He looked so sharp that day in his Army uniform, his hair, almost platinum-blonde, cut so close to his scalp.  No medals on his chest , but he hadn’t yet seen combat.   Didn’t matter to me.  I thought he looked proud and strong and regal, a man ready to take on the world.  I didn’t realize that he was barely out of boyhood, age nineteen at the time.

No, he was my big brother.  Nine years older, bigger, tougher.  He seemed every bit a grownup to me.  Deep voice, hair on his chest, all the markings of a man.  I stared out the window on that crisp Colorado morning, awe mixed with envy, as my oldest brother marched smartly down the driveway with my parents, climbed in the family station wagon and headed off to Vietnam.

I remember wondering if he would come home.  Even then I was attuned to the news; it was 1968, the war was growing exponentially and along with it, the body count.  Something told me he would be fine.  Big brother was tough as nails.  God would look after him, right?  He would do his duty, he would be fine, he would come home in a couple of years.

Looking back on it now, I smile at my own innocence, my own naïveté.  One of the earliest Christmas gifts I remember requesting was the “5-Star General’s Uniform” in the Sears catalog.  I enjoyed pretending to be a soldier, a leader, a man of valor.  Capture the Flag was fun when you played it in the backyard with some of the other kids on the block.  And here was my big brother, going to fight in a real war in a real Army uniform, looking so impressive and unfazed.

He must have been terrified.

I was right about most of it.  He did his duty, served honorably, fought hard.  Deployed near the DMZ as a frontline artillery observer, he followed orders, saw some terrible things, lost his closest buddies.

And then he came home.  Alive.  Uninjured, save for the wounds a soldier hides in his head.

We had the discussion once after he made it home.  He told me my turn was coming.  I remember answering that I thought the war would be over by the time I turned 18.  His four-word answer:

“Don’t bet on it.”

But I was right, he was wrong.  American involvement in the war ended while I was in high school.  Even the draft was gone by the time I turned 18.  It seemed at the time that our nation politely folded up its military forces like a battle flag and put them high on a closet shelf to be brought out again at some future time as needed.  So no, I never served.  It wasn’t that I was anti-military or even anti-war.  It just seemed that, by the mid-70’s, my brother and his buddies had done all the heavy lifting and there wasn’t much left for the kids like me who followed.

He doesn’t talk about it much.  I know some of what he experienced.  Most of it he keeps to himself.  I tell people that Vietnam didn’t do him any favors.   I think that’s the best way to put it.  He’s recently begun receiving disability payments through the V-A based on his exposure to Agent Orange.  It was a tough war.  Aren’t they all?

His country called.  He answered.  He served.  He’s proud of his Army record, proud to be one of those men who battled the enemies of freedom for this great nation, proud to have put in his time fighting a war that ultimately turned unpopular.

And his little brother is very, very proud of him.

The sun is harsh and hot in Afghanistan’s Musahy Valley and it’s barely nine in the morning. Up here at about 7,000 feet, the thinner atmosphere doesn’t scatter the solar energy like it does at sea level; the natural coolness of this higher altitude is counterbalanced by rays more direct and searing. Underneath my Kevlar vest and ill-fitting helmet I have already sweated through my shirt which sticks to me now, front and back.

The Musahy looks and feels a lot like some of the mountain valleys in Colorado where I grew up. Back home, places like South Park feature a wide and lush valley floor walled in by incredibly rugged peaks. So it is here in Afghanistan, except that Colorado’s mountains shoulder a fine garment of greenery right up to timberline– spruce, fir and pine. These Afghan ranges seem devoid of anything but rock.

I’m tramping a dirt road with a small unit of Italian Alpine troops sent here under NATO auspices as part of ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force. The Italians’ Forward Operating Base is relatively new to this valley. They arrived in December, a handful of men to keep an eye on 62 villages scattered across 125 square miles. Estimated population: about 60,000. Among that population: an unknown number of Taliban or at least Taliban sympathizers. That’s part of the reason we are out this day on foot patrol. You might say we’re looking for trouble… and hoping we don’t find any.

