Watchdogs slam Taliban for blocking women from boarding a flight to study in Dubai and from visiting a national park.

The BBC speaks to students who were blocked at the airport as they tried to leave for Dubai.

In the first spring of the pandemic, I worked a few shifts at a hospital in Brooklyn. The governor had asked on television that health-care workers volunteer, and tens of thousands did. I was surely among the least qualified—an EMT on paper, I had ’til then logged a total of 12 hours, a single overnight ambulance rotation amid the bars and projects of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The hospital human-resources administrator noted my inexperience and asked if I was willing to work in the morgue. That’s where they could really use the help, she explained. I had been looking forward to treating the living, but on quick reflection supposed the dead were more commensurate with my level of experience and agreed to go wherever she thought best.

The work consisted of bagging, moving, tagging, and inventorying corpses. The main problem, for me, was goggles. Mine fogged up. We were advised, however, not to touch our goggles once we had them on, lest we bring the virus from our hands to our faces. And so, as the first shift progressed, rather than adjust my goggles, I tilted my chin ever higher into the air, peering down my nose through a shrinking unfogged window. It was difficult to see what I was doing, and, in order to identify names Sharpied onto tags and bags, I had to bring my face right up close—which, of course, was the last thing I wanted to do.

The rest of my colleagues fared little better, eye-protection-wise—their flimsy plastic face shields tended to skew and fall off. Bare-eyed, we felt an urgent desire to finish, because the longer we spent among the dead, the more likely, it seemed to us, we were to contract the virus that had killed all of these people. In our hurry, we may have once misplaced a body, or rather, mislabeled one. But by the time we realized that the paperwork didn’t make sense, that the count might be off, we had been in the trailer a long time. One of the bags had ripped; evil-looking fluids dripped and pooled on the floor. A look passed among us. Probably it was fine. Time to get out.

When I volunteered, I thought I might collect such incidents and turn them into a book about life in that hospital, a kind of practitioner’s memoir. But by my fourth shift, it seemed to me that, to do so properly, I would have to work there for years—to become, however much I could, a member of the community, which was majority Black and Latino and not wealthy—and I was not prepared to do so. Moreover, I wondered whether, even if I did stay for years, I could write about this community well or usefully, as I was of a different race and economic class, an outsider.

I was, in a sense, a professional outsider. For more than a decade I’d reported and written about Iraqis and Afghans caught in the American wars. But recently I’d stopped, no longer thinking myself an appropriate person to tell their stories. I had been wrestling with the idea that I ought to pursue some kind of intrinsically useful work, like EMT-ing, and leave people who suffered injustice to write their own stories. Because, rather than experiencing injustice, I had in many ways been its beneficiary. As a volunteer in the hospital, I didn’t dwell on this fact. As a writer, however, matters were more complicated. Even if I was volunteering in the morgue, I was also there, partly, to write. Was I then a tourist—or worse, a kind of profiteer?

As the pandemic ebbed in New York, a summer of protests began. The protesters demanded that America reckon with its history of racial and economic injustice, and I marched sometimes, too. I wondered, though, if I had reckoned sufficiently with myself—or, perhaps more important, with the community that had produced me, which was so very far removed from that hospital and those protests. It seemed a good time to take a look at where I’d come from. I decided to stop the hospital work and just write. But rather than write about injustice as experienced by those people who bore its brunt, I would attend to my own people. I would write about the one percent, among whom I had been raised.

The opulence of New York City is famous. Countless articles, novels, films, and social-media feeds are dedicated to the markers of American oligarchy. Some examples of the genre, such as The Great Gatsby, are staples of public education. The wealth is not a secret, nor the violent decadence. I remember a schoolmate who bragged about defecating in bed so the maid would have to clean it up.

Our school was called Buckley. It had a reputation for rigor, conservatism, old wealth, and athletic dominance over the dozen or so other “top tier” private schools in the city. All sat in a highly developed hierarchy. “Chapin girls marry doctors; Brearley girls become doctors; Spence girls have affairs with doctors,” went one well-known saying. Still, the schools had more in common than not, and if a child attended any one of them, he’d be well prepared to achieve, maintain, and perhaps surpass his parents’ position in society. This preparation was accomplished as much by what was not taught as what was.

