The Pashtun Fixer

                                   The Pashtun Fixer

                                    Paul Anthony Johnson

                                     Copyright 2010,  Paul Anthony Johnson

1 -     Matt drained the last of the whiskey from his glass, stubbed his cigarette out and then made his move on the young Filipina.  He had to concentrate not to sway and attract attention in the crowded bar of expatriates.   After drinking the two Heinekens in his room when he called the kids he’d followed up with four whiskeys, the spell of which had just now endowed him with the courage, or   command from his brain stem to try and seduce the singer in the cover band at the hotel bar.   She was dazzling in the way her rich, shiny hair caught the light from the coloured stage gels.  How she tilted her head in that way perfected by the pop starlets.  Shakira.  Beyonce.   Mariah.   Her Tagalog accent crept through in her delivery and made her even more charming.

    “Hello, you sing beautifully.  Have you ever been to America?”

    “No.”

    “Europe.  Have you been there?   You should go there.   You could be seen, maybe you could get an agent.  How old are you?

    “Twenty three.”

    “How long have you been in Dubai?”

    “6 months.”

    “Do you like it here?”

    “I have to use the ladies room.  We have another set.  Excuse me.”

    With a flip of her hair she darted off into the bathrooms and he never saw her again.  He lingered awkwardly near her table while her band mates looked him over.    The latest drunk, lonely, middle aged traveler trying to fuck the singer.   Lurking in the dark beyond the bar were the shadows of those she would still have to endure in the nights and months before she finished her contract  and had her passport returned  and could go home to  the Philippines.   Beefy,  red faced Americans and Brits headed to Iraq for good paying jobs driving fuel trucks.   Arab men from the Gulf states in Keffiyehs  and flowing white garb  who were drinking expensive whiskey and would  try for free sex first , then  pay for it later when  they failed.  “Allah cannot see you when you are in Dubai” they would tell you.

    Matt stumbled out into the lobby, looked to see if Pierre might have come back down from his room, saw he had not, and then walked out into the superheated air,   lit a smoke,  and got in a cab.

    A kid from Belfast who was a waiter in a strip of faux Irish pubs had told him where to go.   A seedier hotel in the older part of Dubai where the streets were still teeming at midnight.  More men in garb,  tourists coming back from the gold souk  and pairs of young and effeminate looking Bangladeshi men holding hands as they walked.   Matt was almost stumbling now, swaying on his way up the stairs to the “restaurant,”  the alcohol fever in full bloom in his cranium.  An East African looking woman opened a door for him,  he dug  an unknown quantity of the strange currency out of  his wallet and gave it to a short doorman with an earpiece connected to a walkie talkie (why a walkie talkie, here?), then stepped through  a metal detector and  was in.

    He sat at a table and a waitress brought him something dark and strong,  but before that came there was a young African woman in a halter top at his table.  Hello.  Nice night.  Are you married?  Where are you staying ?  Do you like?  Do you like company?  Do you like me?

    She had a pretty, almost regal looking face and a thin, elegant neck.  She must have been a Somali, or an Ethiopian.  But she had a big ass, and enormous, pendulous breasts no doubt held into position by a metal wire re-enforced bra that would have three, maybe, four hooks in back for him to unpick.  He wanted better but didn’t have the gumption to tell her to go away so he just turned away and stared at the women on the dance floor.  Bored looking,  uninspired steps to the annoying techno - hip hop electric noise.  He took a hit of the dark stuff and turned back and the heavy girl was gone, and another younger,  slimmer East African was approaching.   She looked him in the eyes and smiled and sat close to him and they ordered more drinks, and at some point after that she was helping him down the stairs and into a cab, and they were driving back to his hotel and discussing money in amounts he was no longer able to compute with the exchange rate and the booze in his blood.  Just nodding.  Yes, no problem, yes, no problem.  She asked why he was traveling through Dubai and he lied and said he was a salesman for a computer company.   They joked and laughed in his room in the way that prostitutes and their johns sometimes do and then she pulled him close and kissed him on the lips and he grabbed her ass and they collapsed onto the bed.   The building pumped more freezing, sterile air into the room and the clock radio cast a dim red glow on  bare skin.  His wake up call was in 3 hours. 

2 -  He had dozed off in the short cab ride to the airport.   It had been raining and the sun was barely up and the air florid with the smell of wet desert and jet fuel, exciting the nervous system with the promise of foreign places and important moments.   Pierre knew better than to make small talk with Matt, astutely judging his glassy eyes and rank breath as evidence of events too numerous and shameful from the night before.    At the curb side, Pierre started to unload the heavy gear from the second cab they’d hired, more than a dozen boxes and cases.   The TV Camera that photographers never checked with the luggage but carried onto the planes with them.  A tall, cylindrical black case with a metal tripod and expensive fluid head.   A laptop edit machine.   A set of powerful lights and their stands, plus boxes of cables, batteries, chargers, microphones, tapes.   All of the equipment they’d need  for two months of reporting from the field for an  American television network.  Then lastly, two heavy duffle bags with large, expensive flack jackets and helmets.  The jackets had been specially fitted for the dimensions of each of the men.   Their already significant weight enhanced by ceramic plates that were inserted in pockets in the front and back, to stop, or redirect a deadly projectile away from the vital organs.  They even had flaps of Kevlar that hung down in the front, supposedly offering protection to the genital area.   “Like, you need this,” Pierre had teased Matt before they left the U.S. “ If you  lose yours it’s because some Ho cut it off.”

    In an airport mosque, the morning call to prayer began to wail out through the speakers. The jokes about the flak jackets didn’t seem as funny anymore and there was a hint of danger in the air. An Arab passed him on the sidewalk without looking up, sauntering toward the mosque as easy and peaceful as a dolphin in the new light.   Matt thought about his children, and Pierre, who had just become a father.  It was an uncharacteristic moment of sentimentality for him, the kind of mood he detested, and avoided if he could, and blamed on the incipient hangover now gathering strength in his head and neck.   He reached for the bottle of Dilaudid that he’d scored in New York and popped two in his mouth, swallowing them dry while Pierre humped the gear onto carts.   Why feel pain?

    They wheeled their bags into the small terminal building.  Not the massive, bustling international terminal they’d flown into a couple of days before, but a smaller, functional building that handled the charter flights in and out of Dubai.   There were fewer families here, fewer beautiful women with designer sunglasses and tickets to Europe on the long haul aircraft that went to Frankfurt and London, and Singapore.   Here there were more white men like himself, waiting for flights on obscure charter companies to places like Kuwait City, Baghdad, Kabul, and Matt and Pierre’s destination, Kandahar.    The migratory patterns of war and empire.  The clothes and the conveyances were different but the purpose, the logic was the same as had been for thousands of years.  Since Christian crusaders gathered in the ports of southern France.  Since daring Englishmen pushed up the Indus river into central Asia.  Since American GI’s prowled Bangkok’s Pat Pong district on their days out from Da Nang.  

    “We have to pay for this ticket in cash, do you want to get this or should I?”  Pierre asked.

    Matt reached under his shirt for his money belt, still bulging with the wad of cash the network had given him.  “This is an advance,” they had told him.   “It’s for all of the things you can’t put on the card, all of the things we can’t think of now.  You won’t need receipts for this.  Just don’t call us asking for more.   Got it?”   Matt wasn’t sure whether the stern tone of the accountant in New York was only for him, because of his history, or if everyone got it.  He smiled slightly as he imagined the look on the accountant's face if he could have seen him fumbling with the money pouch last night, pulling out cash, handing it over to the girl.  How much had given her?  Five hundred?  Eight hundred?  You won’t need receipts for this.

    “Well aren’t we in a chipper mood this morning Mr. Allison?”  Pierre sensing he was missing out on something funny. 

    It was eight hundred each for the one way ticket to Kandahar.  Expensive for an hour and a half flight, Matt thought, but common sense cost structures never applied to the world of war, and those who participate.  He gave the money to an anti social looking Briton who was working behind an informal kiosk with the name “Saber” displayed across the front.  The transaction reminded him of the companies he’d dealt with as a radio correspondent ten years before in the Balkan war.   They called themselves contractors.  Others had different names for them, from profiteer, to corporate military, to mercenary, to soldier of fortune, all of which were usually correct in one form or depending on the circumstance.  Sometimes they were immensely valuable, because for the right price (typically exorbitant) they could procure the most exotic item on short notice, or execute the most unfathomable feat of logistics in a conflict zone.   They did the kinds of things that hierarchical and sclerotic  governments and armies have seldom, if ever,  been capable of doing efficiently. 

    They gathered up the equipment and were led out onto the tarmac, where a portable staircase was wheeled up the side door on an old Boeing 737.   The sun had risen above the gleaming new skyscrapers of Dubai, a menacing white smear in the hazy Gulf sky.    The plane was streaked with black marks on the rear of the fuselage and looked creaky and ungainly on the ground.  It still had the old tube engines that had   been phased out in North America.  Matt turned to watch the roar of a modern 777 long haul jet as it blasted off the runway, its wheels methodically retracting up into the fuselage.  That’s where all the glamorous women in the expensive clothes were, he thought. 

    Inside the airplane, the passenger area had been reduced to the back third of the cabin.  The rest was given over to the cargo, precious and hard to get items and material that were probably worth more on the ground than the two of them were.  The pilots were Russian contractors, and the flight attendants were curt, intense looking women in weathered uniforms who didn’t smile.   All here for their willingness to make the dangerous descent in Kandahar.  To the surprise of Matt and the few other passengers, they actually began a hot meal service shortly after takeoff, rolling the battered food cart down the short aisle offering them their choice of “the chicken or the meat.”

    “What kind of contract are you doing in Kandahar?”  asked a women sitting two seats away,  looking at Matt tentatively through sunglasses,  her head obscured baseball cap.  She wore sweatpants and sneakers,  and had a midwestern accent. 

    “News.  TV News actually,  we’are with T5.”

    “Cool.  Are you an on camera guy?”

    “Yes, in fact.  I am.”

    “Wow, what’s you name?”

    “Matt Allison.”

    "I think I’ve seen you before.  You were at that shooting in Georgia or wherever”

    “Yes I was” he lied.  Matt hadn’t been out of Washington DC in four months,  and for two of those months he been suspended.  Off the air,  without pay.

    “Dude that is so cool,  you must see all kinds of crazy shit.”

    “Sometimes.  It’s still just a job though. 

    Matt couldn’t figure out her age.  She spoke in the style and vocabulary of a college girl,  but from what  he could see of her somewhat weathered face she looked older than that.  Mid 30’s?  “What do you do in Afghanistan?” he asked.

    “I work for Emerson.  Mostly in the travel office.  We book trips home, or anywhere when the soldiers  have time out.  I’d call myself a travel agent if I was one, but not really.  I just go on the internet. “

    “How do you like working in a war zone?”

    “Sucks.  But I’ve been doing this for three years now and never made less than 80 a year.  Two months off per year.  Way better money than I ever saw back home.”

    “Where’s that?”

    “Dubuque Iowa.  You ever heard of it?   We always called it De -Puke growing up ‘cause there aint shit to do there.   Most everyone from my time left, went to college or moved West or whatever.  Afghanistan was the first time I ever left the country.  You married?”

    “Yes.”

    “Kids?”

    “Two. How about yourself?”

    “I got a little girl.   She’s eight.  She’s my angel.”

    “Her name’s Angel?”

    “No her name’s Cassidy.  Take a look.”   She pulled out a clunky black wallet and dug out a small picture of a pale,  chunky little girl in a soccer outfit.  “Isn’t she just precious?  That’s the only problem being over here.  Is the whole time I’m gone she lives with fuck face.”

    “Fuck face is your ex husband?”

    “No.  Just her dad.”

    The plane shuddered with some of the strongest turbulence he’d ever felt.    The fasten seat belt lights came on and everyone quieted down. Matt was happy to be done with the conservation, but she leaned over again “You never asked me my name.”

    “What?”

    “You never asked me my name. I’m Sandy.  Sandy Gowdy.”

    “Pleased to meet you Sandy.”  Matt bowed his head in mock shame and smiled at her. 

        The terrain below was rough and mountainous.  Only different shades of grey and brown from the altitude of thirty thousand feet.   Matt heard the tell tale sign of the engines being eased off,  a signal that the descent into Kandahar had begun.   There were no announcements to put your seat forward and put your tray back, and the flight attendants didn’t bother to walk down the aisle and check.  They just strapped themselves into their seats and looked down at their shoes, or their nails. 

    As the plane descended, Matt observed the rippling sand waves of a red desert,  then flatter, barren land crisscrossed by a patchwork of roads and paths.   At one point, a shallow, swift river appeared, with a shepherd on a horse  trying to get a flock of sheep or goats to traverse it.   There was the bump of the landing gear being lowered, and then they crossed over a tall, barbed wire fence, and Matt saw humvees and other military vehicles driving about.   With a jolt and a roar they touched down at Kandahar airfield. 

    On the flight line was the most diverse array of civilian and military aircraft he had ever seen.   Fighter jets painted the grey color of herons lined the tarmac as far as he could see.  There were some he recognized, the single engine F - 16’s that reminded him of sports cars, and the menacing A - 10 ‘s with their two engines up high and back and their hellish Gatling gun in front.  But there were others he didn’t recognize.  Exotic airframes and paint schemes  from the other NATO countries.   A massive, Soviet era transport with wings that descended from the top of the fuselage from what looked like giant, metallic shoulders.   A squat   aircraft that looked like a cross between a cruise missile and a robotic kite made its turn onto the runway, and then blasted off into the bright blue sky.  Matt recognized it as a drone, an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle.   He’d seen many pictures before, but had  never actually seen one with his own eyes.     Pierre was sitting back in his seat, headphones on, staring straight ahead into the seat in front of him.  What was he thinking? Was this how everyone felt when they came here?

    When the door was opened a bright intense light flooded the aircraft.  The air was cooler than he expected, and refreshing.    There was the clatter of a metal stairway being pushed against the aircraft, and then a tall, bald man in a military uniform appeared, taking his hat off as he moved down the aisle.

    “Welcome to Kandahar airfield everybody.  My name is Major Hart,  I’m with the U.S. Army’s Public Affairs unit here,  I’ll be helping everyone disembark this morning, and I need to talk to the new reporters we have here, which I believe would be you two.”  He expertly pointed out Matt and Pierre and half smiled.  “T5?”

     Matt reached out to shake the Major’s hand and caught a glimpse of Sandy across the seats, watching him.  A guy who hadn’t lied about who he was. 

    “OK,”  said the Major. “  We have a quick turnaround here on the tarmac before this plane heads back for Dubai.    You guys haven’t been cleared through Afghan customs yet, and we will take care of that, but you and your gear need to stay with me at all times until we get you processed in to the country, and to this base.  I know you don’t want a baby-sitter, but you’re going to have to play along for the next few hours, and then you’ll be free to go on your way.   So when we get down the steps from the airplane, grab all your gear, and head straight to the side of the tarmac, and wait until you are told to move.   There will be no photography of the flight line, so keep your TV camera off, and don’t use any personal cameras.   You’ll have a few minutes to talk you’re outgoing crew, they’re waiting down there right now.

    Off the plane and down onto the dusty tarmac.  They were parked next to an old hangar that had clearly been the site of a substantial small arms gun battle.  The thin walls    bore  the unmistakable patterns of holes created  by small automatic rifles like the AK - 47.  A small burst of holes  and then a climb.  Burst and climb.   Other parts of the hangar, particularly the roof had signs of what looked like larger explosions.   Mortars?  Grenades?  Matt remembered his cursory face to face meeting with an Army Public affairs officer in Washington DC before he left :  “Kandahar was  where the Taliban made their last stand when we attacked them after 9/11. It’s still kind of crazy.  Good luck.”   

    They dragged their gear over to the part of the tarmac immediately in front of the battered hangar, and a tall, dark haired man walked over to Matt with his hand outstretched in greeting.   It was Anthony Bloom, the outgoing correspondent for T5, leaving after a three month assignment to Kandahar.   Behind was a low key,  congenial Al Resnik, Bloom’s cameraman, smiling from behind his sunglasses and looking woozy with the prospect of getting back to civilization.   Bloom, with his lantern jaw and impossibly thick hair looked almost nervous to be leaving.  Surely he’d heard about Matt’s story in DC.

    “Matt. We’are glad you’re here.  So glad you’re  here.    Get ready for a busy couple of months.  You know about this Spring Offensive? A couple of things:  the satellite uplink is having problems because the generator is intermittent, so you might have to try filing your stories back on the computer with the FTP thing.  Do you know how to use that?  The cell phones are on the desk in the work tent,  you have to charge them up with credits that you buy at the PX.  There’s plenty of body armor in the corner of our workspace, so just grab whatever fits you when you go out.   And, I hate to ask, but could you cover the last week of our payments for the fixer?    It’s $850 for this week and we’are out of cash.”

    “The fixer?”

    “Yeah, they didn’t tell you?  Sammy.    Sammy Khan.  He’s your lifeline for information and video outside the wire.   He gets $700 a week, cash, every Thursday as his retainer, $150 for every video he shoots and brings back,  and $200 a day if he takes you anywhere.  They didn’t tell you?  Anyway, if you could pay him the $850 tomorrow afternoon you’ll get to know him and he’ll tell you everything.  He’s the best fixer of them all, we are  lucky to have him.  You can trust him with your life.”

    Bloom was cut off by the sound the 737 spooling its engines back up,  and Major Hart waving him and Resnik toward the departing plane.  Resnik threw a just lit cigarette into the breeze and headed for the old plane.   “Just talk to Sammy” Bloom shouted,  “you can trust him with anything. You can trust him with your life.” 

    “Okay guys,” now Major Hart was hollering.  “Take all your bags down the tarmac and load them into that SUV there.  Don’t walk anywhere else.”

       From there they were taken to a coffee shop next to Kandahar Airfield  called Java Bean  where a staff  of young male Indian baristas poured them strong Americanos and Lattes.    Airmen wearing  flight suits wandered in and out holding tall cups of coffee and a clutch of beefier,  infantry types stood around a wooden table outside smoking, their M – 16 and M – 4  rifles and myriad variants slung over their backs pointing downward.   Matt and Pierre bought coffees and then stood among the soldiers  hoping for conversation.  No one spoke to them. 

    After finishing their coffees and then standing around awkwardly, Major Hart returned and drove them to their work space - a utilitarian Quonset Hut like dirty green tent.  It was one of two that the US Military had provided for the press corps.  There were flimsy plastic doors at either end,  with  a combination heating/cooling unit above each one.  It had poor lighting, and the floor was covered in dust.   Major Hart directed them to a couple of sad looking  work tables next to a pile of various pieces of body armour,  old videotape boxes, and a single  crate of military rations that had been torn open and was missing a single meal. Pierre blew hard on one of the desks, forcing up a small cloud of fine grey dust that undulated and swirled in the dank light.   Pierre caught Matt’s eyes for a moment of unspoken understanding.    There was a hollow sounding rap on the door, and a young officer strode in with a sheaf of documents under his arm.

        “Hello fellows.  Welcome to Kandahar Airfield.  My name is Captain Tewksbury,  I’ll be your primary liaison here for the duration of your employment.   Any needs, requests, gripes, should come to me first so they can be kicked up the chain.”  Captain Tewksbury spoke as though he was reading from some kind of script.  He was a tall and willowy young man,  with a recessed chin and hair receding at the temples.   The kind of man who looked like he’d be disgusted or afraid of Matt if he opened up and let his true self out.

    Tewksbury gave them formal  press badges meant to hang around their  necks from garish “lanyards.”   He advised them that they must be worn at all times,  working or not.    More of his   over rehearsed,  official voice,  ploughing through a list of do’s, dont's and “no - no’s,” as he called them.    Going to the showers without flip flops on was a “no-no,”  brushing your teeth outside your tent and spitting the water out onto the ground was a “no-no,”  use of alcohol or  any kind of illegal drug was a “no-no,”  as was “fraternizing” with any person of the opposite sex,   military or not.    Matt briefly toyed with the idea of asking if homosexual encounters were allowed,  but thought better of trying to break the man’s official tone with a joke.  This guy probably only laughs at Seinfeld, he thought.  

    “Now I need you to listen very carefully to this.   We have kicked out reporters here in the past for violating Operational Security.  OpSec.  The media are guests here, and meant to create accurate and timely reports for audiences at home.  In no way can our work here be jeopardized by reporters including information that could give an advantage to the enemy.   We will explain to you as best we can what is considered OpSec, and what is not.  If you find yourself wondering about something, you need to ask.   Dates, times, places, and future movements of any personnel here are considered OpSec...a good rule of thumb is to only report what has already happened....not what WILL happen......”