We pass a school where some 500 boys are enrolled just in grades 8-through-12. The place is bursting at the seams; there’s no room for that many children in the meager classrooms now standing. Colonel Michele (pronounced mi-KAY-lay) Risi, commander of this Italian force, tells me that to handle the overcrowding the school is constantly running a kind of double-shift; half the boys are in classes while the other half are outdoors enjoying what you can only call ‘recess.’

I see a teacher dressed all in white carrying a switch of willow half an inch thick and close to five feet long. He’s shouting. Whatever is going on among the kids outside the school, he doesn’t like it. He chases the boys, wildly swinging the switch and yelling commands. They seem to have seen this drill before and manage to stay just beyond his reach. I’m glad I don’t see him connect—the weapon he’s using would raise a serious welt, maybe even break the skin. “The teachers,” Col. Risi tells me, “are judged not by how well they teach, but by how well they handle the switch.”

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The morning sky in Kabul is never exactly a normal color.  It’s a hazy, wan, milky mess, more gray than blue, nature’s true palette obscured by the smoke of a million morning cook fires and the exhaust of this broken-down city’s assemblage of rattletrap rolling stock.  And then there’s the dust.

We’re on the outskirts of Afghanistan’s capital awaiting a chopper that will carry us into Taliban country; the coffee I’m downing might be the best I’ve ever had.  Leave it to the Italians to concoct a delicious espresso even in a war zone.

The sudden, guttural thumping of helicopter blades overhead says it’s time to go to work.  We depart the comfort of the base mess hall, strap on our body armor and head for the airfield.

I’m with two other guys who will make this assignment possible: U-S Army Lt. Col. Web Wright is my guardian angel and answer-man; Akbar Shinbari, my indefatigable cameraman, fixer and source of local knowledge.   Col. Wright is one of those walking contradictions our armed forces seem so good at producing; intelligent, soft spoken, polite-and really scary-looking when he dons his battle gear, slips on a pair of Oakleys and straps a holstered automatic to his chest.   With hands clasped in his lap as if meditating, jaw squared and eyes obscured, he just oozes an air of serene danger.

Wright clamps on his helmet and Kevlar vest and looks like a man not to be messed with.  I bundle myself in my NATO-issue Kevlar and headgear and look like a dork.   Akbar’s video confirms this.  But Akbar-perhaps the most genial photographer I’ve ever worked with-is much too kind to say so.  I’ve heard that the Afghan culture is very welcoming of strangers, and right now there’s nobody stranger in Kabul than me.

We leave the mess hall and notice a forest fire has broken out in this high desert.  As our Land Cruiser rolls toward the airfield, a towering cloud of smoke is boiling skyward, a brown pillar now supporting the milky sky.  But there is no fire and the tower is not smoke.  It’s dust kicked up in the rotor wash of the giant Chinook waiting impatiently for us to climb aboard.

The blades are as wide as desktops and thumping over our heads.  Unconsciously, I duck down.  Maybe I’ve watched too many episodes of M*A*S*H; this craft is so big those rotors wouldn’t touch me if I did my best basketball leap.  Its jet engines are screaming and hurling powerful streams of exhaust directly at us as we approach from the rear.   The blades pound; the combination of exhaust blast and rotor wash from above has the kerosene-tainted air convulsing wildly in waves that push and swirl.  I walk unsteadily, like a drunk, until I’ve climbed past the machine gunner in position on the boarding ramp and find myself safely inside this flying bus.

We’re off the ground within seconds.  I’ve noticed that virtually no piece of military hardware stays put for long in Afghanistan.  Such targets are too easy to hit if they’re standing still.

