Battlefield tourist
By Steve Coll, March 30, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010 - 2:43 PM
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I have a new post about my trip to Afghanistan over at Think Tank.
Greetings from en route to Marjah. I’m out in Afghanistan for a spell to
do some reporting for the magazine. I thought I would file some posts
as I go along, while trying to avoid subjects that might overlap with my
prospective print piece—hard to sort out how to do that with precision,
but I’ll try.
To reach Kabul and beyond I hitched a ride with the press pool
accompanying Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mike Mullen, who is in
Afghanistan for about forty-eight hours. The pool includes me, two old
Washington Post colleagues, Karen DeYoung and David Ignatius,
as well as Joe Klein of Time, Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times,
and four or five others. It’s kind of a Bucket List trip for aging
national-security reporters. I’ll peel off from the pool tomorrow and
report the rest of the way on my own, but for now I’m enjoying a quick
inside-the-wire tour.
I’m typing this from the cargo hold of a V-22
Osprey, that Star Wars-looking hybrid of jet and helicopter.
Ignatius remarked as we boarded that it looked like an aircraft designed
by a congressional committee. You can take off like an airplane or lift
off like a helicopter. We rolled down the runway with the rear ramp
lowered. A gunner strapped to the fuselage held down his position on a
machine gun, trying not to let the G’s pull him down the ramp to dangle
in the sky. We let off a few missile-deflecting flares as we lifted into
Stinger altitude over Kabul.
For the rest, visit my New Yorker blog.
Steve Coll is the president of the New America Foundation and a staff writer at the New Yorker.
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