    Matt started to tune out Captain Tewksbury's droning speech.   The overseas flights,  last night’s drinking,  the daunting view of all of the hard work before him,  and his absence from home  produced a wave of fatigue that caused his body to slump slightly in the chair.   Captain Tewksbury was now talking about what to do in the event of a rocket attack, which happened frequently at Kandahar Airfield,  but Matt had hit his wall.  He held his eyes open,  and looked attentive,  but his capacity to ingest any more information had expired.

3 -    There was a single light bulb clipped onto the tent above Matt’s  head.    He was staring at the switch and contemplating turning it on,  getting dressed  and trudging through the loose gravel to the lavatory trailer down at the end of the row of tents they’d been assigned.  He knew he’d sleep better if he emptied his bladder, but despite being awoken,  he was still too tired,  unable to muster the wakefulness to go and relieve himself.     He had fallen asleep immediately after Captain Tewksbury had shown them their quarters, which were small zones in a larger tent   curtained off with canvas to create private space.   Correspondents from previous assignments had left  odd items behind,  a woman’s hair band with a paisley pattern,   two flashlights with dead batteries,  and a battered, sad looking “For Him” Magazine,   the young woman on the cover suffering under the stain of some suspicious liquid.   But the most unsettling, most unavoidable facet of the new environment was the noise from the airfield.   The tempo of takeoffs and  landings had  barely changed since the afternoon. 

    Pierre grunted from the other side of the tent, and rolled over.  He was heavy, probably 20 pounds overweight, and prone to snoring.   But he was charismatic, and had a lovely, sunny way about him  that endeared him to most people.   For years Matt had judged himself superior to the comparatively simple life stories of the photographers he’d worked with,  but lately he was starting to envy them.    Unburdened by the vanity of the on camera   types and much less affected  by the  whims of editors   and producers, and agents,  their rewards were not as big ,  but the sheer pleasure, the unique rush of  being a newsman,  with its varied and exciting circumstances was all theirs to enjoy.   For years Matt was consumed by the vanity of being “talent,” good at earning the approval of others and the people who mattered in the business,  but  in end  finding he needed it, and then finding it had twisted the very fabric of his personality.   The stories he covered weren’t about the people in them anymore, but about how they did or did not contribute to the immediate and long term success of Matt Allison.   Laying in a cot in Kandahar, Afghanistan,  his mind and body scrambled from the time zones and the force of the experience,  the roar of fighter jets blasting off into the darkness,   Matt could see the pattern emerging.   The dots and lines that delineate the arc of  a career, of a life.    It is disconnected randomness at first, then suddenly,  it is your life.

4 - “We are providing the cover under which democracy, and a civil society can emerge.”  The Dutch general was droning on mercilessly in the hot sun.   A few feet in front of him, in a row of folding chairs sat an assemblage of local power brokers.  Mullahs?  Matt wondered.    Older, heavy set men with deeply lined faces and massive, cumbersome turbans.  They weren't  the slightest bit deferential to the NATO officers,  but they came nonetheless, and sat through the speeches.   Matt and Pierre were at the back of the outdoor gathering, next to a row of young Afghan men, slim and fresh faced.  All of them wore small skullcaps covered  with dazzling little stones that captured the mountain light.  They looked bored as well.

    The occasion was the opening of a trade school for young Afghans that had been built by Australian and Dutch soldiers in the mountain town of Tarin Kowt, in Uruzgan province.   To reach it they had flown for an hour from Kandahar in a twin rotor Chinook helicopter, weaving their way through the low mountains while an Apache helicopter gun ship trailed not far behind.   The massive back door remained lowered the entire time,  with a machine gunner dangling his feet over the edge,  the gun swinging idly in his hands.  It was astonishingly beautiful. 

    When they reached Tarin Kowt they were back  in the clutches of Captain Tewksbury,  who would  stop every mid level officer they encountered and force them into a short debrief for the assembled media;  how we all work together as a team here, he would say,   how this is a “joint” mission,  meaning team,  again, how the “reconstruction” was their main purpose here,  how “engagement” with local tribal “stake holders” was “paramount.”  It was the kind of watered down,  politically correct officialese that would never make air,  and bored everyone to death, but  they pointed the camera in the right direction, pretended to roll tape,  and nodded their heads like it was all very meaningful.

    Following the speeches, a massive buffet lunch was offered.     Afghan food cooked by the staff of the Australian mess tent.   Lamb, saffron rice,  nan bread,   plentiful and delicious.    It was the best part of the event so far,  with a relaxed atmosphere where everyone spoke casually.   Matt laughed as he watched Pierre load stupendous portions of food onto his plate.  Pierre didn’t seem to mind, the meal was the best part of the day.

    As they waited for the Chinook to return and fly them back to Kandahar airfield,  a Black hawk medical evacuation chopper came gliding  onto  the gravel airstrip with an  Apache gun ship flying escort.  An ambulance pulled out onto the airstrip, and the crews transferred a bandaged,  badly wounded  Afghan man into the ambulance.   Sensing an opportunity for good video,  Pierre and the other photographers started rolling tape on the operation.  After the patient had been driven off and the Blackhawk’s rotors started winding down  they all turned their cameras over to the Apache,   with its menacing array of cannons and rockets it made for a startling image against the windswept, mountain skyline.    Suddenly there was the roar of an engine   and a stalky, bearded American with long hair and wraparound sunglasses  riding an ATV  pulled into the circle of journalists next to the airstrip.

            “Turn those fucking cameras off!” he shouted above the noise of the Apache.  Everyone turned to look at him,  but the photographers,  by instinct, continued rolling.

            “I said turn the cameras off  before you lose them!”

            “Excuse me, but who are you?”  asked   a British correspondent.

            The man responded by taking a swipe at his photographer’s shoulder, knocking him off balance and causing him to nearly drop the camera.

             “Hey,”  shouted Tewksbury, his voice coming out in  a pathetic croak.  “Everyone is here with me, they’re all embedded media. What’s the problem?”

            “The problem is no fucking photography on the flight line.  You know this.  I don’t care if they’re embedded, they’re not shooting what happens here.”  Most of the photographers by now  had stopped shooting and had taken the cameras down from the tripods, expect for a young Afghan photographer still cradling a small digital video camera in shooting position.

            The man turned to him  “put that DOWN.”  Instead the young Afghan remained strangely immobile,  staring the man down with his dark, defiant eyes. 

            “OK, “  the man said,  and started walked toward the Afghan,  his right hand grasping the pistol that was strapped to his thigh.   The Afghan still didn’t move, and a confrontation appeared only seconds away.  Tewksbury tried to step in front of the man, but backed off when the man put his hand out to hold him off.   The man wielded his pistol and cocked it and brought it down pointing square at the skinny chest of the young Afghan.  Without flinching, and in his own time,  the young Afghan slowly lowered the camera,  but didn’t break eye contact with the man, and seemed to not even blink. 

            “Who the fuck are you?”  the man snarled.

             “He’s OK, he just doesn’t understand, that’s all” Tewksbury croaked,  grabbing the camera from the young Afghan.  “He’s with the Afghan TV station in Kandahar, we’ave been working with him for months.  It’s OK.”

            “It is not OK.  You know filming the flight line is against the fucking rules.”

            “But that’s only expressly forbidden at Kandahar airfield”

            “It’s expressly fucking forbidden anywhere I am.  You got that?

            “I do.”  Tewksbury was shaking now.  Realizing  he’d screwed up,  and come  close to a catastrophic ending to the coveted job of Public Affairs Officer.  “I’m Captain Tewksbury from the Brigade Support Element.  You are?”

            “Master Sergeant Nething.    Any more questions, Sir?”

            “No more questions.  Sorry about the misunderstanding.”

             Nething  gave the Tewksbury the same steely stare he’d given the Afghan,  then cracked the thinnest of smiles, and saluted Tewksbury, who was nominally his superior.  He turned around and walked away before Tewksbury could salute back.

    As the confrontation ended the lumbering Chinook and its gun ship escort appeared over the mountain range and descended onto the airstrip to pick them up.   The back door to the Chinook was lowered, and Tewksbury led them  through the blast of air from the rotors and the hot exhaust from the choppers turbines.    Approaching it like that they  could hear the two different sounds that helicopters make;  the whine of the turbines,  and the slapping of the rotors into air.   The tail gunner lifted a black gloved hand off his weapon and gave them a desultory salute.  Pierre saluted back. 

5 -           “Hello Matt this is Sammy Khan.   I’m trying to reach you.  Please call me at your earliest opportunity.  Thank you.”

          “ Hello Matt it’s Sammy Khan.   There was a suicide attack against ANP in Panjwai district today.”

           By the time Matt had figured out how to retrieve messages from the cell phones left for him in the work tent, there were already eleven messages from Sammy Khan, the fixer.   Matt had assumed it was because he wanted his pay,  but Sammy didn’t mention money in any of the messages,  which seemed like a daily tick tock of violence and calamity in the dangerous area around Kandahar.    Sammy’s English was much better than Matt had expected,  and seemed to carry a hint of the UK in it, a sign that Sammy may have studied there or traveled there recently.   When he finally called him back,  it was over a terrible connection, with static, distorted syllables, and a long delay,  but they still arranged to meet at the “back gate” to Kandahar Airfield that evening at 6. 

        Pierre had begun work cleaning out the dusty pile of camera bags,  body armour,  and assorted protective gear that was piled high in their corner of the tent.  When he found something that was valuable,  or had sensitive electronics, he would blast it with a can of compressed air, the force of the air jet instantly rendering most surfaces clean.  Pierre would hold an object close to his face to inspect it,  squint, hit it with the compressed air and then turn it over in his hands with a simple, satisfied look on his face.   Matt could see Pierre had already taped a picture of his young son on the tent wall above his workspace, and realized he hadn’t even thought to bring  any pictures of his own children with him, Joanne, 12,  and Logan, 10.    Joanne who had predictably become  distraught  the day  Matt left them for the Airport, possibly sensing correctly that it was a function of the breakdown in his family and career.  If Logan was apprehensive he hadn’t shown it at all, spending his time instead downloading pictures of the tanks and helicopters his father would soon see in Afghanistan.   The boy was like a stabilizing force in the disarray of recent years.   The irrepressible spirit of a boy before his teens, with the world still a new and fascinating place.   Knowing nothing of the vagaries and anxieties of the years to come.  After he and Wendy had split up it was Logan who he saw the most,  coming over in a Taxi to his one bedroom apartment in Arlington to watch a Redskins game,  drink Coke and eat pizza.    Logan seemed to be the last person truly impressed by his career.    He wondered how long it would last. 

        When Pierre  finished the cleaning he set up their laptop computers to work with the Internet connection that the military supplied them.    It was an astonishingly fast connection considering where they were, and they were encouraged to use it much as possible for work and personal reasons.   Matt knew it would be monitored by Military Intelligence, that access to certain sites would be blocked, and that it could be shut down on a moments notice if they wanted to stop them from communicating with New York for some reason.    He laughed to himself thinking of the irony that he, in particular,  would be someone who would unearth sensitive information,  or pose a serious challenge to an institution like the U.S. military.    He hadn’t had a real scoop in many years, and had devolved into the kind of correspondent the photographers snickered and rolled their eyes over,  the guy who’d gotten to a certain point in his career and then gave up and started “mailing it in.”   The hard drive on the computer made its staccato clicking sound and his e mail came up.  There were messages from his desk in New York, and from Wendy. 

        “Do you have anything from Kandahar?”  they wondered.  “Can you work up something about armoured humvees and IED’s?   Is there going to be a new offensive soon?  Will the Taliban start an offensive?   Can you get into the trauma hospital there?  We’are all hoping for big things from you this assignment.  Hal says he’s looking forward to seeing your first piece.”    The  last sentence was the threat. The loaded gun cocked and pointed at his forehead.   In the passive aggressive language of a network newsroom,  where everyone was paranoid that their e mails could one day be used against them,  outright threats were usually disguised as corny enthusiasm.   Hal was the Network news Executive Producer who’d only grudgingly let Matt hang on to his job and take the Kandahar assignment.   Not even an Afghanistan assignment,  but a Kandahar  assignment.   Bald,  laconic, Manhattan Hal.   You’d never hear from him when you were doing well.  When you got an invite to meet him in his office you’d best call your agent and your lawyer first.   Matt had been around long enough to know the desk didn’t dare use Hal’s name unless he had said something to them,  and good things seldom happened when Hal was thinking of you.What to do?   Matt typed back a short note about the footage they had from Tarin Kowt.   Probably not urgent enough to trigger them to ask for a full report ,  but it was something that the producers could chew on and debate in one of their interminably long editorial meetings   where ideas rose and fell with the regularity of the tides.  It would  create the perception that he was on top of things,  even though the elements he had for a piece were not strong.   The best part of that trip,  he realized,  was where that Special Forces soldier had challenged them about filming the helicopters,  and that,  was obviously footage they didn’t have. 

        Then he opened the message from Wendy.  Short, curt,  a reminder that he would have the arrange to have money transferred into her account to pay the mortgage this month because the interest rates had risen, and their monthly mortgage payment had adjusted accordingly.   When he had met his obligations to his fragmented family, paid his agent,  and his credit cards,  he had nothing left over at the end of the month.   This without even having to pay the rent on his Arlington apartment, which he had given up when he left for Afghanistan.   Aside from the  sleeping space he had in the tent,  he was,  for all intents and purposes,  homeless. 

            “What do you say we go hit the mess tent for a late lunch chief?”  Pierre had finished setting up the computers and was ready for another activity.  “ Tewksbury says they’ve got those no alcohol beers in there this week, and they go fast.”    By order of the commanders, alcohol was totally forbidden at Kandahar Airfield,  even for the civilians.   Partially an effort to show respect for the Islamic culture, and also a means of maintaining discipline.  Much of the Soviet military failure in Afghanistan before them was thought to have been because of poor discipline.  Russian alcoholism that degenerated into  drug addiction, fuelled by an abundant local supply of opium and hashish.  

            Matt told Pierre to go on without him, as he was planning on meeting Sammy shortly,  and didn’t yet know the way to get across the sprawling, confusing base.  As busy as a small city experiencing an economic boom,  the gravel roads of  Kandahar Airfield were prone to outright traffic jams  at times.  Columns of evenly spaced   armored vehicles crawling slowly along the roadways,  kicking up dust and diesel exhaust.  Endless rows of gray tents,  blast barriers, and portable buildings.   The base had two of its own small cement factories,  fed by an endless line of top heavy, garishly decorated Afghan and Pakistani trucks that hauled in the gravel and substrate.   They would sit outside the base for hours in the dust and heat, waiting for a soldier to inspect them and let them on the base, or turn them back.   Matt found a rickety Chinese made bicycle that had been left leaning against the side of their work tent and slowly pedalled along the gravel roads toward the back part of the base.    He passed a kennel where he could see German Shepherds pacing back and forth in their cages,  then a large yard full of long metal pipes that looked like a staging area for an oil field.   A soldier out walking one of the dogs directed him to a warren of low buildings and tent like structures that was the back end of the gate.   At the last checkpoint before he got outside of the base he flashed his badge at three young soldiers manning a strong point.   They wore as much body armour as could possibly fit on a human,  and in addition to their personal M- 16 rifles,  they had a large,  belt fed machine gun.  They were the first line of defence against a potential suicide bomber charging the base in a vehicle. 

            “How long are you gonna be out?” One of the soldiers asked,  casually pulling a Marlboro out of a pack and then rapping it on the concrete barrier.

            “I don’t know, a half hour maybe.  I’m going to meet my fixer.  He said this is the place to meet.”

            “Not here.   You want to meet him across that dirt road and in the parking lot, with all those trucks.   Just don’t get yourself kidnapped,  and make sure he doesn’t come driving up here.   We don’t want to have to stop him.”  When he said the word “stop” he’d gestured toward the machine gun, and looked Matt square in the eyes. 

            “OK.”  Matt grinned slightly,  feeling like they were being a bit overbearing and paranoid.    The soldiers didn’t grin back,  and the interaction felt awkward.  Matt would learn later that  a suicide bomber in a small, white Toyota Corolla had charged a similar checkpoint at the U.S.  base in Bagram couple of weeks prior,  had detonated himself before the gunners could stop him,  and killed more than 30 Afghan men who were lined up outside the  gate waiting for day labor jobs on the base.  And Bagram was considered a much more stable region than Kandahar. 

            “Stay to the left as you come back in so we can see you,”  was all the soldier said as he walked out. 

6 -   Although it was dark and a chill had crept up from the sandy, garbage strewn  ground,  Matt found he was sweating as he leaned against a blast barrier out beyond the checkpoint.   Aside from the vehicle traffic in and out of the base,  he  noticed after a while that he was hardly the only pedestrian near the road that led into Kandahar city.   He didn’t see them at first,  but several dozen Afghan men loitered quietly in the vicinity, some standing partially obscured near scrub brushes,  others squatting next to sections of blast barriers.   Sometimes he could hear them speaking,  or rolling down the window of a parked car and flicking a cigarette out,  the embers tracing an orange arc through the dark.  Behind him was the dull roar of generators, and the glare of lights at Kandahar airfield.   In front of him,  darkness,  and the low voices of Pashtun men.   It looked like what it was;  the kind of darkness from which you could never return.    He wondered what would be worse;  dying  from a car bomber detonating himself as you waited outside the gates of Kandahar airfield?   Or being kidnapped and facing days of inhumane and  uncertain captivity at the hands of the Taliban,  and then having them chop your head off in front of a video camera for propaganda?   He decided that the latter was far worse,   because you and your family suffered for longer.   But at least a kidnapping offered the opportunity of escape,  as a quick thinking American contractor had demonstrated in Iraq years before when he simply ran away as his captors prayed.  Or there was the possibility of rescue.    A team of Special Forces,  like the freak he’d encountered the day  before,  storming the place,  and executing the hostage takers with such speed and precision that they didn’t have a chance to even think about the hostage.   One of the previous correspondents had left behind a small manual written by an  obscure NGO that advised people  if  captured in places like Afghanistan   to cooperate with their captors,  and NOT try and escape.  Mat stopped reading the pamphlet at that point,  thinking it ridiculous that someone wouldn’t capitalize on an opportunity to get away.     His cell phone started to vibrate in his pocket.

            “Hello.  It’s Sammy.  Everything is OK.  I am just driving down the road now.  I am in a white Toyota Corolla, one of the headlights is dark,  OK?”

        Down the road, Matt could now see the single light of the car bobbing up and down as traversed the pothole riddled road.   He was anxious to get into the car, and get out of the site of the Afghans around him,  who he felt were still quietly watching him.   There was an older man in particular, arms crossed,  squatting on his haunches,  who watched him continuously,  not blinking,  not breaking eye contact if Matt looked at him directly.    Sammy arrived and pulled right over, popping the locks on the passenger side.

            “Hello and welcome to Kandahar my friend.   I’m happy you are here and hope you are well.”    Sammy smiled with his entire face, a warm, authentic, happy  face that was unlike anything you ever saw in photographs of Afghans,  which always portrayed  suffering, and  tragedy.   His handshake was with two hands, and he seemed to almost giggle as they looked at each other.  Matt felt cold  and clinical by comparison.   “Come.  We’are driving over that field to talk.”    As they rocked up and down over the potholes on the bumpy road,  he maintained his beaming,  toothy smile.  It felt like a reunion of relatives,  or long lost friends.   Sammy seemed literally excited to have Matt there.

            They pulled into an informal dirt parking lot a couple of hundred yards down the street from the entrance to the base.   Several other cars and trucks were parked there as well, with more Afghan men lingering about.   Matt looked over his shoulder them, and Sammy sensed his apprehension immediately.  

            “Don’t worry.  Don’t worry.  It is safe here.  You are with me.  Now no one will fuck with us.” Then he smiled even wider and reached over and slapped Matt on the knee.  “Come on and relax.   Do you smoke?”

            “Yes”

            “Let’s have a smoke.”  Sammy got out a pack of Marlboros pulled one out for each of them,  rolled down the windows, and then turned on his tape player.   The car filled with pleasant,  sitar sounding  music with a woman singing.  “This is Pashtun music.  My people.  You know?  Enjoy.”    He slapped Matt’s knee again, and then leaned back in his seat, smiling, studying Matt.   “It is a good time for you to come here.   There will be a lot of news soon.   Jeremy was here when it was slow time.    Now it’s going to get hot,  and the Spring Offensive is coming.   The snow in the mountains is getting low, and the Talibs can get their weapons through.  You will be making a lot of reports.”

            “What do you think the Taliban will doing?”

