the_taliban_shuffle_-_kim_barker

I
CHAPTER 2
MONTANA
ew home to Chicago in late April 2003, just before Bush declared
victory in Iraq, and all the other edgling correspondents also
returned to their regular metro reporting gigs. But I could not stay
long in the United States—I was already hooked on warlords and bad
vodka, my new version of a hot date. Sure, I was in my early thirties. I
had a serious boyfriend, an aspiring screenwriter named Chris, and I
was on the marriage and baby track. I had good friends and a
comfortable life in Chicago. I rode my bike to work, I listened to NPR, I
played softball. But my world felt small there, a comfortable habit, an
old shoe. Life in Chicago seemed gray compared to the Technicolor
jujitsu of Afghanistan. All the other stu, the marriage and the babies,
paled in comparison, paled to the point that they didn’t even seem to
matter.
This made no sense to my family. I grew up in Montana, where most
people graduated high school and never left, where a meal of bull
testicles passed for a culinary experience, where my parents scolded me
for failing to take proper care of their marijuana plants. We didn’t have
much money and rarely traveled. The closest I got to overseas was the
Great Salt Lake. One year we only celebrated Christmas because
Grandpa Halfpap died and left us $750, and because we stole the
Christmas tree from our school across the street, after the school
dumped it in the alley. (As a bonus, the tinsel was still on it.)
It was probably good that I grew up so sheltered. I was not a brave
child. I was convinced that death lurked behind every corner, perhaps
the most unlikely future foreign correspondent ever born, the most
improbable person to contend with suicide bombs and the real threat
of nuclear war. I was scared of the dark, of my dreams, of nuclear
weapons, of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who reminded me of Darth