The Army had this elaborate plan to find the caves. Dozens of soldiers would be dropped via helicopter into an isolated valley in Taliban country, each carrying enough equipment, food and water for several days of marching.  From there, they would target ten or so suspected cave sites that had been reconnoitered by air, dotted into a nearby mountain range.  It sounded fun, so I tagged along, and jumped off the helicopter onto the muddy farm field with everyone else. Almost before we had a chance to hit the soil, the Blackhawk lurched up again into the sky, the roar of the rotors quickly fading away.  Soon it was quiet. The rising sun was just peeking over the horizon.

The platoons regrouped, and then headed off for their objectives. The one I stayed with was lead by an ebullient and witty staff sergeant from Indiana named Steven Caldwell, whose platoon was a motley group of young men from across America.  They irreverently cracked jokes as they marched, mostly banter about their girlfriends back home or discussions on the bathroom habits of local Afghans.  Also along for the ride was a somber Air Force dog handler named Schwartz and his pride and joy, a black German Shepherd named Bleck, who was trained to sniff out explosives.  All of them were hauling huge packs full of 100 pounds or more of gear, along with their heavy weapons and ammunition.

The entire first day of the mission was earmarked for finding the first two caves, but a short walk took us to the spot where they were, and it turned out they weren’t caves at all, just natural ridges in the rock that apparently looked like caves from the air.  Caldwell shrugged, entered the information on a rugged handheld GPS-type device that he was using to find the targets, and we continued on to look for the rest, some miles ahead on a windy path.

We passed through several villages along the way, the Pashtun tribalists regarding us with curious stares as we walked by.  A few hours of hiking brought us to a road that hugged the base of a long, imposing cliff face.  Caldwell glanced down as his computer and back up at the moutainside.

“Looks like the next few caves are right up there,” he said, pointing to a spot on the cliff far above us. He looked over at his men, “Who’s coming with me?”

No volunteers. Caldwell rolled his eyes, and muttered several unprintable things. Then he drooped his pack with a thud onto the dirt.

“Fine, just watch the road. I need the K-9, though,” and with that, he started clamoring up the mountain. Schwartz and Bleck scrambled up after him.  Soon they were all over the ridge and out of sight.

I hesitated for a few minutes, trying to convince myself there was something productive to photograph right where I was, without venturing up into the heights. The platoon laughed and loudly started back with their discussion about the Afghan’s toilet habits.  I sighed, slung my camera over my shoulder, and headed up the mountain.

It was ridiculously dangers; the route up ranged from a steep incline to nearly vertical, and the rock itself was a grey shale of some kind that had a disquieting tendency to disintegrate as you searched for a foothold on it.  One slip on this thing and you’d go for a long, painful tumble onto jagged rocks somewhere below.  Eventually, I caught up with Caldwell, Schwartz and Bleck on a narrow ridge.  They were barely sweating.

“Caldwell, you’re from Indiana,” I said, panting. “Where did you learn how to climb mountains?”

He smiled without looking up from his computer.

“Man, I’ve been stationed in Alaska for five years. We do this stuff all day… a-ha, it’s over by that crevasse.” He bolted off and started making his way literally across the base of the long vertical crack that wound down the cliff face.  Schwartz and Bleck gamely followed after him.

The way they went looked nearly impossible to me, so I hiked up a bit instead, looking for a better place to cross the crack. But there was nothing a few feet up either, and I couldn’t go down because I couldn’t see, so I went up still farther.  Still there was no way to cross. Before long, I couldn’t go up any more and the sides were nothing but an inclined slope of loose pebbles. Somehow I’d gotten 50 feet over the others, and was completely stuck.

After a few minutes of self-pity, I lunged to the left and danced across the crumbly slope like a barefoot teenager on the hot sands of vertical beach.  I made it to the crevasse and awkwardly landed on my rear, and instantly started sliding down.  But inside the crack I could use my feet to slow myself and it was actually kind of fun, like a waterslide.  (My pants would disagree; I shredded them and, as they were my only pair, an Afghan tailor working on the Army base later laboriously put them back together.)  Finally, I tumbled to a stop at the bottom, landing with a cloud of dust right next to Caldwell, who was still absorbed in his GPS.

“Hey there,” he said. “Man, this ain’t no cave here, either. You about ready?”

“Whenever you are.”

It is moments like these in foreign lands that always prompt me to get philosophical, even existential: Why am I here? How did this happen? Why exactly am I hanging on the side of a mountain in Afghanistan this morning? I’m not in the Army, I didn’t sign up for this. I should be back home, watching TV or canoodling in bed of having a strong espresso in Brooklyn. Or just about anywhere else.