            “Killing the Americans.”  He blew a cloud of smoke out the window.  “Suicide bombs.  IED’s.   Rocket grenades.  They will prove to the people here that they are back and will drive out the Americans.   There are thousands who are willing to die for this.  But don’t be afraid.  You’’ll be with me.  We’ll make lots of reports together.”  Sammy slapped his knee again, and smiled with his big,  cherub like face.  “You’re going to be lead story on T5 network.    Kandahar is going to be lead story.Too easy”

            “I could really use that.”

            For the next 45 minutes they talked about stories they could do together.   They talked about Sammy’s young family.  Matt didn’t tell Sammy he was separated from  his wife and likely headed for divorce.   When Matt reached into his pocket to count out the hundred dollar bills, Sammy stared closely at his hands as they moved,  a mannerism that undermined his otherwise savvy appearance.   They agreed to have Sammy meet them the next day to go to a field where a farmer was growing Opium poppies, a story Matt knew his desk would be interested in.  Sammy asked if Matt could get him some kind of badge,  or official looking paper credential that said he worked for T5.  “I really need something like this.  It is very important for me to get this.”

                “I don’t see a problem  with that.  After all,  you do work for us.  I’ll ask.”

                “Thank you.  Thank you.   I think you are a good businessman Matt.”

        Sammy drove Matt back down the road and stopped in front of the entrance to the base.  Matt could see the soldiers he had spoken with lifting up their binoculars to watch them.  “Move quickly,  but not too quickly,”  Sammy said before driving off,  his single headlight bouncing  up and down as he ploughed  through the potholes and disappeared into the darkness.   Matt held his press badge up and started walking back to the checkpoint ,  walking exactly where the soldiers had told him to walk. 

7 -  On certain clear mornings  Matt could see  that far to the south of Kandahar Airfield  was  a red smear on the horizon,  with  what looked like wisps of red vapour rising off of it, giving it   the effect of some kind of strange  optical illusion.    One of the soldiers told him it was a great, red sand desert that ended just south of the Airfield,  and Matt remembered seeing part of it when they’d flown in on his first day, it’s dunes, and undulating waves of sand giving  it  a fluid appearance.  Living close to it, and knowing it was there  gave  the feeling  of living close to an ocean, with its sense  of promise and mystery.      Matt had  asked if they could explore it but was assured that it was far too dangerous,  a place known for bandits and Taliban.    One morning as Matt stood outside the sleeping tent  there was a great roar as two  F - 16 fighter  jets took off from the runway simultaneously, their afterburners shooting orange flame as they  skimmed the ground  out toward  the red desert.   Matt watched until they disappeared into the far reaches of the sky, like herons at dusk.

    Later that day Matt and Pierre met Sammy at the back gate to drive out to a partially destroyed compound Sammy had told them about where Osama Bin Laden had operated out of prior to the US invasion of the country.    It had been nearly a week, and Matt had not yet had a story make the air.  His anxiety was beginning to build, as he pictured Hal looking at the daily rundown of stories in his computer, wondering where his Kandahar correspondent was.  Where was the enterprise   reporting?   Matt was still dipping into his stash of illicit pharmaceuticals to offset his anxiety, his Xanax and Dilaudid,  but the week he had now spent without alcohol was already giving him a new boost of energy, and surprisingly, enthusiasm.    Ideas, story pitches , came to him faster than they had in years.  When he called the desk to suggest they go and explore a deserted former Al Qaeda compound,  they too, seemed somewhat surprised.   “It’s Matt.  Matt Allison.   He’s pitching something about an old Al Qaeda base.  Should we go?   Do we like this?  Tell him to go.    Be careful.”

    “You see here is the graveyard for the Russians” Sammy explained as they drove past a  vast, fenced in compound piled high with decaying armoured vehicles, aircraft fuselages,  and other assorted sundries of war.  “We drove them out.   All of us.  The whole country.  They were right like rats.  Filthy and corrupt and they raped our women.  They deserved to be killed.  They destroyed the country,  but we became strong,  the Pashtuns, we knew if we could defeat the Soviets we could defeat anybody.   Nobody will conquer the Pashtuns, ever.”

    “But what do you think about NATO then?”  Pierre asked. 

    “Now is different,”  Sammy flashed his brilliant white smile into the rearview mirror.  “Taliban was bad for us because of the Arabs that came here.  Because of Bin Laden.  So America, and NATO came to drive them out.  That was good.  Now they are doing some work, and some construction,  and some jobs, that is good also.   The NATO soldiers don’t mess with our women,  they don’t rape and kill for sport.   Nothing like the Soviets.  When the NATO goes,  we will remember them as OK.”

    “So  you want them to go then?”

    “Of course.  This is our country.   No,  we are not perfect, and there are a lot of problems,  but we want to run our own country.  What would you think if China came to America and said ‘this is how you are going to do things, this is how it will be, this is your leader.’  Americans would fight.   Men  hiding behind every tree.”   Sammy made a gesture like he was shooting a rifle.

    “In America they would love you in the National Rifle Association.”

    “Who is this Rifle Association?  I like them too.   Welcome to my home.   Afghanistan.  One big Rifle Association” 

    They laughed until they reached the main highway connecting Kandahar Airfield and Kandahar City.  A couple of   Afghan National Army soldiers manned a small checkpoint there and an  old Soviet MIG was mounted on a stand nearby, its nose pointed to sky.   They turned right onto the highway, the first pavement Matt and Pierre had seen outside of the     base.   Sammy immediately accelerated to a speed they’d never imagined for a rickety old Toyota Corolla.  His driving was even more surprising;  pulling up closely behind slower moving vehicles, and then  abruptly swerving out into the oncoming lane and hitting his horn.  Much of the oncoming traffic simply veered onto the shoulder, kicking up clouds of dust.  Other vehicles though,  refused to yield, and stayed on course in a bizarre and seemingly pointless game of chicken, which Sammy seemed to prevail at each time,  blasting by them in a cacophony of shrieking horns  with mere inches to spare .  Matt was terrified by his driving,  but  felt  it would be somehow inappropriate, or a sign of weakness to say something.  Instead he just braced his feat against the floorboards and grasped the ceiling strap even tighter.  He didn’t look back at Pierre in the rear seat,  fearing  he was even more terrified.    Matt looked over and studied Sammy’s Face.   His dark, chocolate eyes sparkling with the thrill of the drive, his  impossibly happy face framed by the shiny black waves of hair.  His immaculate clothing.   There was that  incongruity about Sammy,  a face that somehow didn’t belong in Afghanistan.  Maybe in Bollywood.   Maybe as the character who was the comic relief in an American pirate movie.  But not here.   Not in Kandahar. 

    That grin crept back across Sammy’s face.   “Matt .  You don’t worry about the driving.  We are all very good drivers here.  Trust me.  I am the fixer,  and everyone here will move out of the way.”

    “How can they possibly know who you are?

    “Trust me.  They know.”

    They crossed a bridge over the Arghandab river,  mostly a shallow stream at this point, draining what remained of the mountain glaciers out into the southwestern desert.  There were few trees here, mostly scrub brush breaking up the alternating patterns of  rocky soil, and sand.  What a struggle it must be to coax anything of value out of this ground, Matt thought.  The roadsides were littered with garbage, used tires, and the hulks of old rusting vehicles.   There were also strange looking, improvised  shelters in random places along the road,  some made out of mud brick,  others wood, others just a conglomeration of garbage.  Most were empty, but as they passed the odd  one they would see a face peering out,  a man lying down,  or the butt of an AK - 47.    At one of the shelters particularly near to the road,  Sammy told them it was a “police checkpoint,”  and indeed two men inside with AK - 47’s slung over their shoulders and dirty blue uniforms on raised their hands lazily to wave them on.  “They are always getting attacked by Taliban,”  Sammy said.   “I would never let them search my car. “

    A couple of miles later they  slowed down and pulled over onto the shoulder.  “There it is,  that was Osama’s old building” Sammy said, pointing to a group of low brick structures about an eighth of a mile away in the empty scrubland.  Some of the buildings were partially collapsed,  others looked intact.  “The Americans blew it up with B - 52’s.  My cousin saw it himself. “

    “It’s kind of far away to get video,  don’t you think?  “  Matt asked.  “Or should we just shoot my standup here?”  Matt knew that for the story to truly be associated with him,  he would have to include a short part that had him on camera talking about the place, a reporter’s “standup.”  One that was shot in front of the former home of the world’s greatest terrorist could be an important part of his new resume,  should he have to look for another job, which was entirely possible.  But he knew from this distance that the viewer wouldn’t really be able to make out the buildings.   The association with him, and this iconic place would be lost.

    “We’are too far away to make this work, aren’t we?”

    “Yeah” Pierre nodded slowly, clearly losing enthusiasm for this project.

    “Sammy, can we get any closer so I can shoot a standup next to the building?”

    “There is a road here” he said, “but it is not good and I haven’t been down there in a long time.  Maybe you just shoot your standup from here and have Pierre zoom in the buildings with telephoto.  Too easy. “

    Matt felt a subtle rise in the emotional temperature of the group, a sense that both Pierre and Sammy opposed driving closer to the compound for whatever reason;  fear, laziness,  perhaps a combination of both.  In the past, when Matt had encountered situations like this with a crew he had been quick to resort to the brute power  of his title,  and overrule, them,  often in a less than polite fashion.  But today he felt calmer, stronger somehow in the bright sunshine, even with the heightened safety threat they were working under.  He realized that the benefit of driving closer to the compound would accrue solely to him, that Pierre and Sammy had nothing to gain from it.   For them, there was only risk, but no upside.  He took a couple of steps away from the car and stared off toward the compound for a while.

    “Sammy.  Do you think it’s dangerous to drive down that road?”

    “I think the road is fine.  Just a bad road. You know,  bumpy.”  He paused.  “ I will take you,  it’s fine.  Too easy.”

    “Could there be land mines there Sammy?”

    “There are no mines here.  We know for sure.”   

    “How do you know for sure?”

    “Trust me, “  he smiled.  “I know.” 

    “Pierre,  do you have a problem going down there?”

    “I never had a problem in the  first place”  Pierre said,  sounding slightly  defensive. 

    They climbed back into the car and started slowly along the dirt road.  The potholes were worse and  Sammy was driving much slower, and more cautiously than before.   As the compound came into view,  a couple of Afghan man got up from a rug they had spread out over the rubble in front.  They appeared to have been  eating and drinking tea,  and didn’t seemed threatening,  but Matt was alarmed by their presence nonetheless.      “OK” Sammy said,  cranking the parking break on.  “Greet everyone here, and don’t move fast.”  He climbed out of the car, with his electric smile cranked up to capacity.

    “Salaam Aleikum.”

    “Salaam Aleikum” the men barely mumbled the words and touched their hands to their hearts.  

    “Oh that’s just wonderful,”  Pierre said, gesturing over to the rug where a rocket propelled grenade launcher and a  large heavy machine gun lay among their plates and pots.  “He didn’t tell us we’d have company.”

    “I don’t think he knew.”

    Sammy was speaking in Pashto to the two men, who were nodding their heads slowly, gesturing with their hands.    Over in the rubble of the bombed out compound,  Matt spotted another man  improbably perched on the second floor of a building with a blown out roof, squatting on his haunches and watching them intently.

    “Who the hell are these guys?”

    Sammy walked back to the car and opened the door, smiling,  still,  “come on out and meet your new friends.  They are happy to meet you.”

    The next ten minutes was an awkward series of introductions to the first two men, and then five or six others who emerged from the rubble and wandered over to see what was going on.  All of them were heavily armed,  with AK - 47’s,  RPG’s and heavy machine guns.   Their robes were filthy and tattered, as though they’d been living outdoors and hadn’t bathed in weeks.   They were handsome, strong looking men,  but their faces were weathered and deeply lined.    One of them started speaking to Matt in a low, but deliberate voice.

        “He wants your help,” Sammy says.  “He says they want NATO to come and to drill for them a well.  They have no water here.  Can you say something for them.”

        “Sure,’  Matt replied, smiling at the man and pulling out his reporter’s notepad.  “One well”  he said and wrote it down.  He looked over at Pierre and smiled.  Pierre did not return the smile, and  was busy fending off another, younger Afghan in a jewelled skullcap who was poking at his camera.   Matt  fished one of his business cards out and handed it to the Afghans, who looked mildly excited to see it and gathered in close to inspect it more closely.  “Call me at that number if you have any problems with the well.  Or even better, just e mail me.”    This finally drew a mild reaction from Pierre,  visibly suppressing laughter.  Sammy translated everything and the Afghans all nodded.  Matt and Pierre both felt exhilarated as the sense of danger seemed to lift  slightly.   “Let’s do that standup” Matt said.

    Matt attached a small  radio transmitter to his belt and looped a miniature microphone up under his shirt to just below his Adam’s Apple.   Pierre set his camera up on it’s tripod, and Matt went through his routine, walking along the path in front of the compound,  and describing the location,  “the former home of Osama Bin Laden,  still standing, a symbol of the ongoing war on terror, not yet  won here in the desert of southern Afghanistan....”  It was overly simple, and was only partially accurate, but Matt knew it would translate well onto television.  Hal would be happy with it. 

    They did several takes, and at the end of each Matt would be standing at a place where he could see between the buildings and out onto the open landscape beyond.  At the horizon he could see the great red desert.   On his last take,  he was surprised to see that a pickup truck had pulled up behind the building,  the cab crammed full with four Afghans, idling there on the sand and watching them.  Matt tried not to show his alarm,  and started walking over to where Pierre and Sammy were standing.  “Did you see these other guys?”

    Sammy craned his neck over to see between the buildings  “OK it’s time to go.”

    “Who are they?”

    “I don’t know.  It’s OK.  Everything is OK, but we need to go now.”

     As they drove away from the compound the pickup truck emerged from between the buildings and started to follow them, slowly at first, then picking up speed as they got closer to the highway.  Sammy tried to go faster, but the low riding Toyota couldn’t negotiate the potholes as fast as the pickup, which was getting closer, and would overtake them before they got to the highway.  “Don’t  look back at them,”  Sammy said,  “don’t let them know you are afraid.”

    “Who are they?”

    “I don’t know. ”  Sammy jerked the wheel suddenly and they served off the road and onto the brush covered land between them and the highway.  It was flatter ground, and Sammy could pick up more speed.  The pickup also veered off the road to follow them, proving for certain that the Afghans were trying to catch them.  As the Toyota crashed through the brushes,  Matt braced for the sound of gunfire,  an RPG flying their way or the roar of a mine from the ground under them.    Or would you even hear it?  He wondered.  Wouldn’t you just be dead before you knew anything.  Weren’t you  supposed to be feeling something important now?  Something profound and spiritual?  Instead he just felt anxious dread, like standing up to the plate in baseball against a pitcher you knew was likely to hit you in the face with his fast ball.  Where was the “glory” that soldiers used to talk about?  Would this mean anything in the end,  or was he just naive and stupid to have come here in the first place?  Matt thought of having his boy over in the apartment in Arlington and eating pizza on the weekend, how they both liked to eat the leftover pieces cold from the fridge the next morning.   His abdomen grew taught,  waiting for the bullets.

    They crashed through the last bushes before the highway, and  fishtailed briefly on the blacktop as Sammy pushed the accelerator to the floor and pointed them toward Kandahar Airfield.   Behind them the picket truck reached the highway, and started to pick up speed.   It would still overtake them, but they had longer on the highway with Sammy’s car no longer impeded by it’s low clearance.  Ahead of them was one of those Afghan busses, tall, colorful and lumbering slowly down the highway.  As they approached from behind the men squatting on the roof all turned to look at the spectacle behind them.    If there was any question that something was going on, Sammy started honking his horn furiously, causing more passengers to crane their necks.   Sammy jerked the car blindly into the other lane and passed the bus,  a show of dark,  startled eyes peering out from their rags and robes.     There was oncoming traffic,  but far enough out still there was no danger of collision for them.   Sammy pulled in front of the bus and floored the accelerator again.

    “They are not following.  They are not following” he yelled.    Matt and Pierre both turned to look and indeed the pickup truck was still somewhere behind the bus, having given up its pursuit for some reason.

    “Why were they following us?  What did they want?”

    “Kidnap probably.   They  get money from that.”

    “Kidnap us? “  Pierre asked.  “We’are journalists.”

    “Even better.  Everyone in your country will know about you then.  It is propaganda to end this war and bring your soldiers home.  Aside from the money.”

    “But our country won’t pay terrorists.  It’s the policy.  They never do.”

    “Never do?   You are naive my friend.  And if they won’t pay,  then there’s your company, and then there’s your family.  Maybe they are not kidnappers.  Maybe they just want to come and see your camera and tell their story, you know “in Afghanistan it is so hard because of this and this.”   We can go back and see,  if you want? Too easy. Then he paused,  “OK this is real trouble now” and slammed on the breaks hard.

    Sammy had scarcely slowed the car down while they’d been talking and they were now approaching the outermost checkpoint to Kandahar Airfield , where the old MIG was.   A column of armoured NATO vehicles was returning to the Airfield, and without a word from Sammy,  Pierre and  Matt both knew what the problem was.   Here was a NATO convoy, still outside its base,  with a small white Toyota Corolla with local plates approaching them at high speed.    Sammy’s strange familiarity with the other drivers on the road would not be extended to this encounter, and as the car skidded to a halt in the middle of a highway  the machine gun turret on the nearest Armoured Personnel Carrier in the convoy swung toward them,   its barrel was lowered and pointed directly at the windshield.   All of the vehicles stopped moving, and no one spoke, just the clattering of diesel engines and their own laboured breathing.  Sammy was immobile, staring straight ahead at  the vehicle that had lowered its gun on them.  Matt wondered if he knew where to look, if he was trying to make eye contact with the young soldier hidden somewhere in the armoured bowels of that vehicle.  A private, or corporal, probably from some small town in the American South or the Maritime provinces of Canada, scared that he was facing a massive car bomb that would kill or maim him.    Slowly, the vehicles behind it lurched into gear and resumed their trip back to the base.    After the rest were safely on their way,  that last armoured personnel carrier crawled forward,  but the gun moved as well,  staying  trained on them until it was long out of range. 

8 -    The boy was now  in  a drug induced coma.  His face was completely bandaged because of the burns,  with only a small portion of his shaved head showing above the gauze.  There was a scabbed over incision that had a wire leading up and then into his skull.   The device measured the pressure inside his skull that had risen to life threatening levels as his brain responded to the  injury by swelling.   Without the drugs,  it was certain  that the swelling would crush the critical areas of his brain stem that regulate the most essential  of functions such as breathing.   The chances of him surviving the next few hours were low,  and if he actually recovered from the brain injury the third  degree burns to most of his upper body,  including his face,  would far exceed the ability of caregivers in Kandahar to treat him.   He was alive now only because Sammy Khan had been near the schoolyard when the boys found an old Russian mortar and started playing with it.  The two other boys were killed instantly in the explosion,  but Sammy managed to get this one into his car,  drove him out to the base over the horrible road with its potholes and debris and then talked his way onto the base and got the boy admitted to the trauma center.   He would remain there until he died,   improved enough to be sent home,   or until his bed needed to  be given to a wounded NATO soldier.    In the time he had  worked as a fixer for the foreign news media,  Sammy had brought at least a dozen Afghans to the hospital, half of whom improved enough to return to their homes.   

    Matt was now alone in the room with the boy.  The other beds in the Intensive Care Unit were empty.    Pierre had shut his camera off and wandered down the hall to talk to some nurses, and Tewksbury had grown bored from escorting them around the Hospital and had gone outside to make a phone call on  his mobile    Matt picked up the boy’s hand,  and held it in his, the beautiful dark hues of the boy’s skin contrasted with Matt’s pale, almost translucent skin.

    “Hey buddy.  How are you?  They’re gonna take really good care of you here.  You’re gonna wake up soon and see your family, and you’re gonna go home to them.  Nobody is going to hurt you anymore.   Ok Buddy?”    Matt wiped  tears from his face with the boy’s hand and then kissed  it, and gently put it back down on the bed.    Sammy had called him earlier  to say that they wouldn’t let him on the base today, and that he was out trying to contact  the boy’s family.    

     “With any luck he’ll get to die at home.”    The doctor had returned to the room.  A young, intense and skinny Australian  who picked at his fingernails when he spoke and seldom made eye contact.    He’d given a talk to the reporters a couple of days before about his specialty; understanding and treating the poorly understood effects of roadside bomb strikes on people.   As the casualties had added up from  the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,  and soldiers and their doctors were starting to realize the damage to the body went far beyond what was obvious in severed limbs,  shrapnel wounds, and scorched flesh.  There was something else going on,  much deeper, at a cellular or possibly even molecular level, where the concussive shock wave of the blast was doing something to human tissues.   He wasn’t sure how to describe it  or even  measure it yet, no one was,  but it  was doing some kind of damage to the brain. 

