The Most Dangerous Place in the World
In 2007 the war in Afghanistan dragged on, the prospects for peace diminishing every year. The Taliban insurgency spread throughout the countryside, and America, distracted by Iraq, was paying the price for neglecting a country all too familiar with an occupation. Car bombs and suicide attacks occurred weekly; NATO troops retaliated, killing a large number of civilians in the process. My relationship with the country had already spanned seven years, and as more and more lives were lost on both sides, I felt I needed to document what had gone wrong.
In August Elizabeth Rubin—my old partner from Iraq who had become a close friend—and I were searching for the perfect embed with American troops, one that would involve combat and explain why so many Afghan civilians were being killed despite the Americans’ advanced and supposedly precise weaponry. We talked almost nightly, going over the options.
Elizabeth suggested that we go to the battle-ridden Korengal Valley, which was near the border with Pakistan and one of the most dangerous places in the country. Korengalis were renowned for their toughness; the area was called the “cradle of jihad” because they were among the first to revolt against the Soviets in the 1980s. “I want to figure out why so many civilians are dying,” she said. “Did you know 70 percent of bombs in Afghanistan are dropped in the Korengal?”
I was eager to dive into a good story with Elizabeth, and I was familiar enough with her work to know that anything she produced from the field would be brilliant and have journalistic impact. By 2007 I had done more than a dozen embeds; I was comfortable traveling with the military and prepared for battle conditions. We wanted to find an embed where we could stay longer than a week or two, unlike my previous stints with the military, to get a sense of the rhythms of war.
The embed permission was approved in mid-August. I went ahead to the Kandahar Airfield, a NATO and American base, to begin shooting troops with the medevac teams, and waited for Elizabeth to arrive. Elizabeth and I checked in regularly while I was at KAF, and she was still in New York.
“When are you getting in?” I asked, quietly hoping my persistence might push up her arrival date. She was already late, and I feared any further delay might wreak havoc on my carefully crafted assignment schedule.
“I’m sick,” she said. “Probably another week.”
“You’re sick? What kind of sick?
“I have a flu,” she said. “And I’m three months pregnant.”
“What? Pregnant? Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine. I just need a little more time here, and I will be fine.”
Pregnancy was always a terrifying idea to me. In our line of work few women got married, much less had children. Only college friends back home, people with “normal” jobs, were pregnant. I had no idea how babies grew, even less about the stages of pregnancy, what women felt like, how they looked.
“Do you look pregnant?” I asked. “How are you going to hide it?”
As far as I knew, there was no rule that a pregnant journalist couldn’t go on an embed, but most likely the military had never been faced with such a proposition. She assured me that it was too early for the pregnancy to be detectable, that she was comfortable with the risks, and that physically, she felt great. I assumed that the military would never allow our embed to last more than a month and that we would leave Afghanistan before Elizabeth would be far along. My philosophy had always been that people must make their own decisions, and I wasn’t about to judge what Elizabeth was doing with her life and with her body. She was one of the most dedicated journalists I had ever worked with. Though the pressures, endless travel, and risks of our jobs made raising a child nearly impossible, I knew she was getting older, and wondered if she didn’t want to miss this opportunity to have a baby. I was sworn to secrecy.
Elizabeth looked the same as she always did when she joined me in Afghanistan in early September and we made our way to a base in the city of Jalalabad, from which journalists were sent off to military bases across eastern Afghanistan. We met with the public affairs officer in charge in a mobile trailer media office, which was set up amid tents and a mess hall. Everyone gave us that familiar look that male soldiers try to conceal without success: Ugh, girls.