But in the end, things tend to work themselves out, I find, and the satisfaction of photographing and documenting the most important issues of our time far outweighs any temporary discomfort, or even fear.  In the end, I found a way down by quickly dancing across the inclined slope like a barefoot teenager bouncing on the hot sands of a vertical beach, and continued on with the mission.

Chris also writes for dscriber.com about his experiences in Afghanistan. To read more about this particular day, click here.

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The Americans left the earthen walls of their base around dawn, taking a left on the dusty unpaved path that runs outside, in the direction of the boarder with Pakistan.  But they weren’t going that far.  Just a few miles in fact, to the nearest village, for a routine foot patrol.  A few Afghan men watched from distant hills above us, crouching stock-still as we passed.

After a half hour we arrived a tiny hamlet, a dispersed collection of mud brick houses set among farm fields and tiny hay barns.  The largest building by far among the dozens or so in the area was the mosque. It was also of mud, and was around the size and shape of an old one-room schoolhouse on the prairie.  Several other buildings abutted the mosque, forming a simple town square fringed with hewn long benches.

The purpose of the patrol was ostensibly to search the farm houses in the area, looking for weapons or signs of militant activity. So as not to rile the locals too badly, the American forces I was traveling with, led by a burly Staff Sergeant named Adam James, brought along members of the nascent Afghan police force to do the actual searching.  The Afghan police didn’t look any different than the men sitting idly in the square, save that they wore heavy blue coats that read “Police” in English on the back.

Staff Sgt. James laconically directed these Afghan forces to begin their search, seeming almost bored; he has two hours of Iraq under his belt before coming here, and has a seen-it-all sort of air about him.  Before long, like everywhere else in the Third World, young boys materialized from the ether and started gathering around the visitors.  No girls approached us, though I could see some in the distance, leading pack animals around or tending to the fields.  Sgt. James ordered some of his men to nearby high ground to watch the road and the land around us. Once these sentries were in place James relaxed, sitting on the log bench and taking some of the pale yellow Afghan hot tea offered to him by one of the men of the mosque.

I looked around at the surrounding hills. “Hey, isn’t this Taliban country?” I asked.  “Pretty much,” James said, blowing on the tea glass while holding it gingerly by the rim. “Aren’t you worried you’ll get ambushed?” I asked. “Naw, they wouldn’t do it here,” he said. “They’ll wait until we’re on the road heading back to the base.”  “Oh. What might you do to prevent that?” “I’ll call in helicopter support. They’ll cover us, and then we’ll head back.”

Just then, one of the soldiers watching on a hill called won, stringing some words together he probably never had uttered before in his life: “Looks like we got a bunch of camels heading for us, sir.” Everyone turned to look down the road.  He was right. In minutes, they were among us.

It was a colorful caravan of at least fifty camels and as many ponies, all laden with ramshackle cloth bags tied with homemade ropes.  Hundreds of angular bearded mean in turbans and shalwar kameez and as many women covering their faces walked alongside.  Sleepy children with wild hair and runny noses rode on hand-woven saddles on the humps, their heads rocking in time with the rhythmic sway of the camels’ steady gait.

They were passing through and didn’t stop, but the Army’s Pashto translator managed to shout out some questions as they lumbered past, and we got the gist of their story — they had been on the road four days so far, and had about a week to go; they were fine thank you though one of their camels was going lame; and they were heading for warmer climates for the winter, toward the village of Salerno and coming from Ghazni.

As the caravan disappeared into the dusty distance, we all watched it quietly, with the kind of instinctive awe one gets when you see something that seems to walk out of history.  Had one stood on this road during the autumn migrating months a thousand years ago, that caravan would have looked completely the same.

Soon the local police finished their searching and it was time to return to the base. Sgt. James called in for Apache attack helicopters to cover the road, but none were available.  So, instead we hiked up into the hills and returned cross-country on the high ground, the soldiers marching single-file on the ridges of the ancient mountains. We were back in time for a late lunch.

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Everyone is asking me if things have changed in Afghanistan since 2002, when I was last here.  Of course it’s a too-simple question, with a non-answer: they have, and they haven’t.  Kabul for instance is still dirty and exotic, still full of tan old sheepherding men with white beards and wrinkled faces (even  now they might be chatting on a cell phone as they guide their flock around town with long sticks).  Some new buildings have gone up, but not that many.  On the military side, the US Army is still stocked with an endless parade of energetic young men and women, and now as ever they are fitness fanatics and will work out every day even if they have to run laps back and forth through some muddy field on the edge of their base as the sun rises.  But they’re more jaded now than they were in 2002, after so many tours in Iraq and now here.