    The doctor picked up the boys hand to feel his pulse.  “They are so strong when they’re young like this.  Even after all he’s been through, he has this robust pulse.  There are men in their forties whose hearts no longer pump like this.   But  we could turn these entire hospitals over to treating the Afghans, and still there would be more coming.  This country is one big minefield.  It will always be one big minefield.”

    “Don’t you think NATO and  the Americans are helping them?”

    “Have you ever heard of Pashtunwali?  It’s the ancient, unwritten tribal code of the Pashtuns, the people of  this part of Afghanistan. It was Pashtuns from around here who were the driving force of the Taliban.  Still are.  Pashtunwali tells them all kinds of things about how to behave, how to react to things.  Things like women,  money, land,  outsiders, aggressors. All the important things.   It tells them to be people who don’t ever back down.   A Pashtun man will never admit, never acknowledge that he is inferior,  or subordinate to another man.  They’re like vikings.   If you ask a bunch of Pashtuns who their leader is each one will tell you he is  the leader, or they won’t understand your question in the first place.   See what I mean?  So we come over here because of 9-11, because we’are scared and don’t know what else to do,  and we just plain kill a lot of them,  but them we try and make friends with the rest, help them, bring them here to this hospital,  try and understand them,  and then this thing called democracy, which we think is God’s gift,  and most of them think is some kind of joke.   They already invented their own democracy,  they bow to no man but Allah.  If he even is a man.”  The Doctor shrugged and then looked out the window peacefully.

        “You know a lot about this.  It’s impressive.  Don’t you ever want to say something?”

        “I would.  But I don’t believe they’re listening right now.”

9 -    When Matt got back to the work tent he was surprised to find Major Hart sitting there with the man who confronted them when they were shooting video at the airfield in Tarin Kowt.   They were drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups and talking quietly and grinning to each other.

        “And there’s the TV star himself” said Major Hart,  reaching up to shake Matt’s hand.  “Is everything going all right for you?”

        “Yeah, for the most part”

         “This is Master Sergeant Nething,  he’s with a Special Ops group out of Fort Bragg.   I wanted to see if I could get you guys into a quick meeting,  off the record,  to talk about the place you were at the other day.  You apparently met some strange fellows out at one of the old Bin Laden compounds and were hoping we could have a little open ended dialogue about that, in case you had any questions.”

        Matt was stunned.  “How did you know about that?  We didn’t do a story on that.  We didn’t tell anybody.” 

        “I’m Master Sergeant Nething.  Most people call me Teddy ” said the other man.  “Please don’t be shocked that we knew that.  No, you’re not in trouble, and no, we’are not following you.  As you can imagine we try and get to know most of locals right around the base here,  and most of the guys like the ones you met the other day are affiliated with us.”  He held his hands in the air and bent his fingers to signal the word “affiliated” should be understood inside quotation marks.  He looked about Matt’s age,  had a shaved head,  and spoke with an accent he recognized as American  mid Atlantic.   “So I don’t want you to think we’ave got some black ops, intel , spook thing going with you here.  This isn’t  Hollywood.  We also know the fixers pretty good,  including yours, who is one of the best, I may add. “   

        “So Sammy told you about this?”

        “Look.  It’s not important how we knew” said Hart.   “ We just wanted to ask you some questions about it, that’s all.   You are a guest of ours here.”  Technically,  this was true.    As an embedded journalist with the US military he was essentially hitching a free ride with them.  Staying in their tents, eating their food,  using their transport,  and  most importantly:  getting the kind of combat zone protection and access that could only be afforded by being with them.  The downside was a worrying abrogation of the basic principles of journalistic objectivity (although Matt sincerely doubted something like this even existed at all),  and the possibility that his  reports could be coloured by low level censorship or coercion,  which he suspected might be taking place now.   The trip to the Bin Laden compound wasn’t any kind of great scoop,  although the standup had been fed up to New York.   Pierre had been decidedly cold to him in the days after,  clearly not happy that his life had been jeopardized for such a trifling element. 

        “So what do you want to know?”

        “The guys you saw out there with the weapons,”  Teddy began. “We’are not worried about them.  We know who they are.  But it’s our understanding that there were some guys who showed up in a truck, followed you for a bit, could you tell us a little more about that?”

        Matt told them what had happened, the appearance of the truck, the truck following them,  the incident with the returning convoy outside the base.  “Did we screw up somehow with this?”

        “No, no, not at all.  Any time you go outside of the wire without us,  this kind of shit can happen.  Which is why we encourage you to go with us if you have to go out.  But  whatever.   This isn’t a prison camp,  you  know?  You’re basically free to come and go as you please”  Teddy grinned at him.  His teeth were almost impossibly white, as though they’d been bleached.   “What I wanted to know, was about that truck.  Do you think Sammy knew those guys?   Did he wave to them, or maybe signal to them in some way, or do anything to make you think he might have known them?”

        “Well as soon as he saw them he said we had to go.  I think it was more of a case of him knowing OF them, than knowing them directly.   I mean I even asked him,  ‘who are these guys?’ and he didn’t know.  I believed him.  Don’t you believe him?”

        Teddy and Major Hart were both silent for a while,  then Hart spoke.  “ I don’t know how you guys from the TV networks divvy up the local fixer talent here in Kandahar,  but however you do it,  you guys at T5 got the best deal.  Sammy Khan is probably the smartest, most well connected fixer of them all.  If you guys weren’t paying him the big bucks,  we would  have him working ’ for us.   We have no issues with Sammy whatsoever.  Do we worry about him?  Yes.  And that’s more of what we are  getting at here.   We just need to know who these guys are.  But I thank you for your time,  I think that’ll be all.  You good Teddy?

        “I’m good.”

10 -     A heavy rain pounded the canvas roof  in waves and sheets that came in oddly timed intervals.   Had the soldiers around him not proceeded with such nonchalance a newcomer  could  have thought it was gunfire.   Matt and Pierre had gone to a massive tent complex that served as the recreational facility on the base.  Just after they entered, a powerful burst opened up above them, raining and blowing intensely for at least twenty minutes.    The roof flapped and reverberated in the onslaught, but as far as Matt could tell not a single drop of water made it though the material.    In the middle of one of Afghanistan’s most dangerous and primitive regions,   the facility looked like a the gymnasium at a large, well endowed  American public university.    Hundreds of young men and women were exercising on modern machines and weights.     Matt was laying on a padded floor and doing sit ups and studying himself in the wall mirror.   He had decided years ago that he would be fitter, and look better if he lost about ten pounds, but he’d never had the discipline to stick to a healthier diet and exercise plan,  and could seldom control his drinking.     Straining to rise up for his last few sit-ups, he noticed  a discernible reduction in the amount of fat on his belly.   He lifted his t - shirt and exposed the pale skin,  dappled with the kind of moles that concerned doctors.    His belly was smaller, and flatter, and when he pivoted his torso there was the faintest outline of a more muscular sub structure somewhere underneath.     Even with the heavy food he’d been  eating in the mess tent,  he was losing weight simply because of the absence of alcohol after two weeks in Kandahar.     

    Standing up he could see his outline against the bodies of the young soldiers behind him.   Despite his reckless lifestyle, at 41 he was still passably healthy and vigorous.   He had some grey on the sides of his head and in his beard when grew one, but he’d barely lost much of his thick black hair.   His big shoulders lent him a powerful,  mesomorphic  aspect  that easily compensated for any flab he gained on his stomach.   If there was a chronic health problem about to erupt and dominate and then shorten his life he was free of any symptom of it, and he  had seen enough death to know how lucky he was.      He felt age in his teeth, in the recession of his gums that the dentists kept warning him about, and was reminded after every meal when some chunk of meat or plant fiber would embed itself in the growing spaces between his molars.   His knees were noticeably stiffer now then even just a few years before  and would cry out with alarming pain if he exercised without adequate stretching.  He knew his lung capacity had diminished from smoking, but he could still run and swim competitively with most other men his age.  In the basement pool of his apartment in Arlington shortly before he left for Afghanistan he had raced another, younger man who was doing laps in the pool when he and Logan had gone down for a swim.    Even without his goggles Matt had been able to keep up with the swimmer and then explode into a sprint in the final fifty feet and overtake him.   Logan was thrilled. 

    If there had been a noticeable decline, it was more in the realm of his psyche and spirit.  The events of the past year, Wendy and the kids,  the incident at work, had amounted to a tragic implosion, a long overdue correction in the arc of his life and career.    While he had believed for years that his core issues were addiction to sex and substances, in the pure light and clarity of basic  survival in  a place like Afghanistan he was beginning to think there was a deeper core, something beyond even those temptations.    The past fifteen years of his life had seemed like an endless string of reckless experiences followed by guilt and shame, an inevitable personal vow to “never go there again,”  then the eventual breaking of that  vow,  ascending to a new plateau of recklessness,  another breakdown, and the cycle repeated itself, only getting faster and more intense.    You would look to your last incident and say “that was the problem,” “if only I hadn’t been more careful and not forgotten to eat before getting drunk then I wouldn’t have missed work.”  “If only I hadn’t forgotten the empty cocaine bindle in my trouser pocket then Wendy wouldn’t have found it in the laundry.”  

    The last plateau of recklessness he’d reached before the implosion had been centerred around a place they called “Club 1744.”   Which was 1744 Swift street in Washington DC.    Home of Damian Silverman.     Silverman was exactly Matt’s age,  and had  similar tendencies in drinking,  drugs, and womanizing.  Damian had been a junior staffer in a previous President’s administration, and was a now a partner in a K street  lobbying and influence firm called Magus.   They’d met at a retirement party on Capitol Hill for a Democratic Senator, and sensing a compatibility of interests, or, admittedly,  potential for sleaze,  they’d become fast friends.  Damian had also evolved into a deep background source for Matt  on high level events in the Democratic party. But mostly it was just partying and womanizing.  Damian and the other partners in his firm, some married, some not, had built up a stable of young Washington women they’d recruited for the purposes of sex and entertainment  and power brokering.    They’d get invited to dinner parties at Damian ‘s  home at “Club 1744,”   would be bowled over by the name dropping,  the booze, and if they stayed late enough,  the drugs.   The women were used as interchangeable sex toys by the men.   Trading their bodies for the access, or the illusion of access,  to the exclusive power nodes of Washington.  In practice, they could be dropped by a man at any given times and re-assigned to another.  Matt remembered one occasion where a  sweet,  beautiful young woman from Florida who’d been sleeping with Damian  for a number of weeks was invited to one of the dinner parties, only to find Damian  wasn’t  there.  When she’d asked where he was, one of Damian’s  colleagues told her he was upstairs in his bedroom,  “busy with his  girlfriend.”    The girl was visibly stunned by this, and she lingered awkwardly  in the busy kitchen for a while and then quietly disappeared, never to be heard from again.

    For Matt, it wasn’t so much the women at “Club 1744” that were the problem but the drugs.   Since his days growing up in Bellevue, Washington,  Matt had been a regular pot smoker,  which never seemed to be an obstacle for him.  He and Wendy used to smoke together before the kids,  after which she became obsessed with her health and fitness.  The problem for Matt at “Club 1744” was the cocaine.    Like a lot of people connected to the official power centers of Washington, Damian and his crowd from Magus were indifferent to pot,  and preferred heavy drinking,  cocaine and ecstasy.  While Matt had experimented with cocaine before, he’d never been in a milieu where it  was readily available most of the time.  Most of the girls who came by the club seemed to like it, even came looking for it,  and it was only a matter of a few months after Matt had become a regular at “Club 1744”  that he was sharing in the purchase of ever increasing amounts of it.   He never noticed when he went from the time in his life when he never thought about cocaine, to the time when he thought about it a lot.  Where he could get some, where he would do  it,  who he would do it with, and what his cover story to Wendy would be.  He would wake up in the middle of the night thinking about cocaine, about the acidic drip down the back of his throat after snorting a line, the beautiful taste, and then the numbness in his mouth and gums.    At one point,  after having sex on  a pool table in Damian’s basement with a young intern from his firm,  Matt and the girl sprinkled the cocaine into a pipe and smoked it with some pot.    “Snow capping,” the girl had called it, smiling as she exhaled.   Matt knew at this point he wasn’t really that far away from smoking crack.  It was this kind of lifestyle, this kind of recklessness that had led to the incident with the Vice President,  and the reason he was in Afghanistan,  estranged from his family.  

    “You ready to go pretty boy?  Or are we staring at ourselves in the mirror the rest of the afternoon?”   Pierre had finished his workout on the machines, and stood behind him with a towel draped over his shoulders, and massive, dark sweat stains under his armpits.  He too looked like he’d lost some weight in the days  they’d spent in Kandahar. In Pierre’s case, Matt thought it actually made him look older, taking away from the his chubby,  boyish  look.    “I’m going to capture that tape that Sammy brought in yesterday on the opium.”

    “Sammy was here yesterday? Where, at the hospital?”

    “I don’t think so, I saw him with Major Hart and that crazy fuck from up in Tarin Kowt, the Special Forces guy.  They were coming out of the Headquarters Compound and he gave me the tape.  He said you wanted video of the poppy fields.

    “What was he doing going in to the Headquarters Compound?  They won’t even let us in there.”

    “That, my friend, is for you to find out.  I leave the big editorial mysteries to the smart guys like you.”

11 -     Back in the work tent Pierre put the tape in the deck and then booted up the computer so that the video could be “captured” into his editing program.  Pierre had taken to drinking the de-alcoholized beer from the mess tent and had put several dozen of them in the small refrigerator they had in the tent.    When no one else was around other than Matt, Pierre had the annoying habit of taking a few hits of the beer,  and then belching loudly.  More than being annoyed, Matt felt sorry for Pierre, but he never said anything.  We are in a war zone  he thought, and let it go.

    The video was  wide shots of a nearby poppy field,  then tight shots  of the beautiful unmistakable flowers, slowly pulling back to reveal row after row of them,  in what was a breathtakingly large cultivation effort.

    “Holy shit that’s a lot of drugs,”  Pierre said,  punctuating it with a belch.

    Suddenly a line of dark SUV’s pulled up next to the field with dozens of heavily armed Afghan National Army soldiers who started plowing the crop under with a couple of old tractors.  Poppy eradication was nominally a part of the new government’s plan for peace and stability in Afghanistan, a strategy some said had been ordered by the Americans. Matt loved these kinds of stories, drugs being a natural topic of interest for him, and he thought this was a  great one to illustrate his thesis of the ultimate futility of the  “War on Drugs”.  Look what happened with Prohibition.   Look at how cheap blow is in the U.S. today despite the billions of dollars flushed down the toilet known as “Plan Colombia.” 

    “This is such bullshit.”

     Despite the eradication program, in the years since the fall of the Taliban  opium poppy production had actually increased  by a huge amount, surpassing South East Asia as a source for opium and heroin.   Hal had seemed supportive,  and possible even excited about the story since the piece they had filed on Bin Laden's  old compound.  Matt felt his ideas were carrying more sway than usual with New York.   He was still in a delicate place with T5, but he felt like he was trending in the right direction

    “Sammy’s a pretty good photographer.  He uses his tripod and composes the shots pretty good”   Pierre said and belched.   “But what are we gonna do for sound?”

    “I don’t know yet.  I’m editorial, remember.  You just worry about your pictures.  And your belching.”

    “Hey. We’are in a war zone.  You got a fucking problem with that?  Send for a new photog then.”  He proceeded to belch again, turning his mouth up in the air like a howling wolf. 

    There was a rap on the door, and Tewksbury walked in taking his hat off in his awkwardly formal way and smiling at them.   He was with another man, an unshaven civilian with  scruffy black  hair, and a checked head scarf wrapped around his neck.  “Having fun guys? I wanted to introduce you to your new tent mate. This is Robert Goulet, he’s from the French TV news,  it’s a documentary, right?” As if to underscore that point,  Robert Goulet had a small format Digital Video camera hanging from a strap around his neck.    His pants were dirty and looked like they’d been slept in, and as he reached over to shake hands Matt saw that he had dirt under his fingernails.   Tewksbury lingered near the door and then left quietly.

    “ You’re shooting a documentary here?  By yourself? That’s pretty brave.”

    “Well, I don’t know that you call me brave, maybe just  trying too hard for the right shots, you know,  bang -bang up close.  It’s hard to get.  But I have a couple of months, so maybe I’ll get something.  What about you?”

    Matt told a bit of his story and what he had done so far, the story about the Bin Laden compound and the poppy eradication.    Robert was polite and made eye contact and nodded, but Matt suspected he wasn’t very interested in what he and Pierre had been doing.    Robert was so thoroughly filthy that Matt could see clumps of dried dirt and dust in his ears.    He looked like he’d walked in from a sandstorm, even his camera looked like been dragged through the sand.   He was animated when he talked and seemed to be genuinely excited to be in the tent and in the company of other journalists.   He lit a cigarette and flicked the ashes on the dirty floor as he moved a table to create a workspace for himself.    His baggy clothes concealed how skinny he was.  Slight, but not effeminate. 

    “Do you know anyone here I could hire for help to get around?  Some kind of fixer maybe?”

    Matt hesitated for a second, pondering the different possibilities about recommending Sammy.  If he did, Sammy would certainly be grateful for the extra money,  but he would also have another client to serve, a potential competitor,  and Matt had no  way of knowing how this skinny Frenchman shooting a documentary would factor into the next few weeks of life.  But Pierre made up his mind for him.

    “We have the best fixer around here,” Pierre said from his corner,  and then incredibly,  belching again.   “His name is Sammy Khan.  I have his cell phone number if you want.  He’s really connected around here.” 

    “There you go,”  Matt said,  “ I was just going to recommend Sammy.”

    Matt left the work tent and walked a short distance to a covered wooden boardwalk that  had been built in the middle of the base.    Inside the rectangle it formed was a large gravel field that served as a gathering point for informal sporting and social events.   A dozen young U.S. Army soldiers were out on it playing flag football, using the neon covered strips of material issued to prevent traffic accidents at night as flags.   With their thick heads of hair and strong, limber legs they could have been college kids at any campus in the United States.    Other young men, and a few women were mulling around the shops and restaurants that had been built on the boardwalk, buying slices of pizza  and hamburgers and trying to hang out as though they were spending a peaceful afternoon at home.   There were smaller shops with men selling Afghan rugs and souvenirs, and Russians selling flasks emblazoned with the old Soviet hammer and sickle icon.  At one of the corners of the boardwalk  there was a gap between the shops,  and from his raised position on the boardwalk Matt could see out over the endless field of tents and buildings of the base and caught a glimpse of the red desert shimmering in the distance,  bleeding its wisps of sand up into the sky.  

    “Hey you.” Matt heard a woman’s voice from behind, and turned to see the woman he’d met on the plane a couple of weeks ago.  “It’s Sandy, I was wondering if you were actually around here or out running around with the Taliban.” 

    “I could only hope.” 

    “How are ya?  I told my family in Dubuque that I’d met you,  and my sister says she saw you on the news a couple of times.  She was wondering if your ever gonna put me on? Just joking.”  

    Sandy seemed so much more vibrant and attractive than she had on the plane.  She looked like she’d lost a few pounds, and she too had been at one of the base gyms and was  wearing shorts that revealed her tanned, strong looking legs.  Her face was freckled from the Afghan sun, and her hair was tied back in pig tails.  She looked much younger.

    They wandered back toward the row of sleeping tents and sat in the empty space between them, already half dried even though it had rained hard just a short time ago.   They sat with their backs against the tough canvas and smoked. 

      “So why does the big reporter have to come over to this shit hole?”

      “I fucked up.  I needed to keep my job.  I hoped I could save my marriage,  but I was so out of it at the time, I didn’t even realize I was way beyond that even.   Way beyond keeping the family together,  now just trying to make sure my kids will talk to me, let alone respect me.  I used to think it was automatic that they’d think I was a great guy, a great man,  that they saw me on TV,  all that bullshit.    Then you wake up one day and realize you’re just another fucking alcoholic sex fiend.  No - an alcoholic sex fiend with a major drug problem.   How does that look on  match dot com?”

    “I don’t know.  You never called me up.”