[From the April 2021 issue: Private schools have become truly obscene]

At Buckley, for example, we had Quiet Street. It began with a turn we’d make on the charter buses—not yellow school buses—that we rode out to our playing fields most weekdays of the fall and spring. A right turn onto 124th Street in East Harlem. As we turned, one of the coaches—“sport-sirs,” we called them—would announce: “Quiet street!” and that bus, full of white adolescent boys, fell silent. No whacking of shoulder pads or lacrosse sticks, no trash talk, no jokes, no whispers, no pantomimes. Long before, some boy had called a racial epithet out the window, and a Black pedestrian, in response, had thrown something at the bus.

This article is excerpted from Nick McDonell’s new book, Quiet Street: On American Privilege.

Or so I heard, long after I graduated. As a student, I never learned the details of the story. It was not widely or formally discussed. No one ever explained, and few asked. I knew only that to speak on Quiet Street was forbidden. In 10 years at the school, on nearly a thousand bus trips, I remember none of my peers breaking the rule. Such was its mysterious power.

What was going on? I recently asked some of my old classmates. All remembered Quiet Street, and some vague version of the origin story above. One said this: “Seems kind of silly, and also, I don’t know, vaguely racist, maybe? You’re basically like, ‘If we’re not quiet on this street then the horrible people who live here are going to jump us,’ you know what I mean? … Maybe not even vaguely racist. Maybe overtly?”

Quiet Street was the manifestation of a culture that preferred silence to discussion of race and class. These issues could not be discussed without raising questions that might undermine, even reveal as hollow, the school’s motto: Honor et Veritas, or “Honor and Truth.” But the nation’s inequalities and injustices were so obvious and incendiary that they could not credibly be ignored. And so Quiet Street both acknowledged and elided the violence of society through memorial silence.

That first summer of the pandemic, I received a school-community-wide email from Buckley’s headmaster, emphasizing the importance of diversity and explaining steps taken in response to the murder of George Floyd. In my own eighth-grade class, 30 students were white and three were people of color—of Chinese, Filipino, and Guyanese descent. Today, according to the school, 34 percent of families self-report having a nonwhite parent. Other things have changed too. The Lord’s Prayer rotates with prayers from other religions at Friday assembly. The school closes for Jewish holidays. As of 2001, female faculty have been permitted to wear pants, rather than only dresses or skirts, to work. And though no one is quite sure when it ended, Quiet Street, I am told, no longer exists.

Officially, it never did. There were a lot of powerful, off-the-books rules like that, so powerful that they didn’t even seem like rules. They seemed almost like physical laws, like gravity—norms, a social scientist might call them—and they governed our lives long after we left Quiet Street and on-ramped to the Triborough Bridge, as it was then known. Thereafter, we filled the bus again with noise and crossed the Harlem River to our playing fields on Randall’s Island. These happened to look out on another island: Rikers—a prison complex, where, of some 6,000 inmates, about 90 percent are Black or Latino.

Children at schools like Buckley almost never ended up anywhere like Rikers Island. They could, for fun, kick garbage cans into traffic on Park Avenue in the velvet dusk of a spring weekday and suffer no consequences. They could be arrested for, say, vandalism and underage intoxication, mouth off to the arresting officer—“Yeah, I got a bazooka in my pocket”—and be released without charge from the local precinct into the care of a teenage sibling. Passing into adolescence, many such children developed a sense of invincibility. This is common enough among adolescents but lasted, for some of the people I grew up with, deep into adulthood.

The shock, rage, and chagrin expressed by the rare one-percenter sent to prison were genuine. They were genuinely surprised that the world did not bend to their will as it had since childhood. One schoolmate of mine, convicted of murder despite his insanity plea, wrote a letter to the Manhattan district attorney noting that, like him, he was “a graduate of Buckley”—as though this were a basis on which to begin clearing up the charge. The connection usually didn’t have to be mentioned, and especially not in writing. On the off chance that no mutual friend existed to make a necessary introduction, there were other ways to signal membership in the tribe. The handshake, for example. Teachers manned the door each morning and might deny a student entry until he had shaken hands and voiced a greeting to the teacher’s satisfaction.

“Good morning, sir.” Firm grip, direct eye contact, tie knotted, 10 years old.

“Good morning, Mr. McDonell.”’