The central military hub in Afghanistan, both seven years ago and now, is Bagram Air Base, an hour’s drive from Kabul across a spectacular plateau nestled between the mountains.  I stayed at Bagram for some time in 2002 as well; back then all the press stayed in one large tent located next to the barbed wire perimeter of a now-infamous detention facility. (No getting anywhere near that place, now.)  Opportunistic Afghans had set up impromptu bazaars just outside the front gates, and we’d discreetly purchase incredibly bad Uzbek vodka and other things for our nightly rabble-rousing party in the press tent. Off-duty soldiers would walk by, peek in, and find themselves downing a quick beer and flirting with reporters for a few minutes, dashing off into the night again if they saw an officer or sergeant-major heading our way.

Those days are gone.  Bagram today has evolved and changed in spirit; everything is far more organized and uptight and the base has spread out, like a California town exploding into a tangle of urban sprawl.  Rather than in tents, troops now stay in long rows of stacked housing units that look like the apartment complexes near college campuses. MPs hand out tickets to drivers who are speeding or not wearing a seat belt.  Sometimes the trappings of home are faintly ridiculous; I saw a flyer touting free swing dancing classes.

One thing hasn’t changed: the troops doing their physical training every morning en masse along Bagram’s broad main boulevard.  Inspired, and clearly not going anywhere for a few days, I laced up my own shoes and went for a run. The main street ends after a few kilometers and opens up onto a broad flat plain; a few kilometers more and the running path fringes the edge of the flight line itself.  I stopped and watched all manner of military aircraft taxi and roar into the sky: stately C-130 workhorses, massive C-17 cargo carriers, strange, Russian-looking planes and the incredible fighter jets, lithe wedges of physics-defying magic that scream overhead louder than a train thundering by.  The scope of it all is staggering; Bagram is a small city and big airport, all built from nearly scratch in the middle of this inhospitable countryside, for billions upon billions of dollars.  And there are hundreds of other bases more or less like it, all over Afghanistan.  If there’s anything I wish I could convey to the general American public who will never visit this place, it is the enormous scale of the undertaking being done here in our name.  Try as I might, photos never seem to convey it.

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KORENGAL VALLEY, AFGHANISTAN: Afghan elders of the Korengal Valley arrive for a meeting with U.S. and Afghan military officials October 30, 2008 at the Korengal Outpost in eastern Afghanistan. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

Getty Images staff photographer John Moore reports in from the Korengal Valley.

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Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

Kabul, Afghanistan: I came to the Malalai hospital to shoot a story on surviving childbirth. The maternity facility delivers an average of 60-100 babies a day. In Afghanistan, one in nine Afghan women die during or shortly after pregnancy, which remains one of the highest mortality rates in the world for maternal mortality. In many cases, Afghan conservative cultural sensibilities put the health of the Afghan mother at risk.

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Ziajan, 35, was waiting on the operation table; she was almost full term and had a ruptured placenta along with heavy vaginal bleeding – every minute counted. The problem was her husband was not there to sign the consent form so the nurses just waited and started on another emergency case. In the mean time, Ziajan was in extreme pain. She was getting some blood to stabilize her until the cesarean operation could begin.

Ziajan’s case was truly heart breaking, the baby inside her womb was dead. He was to be her first son after having nine girls. Out of the nine, two had already died. In Afghan culture, having a male is extremely important and many women don’t have the choice but to keep trying until they are finally successful. Given Ziajan’s age and her health condition, this would have to be her last try. Knowing the Afghan culture like I do, I now understand why her husband was absent.

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About 45 minutes went by until the nurses could get going, I was told they got a signature from her brother. They started the c-section, the incision was made into her belly to bring out the fetus as I continued to photograph. All of a sudden the power went out and the room went dark. A few minutes passed but it seemed like ages. It was the second day of the big EID holiday, just after the end of the holy month of Ramadan so who knew how long it would take for someone to turn on the generator.

The surgeon was getting anxious and I knew this case was critical. I said to one nurse in Dari that I would be right back. I made the quick decision to go and grab a small key light I had in my photo bag. It was only a tiny light that I used to find things at night but it was all I had. I scrambled to find it in the dark but finally managed. I ran back and held the light over the pregnant woman’s belly. Immediately the operation team started up again using only my light. It was hard to keep it on since it was just one of those purse size ones that was made for short-time usage, once or twice it went off and the nurses started to please with me to try harder to keep it on.

Photographing was over for certain as I watched them bring out the lifeless baby boy. Finally the generator was cranked up and the lights came back on. Ziajan’s condition was still serious but the surgeon smiled a bit and turned to me saying, “tasha kor.” This means thank you in Dari.

Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

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