but I am prepared to look them in the eye and deal with their presence. I will take it one day at a time, and I will think about Matt, who doesn’t have the distraction of holidays and picnics to shield him from unwanted emotion. And I will think about my friends, who feed me cake and keep me busy and watch fireworks on the street in front of my apartment after the sun goes down.

The Afghan Eight

2009-07-03T07:52:00.003-04:00

By Matt

It’s often said that the Army is about people. Ask any veteran, and he’ll tell you: his time in the service is indelibly marked by the men with whom he served, trained and fought. There is simply no stronger personal bond than that which is forged through military service.

During my two ensuing years as a civilian, most of my nostalgia for the Army sprang from the relationships I’d formed with fellow soldiers. In five years on active duty, it was during periods of great adversity – be it extreme discomfort, exhaustion, fear or homesickness – that I made my very best friends. I’ve often lamented to Molly that I would never again enjoy that sort of camaraderie. I think a lot of veterans would say the same.

So for all the strife this recent call-up has caused in my life, I’m grateful for the soldiers I’ve met since donning the uniform again. Many of them find themselves in the same situation as mine, ripped from their new lives to return to a virtually forgotten battlefield. Somehow that makes it all much easier for me to bear.

During these last few weeks in transit, there are several soldiers who I have come to know well and of whom I have become quite fond. We first banded together at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, just before deploying, the only eight soldiers of 50 in our initial troupe who were bound for the desert city of Gardez in Afghanistan’s eastern mountains.

Our motley assortment included a construction contractor, a paralegal, mechanics, technicians, and me, a journalist. I’ve spent hours getting to know them over meals, in barracks or at the gym. All of us, with one exception, were call-ups from the individual ready reserves. In other words, all of them were involuntarily recalled to duty for a fresh tour in Afghanistan.

Corporal Tim Blankenship of Portland, Oregon, was working as a telecommunications technician and edging toward his Bachelor’s degree when the call came. His wife of six years is holding down their brand new house in Vancouver, Washington. Despite it all, Blankenship, 25, maintains an impossibly cheery disposition that has kept our group moving through the blazing inferno of Kuwait and the mind-numbing, days-long transportation out of Kabul. Now in Gardez, he has accepted his indefinite and thankless assignment as a gate guard with humility. Still, he is eager to “get outside the wire” and to see some action before the year is out. I admire his enthusiasm, but I caution him to be careful what he asks for.

Specialist Leo Hendrick is a tall, slim 34-year-old motorcycle mechanic who sports a clean-shaven head and a tapestry of tattoos. Serious and eccentric, he smokes a pipe each night outside, under the moonlight, and boasts of his extensive domestic gun collection. Yet Hendrick’s one weakness is his young family back home in Iowa: a wife and an infant son, who he refers to as “my little guy.” It’s the only time I’ve witnessed his carefully cultivated veneer of intimidation melt away to reveal the softer man inside. Hendrick worships his wife, who holds a Masters degree and works for Kaplan Publishing. “Compared to her, I’m just a knuckle-dragger,” he says playfully. “My wife just keeps me around to open jars and fix things around the house when they break.” He is impossible not to like.

Sergeant First Class Brian Mauro has been my closest companion on this deployment. A confident, thoughtful man who had a rough upbringing in rural Massachusetts, Mauro found paradise in his adopted home of Georgia in the 1990s. Despite serving his third deployment in as many years, he spends lots of time on the phone directing the completion of his dream house near Macon, where he works as a mechanic at Freightliner. Mauro is a sort of working man’s intellectual, drawn to political arguments and convinced he is a better man for the hardships he’s endured. A National Guardsman who has seen intense action in some of the worst areas of Iraq and Afghanistan, he is tortured by long separations from his 4-year-old son, A.J. “I didn’t get to see him take his first steps,” Mauro told me one night over dinner in a crowded mess hall in Kabul, his eyes glistening with tears. “It’s hard for me to talk about, you know? My wife put up pictures of me all around the house so he’d know who I was when I got home. And you know what? It worked.”

The rest of the guys in our crew are no less wistful about the homes and families they’ve been forced to leave behind.

Sergeant Raul Gonzales, 28, who is respectful and quiet, leaves a wife and two children back in Austin, Texas. I’ve watched him lie countless hours, fingers interlocked across his stomach, staring up at the underside of a crude top bunk. During these episodes, I like to think that Gonzales is not among us, that he possesses some special power to transport himself from this dreadful place.

Gonzales’ buddy, Corporal Felix Lopez, is the one habitual grump in our group. (In any group of soldiers, there is always at least one.) But Lopez, who is 35 and comes from Orlando, is rarely seen without his cell phone in hand – a portable, digital photo album chock full of photos of his curly-haired young daughter.

Staff Sergeant Justin Boeck, a meaty, blonde-haired 24-year-old from Lincoln, Nebraska, works out in the gym twice a day – under orders, he says, from his fiancée, who was alarmed at his weight-loss on a previous Iraq tour. He plans to marry her when he gets home.