The best manners teach empathy. We learned some, and mostly grew into kind men. This did not mean we grew into good men. But kindness, interpersonally, was easy because, generally, everyone was kind to us. Though all families are worlds unto themselves, we were universally spared the societal traumas of racism, poverty, state violence. We never even had to wait in line, really. We were handled with silk gloves at the Knickerbocker Cotillion dance classes. Our world was gentle, and so, though there was some bullying, we were usually gentle with one another.

[Read: Checking privilege checking]

Really we were blinkered, even as our chivalrous good manners were explicitly connected to the Gospel of Luke—“to whom much is given, much is expected,” as quoted by Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI and a Buckley boy, at a recent graduation. We were expected to excel, to give back, to serve.

But to serve whom? The only people we knew outside the Bubble were the people who served us. We were not boarding with the rest of the passengers. And consider that, if he failed the handshake test, a student was not allowed into the building. He was sent around the block, perhaps in the snow—as I was, January 1996, penny loafers soaked. What, then, was a child to make of someone who didn’t know—who was never taught—the proper way to shake hands? Should they be let in out of the snow?  

There is a violence to good manners. A thank-you note, standing up when a woman enters the room, holding the door—we learned soon enough that these thoughtful practices could also be pieces of armor, or tools that might allow you to, say, get your younger brother out of the precinct without a problem. It was not, of course, using the word sir that did it. It was what loomed behind a white 16-year-old in an Armani tie—power. In certain contexts, a properly executed handshake sent a message not unlike a snake’s rattle.

The handshake was the most basic tool. I heard parents put it this way: “I wanted to raise them so that they knew how to do everything.” And by college, it must be said, the level of competence was sometimes very high. Twenty-year-olds who could, variously, sail long distances, play the piano, read Latin and Greek, speak French and Mandarin. They could play all the games: tennis, football, racquets, chess, backgammon, bridge. They could confidently deliver a eulogy, a toast, a speech on nearly any matter of the day, and were excellent drivers and even, very occasionally, pilots. They were familiar with pistols, rifles, shotguns, dog training, falconry, cigars, horses and horsemanship, wines, cocktails, tax strategy for the estate and individual, the real-estate market and how to access it in several cities (both American and European), art history, how to ask a favor from a chief of staff. And on and on. World-class pimple popping, masturbation, and video gaming too.

Such skills arose not from any extraordinary talent or discipline but from the enormous resources invested in each child. And though I have here emphasized traditionally highbrow skills, we were groomed to be comfortable at every level of culture, in every room—to appreciate Taylor Swift as well as Tchaikovsky, to make small talk with the custodian as well as the senator. The deeper lessons were confidence, poise in any context—what the sociologist Shamus Rahman Khan calls “ease.” Old-fashioned exclusionary markers could, in fact, be a liability, in the same way an all-white classroom was. All the world was ours not because of what we excluded or inherited but because of our open-minded good manners and how hard we worked—which, all agreed, was very hard indeed. This superficial meritocracy masked, especially to ourselves, a profound entitlement.

Our summer holidays were longer than the public schools’, and many of us left the city every June. But our education did not stop; it only shifted focus. From ages 6 to 14, for example, June through August, I attended the Junior Yacht program at the Devon Yacht Club in Amagansett, New York. The lessons were in skill, but also—perhaps more so—in taste. Sailing was but one of many pleasures imprinted on our psyches in those summers, so deeply as to become beloved, essential pastimes that some of us would feel compelled to maintain for the rest of our lives.

The planks of the dock were warm under our feet and the day was divided: sailing, swimming, tennis, and lunch—arts and crafts only if it rained. To swim, we walked out along the pier over seagull guano and the dried shells of spider crabs, dove off, swam laps back and forth to the pilings where the cormorants sat. On the clubhouse deck, grandmothers watched, ate Caesar salad, patted their lips with crisp white napkins, and planned to see one another again at Family Night. This was every Thursday of the summer. The club put out a buffet and hired a band. You had to wear a jacket and tie, and the rule was enforced. If you arrived without, the maître d’ provided a faded spare.

No money was ever exchanged at the club, no credit card ever seen. Everything was included in annual fees or charged after. At Family Night, or at lunch, or in the snack bar, you provided your member number: M-361, in my case. Then you’d fill out a chit with a small pencil, marking the grilled cheese or milkshake or burger or cheese fries that you wanted. Marina staff, kitchen staff, and waitstaff all wore uniforms, white and blue, vaguely nautical, and were largely from Ireland. I don’t remember ever seeing groundskeepers, but the club was immaculate from the gravel to the dune grass to the clay tennis courts to the White Room. That was the name, I can’t remember whether officially or not, of the lounge/bar in which every piece of furniture was white—like almost every person I ever saw at the club.

