The officer quickly dropped the question, but I remained worried that others would find out.
We didn’t stay long at Camp Blessing. The night before we flew out to the Korengal Outpost, we gathered in the TOC to watch U.S. troops pinned down as the Taliban fired mortars at them from a roof. The commanders considered dropping bombs from planes and discussed the potential “collateral damage”—civilian casualties—that five-hundred-pound bombs might cause. The fighting dragged on. The troops remained pinned down. And eventually Lieutenant Colonel Bill Ostlund, the battalion commander sitting in the TOC, called in an aircraft bomber and dropped one of those five-hundred-pound bombs on the area. Taliban fighters disintegrated on the screens in front of us. The combat wasn’t different from what I had covered in the past, only this time I was watching it unfold on a screen, which oddly seemed more ominous than being on the ground. I noticed something else: In Iraq and in other parts of Afghanistan there were long lulls between battles. In the Korengal it was a constant barrage, day and night.
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IN THE KORENGAL VALLEY the Americans had established several small bases, called forward operating bases (FOBs), and smaller combat outposts (COPs). They were dug into some of the most hostile territory in Afghanistan, in the heart of the insurgency as well as the heart of the country’s timber trade—which helped fund the insurgency. The Korengal Outpost, or KOP, was only six miles south of Camp Blessing, along a narrow mountain road littered with IEDs. It was an easy target for the Afghan fighters positioned high up in the surrounding mountains. We chose to fly in on a Chinook, a slow-moving boat of an aircraft that was a larger target and less agile than, say, a Black Hawk. I always feared we would be shot down.
The minute we touched ground we were escorted directly to the medic’s tent. The commander at the KOP, Captain Dan Kearney, greeted us, but our attention quickly shifted to the scene inside. Afghan boys had been brought to the base practically in shock, with superficial lacerations on their faces and bodies. Their families told the army medics that the wounds were from shrapnel from the evening before—presumably from the bombs we had watched explode on the screens at the TOC. We had flown into the very scene we had wanted to document: the effects of the war on civilians.
I spent most of my time photographing a young boy named Khalid, whose eyes were bloodshot and glassy, his fair skin spattered with scrapes and mud. Dirt had collected in the corners of his red lips, and he rarely blinked. As part of the counterinsurgency campaign to win the hearts and minds of the people, army medics often treated the injured Afghans. But they acted skeptical when the Afghans told them they had been injured by American bombs.
That night, we slept on cots in cavernous bunkers dug into the ground, lightbulbs strung up above us by precarious wires. There were fleas. Elizabeth’s torso became a patchwork of bumps and splotches; no part of her stomach was spared. The fleas—perhaps detecting her pregnancy hormones—feasted on her. (They didn’t seem interested in me at all.) Elizabeth went several times to the medic to get something to allay her misery, and each time he sent her away with ibuprofen and flea repellant, but there was little she could take that wouldn’t be harmful to her pregnancy. She writhed all night in discomfort.
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CAPTAIN DAN KEARNEY was only twenty-six years old, handsome and solidly built. Sometimes he was a gentleman, other times he was a hard-ass: autocratic and demanding of his troops. He was always gracious and helpful to us, ordering his troops to give up their cots for us or providing us with extra blankets as the late summer weather turned wintry. The troops weren’t thrilled to oblige Kearney’s requests.