We head south from Kabul, flying low, maybe three-hundred feet off the ground.  We climb only to clear  the spiked teeth of a mountain range, and even then, the big ship hugs close to the forbidding landscape, all escarpments of rock from base to peak.  No trees, no grass-just jagged, angry stone.

The chopper drops down the other side and into the Musahy Valley, an unbelievably flat, wide expanse.  We fly across it very fast, and yet despite all the ground we cover, I see exactly one paved road.  The scenes dashing by below look almost Biblical.  Goats scatter as the thunderous machine roars overhead.  Flat-roofed houses with walls of mud and straw punctuate fields in which children are working.  An occasional cow bucks and flees in terror.

For a time the valley is verdant and green; then we fly over a long stretch that shows dry and gray as the moon.  The one advantage of such a bleak landscape, or so it would seem to me, is that it offers no hiding place to insurgents.  There are no houses, no trees, no boulders below us.  The three men stationed at this ship’s very large machine guns-one on each side behind the pilots and the one mentioned earlier on the Chinook’s tail boarding ramp-have a moment to relax their minds, if not their weapons.

We land.  Quickly we’re out of the chopper and it takes off on another mission.  As its thunder fades down valley and we head toward the small NATO outpost the Italians have established here, Col. Wright speaks but five telling words:  “Welcome to the eighth century.”

I look around and it’s easy to see what he means.  Absent the Italians’ base, its vehicles, sandbags and razor wire, there isn’t anything in sight that appears to have been made by machine.  A large herd of sheep is grazing unfenced in a pasture, tended by what looks to be a teen.  Children are running in our general direction, apparently believing the chopper must have disgorged something interesting.

We set out on a foot patrol with a small contingent of Italian Alpine troops who’ve made the valley their home.  Akbar and I are warned to keep to the middle of this walking convoy of less than a dozen men.  Gunners in the front will act as scouts, along with an explosives-sniffing dog that bears some resemblance to a German Shepherd.   More heavily-armed soldiers will trail behind us.  A small aerial drone–wingspan maybe three feet–is launched to fly ahead and beam back pictures that are monitored in a situation room at the base.  If there’s trouble, we’re told to get down, stay flat and look for cover if any can be found.  In this peaceful valley of gurgling creeks and bleating sheep, surrounded by peaks under a cloudless sky, it doesn’t seem like violence should intervene.  But in this part of Afghanistan, I will learn, trouble is never far away.

To be continued…

It’s a bit disconcerting dropping in here for a visit. And I do mean ‘dropping’. The gigantic Air Force C-17 that dropped us here offers no windows, so it’s difficult to know exactly what’s going on. But I could tell we were at a substantial altitude—I’m guessing 20,000 feet or so—when the pilot dropped the gear.

Suddenly the roar of an already-loud aircraft notched up another dozen decibels as the outside air screamed past the landing gear now hanging out in the airstream. A pilot will ‘fly dirty’ (meaning the airframe isn’t smooth and clean) if he wants to get down in a hurry. The exposed gear creates a huge amount of drag that helps the jet fall out of the sky.

I could feel the giant craft tip nose down for our steep approach to the runway. The C-17 is a huge target, and with a 4-star general onboard, the Air Force was taking no chances. There would be no low flybys of the jagged peaks surrounding Kabul, just in case some lucky-shot insurgent might be waiting with a shoulder-launched missile.

Once on the ground it was a mad scramble to get off the plane, but executed with military precision. I can honestly say that the worst part of this entire trip—repeated over and over again—is donning the mandated body armor for any trips outside secure NATO installations. The “bulletproof” vest is heavy and of course, doesn’t allow air movement, so almost as soon as I’ve put this thing on in the 90-plus degree heat, I’m drenched with sweat. That’s not so bad; I can deal. What’s absolutely awful is the heavy protective “one size fits none” helmet. The thing weighs about five pounds with virtually no padding, only a taut spiderweb of nylon webbing that grinds into my scalp. More journalists should be required to wear this stuff when dispatching stories about battlefield conditions; I have new respect for our troops, fighting in conditions like these wearing much heavier gear than the cumbersome load now burdening me. I’m told mine is the “old style” helmet; the new ones are more comfortable. Yeah. Right.