    They laughed together, and Matt told her the story about Damian, and club 1744, the ‘ Dirty Dems.’    The cocaine.  Sandy didn’t wince or seem the slightest bit judgmental, and just listened.  “I was so bad at this point,  I was only coming home a couple of days a week.  I just lied and told Wendy I’d caught the shuttle up to New York and was working on a Big Story.  I think she believed that about twice,  and the other thirty times she ‘d just call her sisters,  or her lawyer,  and figure out her game plan  for dealing with the derelict husband.   But I didn’t care, didn’t notice.  Damian and I were on some kind of roll - you can’t imagine what Washington is like when you have money, drugs,  and  connections.    That meant we always had women.  Lots of young women.   It’s so fucked up because when you’re in that head space,  you can even keep partying while part of you knows that it’s falling apart.  I mean,  the few times I was home,  Wendy would be doing the laundry and find an empty bindle of blow in my trouser pocket,   or a condom wrapper, and she never said anything, just left it in the bowl by the door where I kept the car keys.   Maybe she wanted me to keep going,  to see how low I would go,  reveal who I really was.  I don’t know.   So there comes this day when I’ve been partying at Damian’s, and I have  to head downtown to this function at  a think tank where I’m supposed to do a story on the Vice President’s speech.  I take a shower,  iron my clothes,  and get a cab down there in plenty of time.  Everything is going great.   I meet the photographer and sound man,  and we start getting processed through the security there, you know, the metal detector that the Secret Service sets up whenever the President or Vice President goes somewhere.  And I’ve  got this heavy coat that I was wearing because it was cold the night before,  didn’t even need it on that day,  but I was still carrying it.   Sometimes, in addition to the metal detectors, the Secret Service guys will have a dog there to sniff for explosives, and this time they had this beautiful German Shepherd there, sniffing over the equipment.  Well, I love dogs,  particularly German Shepherds,  so I’m standing there, petting this dog in front of all the other reporters and dignitaries,  when suddenly, he starts sniffing at my coat pocket,  and then starts scratching at it with his paw.  I think, he’s just being friendly,  and then the Secret Service guy asks me if I have anything in my pocket.  I think he’s joking,  but he’s not, and then the dog barks.  Just once,  this loud bark,  that suddenly gets everybody’s attention. ‘OK,’  I say, ‘ look in my pocket,’  and I  hand him the coat, I mean obviously I’ve got no EXPLOSIVES in my coat pocket.   This dog calms down, and I ‘m even petting him as the guy goes through my pockets, and pulls out a fucking bindle of blow.  Not an empty one,  like my wife found,  not a even just a little bit, but a full on fucking eight ball of blow that I had completely forgotten about.  To see the look on this Secret Service guy’s face,  you’d think he’d just caught Osama Bin Laden sneaking into the Kennedy Center with a dirty bomb.

    Matt took a long drag on his cigarette and blew a plume of smoke up into what was once again an impossibly  blue sky.    A twin rotor Chinook Helicopter spooled up on the tarmac near them and   rose awkwardly into the sky,  followed by an Apache gun ship.    The noise drowned them out briefly, and Sandy reached over and touched Matt’s hand.  “That’s terrible,”  she said.   “ Is that why you’re here?”

    “Pretty much.   I was actually pretty lucky,  because,  believe it or not,  they never charged me.  I mean it was a big stink and all the reporters and everyone in the White House knew about it,  and my lawyer had everything ready to go to deal with the charges,  but they never came.  I think they knew the problem would be at work, and at home.

    “So they fired you right away?”

    “Actually they didn’t.  The Secret Service took me away, and gave me a big lecture in one of their vans, told me I would have to go to court,  I could do time for this,  blah blah blah,  then they took me to the DC jail and I was booked.     It took until about eleven that night that Damian finally bailed me out, and I had two e mails on my Blackberry,  one from my boss,  the big boss,  telling me to be at his office in New York in three days time,  and another from Wendy,  telling me not to bother coming home.  I’m not sure how she found out right away, but I think the cameraman told her.  Or maybe Damian.  I don’t know. 

    “Your wife didn’t come to get you out of jail?”

    “No.  And I guess I didn’t expect her to at that time.  Would you have done that?  For someone who had done what I had?”

    Sandy didn’t say anything for a while, just stirred the loose gravel with her shoe nervously and looked down.  “So did she kick you out because of drugs or because of cheating?”

    “I would probably say both.”  Matt looked at Sandy and then crossed his eyes and they both burst out laughing.

12 -  Sammy’s car turned out of the dirt lot and started bouncing through the potholes toward Matt and Pierre.  Pierre had grown a scruffy beard that he had taken to stroking nervously,  particularly when they made trips outside the base.    His face too, had taken on the lean,  tanned look of people who’d been in Afghanistan for a few weeks.   He’d even started bumming the odd cigarette off of Matt, and smoking them clumsily,  holding them to his mouth like they were joints.   Sammy swung the car over their side of the road and reached over and pushed the passenger door open.

    “My gentlemen from T5,  Salam Aleikum.”

    “Salam Aleikum.”

    “Salam Aleikum.”

    Sammy was set to take them into Kandahar city for an interview with a young Canadian woman who was running the local office of the Global Trust,  and NGO that was trying to come up with solutions to violence and the drug trade in Afghanistan.  He had pleasant Pashtun music playing on his tape deck,  and was in a happy, expansive mood.

    “I think you will make a very good story from this interview.  Nancy is my friend for months now,  and I have had her talking to AP,  and to the French television.  She is very smart,  and very pretty.”   Sammy flashed his mega smile.  “One night I would like for you to come into Kandahar, to come to my office,  you can meet the other Afghan journalists,  and spend the night.  It is safe.  And,  we have whisky.”  They drove past the old MIG and turned left onto the highway headed for Kandahar.    Matt noticed the picture of a young boy on Sammy’s dashboard,  dressed in brown Afghan robes, and with Sammy’s  unmistakable smile.

    “Is that your boy?”

    “Yes, that is Noor.  If you are coming back here in 10 years time you will be working with him.   He is going to have my business, and work with the reporters from all over the world.”

    “I hope I’m not back here again in 10 years,”  Pierre said from the back seat.  “  You don’t think this place is going to  be fixed by then?”

    “Fixed?  How do you mean fixed?  Afghanistan will never be fixed,  It never has been.”

    “Well I guess just more peaceful.  Democratic maybe.  I don’t know.  Don’t you think things are going to get better around here?”

    “Honestly.  I tell you.   I think it gets worse.  This democracy is your thing.  One man one vote.  It is not our thing.   We are tribal here.  If we have a problem we go to the chief,  to the Mullah, we work it out that way.  Your way means more fighting, more problems.  This is why I think we will be  working with the reporters for a long time. Someday me and my boy.”

    Sammy smiled peacefully and looked out ahead on the highway.   Traffic was light, so Sammy wasn’t weaving in and out of the oncoming lane,  and for the first time,  Matt felt fairly comfortable on a trip outside the base.   He was well rested,  and feeling healthier than he had in years.   In the mornings he noticed that his skin had a different, almost youthful luster to it.   So much better than the mornings in Washington when he would struggle out of bed late,  with a muddled head and dark circles under glassy red eyes.   There was some kind of purity in the primitive, stony world of Afghanistan, in the clear skies and cold water drunk in the shadow of a mud brick wall.   It was  an exhilarating clarity of mind that he hadn’t felt in years.   After his long talk with Sandy next to the tent the other day, she’d leaned over and hugged him tightly before heading back to her tent.   The physical  memory of her breasts pushing into his chest energized and excited him.  Looking over at Sammy, driving to his Pashtun music,  and at Pierre in the back seat stroking his new beard,  Matt thought finally, for once,  he was in the right place in time,  and in his life.  He was where he was meant to be.   One of Sammy’s mobile phones started ringing.

    “Prraang?  Darsem ba’d itlaa.  Itlaa de serra Amrikaayi” Sammy didn’t so much as speak as yell into his phone, listening as people did in most places, but then moving it a couple of inches away from his mouth when he spoke, and yelling into it as though it was a walkie talkie.  “  Khatarnaak,  ka tsheeri darsem kor os.  Khatamaak.  Urdu sskaar.” 

    To Matt and Pierre the Pashtun language sounded exactly like they thought it would; guttural and exotic, the perfect language for rag clad insurgents in a barren land.  Sammy put the phone away and smiled.  “That was Taliban.”

    “Taliban?”

    “Spokesman for Taliban.  He is calling me every day with news from them.  They will be having big spring offensive when the snow is gone from the mountains.  More bombings of NATO.  More attacks.”

    “Well tell him I said Hi.”

    “I tell him.”  Sammy flashed the blazing white grin and gunned the engine, passing a slow moving donkey cart on the road.  The old man sitting on it turned to wave,  and Matt saw that he had bright blue eyes shining out from his dark and grizzled face.  They were now in the city of Kandahar,  with the streets becoming busier and more congested with traffic of all kinds as they neared the city center.    From a distance, most of the buildings looked like they were made of scraps that were scavenged from a junkyard.   Awkward, delicate looking structures piled against on another;  an auto parts shop with a stack of tailpipes and mufflers leaning against a makeshift wall,  right next to a butcher’s shop with the carcasses of freshly killed sheep hanging on hooks.   The stores looked more like overgrown stalls than proper buildings.  Between the shops and the streets a stream of putrid water trickled along in a makeshift ditch,  an open sewer.  Matt saw women lifting the fabric of their blue Burqas as they hopped across it to buy food.  This is the Kandahar of legend? The Kandahar that spoiled the hopes of Queen Victoria’s army,  and was renowned throughout the Kingdoms of central Asia?    At what looked like the center of town there was a four or five story steel and glass looking building,  with many of the windows shattered or blown out completely.  “That was the Taliban building.  All the windows are broken from the car bombs on this street.   This is the most dangerous street in all of Afghanistan.”

    “That’s good to know.”

    “Hey, don’t worry now.  You are with me. It’s safe. Too easy.”

    They careened through a roundabout clogged with more trucks,  donkey carts and men on mopeds.    Sammy sped up and drove down a smaller street lined with lower,  better kept buildings.   He turned abruptly off the street and  onto a small wooden bridge that crossed the open sewer,  and honked  the horn.    An old man in ragged clothing and an AK - 47 slung over his shoulder shuffled out of a small door, and struggled to push a massive sliding door open that led into a well kept inner courtyard.   As they drove in,  Matt saw that the  tops of the compound’s high  walls were lined with shards of broken glass, and another, younger man with an AK - 47 watched them casually from across the courtyard.   Another slender young man emerged from one of the buildings and started walking toward them.

    “That’s Nancy.  From the Global Trust.  She is very smart.”  Sammy put the car in park and started toward the person.

    “That’s a woman?”  Pierre asked. 

    Matt watched as the person  approached, and realized that this was the subject of his interview, Nancy Henderson,  a young Canadian  lawyer with the Global Trust,  now  dressed in the typical attire of young Afghan man.   Some of the print reporters embedded with the U.S. Army at Kandahar had favored Afghan dress when going outside the base.   Matt thought it was stupid,  that they weren’t  fooling anyone and would be revealed as  foreigners,  as a Parangay,   as soon as someone got close to them.  For centuries,  Western men had sought to penetrate the dangerous kingdoms of central Asia by wearing local attire.  As often as not, they ended up beheaded or starving to death  in the rat filled dungeon of some Sultan.  To Matt, the risk of stirring anger by trying to be deceitful about his  identity was worse than  being recognized outright as a foreigner.    But in Michelle’s case,  he realized the ruse was probably very effective.   From a distance,  she was just another Afghan man who wouldn’t likely be bothered. 

    “Hello.    I’m Nancy Henderson.  Thank you so much for coming. Salaam Aleikum, Salaam Aleikum.  Hello Sammy.” 

    Sammy introduced Matt and Pierre,  both of whom felt suddenly awkward in the presence of this brave woman.    Sammy seemed almost giddy, as though he was in the company of a celebrity.   In Afghan culture,  he would probably never have any professional dealings with a young, single woman who was not escorted by her husband or a male relative.  

    “Shall we go inside?   I’m more comfortable conducting an interview indoors.” 

    They crossed the gravel strewn courtyard and passed a couple of anemic looking saplings and a wicker birdcage on the ground with two yellow birds inside that pecked around on the floor oblivious to the people.   Nancy was tall for a woman with a slim waist, long neck, and long, elegant fingers.  She opened the door into a cold foyer where an  old Afghan woman  sat on her haunches in the corner, completely covered by her robes and headscarves expect for her dirty,  mangled looking feet on the bottom  and her dark eyes penetrating from the withered skin on the upper portions of her face.  If there was electricity  inside the building it was not being used for lighting,  and the interior was illuminated by the cold gray light that slanted in through the dirty windows.  They crossed into a warmer,  better furnished room with a couple of couches and a metal desk and  chairs with a laptop computer on top. 

        “Welcome to the Global Trust, Kandahar office.”  Nancy said, impishly,  reclining into one of the old couches.   She picked up a stone that dangled on the end of a long silver necklace and rolled it in her fingers as she spoke.   It had a dazzling blue quality to it, and was the only instance of bright color in the drab room. 

        “Do you  want to do this here,  or outside?  They usually have me do this outside, out back, there’s a bunch of old dead Soviet tanks out there and they always have me walk among them.  You know, ambiance I guess.”

        Matt turned back to look at Pierre who was fumbling with his equipment.  He shrugged at him , not caring,   but Sammy was standing behind and shaking his head and waving his hand no,  like an umpire.  “I  guess we’ll just do it in here.   He’s setting up already.  So tell me about yourself?” 

        Nancy looked downward, momentarily shy,  and twirled the stone through her fingers again for a while.    “ Well I can’t say I ever fancied myself doing this kind of work.   If you talk to my Mum she still doesn’t quite believe any of this.  All I can tell you is   I grew up in a mill town in Western Canada,  in British Columbia,  and there’s a tremendous and diverse native population  up there.   I went to elementary school with native kids,  and early on I think I  learned something about tribal nations  interfacing with modern, and post modern western power structures.”

        “Whoa.  I’m gonna need a translator here.” 

        I’m sorry,” she said with a half smile and turned her face down again to look at the stone.  “This is hard to do sometimes.”

        “No worries.”   Peter looked back again at Sammy,  who smiled,  and Pierre, who gave him a thumbs up. 

        “ I was a lawyer working in Vancouver, and I got burnt out  of the whole corporate law thing,  sitting on my  ass on front of computers getting fat,  putting in ten, twelve billable hours a day.   It wasn’t my thing,  and I was introduced to some of the board members of the Global Trust through a freelance article I wrote for magazine about the Nisga land deal,   a big settlement between the province of British Columbia and the Nisga nation.  I won’t bore you with the details,  but it ended up leading to a job as country coordinator here in Afghanistan.  I did that for a couple of months out of Kabul, which was more boring, administrative work,  but in a real crappy office,  and then got the opportunity to come down here and work on the opium issue. “

        “You weren’t scared to come down to Kandahar?”

        “Sure I was.  But a couple of things happened.  First,  I was introduced to Haji Naqib,  one of the power brokers in the Alokozai tribe,  who are big players from here down to the border at Spin Boldak,  and even further into Baluchistan.   Naqib and I have an agreement,  he uses me as a go between to NATO  forces at Kandahar airfield,  I have a pass and can get on the base, and talk about his and the tribe’s concerns,  it helps both sides a lot. and having Naqib and the Alokozais  at my back means I’m protected here, anyone who would try and hurt me,  or thwart what I’m trying to accomplish, has to answer to the Alokozai’s to some degree.    Beyond that,  as a woman, my chances of getting my head chopped off  down here are a lot less than yours, or any foreign man.

        “That’s comforting.”

        “It’s this curious phenomenon,  one of the few  benefits of an extreme sexiest culture.  Even if I wasn’t protected by the Alokozais,  and I was kidnapped,  they would never physically hurt me, its part of their tribal code, part of Pashtunwali.   When they’ve abducted women,  they usually just hold on to them for a few weeks,  keep them with some family and have them hang out with their women and the small children.  It’s obviously something I’d never  want to have happen,  but they wouldn’t chop my head off, which is what they would do to you.”   She reached down sipped tea from a tray that had been brought in by the old Afghan woman they’d seen outside.   Matt was still too unsure about the water,  and knowing this was a fellow westerner, and not an Afghan, he wasn’t offending her by not drinking.  “So, we started working on Opium.   In the years since the Americans came in under Operation Enduring Freedom, there was a lull, then a literal explosion in opium cultivation.   Now it’s at the point where Afghanistan is by far the world’s leading producer of opium,  and the Taliban are imposing a tax on the farmers of about ten per cent,  so a big source of funding for the insurgency.  A huge source.   The farmers plant it because it pays far more than wheat,  and if they’re not doing pomegranates or grapes,  the opium is the sure fire cash crop.  One farmer told me the other day if he plants wheat,  he struggles to feed his family,  but if he plants opium,  even with the payoff to the Taliban, he can feed his family and even expand his house.   So can you blame them?  

        “But the policy from Kabul is to wipe out opium fields once they’re planted.  We  even have video of them doing that.”

        “Sure that’s going  on,  but its all just for show.  The ANP and the Americans roll into some district in Helmand or Farah province, drag the Afghan media out, plow under a couple of fields,  and then head back to their bases before it gets dark.   The farmers who lose their crops are usually the ones having some kind of dispute with other growers, and haven’t paid the right bribes.  Most of the crop is left alone, because NATO know if they really went after it they’d drive the farmers straight into the hands of the Taliban and  kick the insurgency up by a couple of hundred degrees.   The West can’t win this one.”

        “So you guys say legalize it?”

        “Not legalize it,  but license it.  There’s a global shortage of opiate based pain killers.  In the West we don’t notice it,  but have you ever thought of what happens to someone who’s dying of cancer in India, or Bolivia,  they can’t get strong painkillers like morphine and codeine because they’re too expensive, so they suffer in ways we can only imagine.   What the Global Trust is saying,  have the Afghan government give licenses to grown opium,  regulate it the best you can,  but the opium from the farmers at a better price even than the drug traffickers are paying,  and use this massive harvest as feed stock for the production of morphine and codeine.    You help to quell the insurgency here,  you help Afghan farmers feed their families,  and you reduce suffering on a massive scale.

        “So, if you guys have studied this,  and the numbers all add up,  why aren’t we doing this?”

        “Ha.  You really just got here didn’t you?  And you say you’re from Washington?  I don’t mean to be rude,  but are you aware of the power of the anti drug lobby in Washington?   The Drug Czar,  the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy? “

        “So let me get this right,  social conservatives,  and the “Reefer Madness” dolts in the US government won’t settle for anything less than complete eradication. Just say no.   I do happen to know a bit  about drug policy in Washington DC.”  

        “Oh it’s even worse than that.  Now they’re talking about an aerial spraying campaign.   The US embassy in Kabul, and everyone straight  back to the White House  are all behind it,  and its complete lunacy.  First,  it’s not going to work, it’s not going to kill a significant amount of the crop, and you can imagine what this is going to look like to the Afghans,  helicopters and planes flying low over their fields and releasing chemicals.  After what  they went through with the Soviets,  they are going to be terrified, and it will drive them straight back into the arms of the Taliban.” 

        The interview continued for another 45 minutes,  stopping only for Pierre to change a tape.   Sammy  waited silently in the back of the room or walked outside to talk on his satellite phone.   The longer Nancy talked the more comfortable she became,  looking directly at Matt instead of  down toward her hands or that necklace.   Matt had begun to feel   the exhilarating buzz of a good story about to break.    There was a strange allure and power associated with moments like these,  knowing that the way an issue or event would be known to the wider public depended on how he saw,  understood, and rendered the story.    It was a sense of the potential energy that lay lurking behind the arc of human events,  and knowing something about it’s contours and weak spots, like holding a car battery and knowing the energy that would be released if you somehow connected the two poles and closed the circuit,  positive to negative.   He already knew what he would say to the desk in New York.  Hal was going to love this.

        “Matt.”  Sammy interrupted.   “I think we should get ready to leave now.  Now is a good a time.  The road is OK.”

        “You think we’ll have a hard time getting back? “

        “No, no hard time.  We’ll get back to Kandahar Airfield,  too easy.  It’s  just better if we leave soon.”

        “He’s right,” Nancy weighed in.  “There have been some problems lately.  There’s an office for another NGO just a couple of minutes from here,  and the night before last about a half dozen Talibs showed up and stormed into the place,  they mostly just messed things up and pointed their rifles at people.  No one was hurt, but we think they were looking for westerners, for someone to kidnap.   I wouldn’t be too worried, because you’ve got the best help you can get with Sammy,  but they would love to get their hands on you guys.    You should watch what you say on those cell phones too.   Pakistan’s ISI is listening,  and they’re feeding the information back to the Taliban. Be careful. 

        “Really? Where are you getting that from?”

        “I’ve got a contact in the Army.   Special Forces.  He told me.” 