I count men like these, and the loved ones who miss them, among the finest Americans I have ever known. They are people who care deeply about their country and complain little though their burden is great. I have no doubt that each man will serve out his tour with honor.

Personally, I feel privileged to have traveled as one of “The Afghan Eight,” as Mauro warmly coined us when we finally arrived in Gardez. I look forward to following their experiences from this little desert outpost of ours.

Looking Away

2009-07-03T07:25:00.000-04:00

By Molly

I took a bus from New York City to Boston on a Friday in mid-June. I planned to spend the weekend with my mother, who lives in Brookline with her boyfriend, and then join my father and my stepmother for a few days on Martha’s Vineyard, where they had rented a house for a week of vacation.

I stood outside the Tick Tock Diner on the loud intersection of 34th Street and 8th Avenue around noon. Cabs honked and double-deckers filled with tourists passed by. Vendors manned metal carts that poured steam and the scent of grilled meat onto the street. Women in heels talked on cell phones and, one after another, travelers bearing suitcases lined up down the far edge of the sidewalk to wait for the bus. It was hot and noisy. The driver, we were told, was running late.

As I waited, I watched as a man in uniform walk slowly down the block. He wore cargo pants and a loose-buttoned shirt, all the same shade of pale earth camouflage. It was an Army uniform, the same uniform I had last seen on Matt a few weeks earlier, when he had greeted me at baggage claim in the New Orleans airport. I had flown down to visit him on his last 5 days free before deployment. He had looked quite handsome.

This man, however, looked old and ragged. He had long dark hair, which was mangled and tattered. Scruff covered his face. His eyes were bloodshot and his teeth, yellow. He walked with a hunch, swinging his arms awkwardly around as he spoke in a garbled tongue. I couldn’t tell if he was drunk or delirious. He paused towards the intersection and looked at all of us waiting in line for the bus.

“What’r you doing here?” he cried.

No one said anything. After a glance at the source of noise, everyone looked away. I averted my eyes, too.

“C’mon, give me something,” he yelled. “Why can’t y’all gimme something?”

He voice was loud and grating. I felt embarrassed, and I wasn’t sure why. After a moment he grew quiet. He walked away slowly, heading east.

Later, as I sat in the back of the bus reading a book, I couldn’t get the image of that man out of my head. I wondered if he was a veteran. I wondered if anyone ever gave him something. I wondered if everyone’s first reaction was to look away.

The Real World

2009-06-28T13:49:00.000-04:00

By Matt

By the time my plane touched down at Bagram Air Field, I’d barely slept in 48 hours. My knees shook from fatigue. Sweat streaked down my dust-covered neck and forearms. I shuffled off the C-17’s back ramp, bracing for a blast of hot desert air. But unlike Kuwait, where I’d just spent three days dragging bags across the desert floor in 120-degree heat, Afghanistan greeted me with a cool summer breeze and a sight I could never have imagined. Majestic snow-capped mountains towered over the tarmac, and a fleeting calm swept over me.

I had to remind myself that I was indeed in Afghanistan, heading back to war. My destination was Gardez, a city south of Kabul in Afghanistan’s rugged eastern mountains near the border with Pakistan. There I’d join the effort to train the Afghan military and police. It would take six more days, two convoys, and another short flight to make it there.

In the meantime, Bagram gave me time to rest. That night, as I waited for a flight to Kabul, I tried to get some sleep on the concrete floor of a makeshift passenger terminal. What does the next year hold for me? I wondered, as I lay there. What treasures does this unfortunate little country hold for me to discover? And how would I ever be able to explain such a place to Molly? Eventually, I didn’t even notice the soldiers stepping over my bootless feet or the contorted position of my neck against my ruck sack as I dozed off to sleep.

At some point during the night, I was drawn back into consciousness by an episode of MTV’s The Real World blaring on a flatscreen TV bolted to the wall. “The Real World,” I thought to myself, as my eyes readjusted to the terminal’s fluorescent lighting. Jesus. A bunch of self-absorbed, drama-hungry twenty-somethings let loose on New York. I closed my eyes again and imagined what Molly might be doing at that very moment in her little Brooklyn apartment. It was hard to think of her there by herself, without me. We’ve been inseparable for most of the last two years. And here I was, filthy, sore and very much alone, beginning my third combat deployment in less than six years.

***

After five years in uniform and two combat tours in Iraq, I left the Army in 2007 to pursue my dream of becoming a reporter. A year in graduate school and another year working as a journalist – in Paris, Moscow and Newark – had set me comfortably on that path. Then this winter an unexpected letter from the Army arrived in the mail. It ordered me back to duty. Just like that.

I broke the news to Molly that cold February night on the sidewalk in front of our East Village apartment. She didn’t say a word. She just dropped the groceries she was carrying, sank onto the steps and cried. “Do you have to go?” she said after a while. “I just don’t understand. Why you? Of all people.” It was a question I couldn’t answer. So we sat there a long time together, shivering against the wind, lost in our thoughts. The New Yorkers walking along E. 12th St. that night will never know how much I envied them.