And every Fourth of July, fireworks. These were organized by George Plimpton, a longtime member, prominent writer and editor, and close friend of my parents. George was an honorary New York City fireworks commissioner and wore the title with some pride. For the Devon display he enlisted a famous fireworks family whose factory, one tragic year, had exploded “up island.” George once brought a troop of circus performers—trapeze artists and little people—to the club, and this was chuckled over. I can’t remember where I heard all that, or rather, overheard it—it was part of the ambient grown-up noise. George also once looked directly into my eyes and told me: Just as I was looking into his eyes, he had looked into the eyes of a man who had seen Pickett’s Charge—the culminating action at the Battle of Gettysburg. This made me feel connected to something secret, old, and important—another club inside the club.

Quiet Street ran straight through Harvard. I applied early and was accepted. My new friends skewed foreign and midwestern and not so rich, but I remained close to some one-percenters, and aware of many. They made up about 20 percent of the student body.

In many ways, the one percent experienced Harvard like everyone else. Everyone had to take the “core curriculum”—a class each in quantitative reasoning, literature, and several other fundamental disciplines. For moral reasoning, I took a class, still taught, called “If There Is No God, All Is Permitted,” in wood-paneled Sanders Theatre. Everyone lived in Harvard Yard as freshmen, was invited to tea at 18th-century clapboard faculty houses, endured the snowy Cambridge winters, used the same libraries.

The richest and best-connected students, nonetheless, had a different college experience. The starkest symbols of the difference were the “final clubs.” These eight social organizations were all-male, dated from the 18th and 19th centuries, and owned clubhouses off campus. But the off-campus/on-campus line was very thin. The mascot of the most exclusive club—a pig—was carved into one of the stone arches above an entrance to Harvard Yard. I was “punched” by that one, the Porcellian, possibly at the request of George, who was himself a member. I attended two “punch” events, essentially social auditions.

[Read: Still white, still male–the anachronism of Harvard’s final clubs]

The first was held near Harvard Yard in a large townhouse. Sophomores tried to make good impressions on juniors and seniors, all in coats and ties, all drinking from an open bar. You could feel the tension, how high the stakes were for some, in every exchange of Oh yeah, I went to Hotchkiss with his brother!

On a cold Sunday morning a few weeks later, a chartered bus brought us—the survivors of that first event—to a rolling estate somewhere outside Boston. Uniformed waiters served Bloody Marys off silver trays during a steak brunch. I didn’t enjoy the touch-football game, kept to myself, charmed no one, and wasn’t invited to a third event. Years later, a member of the club—son of a cop, scholarship student, an exception—told me that I “didn’t seem like [I] wanted to be there.”

He was partly right. I never intended to join. But at Harvard, just like at Buckley, much of my education happened off campus anyway. I spent one formative holiday in the Galápagos Islands on a boat chartered by an oil family that liked to talk politics. The patriarch told me over his tequila on the aft deck, “I don’t trust any government that doesn’t trust me to have whatever kind of weapon I want.” The logic was more convincing on his boat. Snorkeling with his children, I saw penguins shoot past like minor but ancient gods, terns dive down through clear water, streaks of bubbles racing heavenward. The water was silver with fish; so many seabirds were diving at once that we were swimming in a froth. Above, frigate birds attacked and robbed one another in midair.

And everywhere we went on the islands, as guides explained the rare wildlife, the patriarch joked, “Hmm, that looks tasty—turtle soup!” Or, “A little blue-footed booby fricassee?” And so on. Toward the trip’s end, he said that he was in fact interested in hunting on the Galápagos Islands, and how could we make that happen?

Such were the people in the Bubble. And if, here, your mind rebels against generalization—“we,” “the Bubble”—as mine often does, please consider the possibility that such methodological risks can be generous, and should sometimes be taken on account of the urgency of the situation, in which 3 million people control 35 percent of U.S. wealth, 166 million control less than 2 percent, and inequality is rising and correlates with authoritarianism and violent conflict.