13 -   The roar of jet fighters on the runway woke Matt up from deep sleep and a terrifying dream.  He was back in Washington DC with Logan and they were standing beside the stream in Rock Creek Park, the trees ablaze with the colours of late fall and the sun still warm but having lost most of its punch.    Logan was watching as two Mallard ducks,  the dun coloured female and  its beautiful male partner glided in for  a water landing ,  touching down simultaneously and skiing on their feet for a few yards before they sunk into the water and bobbed like small ships.  Logan was wide eyed and excited by the arrival of the ducks,   particularly the male,  with his bright plumage and turquoise head.   Matt was fidgety though, impatient,  and not taking it all in.  At one point looking up at the wooded hillsides and thinking that it must not be far to Damian's house, to club 1744, and maybe a quick stop inside for a bump.  Logan would wait in the car while Dad went in to do some quick business,  and when he was inside there was indeed Cocaine, and some young women he’d partied with before,  and he stayed longer than he’d expected, snorted a few lines,  and had one of the women sit in his lap.   He kept trying to leave but the partyers were telling him it was fine,  the neighbourhood was safe,  his son would just listen to the radio or read a comic book. Stay a while,  Matt.  Have a drink. You won’t believe what so and so over at the White House told me yesterday.   Another line?   Then Matt was running panicked out of the house back to the car and Logan.   But the car wasn’t where he remembered it.   He could hear his heart pounding now,  from terror and from the cocaine, and he thought he might have a heart attack.  But where was the car?   Was it gone, or had he just forgotten where it was?

    Matt clicked on the light and heard Pierre’s breathing pattern change  from mild snore to a slow wheeze.   The jets had gone,  and the airfield was momentarily quiet.   He had essentially been sober for five weeks now,  no booze, and certainly no drugs.   Yet he was  still haunted by the recklessness of his past, which he knew had robbed so many years from him and  had diluted his potential, destroyed his marriage, and probably ruined his career.  Was it because he’d lived that life so long and  so hard that in the final analysis that was who he was, even if he stopped partying?   That he would only ever be a crazed partyer, a drunk,  a doper,  or just a derelict.  Or could he make a clean break from all that , and redefine himself, and literally become a new person?   George W. Bush had been a drunk until he was forty and maybe a coke head too,  and he came back.    There was some saying he’d heard once, that the men who came to define their times in their later years were often wild men in their youth, womanizers and drunks.   That the character of the great man was often perfected by burning away the dissolute tendencies of the young man.   Maybe Matt still had a chance to do something, or maybe that was just the kind of wishful thinking that propelled an addict on his way downhill, to the divorce court,  the unemployment office,  the homeless shelter, and then the grave. 

    The day before had been a good one.  They  had finished the interview with Nancy, returned to the base safely,   called New York, and surprisingly, were asked to file the story  that night  and front it with a live shot.    With the video footage they’d been building up over the weeks they had plenty of good pictures and compelling sound bites from Nancy.  Hal had even sent Matt an e mail praising him for the story and telling him it was one of the “promotables” that day,  one of the high profile stories in the newscast that would be talked up on network programming before the newscast.    When it came to go live,  long after midnight Kandahar time because of the time difference with New York,  Matt and Pierre were pumped up and excited.  Matt hadn’t done a live shot in weeks,  but of all of the various skills  a network correspondent had to master  Matt was strongest at going live, particularly under pressure.   Since his days as a local reporter in Texas, and then in Colorado,  Matt had always shown a preternatural ability to maintain his cool,  and deliver a smooth and concise summary of whatever event he was covering.    Live shots were his trump card, and probably the reason he had survived this long in the business despite his troubles.   Pierre had taken  special care to set up extra lights for the live shot,  two that were trained on Matt from different angles, and a third that lit up the row of armored personnel carriers behind them.    As Matt listened in his earpiece to the director in New York giving him a countdown to his hit time  he felt an uplifting wave of accomplishment.   They had come to Afghanistan, they had been safe, they had found stories, good stories,  and they were delivering them on time.    He rode the wave out through his live shot,  animated and shimmering.   But from experience he knew that after the wave, came the trough. 

    As well as everything had gone, there was a nagging feeling he had about the whole set up.    The story was too big to be just waiting there for him,  for Sammy to take him to it.  Had Sammy been sitting on this?   Why hadn’t Nancy been talking to anyone else about it, and if she had,   why hadn’t it been picked up?  Sammy had acted strange in the way that he felt it was safe enough to drive out there, but then suddenly it wasn’t safe enough to stay any longer.  What changed?  It occurred to him that Sammy must have heard something in one of the calls he took on his sat phone, shuffling in and out of the room in his immaculately clean clothes and shiny new shoes.  He knew he owed a lot to Sammy for making the story happen. 

14 -  “Matt.  It’s Wendy.  I just wanted to say we watched your report today.  The kids are very proud of you,  and I have to say,  that was the best report you’ve done in years.  You look great, and the network really went big with it.  Check in when you can, and take care of yourself. The kids miss you.”

    “Matt, it’s Hal.  Nicely done yesterday.   We’are discussing a follow up on that, Yasmin is going to get a question in to the White House on this and try and work something with ONDCP.   Talk to the desk and stay safe.”

    “Hello Matt, my name is Lester Burns, I’m a policy analyst with the Gatlin Institute in Washington, when you get a chance, could we talk about the story you did on T5 last night? My e mail is......”

    “Matt  this is Laura Stein with American Public Radio.  Can you call me please?   We’are doing a show on drug policy and Afghanistan.....”

    “Matt, Damian.  You keeping out of trouble wild man?   They don’t let you anywhere near those opium fields do they?   Club 1744 is dull without you.  Get your ass back in one piece.  I got my nose to the grindstone here and could use my wing man back.   Damian out.”

    Matt woke up the next day to find his cell phone voice mail overloaded with messages.  He’d had big response from some of the stories he’d done in the past, but nothing like this. With audiences now so splintered and distracted by the myriad of news outlets and the internet ,  it was harder than ever to cut through the noise and do  something that commanded attention.  It took hard work,  plus a stroke of luck.  Normally he would celebrate something like this with a drink,   but  since alcohol was not an option here,  and since he was actually starting to enjoy that,  he resigned himself to a late breakfast instead and trudged across the gravel to the mess tent,  technically known as something called the DFAC in the arcane military tradition of assigning acronyms to everything.

    The DFAC was a massive series of sturdy tents that were interconnected to provide  a central food preparation and serving area,  and then a series of dining halls.   From the low ceilings hung cloth tubing that blew heat  or chilled air depending on the weather.  The fluorescent lights and austere surrounding almost gave the effect of being in a submarine.   In the first room you lined up at the steam tables to get your choice of roasted chicken,  Salisbury steak,  or pork chops.  Then you strolled with plate tray in hand to the salad bar and drinks area.  The food was always heavy and calorie rich to meet the nutritional needs of young men and women in a tough setting,  but also to try and provide what some would call comfort food.  On fridays they even offered a “Surf and Turf” menu,  steak and crab legs that were flown in from somewhere at great expense.   So different from how Matt knew their adversaries would be dining just a few miles away.   Dirty men in rags, squatting on the stony ground and eating Nan bread,  and maybe some lamb if they were lucky.   Matt passed the steam tables and loaded up with a light brunch from the salad bar and found a seat at an empty table. 

        “Mind if I join you TV star?”  It was Teddy Nething, standing next to him with a large cup of coffee.  Matt nodded and the soldier sat down, and the two of them sat awkwardly in silence for a couple of minutes. 

        “So I hear you went big with a story on the opium business.  Pretty ballsy.”

        “Balllsy?   Why so?”

        “Well it’s not  every day that an American reporter comes over here and shoots holes in a key plank of our foreign policy with information from some wing nut think tank.  I’m surprised your bosses would go for that.”

        “My bosses actually want to do a follow up on the story.  They’ll be getting a question about this idea to the White House today.  “

        “Ooh the White House.  Wow this is really getting some legs.   I bet you’ll be promoted to White House correspondent after you finish your rehab program over here in Afghanistan.  Guess I shouldn’t be surprised they’d have you do a big report on drugs.” 

        Matt nearly flinched at the last comment, and finally summoned the nerve to stare Teddy straight in the face,  just like the Afghan photographer had a few weeks ago up in Tarin Kowt.  “What is your FUCKING  problem Teddy?”

     Teddy broke out into wide grin with those annoying,  impossibly white teeth.  “All right.  All right.  Don’t take it personally.  I’m  busting your balls because I know you can take it.  I think your a good journalist,  even though I think that story is crap.  Look,  you’ve got guys, some Americans, and whole lot of Afghans who’ve  been risking their lives every day on poppy eradication.   They’re getting killed and they’re getting fucked up.  Whether you and the rest of the liberal media agree with it or not,  it is an official policy of the US government and of the government of Afghanistan, and soon we won’t just be ripping up the fields,  but we’ll be doing aerial spraying too.   So it’s a big deal,  and there’s a lot invested in it, and we’are doing our job, and then you  come along and shoot a bunch of holes in it on national television in the United States with this looney idea.    Am I supposed to be happy about this?”

        “Teddy,  you know what my job is.    It’s  to ask questions,  tough questions that make people think.    Look, you’re  a patriot.  Part of what makes America what it is, is that people get to ask questions like these and it goes on TV.  That doesn’t happen in China and Russia you know.  Would you rather have their system?”

        “That’s a good point.  I’m not against you doing what you’re doing.  I just think if you’re going to do your job in this way you need to know all the facts.  Not base your story on what the Global Trust is saying.  Who invited them into the equation anyway?”

        “The Global Trust is a respected NGO and think tank Teddy.  Are you saying you have a problem with their numbers? With their methodology?”

        “Methodology.  Now you sound like the fucking NPR alternative lifestyles show.  I mean,  excuse me,  but they don’t know shit, and you know that.  And if you don’t then you don’t know shit.”

        “Anything else you’d like to add, Teddy?”

    Teddy grinned again and stared down at his coffee.  Matt noticed that he’d rolled his arm sleeves up to expose exceptionally well built arms,  and  while on earlier occasions Teddy seemed to be stockier,  up close he was  more lean,  his face more lined.   His age seemed much harder to define when you looked at him closer, and he had some kind of weird reptilian sheen to the skin on his neck.  Despite the rest of his body,  his hands were small and delicate, not the hands you would expect of a brawler or a fighter. The way he spoke too,  seemed inconsistent with that of an enlisted soldier, he was more articulate, knowledgeable, and passionate about issues than most officers.  What a strange specimen he was. 

        “Matt. Remember.  I talk this way because I think you can take it.  I know you can take it.  I don’t want you to take this personally.   If you want to know more about this thing, we should meet up sometime.  Outside the base.  Talk to Sammy.  He’ll set it up.” Teddy stood and walked away leaving his untouched coffee steaming there on the table.  On other side of the mess tent some Dutch pilots casually looked over and then looked away again.

        Matt wandered outside and lit a cigarette,  and turned to look out at  the red desert.   A Chinook helicopter escorted by two Apache gun ships flew over the airstrip  but they did not land and kept churning out in the direction of the red desert.   Matt picked up his cell phone and called Sammy.

        “Hello Matt, is everything OK?  Did your story go well?”  In the background Matt could hear a woman talking, and the voice of a small boy,  probably the son he had seen in the picture in Sammy’s car. 

        “You know Sergeant Nething right?”

        “Yes, of course, everybody knows Sergeant Nething.”

        “He wants me to meet him outside the base.  He said to call you.  What would that be about?”

        “ I don’t know.  Maybe he wants to talk to you, you know off the record.  He does a lot of work outside the base with the local farmers.  You know he works on the opium problem a lot.  His girlfriend is in Kandahar too.”

        “He has a girlfriend in Kandahar?  He’s seeing an Afghan woman.”

        “No she is Canadian.  The Canadian woman you met, Nancy Henderson.”

        “Nancy Henderson is his girlfriend? Sammy why didn’t you tell me this?  That’s important for me to know for the story?  Did they tell you not to say anything?”

        “Matt please don’t be upset.  There is a reason I didn’t tell you.  Please trust me. Everything is OK.  But we shouldn’t speak about this on the phone.  I will come and get you tonight at 9 o’clock OK.    We will go and see Teddy and have a talk OK?”

        “In Kandahar?”

        “No outside of Kandahar.  It is safer there.  I come get you at 9 Ok,  too easy?”

        Matt wandered back to the work tent pondering this latest nugget.   What would a woman like Nancy be doing with a guy  like Teddy?   Theoretically they would be completely opposite  in  political philosophy and working at cross purposes on the ground in Afghanistan.   But Matt also knew the laws of attraction and romantic chemistry were much more complicated than that  and just as often trumped ideology.  Just look at the lobbyist  power couples he knew in Washington;  one a democrat, one a republican, spinning against each other all day then going home to a mansion on Kalorama and two perfect children in  St. Alban’s.   Maybe there was some advantage in that kind of arrangement, working both sides against the middle.   Teddy and Nancy certainly would have had ample opportunities to meet each other here and Teddy certainly would have no access to the local women,  closeted and protected by the laws of Pashtunwali.   

        Pierre was already back in the work tent looking at video on the computer.  “ “Hey Mr. popularity.  You finally show up,  a bunch of people have been by looking for you.”

        “Who was it?”

        “Well that chick you were talking to you on the plane ride in her was by looking for you,  she left this,”  Pierre handed him a note that she’d written on a folded piece of paper,  “and Tewksbury says he needs to talk to you when you get a chance.  Oh, and that French guy says thanks for setting him up with Sammy.  He’s out with him today.  He says Sammy is going to get him embedded with the Afghan National Army for a couple of weeks and go out on patrol.  Has that guy got balls or what?”

        “Balls?   Seems to me lack of brains.  I don’t know, maybe he’s anxious to become an organ donor.  Anyone call from the desk?”

        “No calls from the desk.  I think we’are off the hook tonight while last night’s story sinks in.  I’m going to go for a run if that’s OK with you.”

        “A run. Well that’s ambitious.   Go ahead, get out of this godforsaken tent.  I think I’m going outside the wire with Sammy tonight.  To  see that freak Teddy Nething, that psycho Special Forces guy.  Sammy says it’s safe.”

        “Sammy always says its safe.”

        “What do you mean by that?”

        Pierre leaned over and reached under the work table for a pair of running shoes, and started pulling the shoelaces out while he talked.  “ I think you know I wasn’t at all happy about the way things ended up out at the Bin Laden compound that day.  I know we got the shot,  and we got back safe,  but barely.    You know as well as I do that standup wasn’t worth it.  That standup could have been shot anywhere,  and it just wasn’t worth the risk.   Look, you know I trust you, and I’m going to cooperate with whatever we need to do to succeed here,   but sometimes I think you get a little too inside the story, and you’re not seeing the bigger picture with Sammy.  You  know it’s in his best interests to keep taking us places,  keep us out for as long as possible,  maybe get us into a bit of a situation and then miraculously get us out of  it, to make him look good.   That’s all I’m saying.  He has a totally separate agenda here,  and he’s going to be here a long time after we go.  I like Sammy, and I trust Sammy,  but I think we need to recognize that.”

        “Pierre if I ever ask you to do something that you’re not comfortable with, I want you to say it right away.  Don’t think I’m going to hold it against you.  I’m new at this too. 

        “I’m not mad. I just wanted to tell you.  When we go out with Sammy sometimes I just feel like we have no control.    We may think we know what’s going on,  but if you think about it, we really have no idea, and we’are being stupid if we think otherwise.  I want to go back, and I want to go back in one piece.   I look around at what’s happening here and I realize how good things are at home.  Even with all the complaining.  Even with my mortgage.  Even with all the union crap at work.  I like life,  and I like America.   I don’t care what people around here think of our country.    It’s the best place to be in the world. Hands down.  I bet if you did a poll of the people here, even the ones who say “death to America” and support the Taliban and  asked them if they would move to the U.S. with their families if they got the chance, then 9 out of 10 would  say yes.  Absolutely.  They’ll put us down,  but they secretly envy our way of life. 

        “So are we putting you on camera now for the next report? An Editorial from Afghanistan with the great Pierre Elliot?”

        “Shove it up your ass Allison.  I’m going for a jog.”

        Pierre strode out of the work tent and Matt listened as his heavy strides ground into the loose rock and slowly faded into the distance and then a warm wave of sentimentality   washed over him.   He could have done so much worse than to have Pierre  as his photographer.   After the incident in Washington most  other photographers would have held it over his head as a negotiating tool,  as an implied liability that would give them the right to question his judgment at every turn.   But  Pierre never brought it up.  He worked hard at his job and left the editorial decisions to him.  When he had a problem,  he was direct about it,  like now,  and brought  it up in a way that cleared the air but  preserved their relationship.    Things were clear.  Case closed.  This  wouldn’t ever be brought up again,  and their level  of mutual trust had deepened.   There was that word that Damian always used to describe people with that streak of innate goodness to them.  Pierre was one of them.  A Mensch.

15 -     So quickly you find yourself back in the world of temptation and wondering how to proceed.  How shall I proceed?   But how shall I proceed?  Were those the exact words?    A poem  that he remembered studying in college.   Matt swirled the whiskey in his glass and listened to the ice clinking and then held it up close  to his eyes,  like getting a macro shot with the camera.  The light from the bedside lamp refracted through the glass, the ice, and of  course the Whiskey.  Inside the glass he watched as ice cubes melted, and undulating currents of water bled off into the darker mass of the whiskey.    He had only had a few sips but already felt exhilarated,  riding that beautiful early buzz that came only after the first couple of swallows and then faded away for good .   Maybe that’s what you’re  chasing the whole time when you were drinking or getting high.  Trying to get back to the onset of the first buzz, the best buzz, the birth of the cool.  The Absolute Birth of the Cool.    Matt swished the ice in his glass again and pondered the situation.   “The end of this wagon ride”  he said quietly to himself and laughed.    After Pierre had left for his jog Matt had opened the note from Sandy and was pleasantly surprised to find an invitation to a small party with her colleagues in their tent.   She’d ended the short note with a cryptic “We have something you’ll like”  which Matt suspected it would be beer or a bottle of wine since these women probably weren’t into drugs.   The surprise turned out to be whiskey, a not particularly good bottle of Teachers that Sandy told him had cost a hundred dollars.    As Matt reclined on Sandy’s small bed he pondered another possible surprise that he felt could be brewing.   The “party”  turned out to be little more than Matt,  Sandy,  and another woman from the travel office,  a tall, ravaged looking ectomorph of a woman named Glynnis who seldom spoke but seemed to be quite close to Sandy and also had the habit of referring to the father of Sandy’s children as “fuck face.”    The three had barely got through their first drinks when Sandy and Glynnis announced they were heading outside to use the “ladies room”  (as if anything could legitimately be called that at Kandahar Airfield)  and went crunching away through the gravel , both of them giggling.  

    As Matt half expected, Sandy returned alone and sat next to him on the bed.   Without a word she grabbed her glass and held it to her lips and stroked his thigh with her other hand.

        “Where’s Glynnis?”

        “She had to catch up on some shopping.  You know us girls.  We like to get our Christmas shopping done way soon. Do you want to see what I got?”

        “Sure”

    Sandy put down her glass and smiled at him and then took her sweater off.  Underneath she was wearing a tiny T - shirt, little more than a sports bra that had “Kandahar  Beach” written in bright neon letters.   Her cleavage was whiter than he expected, almost ivory,  and her large nipples poked through the fabric.  It was the kind of thing the Russian contractors sold over at the PX  that squarish looking female soldiers from small towns in the American midwest would buy to wear at home with their husbands, or give to their girlfriends or younger sisters.   Matt reached over to her and started stroking her arms,  moving slowly, closer and closer to her shoulders, collarbone, then down to her cleavage, where he worked his fingers under the fabric, and then  took a very large hit off of the whiskey. 

        “ I think I may be in danger of violating Captain Tewksbury’s rule about fraternization.”

        “God I hope so ” she said. 

16 -    Matt waved at the soldiers behind the blast barriers and wandered out into the darkness looking for the telltale bobbing of Sammy’s headlight through the potholes.   As he took a drag from his cigarette he could still smell Sandy on his fingers and on his clothes.  She was obviously somewhat  disappointed  to watch him put his pants on and leave so soon,  but she said she understood he had to go and work,  and when he looked back at her face the last  time before closing the door it occurred to him that she was used to this,   used to being left.   Mostly out of guilt, but partly out of knowing he might want to see her again he  gave her the number for his Afghan wireless cell phone before leaving.   How could that hurt him?   Wendy would never answer that phone,  if she was to ever answer one of his phones again.   As he passed one of the last tents in the row he saw the willowy Glynnis smoking in the half light and watching him with a knowing look.  Neither of them spoke as he trudged off across the gravel.

    Then the single headlight emerged from the darkness,  bouncing toward him and focusing his mind on the night.  He was half drunk already and heading out somewhere to possible meet Teddy.  If anything happened he would instantly be in trouble with New York and with Hal,  as he hadn’t cleared his trip outside the wire with anyone from T5.   He couldn’t even remember if he told Pierre. 

