Battlefield tourist

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.