Even as I attempted to understand the world beyond the Bubble, it kept me aloft. After college, I set out to become a foreign correspondent, and at 22 spent two months reporting in Rwanda and Ethiopia. Then I checked into a luxury hotel in Kenya for a month: the Peponi, in Lamu. This seemed reasonable to me, so long as I wrote a novel there based on the reporting I’d just finished. I did, barely. And at the bar one evening, watching the sun set over the Indian Ocean, I met a movie producer who bought the rights to that novel then and there, which made staying in that colonial-chic hotel, expensive as it was, profitable.

This is the intersection of work and pleasure inside the Bubble. There is an internal logic to the decadence, an intuitive calculus that pays off, even if you don’t know how it will, exactly, until someone buys the rights, or writes the letter, or offers you their mansion for the week. The house is empty anyway, they might say, so please, go ahead, take the kids, don’t mention it.

Still, the rich like to believe in meritocracy, even fairness. These ideas are beloved by the media, and are one of the few bipartisan talking points. Barack Obama: “Anything is possible in America.” Donald Trump: “In America, anything is possible.” Famous examples demonstrate the seductive drama of economic mobility. Henry Ford was the son of a farmer. Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, George Soros—and so on in every profession. Such examples not only make one-percenters feel good; they distract from the reality that, in the United States of America and elsewhere, success almost always, and predominantly, depends on wealth—and frequently comes at the expense of the less wealthy. I could afford to spend a month writing a book at a fancy hotel, which, when it came out, took attention away from novelists who were not as rich or connected as I am. I could afford to buy a drink for that producer, who bought the rights to my book, not someone else’s.

In that first summer of the pandemic, after I stopped volunteering in the morgue, the Black Lives Matter protests escalated. Tens of thousands of people filled the streets. In New York City, protesters set police cruisers ablaze and workmen nailed plywood over boutique windows in SoHo. One evening, I saw the vanguard of a crowd climb through a smashed store window on 12th Street, emerge with hoodies and T-shirts, and escape from a handful of pudgy, outnumbered cops. A few blocks farther south, I fell in behind a gaggle of excited teenagers. “This place is done,” one of them said, “let’s go to Nike.” In the news, such violations overshadowed far more numerous peaceful protests in New York, Minneapolis, Portland, and elsewhere, whose participants were regularly kettled, charged, and pepper-sprayed by police. None of this, in the short term, changed the balance of power or material lives of the rich or poor. But mass movements, gradually then all at once, have toppled governments.

Members of the ruling class knew this and were afraid. A venture-fund manager at a wedding in Barcelona told me that he expected, within his children’s lifetime, widespread violent conflict on account of resource scarcity and climate change. He was not the only one. One-percenters knew that the MDMA and the Veuve, the weekends in the George V, the time to turn stories of social mobility into election campaigns, the companies valuing profit over lives, the Dubai hotels built by indentured Bangladeshis—they knew that all of it cost more than what they read on their credit-card statements. In their most imaginative hours, some feared the bill would come due in a bloody revolution. A greater number displaced their fears onto Black teenagers, or black-clad antifascists, or American-flag-draped anti-vaxxers toting AR-15s on the courthouse steps.

The fear they shared was loss of wealth. Without ever saying so, they were very much afraid of losing their country houses, the space for the grand piano, the greenhouses, the pied-à-terre where their mother-in-law stayed without being in everyone’s business. They were afraid of processed supermarket cheese; they much preferred the organic stuff, which, they emphasized, would keep them alive longer. The same could not be said of their clothes, but they were afraid of losing the Prada bags anyway, the heavy zippers, the cashmere. They didn’t want to wear polyester windbreakers, or sit on Ikea sofas, or drive a Hyundai. They were afraid of losing the safer, sleeker Mercedes. They were afraid of losing all of it, any of it. And who wouldn’t prefer a Mercedes, anyway?

But the quality of the car was not what lay at the root of the fear. They feared losing wealth not for its own sake but because it was justified, in their own minds, by intelligence, hard work, determination—that is, by character. If they lost their wealth, then, well, who were they? The true fear was not loss of wealth but loss of self.

This article is excerpted from Nick McDonell’s new book, Quiet Street: On American Privilege.

Dubai International Airport has been the world's busiest international airport for the past decade.

In January 2009, I flew to Dubai and got my first taste of what I would come to know as the Terminal of Lost Souls. Dubai International Airport was one of the glitziest in the world—enormous and modern and filled with luxury shops and lounges. But that was only Terminals 1 and 3.

