the_taliban_shuffle_-_kim_barker

was serious, and that someone should have maybe gured that out
earlier.
On the base, conditions were so backpacking basic, we were all
reduced to the same sexless, miserable, dust-covered robots, amused by
ghts between camel spiders and scorpions held in cardboard boxes.
The soldiers lmed the ghts and replayed the highlights, much like
they watched videos of their recent reghts. The winner in Ultimate
Fighter Afghanistan was a particularly large camel spider, which
practically ripped the head off any scorpion found to challenge it.
I was occasionally bored, yet constantly exhausted. I rested in my cot
and read my neighbor’s bad spy novels involving heroic Americans with
names like Jimmy and Ace. I couldn’t watch videos or write. I couldn’t
risk taking my computer out of my backpack, because of the omniscient
and omnipresent wind, which carried the dust with it. The wind was
always in the room, a participant in every conversation. The dust
coated soldiers when they napped for an hour, and by the time the
morning came around, all of us looked gray and dead. Not that we
could sleep, for the heat, for the wind. Putting in contact lenses every
morning was like scraping my corneas with a bunion remover.
One night I escaped to the only dustless place in the whole base, the
TOC, to talk to the man in charge about everything that had happened.
He was interrupted by a whisper about a TIC in the TOC—in other
words, troops in contact that could be monitored in the tactical
operations center.
In addition to Musa Qala, a satellite U.S. base had been set up in the
north. That evening, the Taliban had attacked a U.S. patrol near there.
The troops retaliated, backed by a B-1 bomber. Soldiers then spotted
fourteen Afghans eeing to an alleged known Taliban safe house. A
Predator lmed the men running into the house, which was surrounded
by mud walls. In the well-lit control room, we all watched the grainy
Predator feed of the safe house on a large screen on the wall. The
captain I had been interviewing veried the target with the men on the
ground. He called his superiors; he was approved. So he told the B-1
bomber to drop a ve-hundred-pound bomb. Yes, a ve-hundredpound
bomb seemed a bit of overkill for a mud hut, but that was the
only ammunition the B-1 had, and the Predator had nothing. On the
screen, we watched the bomb hit, sending up a giant plume of smoke.