Rougle’s pack and I ended up coasting over the desiccated landscape toward Camp Blessing the next day.
When I arrived at Camp Blessing, I went into the TOC, the command center where Elizabeth and I had begun our journey into the Korengal almost two months before, feeling the weight and sadness of war. For six days I hadn’t taken my jeans off my body, combed my long, scraggly hair, washed my face, looked in a mirror, slept on anything other than the side of a mountain. I greeted the clean, coiffed men navigating the maps, screens, and drone feeds in the control room, and they all stopped and stared at me when I entered. Perhaps it was the sight of my face, blackened with dirt and streamed with tears, or maybe they were slightly shocked that Elizabeth and I were able to hold our own during such an intense mission. Whatever it was, I felt as if we had finally gained their respect with our experience in Rock Avalanche.
I dumped my pack in a tidy, lonely room with a bed at Blessing and went directly for a shower. The hot water ran long over my naked body for some time, breaking all the rules of limiting water use on the base, and I watched the dirt make dark little rivulets around my feet into the drain. I went back to the room, which seemed like paradise compared to the Abas Ghar ridgeline, and began the long process of downloading my discs. I had hours of work ahead, hours of downloading, editing hundreds of images, and combing through my notes to write captions. It would take me a few days to prepare the images from the Korengal Valley, but I wasn’t in the mental space to give them more than a cursory glance that night before falling asleep.
I eventually made my way back to Jalalabad, Bagram Airfield, and then Kabul, where I sat in the airport waiting for my flight to Turkey. I was physically shattered, emotionally fragile, and thoroughly exhilarated to have survived my time in the Korengal. Coming so close to the edge of death and pushing myself to my own physical and mental limits helped me appreciate the beauty of daily life. In my late teens I had made a promise to myself that every day I would push myself to do something I didn’t want to do. I was convinced it would ultimately make me become a better person. The philosophy extended to work: I allowed myself to enjoy life only if I worked hard, if I tested my limits, if I created a lasting body of work.
I wondered where Elizabeth was in the Korengal Valley as I boarded my flight with Ariana Afghan Airlines, the rickety national airline I flew only in times of sheer desperation. I was seated in an exit row, and as I stretched out my legs, pleased not to have anyone sitting too close to me, a male Afghan flight attendant came over and stirred me from my solitude: “Madam. You cannot sit here. This is an exit row.”
“So?”
“Women cannot sit by the exit door. If there is a flight emergency, a woman wouldn’t be capable of opening the exit door.”
I got up, and as I moved to my new seat I watched the attendant usher over a frail old man with a white beard, hunched with osteoporosis, to sit by the exit door.
? ? ?
WHEN I GOT HOME to Istanbul, Paul’s lifelong mentor, Peter, was in town visiting with his wife. Usually when I arrived home from an assignment, I was able to switch from the life of drinking electrolyte-filled water in a refugee camp to sipping pinot noir in our apartment with a Bosporus view. They came over before dinner. I was excited to meet someone who had shaped Paul’s life, but much to my surprise, I was struggling to speak.
My head was fixated on the Abas Ghar ridge, the Korengal Outpost, the villages of Aliabad and Donga, Camp Vegas, Rougle laughing, Rougle in a body bag.
“Lynsey is a really famous war photographer!” Paul exclaimed proudly. Hearing his description of me made me wince slightly. I wasn’t sure when I had become a war photographer.
“Shut up, baby,” I joked. “I am not famous, and I am not a war photographer.”
“So tell me about your last assignment,” Peter prodded.
“I was in the Korengal Valley with the 173rd Airborne, living at one of their remote bases on and off for a few months.”
“Really? Was it dangerous? Have you ever almost died?”
It was a question I had received often since I started covering war. Everyone wanted to reduce my entire career down to the one or two moments when I might have lost my life.