Terminal 2 was for the discount carriers flying to South and Central Asia and parts of Africa—places like Uzbekistan, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The passengers were generally poor construction workers, mercenaries, contractors, and journalists like me.

I was a public-radio correspondent and had produced stories about Afghanistan for years, but I had been longing to report from the field. When I finally had the chance, I dove in. Only later would I realize how oblivious I had been to the true human costs of the conflicts I had sought to cover.

[Read: Afghanistan did not have to turn out this way]

That first trip, I was reporting on the Taliban’s use of Pakistani tribal regions as a training ground. It was clear that if the Taliban had a sanctuary the U.S. couldn’t touch (at least not with ground forces), the war was doomed. I had been granted an embed in Laghman, a province in northeast Afghanistan where the Taliban had supply lines to Pakistan.

I landed in Kabul and hauled my gear into the dusty winter air. Kabul looked like a cross between Russia and Sudan: The gray sky and scattered trees were Moscow, and the rundown buildings and hordes of vendors were Khartoum. A driver took me north, past mud houses seemingly stacked on top of one another up the hills. Kabul was full of people who had fled the provinces over the years to escape conflict. Many didn’t want to, or couldn’t, return to their homes, and so they stayed, crowded into informal settlements.

I arrived at Bagram, then flew to Camp Fenty. As I waited there for transportation to Laghman, I spoke with the brigade commander, who told me in no uncertain terms that security was getting worse, there was no chance of locking down the border, and if Pakistan provided haven, the Taliban would be difficult to beat.

I had hoped to head out on combat patrols in Laghman, but instead I was assigned to travel around with one of the U.S. government’s provincial reconstruction teams. At least it allowed me to speak with Afghans about their experiences. Road construction was one of America’s major initiatives, counterinsurgency 101. The theory was that with paved roads came increased economic development. Greater economic opportunity would mean less likelihood of people accepting payments from insurgents to shoot at coalition forces or to blow things up.  

Afghans posed for pictures with me looking like a dork in my frumpy body armor and thick-rimmed ballistic goggles. They expressed gratitude to the United States and frustration with Pakistan. But I often wondered what they might be thinking that they did not say.

I spent a few days at an outpost in Najil. Soldiers told me that militants would frequently sneak up the opposing ridge and fire on the base. One evening, they believed an attack was imminent and fired off three rounds in the direction of the suspected threat. However, one of the rounds was an illuminating mortar—a potentially catastrophic mistake, because it hovered there, shining over the entire valley, turning the base into a well-lit target.

We waited, and waited, and yet nothing happened. The night was cold and rainy, and the soldiers explained that the militants who typically attacked were “fair-weather” fighters—locals paid a few bucks by the Taliban to take shots at the base. The chilly rain was enough to stop them. Although there was no contact that night, something that should always have been obvious to me was beginning, for the first time, to feel real: I was in a war zone, and even if I was surrounded by the best troops and military hardware in the world, I was not safe.

The Khost-Gardez highway cuts through a high pass near Gardez, Paktia province. (Scott Peterson / Getty)

I returned to Afghanistan in October 2009, this time to report on security conditions and development efforts. I traveled to Gardez, in the east, and was embedded with American troops building and inspecting schools. I followed along with an Army captain and engineer, a tall man with wire-framed glasses and a mustache. We walked through a shoddily built school, where bricks, mortar, and other debris were scattered all over the floor. The captain made muted sounds of frustration, but no workers were around to be reprimanded. A couple of weeks before, locals had found an IED planted in the school.

That night I had anxiety dreams. I wasn’t sure what to make of them. I hadn’t experienced anything dangerous, but I was starting to tune in to the general stress level of being in a place where something could go boom at any moment.

The next morning, I caught a flight to Combat Outpost Herrera, a small base atop a hill about 10 miles from the Pakistani border. It was the ideal place to observe how the border was nothing but a line on the map to insurgents. The base had seen a fair amount of action. Insurgents had been coming close enough to the base to attack with small arms.  

Sure enough, soon after I arrived, an explosion occurred nearby. The alarm went off, and I scrambled for the bunker along with a few civil-affairs soldiers. The security forces ran to their posts around the perimeter. After a few minutes of huddling in the cramped space, we got the all clear. A mortar had landed outside the base, but it didn’t trigger a firefight. At the time, I felt mostly excited that I might finally gain an understanding of the realities of combat.