        “How are you my friend?   I’m happy to see you” said Sammy pulling up.   Matt got in and reached for the seat belt,  looking over  at Sammy’s luminous white grin in the dashboard light,  the interior of the car purring with the soft sound of his Pashtun music.  “Ah, Matt,  you’ve found something to drink.  I think we’ll have some more tonight where we go.  I’m happy you’re coming.  You want to smoke something?” Sammy reached up and pulled a long piece of Hash out from on top of his visor. “It’s very good.” 

        Sammy drove as fact as he could on the dark  and  empty highway,  sometimes at more than a hundred miles an hour,  and usually right in the center of the road.   Unlike their trips in the day, there was no other traffic at all  and no hair raising encounters with oncoming vehicles.   Matt found it was his most pleasant trip outside the wire yet,  and while Sammy drove he tapped the tobacco out of a cigarette tube,  crumbled the hash by heating it up with Sammy’s Zippo lighter, then mixed it in with tobacco and stuffed it back into the tube. 

        “You know how the ANA smoke it on patrol?”  Sammy asked.  "They smoke it all hashish,  no tobacco.   It makes them brave to fight the Taliban they think.”

        “Are the Taliban smoking as well?”

        “ Every man in Afghanistan is smoking.”

        “Doesn’t Allah have a problem with that?”

        “With hashish Allah has no problem.  Now light that before  he changes his mind. Peace be upon him.”

         “Inshallah”

        Sammy and Matt shared the spliff, with Sammy doing a strange thing where he would take a toke of it, then hold it up to his and inhale a tendril of smoke through his nostril, and then laugh.

        “What are you doing that for Sammy?”

        “It makes you more high. No?”

        “No it doesn’t make you any more high.  That  technique is for something else, something you don’t have here.

        “I know I know.  Cocaine. Johnny Montana.  You ever try?”

        “ Oh yes.”

        “Is it good man?   Me,  I never try.  Only very, very rich can get that.  The Arabs.   When I was studying in Baluchistan I worked for a family who owned huge properties, and sometimes the Arabs would fly there in private jets for hunting.  Fuck man, they’d bring AK - 47’s RPG’s to hunt, and they’d just shoot up everything, and take nothing back but maybe the head and the skin.   They had these big tents,  and blond prostitutes from Russia and they would drink and fuck and do cocaine all night.  That’s the only time I ever saw, but I never tried.  When they finished the hunting they gave the landowner a gold plated AK - 47.  Very beautiful.”

        “Cocaine is a very bad drug.  It’s fun,  but it fucks you up.”

        “Like Opium.  Never smoke Opium.  Never Matt.  You must promise.”

        “OK I promise.”

        Matt looked down at his cell phone to check for calls. 

        “You will not have service here.  The ISI are jamming frequencies  at night,   Never cell phone service.  Either ISI jams here or Americans jam here.”

        “To stop people from using the phones to trigger a roadside bomb?”

        “Yes. and for other things too.  But we don’t know.  This is a very bad place, so we drive very fast.  Once we get to the house, you will be safe though. Too easy.”

        “Who’s house are we going to?”

        “It is one of my houses.”

        “ONE of your houses?   Sammy you must be a rich man?”

        “I have been fortunate.”

    They drove the rest of the way in silence.  Matt pleasantly buzzed from the whiskey and hash and the exotic ambiance of the car and its strange music.   Sammy, he thought,  must do quite well here financially.  Some weeks he had paid Sammy more than a thousand dollars, more than a year’s wages for an ANA soldier,  and far more than an average shopkeeper in town would make.  Sammy was,  like him,  a war profiteer.  Taking advantage of a tragic situation to make as much money as possible and advance himself.    No different from a reporter,  no different from the people who employed Sandy,  no different from the mercenary airline that flew them in from Dubai. “It is what it is” he said quietly under his breath as the car turned off of the highway and drove down another pothole covered dirt road.    Matt rolled down the window and hung his head out to experience the pitch dark country and the string of bright stars overhead.   Away from the whining generators and septic fumes of the airfield the Afghan night was intoxicating.  Air so impossibly fresh and clean  it felt like a tonic.   It took the edge off of the whiskey and hash and made Matt shiver,  thinking about the ragged, dusty fighters who would lie out here for weeks at a time with their Kalashnikovs and RPG’s and IED’s,   waiting to ambush a convoy of NATO soldiers.   Soldiers chubby from months of heavy food in the DFAC,  who passed their time watching DVD’s and playing video games,  who had young families and mortgages in the suburbs of America,  and who weren’t expected to be hurt, let alone die here.  

    They arrived at a compound of small mud brick buildings and stopped while an old Afghan with an AK - 47 lifted a wooden gate.   

        “Aka,” Sammy said to him as they passed.

    There were about a dozen other cars parked in front of the buildings, most of them new and expensive looking SUV’s.    Sammy led Matt through the dark to a door that was guarded by another rifle toting Afghan and they entered a dimly lit room with christmas lights strung along the ceiling and dark figures standing around or reclining on carpets and pillows.  More Pashtun music  and more hash smoke. 

        “Salaam Aleikum.”

        “Salaam Aleikum.”

        “Matt will you take a Whiskey?”   Sammy worked the room with his wild smile, greeting all of the men,  mostly other young Afghans like him, wearing expensive clothes and shiny black leather shoes.  Sammy was clearly an esteemed member of this group, and large glasses of whisky were passed to him and Matt.  “  How do you like the party Matt?   We are here every thursday night.  You are always welcome to join us.” 

        “Thanks, I’ll run it by my boss.”

        “Fuck your boss.  Why you have a boss?  Be your own boss, like us.”

        “Tell that to my wife.” 

        “If you are paying for your wife, why can she disrespect you?  I feel sorry for Americans for this. You are a hard working man.”

        Sammy turned to some of the other men and spoke to them in Pashto  “Amrikaayi  de sera meermen,  lawda, lawda.....”

        Matt felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see the wild looking Robert Goulet,  the French documentary filmmaker. 

        “Mr. Allison.   Fuck man,  you are scooping everybody with your big opium expose.  How does it feel to be the big man at the tent?”

        “Feels great.  How does it feel to be the little man?”

        “Fuck you.    Here, smoke some of this.  Good shit.”    Goulet was drunk, and put his arm around Matt to steady himself as he passed the hash pipe.   “Your shoulders.  You’re like an American football player,  so big and strong.   You fucking stud.”

        “So I guess its true what they say about the French”   Matt held up his hand made a limp wristed gesture.

        “Hey fuck you Allison.  I won’t suck your cock.  But some of these guys might.  It’s thursday night.  Man - boy love night in Kandahar.”  Matt had heard the stories of rampant pedophilia among Pashtun men in Kandahar province.  It was something the Taliban had brought under control in the area but had now come back in the uncertain political climate.    Technically,  homosexuality would be punishable by death here, but many of the Pashtun men thought you were gay only if you were on the receiving end of the sexual act.  When it came to boys,  who couldn’t but fall in love with the fresh face and body of a young boy?  

        “I’m glad you came”  Goulet told him.  “ I was wondering if I was the only parangay coming to this thing.   Maybe they had a deal to turn me over to the Taliban for a ransom.  But  I’m a Frenchman.  My government would probably pay the ransom.  You, your government  “ we don’t pay the terrorists”  your head would be a soccer ball.”

        “They certainly wouldn’t pay a ransom to get me back.” 

        “Listen to me man.  If you ever get kidnapped here - I don’t think you will - but anything happen to you, forget about all  that stupid training they give you in those combat classes.  You know all that bullshit from the Red Cross, they say to not fight back, and don’t make the fuckers mad, do what they say,  don’t try to escape.  That is such bullshit.  Because you know with these fuckers your head is coming off at some point.  If they take you,  the best you can do is try and surprise them and try and run.   Grab they’re gun, punch them in the face, do whatever.   If you see a  way out take it.  You’re better to run and take a bullet in the back than have your head sawed off with a little machete.  No?”

        “I'll  remember that Robert. Thanks for that.”

        “Look you are big.  You can fight.  Why don’t you fight that fuck head?”  Robert pointed to the corner of the room where a man in Western clothes was talking to some Afghans reclined on the pillows.  “Nething. You know him?”

        “I do.”

        “He’s a fucking monster I think.   I don’t know what his job is,   but whatever it is, I’d sure like to know.  Why don’t you go and find out.”

        “I’ve already tried.  I think his job is to hassle people like us.”

        Robert stumbled away into the shadows with the rest of the party.   Matt realized that he hadn’t seen Robert around the media tent for at least a week.  Had he been staying here?   Had he been out with the ANA like he’d talked about?  Looking around the room he figured the place was probably some kind of party pad and safe house for Sammy and  his friends and connections.  Kind of like the Afghan version of “Club 1744”  except there were no girls and no blow.    Even without  that there would certainly be no partying of this sort in a traditional Pashtun household with women and children around.  It occurred to Matt that none of the Afghan men had ever spoken to him about their wives.  They would say “my family is well” or “ my family is blessed,”  but never say anything about their wives.  They would talk about other women, and women they wanted to fuck,  but it was though the wives existed in some forbidden parallel universe. 

        “I’m going to walk outside,  then you follow me out in about five minutes and we’ll talk inside my truck,  OK?”  It was Teddy,   standing behind him and drinking red wine apparently straight from the bottle.    He was close in to Matt’s face and his breath reeked of booze,  but he wasn’t staggering like Robert was.  I know this type, Matt thought.   They can drink an entire bottle of hard liquor and just  keep steamrolling along.  Talking,  making jokes,  doing business,  picking up women or fighting.  They can be exceptionally pathetic or exceptionally dangerous. 

        “I’ll see you out there Teddy.” 

        “Good.”   Teddy  wandered over to the door and exited without anyone noticing.   There was something  about his gait that reminded Matt of a gymnast or an actor.    It wasn’t soldierly  but still projected power and a quiet confidence.   So Nancy was fucking this guy?   He couldn’t figure out if he was surprised or jealous.  

        Matt walked back out into the cold night and fumbled for a cigarette but was signalled with a brief flash of headlights before he could get one out.

        “Smoke it in here if you want.  I don’t care” Teddy shouted from one of the big black SUV’s.   Matt climbed inside the huge vehicle,  an Expedition?   An Excursion?  So this is where all of these fossils end up.    A rack of consoles had been specially installed in the middle of the dashboard, what looked to him like special radios, and maybe one of those radio jamming systems that Sammy had been talking about.  Teddy passed the wine bottle over to Matt and he took a big hit.

        “So you had some hash eh? It’s pretty good here isn’t it? ”

        “ You know my answer to that one Teddy.”

        “Yeah, OK President Clinton.” 

        “So what’s up Teddy?  You wanted me to come out here.   It’s fun to go to a party,  but you know I’ve been to a few better ones that aren’t  as hard to get to if you know what I mean.”

        “Oh I know all about that.  Come on.  I ‘m just breaking  your balls.  Dude,  whatever you did before, everyone here in the chain of command knows you’re the real deal.  You carry and present yourself like it, and your work demonstrates it.  Don’t think the other reporters don’t know about it.  How about that faggot Goulet in there and his “documentary. “  I bet that’s going to be something.  Look Matt, here’s what you need to know.  There’s more going on here than what you can see on the surface with the opium thing.  Just trust me on this.    And what we’are doing on that file is going to be very critical to the long term success of this mission.  Let me rephrase that - if we don’t succeed with this, the whole mission,  Operation Enduring Freedom,  ISAF,  everything is fucked.  It’s that important.   So when you go and do a report like the one you filed the other day,  you’re jeopardizing something that is very sensitive,  and costing us a lot of time,  money and lives.  That’s all.   It runs the risk of fucking things up.   Big time.

        “Teddy, not to try and be a pest here,  but you know there’s a system for that.   Anything that would jeopardize you’re operational security and put troops at risk we don’t report or we get dis-embedded.  Kicked out.   And I would point out to you that neither Hart nor Tewksbury had any problem with that report.  Just you.  And as far as I know I don’t have to listen to you.

        “That’s right.  You don’t.  But trust me Matt,  you will want to listen to me, because I’m going to make it worthwhile for you to listen to me.  So listen to me very carefully.  Tewksbury and Hart don’t know shit. OK?   Rosencranz and Guidenstern.  You should listen to them about how many times you need to sweep out your tent or when you can take a shit or jack off but beyond that they know nothing.    They don’t get told anything because nobody wants them to accidentally pass that on to someone like you.  They are glorified baby sitters and cheerleaders, that’s all.     You know, one of the reasons why the Soviets lost here wasn’t just because they were so brutal that everyone rose up against them.  Think about it.  They had the numbers,  the hardware,  and they had a common border.   There had to have been something else that made them fail, and one of those reasons was drugs.   You had tens of thousands of poorly disciplined soldiers who first got their hands on opium,  started smoking that,  then graduated to heroin, which they also started smoking until they craved the best high and went to the needle.     They drank and shot up and their camps and  facilities went to shit, and they got sick,  and guess what?   They couldn’t fight worth shit.   No only that,  but it just so happened that the Mujahideen were starting to get better and better Intel on when the Soviet convoys and choppers were moving, and what the weak points were.  You see what I’m saying?    Junkies will trade anything for junk.   That’s how we westerners are weak.  We take those people at home and coddle them and say they need help.  Here they just shoot the dopers  once  they become a liability.”

        “But we kill people for treason as well.” 

        “I’m still waiting.  Listen Matt. All’s I’m saying is there is a lot of stuff going on in the background about how we are trying to avoid shit like this, and I’d like you to help us.  I’m asking you to lay off on the opium stories for a while.  Do some other stuff.   And if you’re willing to help me, then I’ll help you.   There could be a big scoop, a major story coming this way with your name on it.  The kind of story that makes your career.  Got it?

        “So you want me to make a deal with you?”

        “Matt.  I don’t care what you want to call it.   We both have a  mutual interest in something here.  That’s all I’m saying.”

        “Let me just get this right.  You’re telling me that I need to lay off on the opium stories because once that news gets out back home,  it could jeopardize what you do, and I don’t even know what you do,  other than I think part of it is trying to keep drugs away from our soldiers here,  so they don’t become junkies and lose the war.  Is that right?”

        “Something like that.”

        “Oh come on. You think I’m going to buy that.  Dude you want something from me and you are  giving me nothing solid.” 

        Teddy took another drink and was silent for a moment until a tapping on the window disturbed them.   It was the old Afghan who was posted at the gate. Teddy rolled the window down.

        “We’are busy here.  Busy.  Go away.  Dzem. Dzem.”

        But the man remained there,  smiling with his near toothless grin, and cleared his throat and attempted to speak.  “Salaam Aleikum,  Mr. Amrikaayi.  My wife very sick.   You bring to Kandahar Airfield for doctor?   Please Mr.  Amrikaayi.  She need Amrikaayi doctor.”

        “For fuck’s sakes”  Teddy hollered and climbed out of the car,  charging at the man.  “ I told you WE ARE BUSY.  Dzem! Dzem!”  Teddy pointed out toward the wooden  gate, but the old man was retreating too slowly and as he backpedalled he stumbled and put his left hand on his rifle.   Teddy smashed the bottle of wine across the man’s eyes and nose which produced a small burst of blood and tissue that flew off into the air  and the man fell to the ground screaming quietly.  Teddy stood over him and took the AK - 47 from him,  ripped out the magazine and cleared the chamber and  started whacking the man’s chest and shoulders with the butt of the rifle. 

        For what seemed like a long time  Matt sat immobilized  in the SUV, unable to move his legs or speak.   There was a fleeting moment where base fear had taken over,  not knowing if Teddy was attacking the man because of some threat he was unaware of.   Slowly he realized that Teddy was simply meting out a cruel assault on the old man and that he would have to intervene somehow.   As the pounding went on he tried to move,  but as if in a dream where he wanted to run and  couldn’t,  his body would simply not respond.   Then he was suddenly out of the car and running toward Teddy and screaming at him but he felt spastic and unsure of himself.  

        “Get the fuck out of here Matt.”

        “Teddy that’s enough leave him alone.”

        “I’m only going to warn you once. Get the fuck out of here.”

        Matt stood his ground and glared at Teddy.  The old Afghan moaned and his mouth was full of frothy blood.  Teddy pulled a pistol out from under his shirt,  cocked the hammer and pointed it in Matt’s face. 

        “You don’t know how close you are to never seeing your fucking kids again.  Now back the fuck off.” 

        Matt put his hands up and walked backward toward the dark outer wall of the compound.   Gripped by a wave of nausea he bent over and vomited several times.  As he dry heaved and the sickness petered out he could hear Teddy laughing as he stood astride the Afghan.   Matt  was still bent over and facing the other way when he heard the shots.  Two in a quick succession ,  then a pause,  and a final third shot.  Matt stayed facing away from the murder scene  and lingered there in the shadows for a while. 

17 -                 “Matt, Hal wants you to call him when you get a chance”  Pierre spoke to him through the canvas walls that divided their sleeping areas in the tent.   It was early afternoon and the inside of the tent had become stuffy and squalid.   Matt had shouted out to Pierre earlier in the morning that he had stomach flu, “something bad in the DFAC” he’d said and Pierre had left him alone and gone over to the work tent.   Matt suspected Pierre could smell the stale booze vapours that were no doubt rising out of his pores and lungs and that he would suspect the food poisoning thing was a ruse.  Despite vomiting up a good portion of the alcohol he’d consumed Matt felt exceptionally hung over.  Debilitated was a word that had once occurred to him.    He’d finished off the one bottle of water he’d remembered to bring with him and now felt severely dehydrated.  He fished around in his toiletries case for that bottle of Dilaudid that he brought from home but couldn’t find it.  Looking on to the floor he saw his clothes crumpled up in a pile,  with flakes of dried vomit around the knees.   

            “Tell him I’ll be calling him soon.  You didn’t say I’m feeling sick did you?   Just that I was busy? ”

            “Got you covered.  Know that’s a deal breaker in your world.”

         In Your World. The comment  stung .  Because of his fuck up in DC it meant that every time he was late for something, or not feeling well,  or something didn’t work out right,  many would suspect  and others would simply conclude that he was screwed up on drugs or booze.   They would gossip among themselves about it to spread it around sufficiently.    They would pay lip service to acceptance of human failure, and the possibility of redemption and rehabilitation,  and giving people a second chance.  They would tell you they pray for you, and they look forward to having you back,  but all of this was truly a lie.    In the zero sum world of business,  and particularly the business of journalism and broadcasting,   failure in the form of a substance abuse problem meant  a strike against you that made it harder to compete against others.   Your rivals,  the other correspondents and the producers who wanted to manage your agenda  were emboldened, either through a formal corporate edict or just the simple knowledge that you were a screw up and they weren’t.    Matt could just picture Hal hanging up the phone at the Desk in New York and saying loudly  “Allison’s out this morning.   Says he’s got stomach flu”  and then watching the producers and editors smirking at each other and holding their fingers up to their lip like they were smoking a joint, or doing a line of blow.   It would  go on as long as Matt ever worked in the business. 

        He put on a pair of shorts and wandered out in front of the tent and lit a cigarette, and stared out toward the red desert.   We were out there, he thought.  He knew somewhere out there a sick woman lay in a  dusty mud brick home  and waited for a man who hadn’t returned on time.  Would Sammy tell her what happened?   Had he told her already?   When Sammy drove Matt back to the base last night Matt had screamed and threatened that he would report Nething.  That he would have Nething court martialled for murder.   That the Americans were no better than the cruel Soviets who wiped out entire villages with their helicopters just for practice.   He had screamed until it was all out of him.  Sammy listened quietly the entire time, and didn’t speak until the end when they’d passed the MIG and approached the last gate.    The body would be taken away, and nothing left,  Sammy said.  There was going to be nothing to report.    From Sammy, the man who brought injured  little boys to the base and then talked his way into the hospital to get them treated  the seeming callousness and lack of concern was stunning.    Matt new he never wanted to see Sammy again.   He would never leave the base with him and he would fire him at the next opportunity.     He would figure out how to get Nething later. 

        Way out in the distance,  high above the red desert,  a small black speck appeared and gradually enlarged like a bud blossoming on a cherry tree.   It turned into the familiar shape of a Hercules supply plane and floated in silently for a perfect landing.  