We piled in the back of a convoy of British military vehicles, sitting sideways on bench seats, knees interlocked with whoever’s sitting on the opposite bench. We’re given a briefing about the drive ahead, how to react if we should come under fire. Somehow it seems a bit less ominous delivered in a crisp British accent. I notice mine is the last vehicle of the convoy. Great. When insurgents do attack—not that I’m expecting such a thing—they like to go for the either the head or tail of the procession. How comforting.

We tear off, weaving through the dusty streets of Kabul. Even on straight stretches of road, our driver constantly makes “S” turns using all available lanes—if these so-called roads actually had lanes. Not because traffic is a problem–which it is. The constant change of course is a protective maneuver designed to make us harder to hit in case our convoy should come under attack.

The vehicle commander in the right seat is talking into a radio headset, keeping up a constant chatter with the rest of the convoy. Eyes peeled on nearby traffic, looking for anything out of the ordinary, hoping to spot any potential car bombers that should happen upon us. It’s all very professional and executed with cool caution; but a smooth ride, it is not. Accelerate sharply, hit the brakes, clutch, gas, swerve, bounce—the helmet feels like it’s shaving my scalp at the follicles as we lurch along these potholed paths.

The Brits’ delivery mission is successful, and after what seems like a very long fifteen minutes we are pulling up to the ominous concrete barricades and blast walls marking the entrance to the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) compound in Kabul. Once inside, I-D’s are checked, more gates are lifted, the armed soldiers traveling with us climb out to clear their weapons of live ammunition.

We drive past a mustard-yellow building, a fairly grandiose structure for this impoverished and war-ravaged country. I’m told it now serves as the headquarters of the ISAF forces. In a delicious (and deliberate) bit of irony, it was the headquarters of the Taliban when that repressive regime ran this nation a scant few years ago.

We’re given another briefing and dispatched to our rooms. We’re safe.

Welcome to Kabul.

You want to see a bit of delightful chaos?

Descend on an impoverished country that holds an exceedingly young population. Bring almost 60 nice, new bicycles. Set up a dignified ceremony involving representatives of the Afghan Cycling Federation and the “Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, Martyrs and Disabled.” Then try to turn over the bikes to those who are intended to receive them — a group of kids from a Kabul orphanage, and members of the Afghan National Cycling Team.

Pandemonium.

As I mentioned in my earlier dispatch, it’s one of the events that brought me to Kabul. Bicycling Magazine teamed up with Specialized (the bike company) and NATO to deliver these bikes to Afghanistan. The U.S. Air Force did the heavy lifting—literally. Two tons worth’ of bikes and assorted repair equipment. Now that they’re assembled and ready to roll, the great handover is underway.

I remember getting a new bike for Christmas as a kid. It’s a great feeling, but in a nation as rich as ours, such a thing can hardly be described as out-of-the ordinary. In the destitute place that is Kabul, handing out new bikes, no strings attached, is almost beyond comprehension– like walking up to a guy in a parking lot in our country and tossing him the keys to a Rolls-Royce.

It begins slowly enough as though no one can believe this good fortune. Suddenly it’s a free-for-all; little fingers clamping on handlebars and desperately trying not to let go. The kids are from one of the many orphanages in this country; their deceased parents, in most cases, victims of the Taliban’s vengeful rule. It’s hard to know how old the children are. Because of the harsh living conditions and poor nutrition, a 14-year-old here might appear to be ten.

I see a boy straddling one of these two-wheeled wonders and ask what he’ll do with it. “Go to school,” he declares with a grin. There simply aren’t enough schools anywhere in Afghanistan, so most kids have to walk miles to attend. A bike will make it possible for him to actually go to classes now. He’ll ride this gift from America into his future.

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