the_taliban_shuffle_-_kim_barker

watch me take notes. In return, I would give them nothing—no
information about my personal life, my past loves, my own aws. One
soldier in Crowley’s platoon, always an outcast, always teased for not
holding his weapon correctly, sat down with the photographer and me
in the mess hall one afternoon and spilled out how he never should
have joined the army.
“I’m just not the world’s best soldier,” the young man said. “If there’s
a way to mess something up, I manage to find it.”
It created a dilemma. I knew that the soldiers might suer for their
indiscretions. But at the same time, some of their indiscretions would
be the most powerful stories. With Crowley’s fellow soldier, the one
who wasn’t cut out for the army, I chose not to quote him. It was a
judgment call. I didn’t want to be responsible for anything bad that
might happen.
Being on an embed created other problems, such as being dependent
on the very people you wrote about, and naturally wanting them to
like you, and wanting the military not to blackball you. The soldiers
took care of us. They sent a translator to the market to buy sunglasses
and sweaters for us. They were American like me. They reminded me
of Montana. They yelled at Afghan men who tried to take my picture
with their cell phones. “What would you do if we tried to take a
picture of your women?” one soldier said to a smiling Afghan, who
snapped the picture anyway.
Regardless of any of this, I wrote the story that was right in front of
me—the “forgotten war,” the bored soldiers, feeling left out of the Iraq
action, and Crowley, unlocked and unloaded. He left for vacation, to get
married, the same day the photographer and I ew back to Bagram
Airfield.
The story got a lot of reaction. I realized how carefully everyone read
anything about the troops. Through an unspoken agreement, I was
expected to leave out the boredom and the fact that Crowley repeatedly
was not locked and loaded. I told my critics that I just wrote what I
saw. I moved on.
I had no idea what would happen.