        Matt took his bathroom kit and crunched through the gravel over to the shower trailer,  another miracle of modern logistics and contracting.   Inside there were two separate rooms,  one with a row of flush toilets and another with a series of individual showers facing a row of sinks and mirrors.    Personal hygiene,  he knew from the boring briefings that he had sat through, was a hallmark of successful long term field operations.   The Soviets in Afghanistan had failed at this, with their camps becoming cesspools of disease that took troops out of action and degraded morale.   Not surprisingly  the Western forces were better at this.  With their vast consumer driven economies and entrepreneurialism they could deliver to the field enough toilets and showers and pallets of bottled water so that no soldier could go long without cleaning up or rehydrating himself with clean, safe water.   One could only wonder - at what cost though?  A strange,  repetitive belching sound emanated from beneath the floor of the shower trailer.   Some expensive, exotic  machine, no doubt,  that  ran twenty four  hours a day, seven days a week.    Drawing away the used, fetid water and pushing it out to the  filthy miasmic lagoon at the far end of the base that served as the sewage treatment facility.  

        Leaning over and looking into the mirrors his bloodshot eyes had the glassy sheen of  a hangover.   There had been times in his life when he’d gone for weeks waking up to this kind of sight,  but it was the first time he’d been like this on his Afghanistan assignment.   The crow’s feet wrinkles sprouting from the corners of his eyes now seemed to be etched slightly deeper into his face.  His teeth looked dull and yellowing, and there was a hint of dark, half moons below his eyes.  If he had the energy he would have shouted and slapped his hand on the sink,  or tossed his toiletries bag across the room.   But the energy was gone.  He had come to Afghanistan for his last second chance.  To clean up his body and mind.   He had gone so long and had felt so clean and renewed,  almost reborn,  and then in one episode of carelessness he had lost all that he’d gained.  He’d failed to stop a murder and was now in a frightening place, controlling neither the events around him nor even himself. 

18 -                  “I saw something last night when you were gone. And I’m wondering if I should report it.”    Pierre was leaning across the table in an empty corner of the DFAC.   It was the late afternoon lull between lunch and dinner and they were in an empty corner of the tent.   A couple of tables away a few Dutch pilots in tan flight suits  lingered over their food and talked quietly.   Pierre fiddled with the tab on a can of diet soda and Matt tried to maintain an even gaze as his head was walloped with waves of pain every thirty seconds of so.   Matt wondered if he could go to one of the medical clinics and ask for a painkiller, something much stronger than Aspirin.  It was war,  he thought,  why would anyone care?

                “Last night I went for a jog around the base” Pierre began.  “  They have this route that’s mapped out over in the gym,  maybe you’ve seen it,  a 5 K loop.  You leave from near the work tents,  go out toward where those UN planes are parked, and then head back out toward to gate where we meet Sammy.   I was out near the gate  and heading back along the fence and this guy about a hundred yards in front of me comes out and tosses a piece of metal over the fence and then turns around and walks back  between a bunch of those Sea Cans stacked out there.   This thing lands on the road outside the base, and a couple of seconds later a car comes by, a white Corolla with a couple of Afghans inside,  and one of them gets out and picks thing up and they drive off toward Kandahar.”

                “What was the object, could you tell?”

                “I don’t know.  But it looked like a large bolt.  The kind you see on the bases of street lights.  You know, big,  industrial strength.” 

                “A bolt?”

                “Yeah.  But here’s the thing.  I kept jogging,  watched the car drive away, and then turned into the Sea Cans, and the guy who threw it was still walking along,  heading away from the fence.  So I just kept jogging,  like I was minding my own business, and when I passed him I recognized him.  You’re not gonna believe this.  It was Teddy.   That psycho from Tarin Kowt.”

                “Are you sure?”

                “Absolutely.”  Pierre fiddled with the soda can and  drained the last few drops and then opened a pack of cookies.   Pierre,  such a victim of genes and metabolism.   Jogging, working out,  dieting, and then losing all his focus in a nervous eating binge.   His double chin gyrated as he chewed the cookies.   “What do you say about something like that? Do we tell Tewksbury like we did about this guys out at the Bin Laden compound?”

                “No.  Don’t say anything.  I’ve got a few things working right now that I don’t want to upset.  We’are out of here in less than four weeks,  so let’s wait a while.   Do you think he recognized you?”

                “It’s hard to tell.  It didn’t seem like he even looked at me.  He just  kept staring straight ahead.    And you know, I had one of those reflective vests that that  the soldiers wear so they don’t get hit by a car.  I wonder if he thought I was military?”

                “Ok.  Let’s just sit on this for while.”

    Back in the work tent Matt found a note on his  desk from Sandy.    “Good Morning.  Thanks for last night.  See you around Cowboy.”   She signed it with her initial S and then a happy face.  Matt folded it and put it in his drawer.    There was a knock on the door and Captain Tewksbury came into the tent.

                “There he is.  How are you doin’ these days?”  Tewksbury took his hat off and put a small briefcase down on Matt’s desk.  “You got a few minutes?  I’ve been meaning to talk with you.”

                “I’m all yours Captain.”

                “Is Pierre around?”

                “No.  He’s gone over to the gym.”   Matt could feel an interrogation coming on.  Couched in professional pleasantries,  but an interrogation none the less.    He knew a great deal of Tewksbury's job was not only to assist journalists,  but to keep them in line.  Find out what they knew.  Babysitters,  as Nething’s words from last night reverberated in his aching head. 

                “So how are you doing?  I see your work is going well.   But I wanted to touch base with you and see how you were making out, you know,  personally?”

                “Personally? What you want to know if I’m truly living in the now or something?”

                “Maybe I didn’t phrase that right.  I’m not prying, so please don’t be offended.   Look,  this a high stress situation.   A lot of resources go into making sure  everyone’s physical needs are being taken care of.    Meals, hygiene,  safety.  You know that.   But sometimes we lose track of where people are mentally.  You know,  just checking to see where people’s heads are at.”

                “So you’re a psychiatrist now?”

                “Matt.    It’s part of my job to make sure you guys are on board.    That you’re not cracking up over here.  Because if that’s the case then the rules have to be different.  And if it gets to a certain degree then you’ve got to go home.  This isn’t for everyone you know. “

                “Have I done something that would make you think I’m cracking up?  I believe you just stated my work is going well.   Or is this about something else?  Maybe something you heard about in DC?”

        Tewksbury was silent for a moment.  “Matt.  I’m sorry this is bothersome to you.   All I can say is that I have a report that I need to fill out.  And in that report I will have to state that I asked you how you were doing,  and that you responded a certain way.   So think very carefully about what you want in that report,  and now I’m going to ask the question:  Matt, how are you feeling?”

                “Wonderful.”

                “OK then.  Our meeting is over. Thank you very much Mr. Allison”  Tewksbury was now flustered and red in the face,  and struggled to open his brief case and put away his notepad.  Matt could see that beads of sweat had appeared on his forehead.

                “Captain.  Sorry if I was a prick OK?”

                “No need to apologize Mr. Allison.  You answered all my questions.”

                “Tewksbury , give me  break.   You come in here with the strangest request I have ever heard from  the military,   and you wonder why I get my back up against the wall.   You’re a military PR guy.   I assume you read the newspapers, and I assume you talk to the other reporters.  I don’t assume, but know that if you talk to the other reporters around here, or anywhere, they will tell you ‘Hey that Matt Allison, he’s a cokehead you know, he got busted for blow in DC,’  because that’s what reporters do. We’are professional snitches,  and a lot of  times we snitch to bring the other guy down.    So I’m not surprised that you get sent in here  to have a sit down with me and fill out a form so you can cover your ass if I get found dead of  a drug overdose here.  Because I am the druggy.  I am the problem.  I am the weak link.  That’s OK,  I can live with that,  I screwed up,  and I ‘m trying to move on.  So why don’t we just admit that at the beginning?  Again,  sorry if I’m being an asshole, I’m probably just making things worse aren’t I?”

                “Can I speak frankly? “

                “It’s all off the record.”    

                “Matt, we’are in a new era in terms of how we fight these wars.  Even with all of our training, and technical and doctrinal superiority,  if our soldiers aren’t right mentally, then we will lose.  It’s as simple as that.   You know the saying ‘ It’s not the dog in the fight ,  but the fight in the dog?’   Well it’s true.  Take away from these guys the feeling that this is the right conflict for them to be fighting in,  and that they’re making a difference, and that they’re supported and will be rewarded for this when they get home,   and we may as well do a hand over ceremony here with the Taliban tomorrow, because that  way we can save a few trillion dollars and a few thousand lives.     We will not succeed here if we don’t have the psychological upper ground.   And these days,  we know less and less about what that means.    Just to give you an example.   In World War II millions of men put on their uniforms and left their homes and families for years.  Nobody knew when and if these guys were coming back.  Maybe they sent a short letter back every few months,  maybe they didn’t.   Fast forward to now.    We’ave got guys here who do video chat over the computer with their kids every day.   At the very least  they get to talk to their families on the phone once a week.  Most of these guys have their own cell phones and lap tops and are in touch  with their families every single day.   It’s probably great, but there’s a downside to that we don’t understand.    I can tell you for a fact that we have had suicides here that have happened because of fights our soldiers are having with their spouses over e mail.  E mail.    These guys are over here in the fight of their lives sometimes and they’re still expected to check in every day and make sure the mortgage payment cleared the bank,  or that their four year old is fitting in at Day Care.    I had one guy who’s wife is so used to hearing from him that the one day he didn’t check in as usual - because they got hit in a Taliban ambush out near the Arghandab -  she actually gave him shit.    ‘Would it have killed you to check in with me honey?’   well sometimes the answer is YES.   The bottom line is,  we don’t know how much stuff at home is affecting people here, and whether it’s for better or for worse.   So we’are trying to check in with people.  That’s all.”

                “So do you want a hug now Captain Tewksbury?”

        They  laughed until the roar of a C- 17 on takeoff drowned them out.

19 -    Pierre framed Matt up in his viewfinder and held a finger in the air and then pointed at Matt to cue him to start talking.    Pierre was a couple of hundred yards away from Matt, who was wearing a small wireless microphone, and as Matt talked Pierre pulled out and slowly widened the shot to capture the dramatic scene that was unfolding.    They had ridden with a NATO convoy from Kandahar Airfield to Zhari, a massive refugee camp on the outskirts of Kandahar city.    At least 5 thousand Afghans were living here now.  Families displaced from fighting and forced to leave their villages,  and others who had returned from years of exile in Pakistan after the Taliban fell  only to find their homes were gone and there was no work available for the men.  The convoy from  Kandahar Airfield had made it through the dangerous roads without incident, and soldiers were unloading pallets of food and bottled water off of trucks and trying to hand the material out in some kind of organized fashion.   Despite the weather having turned overcast and cold they were struck by the numbers of women and children who approached them barefoot.    One young  boy with bright, piercing green eyes had followed Matt trying to sell him a half packet of gum.    Matt gave him two dollars for it,  which the boy accepted quietly,  but he lingered nearby,  watching intently as Matt and Pierre set up their equipment to shoot video.      For some reason he made Matt nervous,  and it took several takes until Matt got his lines right and Pierre had recorded a solid take that would be fit for broadcast.

            “Do you speak English?”  Matt called over to him.  “English?  Pashto?”   The boy didn’t respond, but stood quietly for a moment and then walked over to Matt  and grabbed his hand and hung on to it.   He didn’t  try and lead Matt anywhere or ask for any money,  but just stood there awkwardly,  holding Matt’s hands and looking up at him.   Matt reached down and stroked him on the head,  raking his fingers through the boy’s thick black hair.    The boy looked to be about Logan’s age but was skinnier, and wore old sneakers with holes in the toes and soles that were almost completely worn down.   Matt reached into his pocket and handed the half pack of gum back to the boy.

        “Here,” he said.  “You keep this.   Sell to someone else.  Sell to Amerikaanyi.”    The boy took the gum back slowly and then dropped Matt’s hands and wandered back toward a row of tents made out of faded tarp  where a group  of women stood holding plastic jugs for water.  Matt thought at first that the boy’s mother was among the women but the boy didn’t interact with anyone of them and just shuffled away,  the detached sole of his sneaker flapping as he walked.   A stiff, cold gust of wind blew a cloud of  dust up into his eyes and he winced.

        “Looks like you are making new friends.”    It was Sammy, emerging unexpectedly from the row of tents.    Robert Goulet was with him,  his small video camera hanging around his neck and tripod around his shoulder.   Sammy was his normal clean and well turned out self,  but Robert looked wild.   His clothes were rumpled,  he was unshaven and his hair was matted to the sides of his head.    Up close Matt could see his eyes looked glassy and unfocused.   Was he high?     While Pierre was busy putting his gear away Sammy walked up and extended  a hand,  which  Matt shook reluctantly.   Sammy projected the most serious demeanor Matt had ever seen from him,  then burst into the megawatt smile.    It was disarming.

        “My friend. I have missed seeing you.   I would like to speak with you for a moment.  Privately.  Just over here.   Is this OK?”

        “Yeah Sammy we can do that.”

        They walked over to a small patch of scrubby grass where some of the boys had been throwing a ball.  Sammy gestured, and they both sat down.  “We are like old Mullas at a Shura” he said.  “ With our own business to talk about.” 

        “You know I’m not happy about what happened to that old man Sammy.  If I was more sure of myself I’d have Teddy arrested and have you banned from the base.   That is the worst fucking thing I have ever been a part of.  It was wrong.  It was fucking evil,  and I don’t know how you can live with yourself.    That wasn’t some accidental killing,  some collateral damage, it was just a murder for no good reason and that’s not what I’m about.  It’s not the kind of the thing I want to be around,  and the people who do those kinds of things aren’t the kind of people I want to do business with.    In case you’re wondering why I haven’t hired you lately.

        The two sat in silence for a long time.   Matt fidgeted with the wireless microphone that he was still wearing,  which he slowly unlooped through the spaces between his shirt buttons and then wound into a coil and put on the ground between them.   Sammy picked it up looked at it closely.  “This is Lectrosonics.  Very good quality.  I wish I had for myself as well.  Maybe someday.  Maybe not.”  He dropped it back on the ground.  “You see Matt.  The thing is that  I don’t fight you on this.   I don’t say this was no murder, that this thing is OK.   I don’t say that I am a good man,  or a man of honor,  or just a big man you have to respect,  or that I have the right to do these things.    You want me to say this is wrong,  then OK this is a wrong thing.  You want me to say this is an evil thing,  then OK this is an evil thing.  Even an evil thing I agree with you.   Would I have killed that man?   Never.   Never would I ever kill any person unless it is for defending my family or my tribe.  I’m  Taraki tribe,  that man was Taraki also.   By rights,  I should kill Teddy.   But where would that take me?   Where would that take my tribe and my family?   Where?  You see,  you come from a place where you have the luxury of talking about whether you do business with someone who is right,  or someone who is wrong.  You have  that choice in your world,  or at least you think you do, so that’s how you think.    I don’t have this choice Matt.    I can’t say I won’t talk to the murderer, or I won’t do business with the murderer, or the murderer must be punished and taken to the prison.   I would have no money for my family and then I would be killed.    I could go ahead and report Teddy to the Military Police but where would that get me?  Where.  It would get me here Matt.  Right here in this refugee camp, because this is where my family would have to come when we leave our home because Teddy and his soldiers are looking for us.    Then eventually they would find me here and kill me and leave my family here alone.   Then they are dead too.  You see it’s not so simple.  It’s not so simple at all.

            “What is Teddy doing Sammy?   Who is this guy?”

        Sammy lit a cigarette and took a long drag passed it over to Matt to share.              “You think I know everything?”

                   “Yeah Sammy.  Most everything around here.”

            “I don’t know what this guy does exactly.    I know he runs around and deals with the Opium farmers.   I know he has the Special Forces soldiers with him, and that the High Ups in the Army have respect for him.   I think maybe he has a lot of connections in Popolzai tribe and Alokozai tribe,  and they trust him and he has a lot of power from that.”

            “So he’s a rogue isn’t he? A rogue soldier who just kills whoever he wants?” 

          “Maybe he is.  Maybe there is more we don’t know.  Let me tell you something Matt.   I  am watching this movie a while ago, an American movie, The Godfather.  I learn about how in America you have this thing called the Mafia,  and the Mafia is all of these rogue people out there stealing and killing and taking money for their families and themselves, and it’s like there is this Mafia, who are bad,  and then the rest of America, who are  good people.   And it’s simple like that.  Well in Kandahar province you can’t just point and say this is the small group of bad people,  and here is the rest of the good people, so all we have to do is take of the bad ones and then everything is fine.   Too easy.  The reason is because there are  many Mafias here.  Everyone is some kind of Mafia, and taking care and protecting their people and fighting the others.   You get rid of every Mafia and you get rid of everyone.  Life here is Mafia.   Life is Mafia.      And do really think it’s much different in America?

        “Yes.  Most people are not in the Mafia in America Sammy.  That’s crazy.”

        “No.  You think.  You are smart thinker, I know.   the police who protect the white people in rich cities in America,  are they really any different from a Mafia?  I mean think about it Matt. They say “pay this money in tax” and if you don’t then they come for you.   The say “this is the rule” and if you break the rule then they come for you.   You say they don’t murder, well what do you call the B - 52’s coming over here and bombing a village for Al Qaeda.  Is that not murder just like what Teddy did the other night?   Of course it is.    Maybe you need to start thinking that your Army is a Mafia too.    It just doesn’t seem that way to you because it’s your Mafia and it enforces your rules.      So you ask me what Teddy is,  and I tell you,  I don’t really know.  I don’t know for sure.    I only know he is not part of my thing,  he is not part of my people,  and I  only wish to outlast him and his thing so my family,  my people,  my Mafia,  can be here when all this goes away

        “When is it going to go away Sammy?”

        “Fuck   I don’t know. We’ave been waiting for centuries.   Maybe we wait for more. 

20 -    Matt watched over Pierre’s shoulder as he captured the video into his computer from a playback tape deck.    Sammy had arrived a few minutes before with fresh video from the aftermath of a Taliban suicide car bomb attack on a NATO convoy as it wound its way through Kandahar City.    The attack had failed to even injure anyone in the NATO convoy,  but had killed 13 civilians and injured scores of others in the immediate vicinity.   There were the obligatory shrieking women,  and the skinny shell shocked men either limping away or carrying away others who could not walk,  the chaos of ambulances and police,  and at the center of the bloody debris circle a blackened area with the smoking grey skeleton of what had been the attacker’s  car.   

    "Look,"  Sammy pointed to the wreckage.  "It's a Toyota Corolla.  Always a white Toyota Corolla.  Like mine."

    An attack of this magnitude anywhere in North America or Europe would have instant, lead story status on every broadcast news organization in the U.S.    But with no NATO soldiers killed,  and even worse,  no AMERICAN soldiers killed he knew there was little chance it would air anywhere in the T5 newscast.    Matt suspected that his desk wouldn’t even ask for it to be fed up.   Years into the so called “war on terror,”  the post 9-11 hopes that the American public would have an increased appetite for foreign news had faded about as fast as people had stopped wearing little American flag pins,  or buttons that read “ Together we stand.”   Such was the parochial inertia of the citizens who funded the world’s most powerful military.    Matt could argue with the desk for more coverage,  and the importance of running video like this,  and the producers would listen carefully,  and say “I understand” and “it IS an important story”  but his item would be quietly dropped from the show nonetheless.    Despite the risks they were taking in Kandahar, despite the dozens of families that had been wrecked that day,  despite the disturbing implications that outcomes like these had for the West’s goals in places like Afghanistan,   attacks like these were just part of the background noise that these wars had become.    Stories about celebrities and their drug problems, or the latest trend in helping your pet lose weight would make the show.   The banal category of “news you can use”  was king these days.     But stories about things people didn’t already know about ,  or would be disturbed to know about,  had fewer and fewer places in American newscasts.   When Matt had been summoned up to New York to be handed  the Kandahar assignment in exchange for keeping his job,  he’d watched as Hal emerged from the glass enclosed conference table in the middle of the newsroom,  telling his lieutenants the latest research showed the audience was “Iraqed out.”       Looking over at Sammy watching his video roll,  knowing the risks he took and his success in such a tough place,  he wondered if this was really witnessing the decline of Empire.   Sammy’s video would not be seen by Americans,  but they would see more stories about  new liposuction techniques and how to get a cheap hotel room. 

            “Get ready for more attacks like this. Taliban say they will make this spring their biggest offensive ever.   They are recruiting in the refugee camps,  and brining more people over from Baluchistan.   They have a lot of weapons now. A lot more money.”

            “Where are they getting it from?”

            “They get it from Pashtuns all over the world.   There are Pashtuns raising money for them in Dubai.   Pashtuns raising money in Karachi.    Everywhere. “

            “But not all Pashtuns are for the Taliban, are they?”

            “No , no , no no.     Pashtuns don’t go for Taliban first.  But Pashtuns always fight the occupier.   The Pashtuns are tribal.   You know the saying,  “me against my brothers,  my brothers against my cousins,  my cousins against my tribe,  my tribe against the world? That’s us.  The Pashtuns. Fucking crazy.”