Molly wasn’t supposed to end up with a guy like me. She’s sophisticated, cosmopolitan, educated in the Ivy League. I guess she never envisioned herself dating a soldier, let alone being left behind during a deployment. I feel partly guilty that our lives have been put on hold. But Molly has taken it all with grace and understanding – long stretches of silence, fear of the unknown, a heightened awareness of bad news from Afghanistan.

Even for me, this experience so far has been an eye-opener, and in a way I’m ashamed. I let the freedom and comforts of my life in New York shroud me from the violence and death this war continues to produce. In less than a year, I’ll come home to Molly; I know we’ll both be better and stronger for it. For now, though, it’s time I got accustomed to once again living in the real world.

Leaving on an Airplane

2009-06-27T10:54:00.000-04:00

By Molly

The day Matt left for Afghanistan I woke up in my tiny studio apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, to the buzz of a text message on my phone. It was early. The sun was just beginning to peak through the curtains.

“Getting on the bus soon,” Matt wrote. “Will call in a bit.”

He was on his way to Atlanta, the final leg of what already felt like an epic journey through the pre-deployment training process. Matt had been called involuntarily back to the Army one freezing night in February when a Fed Ex letter had arrived at his family’s home. It wasn’t until that humid morning in June, hoever, that he was actually getting on a plane to Afghanistan.

Despite the dread that constantly hovered in my mind, his departure was almost a relief. Once Matt arrived at the airport – an eight-hour ride from the base in Mississippi where he had been stationed for the previous month – and officially took off, I hoped he would finally feel that his time away from home had some sort of point.

I got out of bed. I turned on the radio and began to make coffee in the French Press. It held too much for one person, but I had bought for Matt when we first moved in together, in a dark little sublet in the East Village of Manhattan. He had been working as a reporter for the Star Ledger in Newark while I freelanced. Coffee was the cornerstone of our diets.

I sat back in bed with a mug and my computer. I did some work. I read the paper and talked to my mom. I cleaned the kitchen and, later, made lunch. But mainly, as the hours trickled away and the sun rose higher in the sky, I talked to Matt.

I talked to Matt as he sat on the bus debating the pluses and minuses of phone cards in Kabul. I talked to him when the busload of soldiers in uniform stopped to eat at a Cracker Barrel and a few members of the group were hugged by a woman who had tears in her eyes. She had lost her son in Afghanistan, she said. Matt and I talked when we had nothing to say, the sound of the bus driver’s yells ricocheting in the background.

I didn’t really know what to do with myself in between phone calls. Matt’s deployment was unexpected and I'm not close with anyone else in the Army. I don’t know anyone else dealing with the constant tension and fear of a loved one fighting abroad. What do you do on the day your boyfriend, already states away, goes to Afghanistan?

I went to the farmer’s market in Grand Army Plaza. It felt ridiculous leaving my apartment, canvas bag in hand. But that’s what I had done every Saturday that I had been in town for the previous couple of months, ever since I had left Matt in South Carolina to report for duty on an afternoon in early April. I felt like I should be doing something much larger than buying a tub of local strawberries for a whopping $6. But I did it, because I wasn’t sure what else to do, and by 2 pm I needed an escape from my apartment’s beige walls.

I talked to Matt as he rode the AirTram to his terminal, and I carried sprigs of fresh thyme and a bag of apples down 7th Avenue towards home. Later, I went for a run. I came home and I took a shower. I talked to Matt as he sat at the gate surrounded by a mass of soldiers in uniform, waiting to board. I listened as he went for a final American snack: Starbucks.

“A medium coffee, please,” I heard him say.

“Do you have any chocolate chip cookies?” he asked, sounding hopeful.

The woman behind the counter must have said no, because Matt’s “oh” sounded so despondent tears actually came to my eyes.

But then: “Oh!” I heard him say, more upbeat. “You do!” I could hear laughter. “Thank you ma’am,” he said. I could hear the crinkle of a paper bag.

“They gave me two,” he said, back into the phone. “They got them from the back. They said I was lucky to be a soldier today.”

When we hung up I put on a skirt and a sweater. I dried my hair, which smelled of rosemary and mint. I put on some makeup and drank some more coffee.

I talked to Matt for the last time as he walked onto the plane around 7 pm, quiet amid the raucous clatter of boarding. The next time I would hear from him would be from the dust storms of Kuwait. When we hung up, I cried.

That night I went to a party with some friends from graduate school. We sat together in a dark bar in the West Village, where televisions blared a baseball game and a ring of smokers puffed around the door outside. I drank some beer, caught up on gossip, and laughed. I felt sad, though. I felt quite discombobulated.

Later, a friend asked me how Matt was doing, and I said fine. She said that she had been meaning to send him an email, but didn’t know what to say.

“I even looked to see if Emily Post had any rules on how to write to someone at war,” she said. “She didn’t.”

She wanted my advice.

“Tell him good luck,” I said, feeling strange.

What do I know? I thought. For the majority of my life, the conscious reality of war has resided generations away. Until Matt was called back into the Army I felt much closer to Ernest Hemingway than C.J. Chivers. I have no idea what to write.

“Tell him that our thoughts are with him,” I said.