The public affairs officer clearly didn’t want us to go to the Korengal because, as he argued weakly, the sleeping quarters and bathrooms weren’t fit for women. Elizabeth told him we could handle whatever the men could. He looked dubious, but a few days later we were given permission to make our way to the Korengal.
Our first stop on our way was Camp Blessing, a small base in the stunning Pech River valley, where stone buildings crawled up lush mountains at impossibly steep angles. Blessing was the battalion headquarters of the 173rd Airborne. There were buildings, rather than tents, for lodging—unusually luxurious for a remote base—as well as a small gym, male and female toilets and showers, a mess hall that vaguely reminded me of a Vermont lodge, and an area for the mortar team to fire off mortars across the valley. The more accessible bases had some sort of “bird,” or helicopter, arriving from Kabul or Jalalabad every day; Camp Blessing was a remote base and saw a bird every three days if they were lucky.
We were at the heart of the war in Afghanistan and immediately got to work. The officers allowed us into the Tactical Operations Command center (the TOC), where an entire wall of screens provided real-time feeds of hostile activity all over the battalion’s area of operation. On infrared drone-feed screens, the commanders were able to distinguish between living and nonliving things based on their heat signatures. The TOC was also equipped to receive feeds from AC-130 gunships, the attack aircraft flying above the fighting, as well as from Apache helicopters, which maneuvered better than planes. Classified maps were pasted and tacked to almost every available wall space. Bundles of Ethernet cables, laptop chargers, hard drives, and telephone wires were taped down on desks and strung up to the walls, snaking up and down columns from floor to ceiling. White paper printouts of phone numbers, extensions, and codes were taped alongside the maps. A massive sheet with acronyms and initials decipherable to only a few lined the wall at the back of the room. A group of high-level soldiers gathered in the TOC, watching their troops in action on the ground through video feeds, while other soldiers on the phones fielded calls from remote bases as well as from the joint terminal attack controllers, or JTACs, soldiers of the air force who served in army units so they could liaise between the troops on the ground and the aircraft flying above. When combat becomes too intense, the army often needs a plane to come in and blow up everything in the area. The JTACs make the call.
It seemed impossible that we couldn’t win the war with the Taliban, an enemy who had little technology—or electricity—and who ran around the mountains in flip-flops, wielding rusty Kalashnikovs and makeshift mortar tubes. But they were formidable fighters and had a lifetime of knowledge of the terrain. At almost any given time in the fall of 2007, there was a fight going on somewhere in the valley, lighting up the screens in the TOC like Rockefeller Center at Christmas.
As a rule, photographing screens, maps, or documents with classified information was always a delicate matter because the images could end up in the hands of the “enemy,” that nebulous term the military used to refer to the Taliban and the anticoalition militants who wanted to eject the West from their country. I explained to the officers that there were ways I could photograph the room without revealing what was on the screens—by altering the focus or blurring an image or avoiding the screens altogether. I wanted to capture the intensity of that room. I was given permission on the condition that G2, or military intelligence, could look over my images from the TOC to ensure that I wasn’t transmitting highly sensitive info. It was almost unprecedented for the military to ask to look over my images, and I agreed on this occasion because they were giving me access to the kind of scene—a glorious blinking panorama of the West’s sophisticated technology—I had not yet seen in print.
After I finished shooting, the G2 officer and I sat in a side room, and as we scrolled through the photos of the TOC—soldiers in gym shorts watching the screens, fielding phone calls, and making split-second decisions about whether or not to drop five-hundred-pound bombs—he casually dropped the question “So how many months pregnant is your friend?”
I was shocked. How could he have known? We had both made phone calls the night before from our Thuraya satellite phones, and maybe Elizabeth had made some reference to her pregnancy while they surreptitiously monitored our calls.
“She’s not pregnant.” I kept my eyes trained on my computer screen. I had never been a good liar, but I had always been a loyal friend. Elizabeth reminded me several times a day that I could never utter a word about her pregnancy, and I obliged.
Soldiers with the 173rd Airborne, Battle Company, react as they receive incoming mortar rounds near the shelter at the Korengal Outpost.