That evening, the troops had a cookout. They were loose and having fun squirting gasoline on the coals in the oil-drum grills to stoke the fires. Most of them were just kids, many not even old enough to drink. They had been barely 10 or 11 years old when 9/11 had happened.

When I was their age, I was going to fraternity parties, playing guitar, chasing girls, and in general being a class clown. I couldn’t imagine how that version of me would have handled heading off to a foreign land to fight an unfamiliar enemy.

At one point, as I was hanging out with a couple of soldiers in the small, plywood rec room, there was a slight boom and rumble—like someone stomping on the roof. We looked at one another and pondered whether we needed to react. Then the alert came over the base PA system. Off to the bunkers we went. According to soldiers, the explosion had happened about 500 yards from the base—perhaps someone had stepped on an old mine or bungled the planting of an IED, but most likely it was a poorly aimed mortar or rocket.

A couple of days later I flew to Salerno in Khost province. Like most larger bases, Salerno had a bazaar. It consisted of a couple dozen metal containers that had been converted into shops where Afghans sold rugs, local crafts, and bootlegged DVDs.

I joined a group of soldiers for tea outside one of the shops. The shop owner, Saeed, a slight man in his late 20s, said that he faced threats for working with the Americans, but no other job paid him enough to support his family. He was frustrated by the corruption of the Afghan government, and he felt that security was getting worse. Just then we heard a loud boom, followed by a quick whistling sound. I caught the second impact out of the corner of my eye. A black cloud of smoke rose from behind a building about 75 yards away.

Some two dozen people scrambled to the bunker in the center of the bazaar. Nothing had ever landed that close before, people were saying. I spoke with a few of the Afghan shopkeepers. They all said it was the most frightening moment of their time at the base.

When I walked to the scene, I realized how lucky everyone in the area had been. A tree had broken the fall of the shell. The projectile hit the branches, detonated, and then sprayed a comet tail of shrapnel all over the area. A canvas tent sat about 20 feet from the tree. Seven soldiers had been sitting inside at the time of the impact. Chunks of shrapnel sliced the tent and cut through the interior plywood like it was wet bread.

I walked through the tent. There were holes everywhere—in the ceiling and floor, in chairs, lights, computer monitors. The soldiers’ body armor had been perched on stands in the tent, and several of the vests had been torn by the flying chunks of metal.  

Amazingly, shrapnel hit only one of the seven soldiers. And the injury was so mild that he didn’t even notice it until a few moments after the blast. He walked off to the medical tent under his own power to have the metal removed. Surrounding buildings had several-inch-deep impact craters in their brick and cement walls. The blast had had more than enough force to kill everyone in the tent, and yet it had caused only one small flesh wound.              

Had the tree not been there, the rocket would have landed in the tent and probably killed everyone. If you want any proof that war is a game of inches, well, that was it.

That night, I again struggled to sleep. The blast replayed in my head. I had to process that anything could happen at any moment. I was on a mission to see and experience war for what it was, but I also wanted to go home in one piece.

The next day, another close call: While we were on a mission to a village to inspect another construction project, an explosion rang out. An Afghan on a motorcycle had hit the trip wire for an IED that had been planted in the road into the village. The motorcyclist survived the blast, but the IED was not meant for him. It was meant for us—and it had been planted there in the short time that we were in the village.          

The implications were disconcerting. It was possible that on our way into the village we had passed some bad guys who saw an opportunity to plant the IED. It was also possible that someone in the village had tipped off bad guys. Either way, it meant insurgents were camped out in the area and possibly mixed in with the local population. Maybe one of the men the soldiers had just paid for working on the construction site had called about planting the IED. That was the war in a nutshell.

Had the motorcyclist not hit the IED, our convoy would have. We looked at the blast crater as we drove out of the village.

A view of Kabul from a hill on the outskirts of the city, on August 1, 2008 (Moises Saman / Magnum)

I think a lot of journalists, myself included, started out with a false sense of security during embeds. Subconsciously, it could feel like a TV war sometimes—like there was no real danger. However, that bubble had been definitively pierced for me. I knew how naive I had been. And that made me question what it was that I had been seeking in the first place.

[From the March 2022 issue: The betrayal]

That day was the first time I started to think deeply about what I was doing and why I was doing it. Was I chasing firefights because I felt it was crucial to cover and report on them? Or because I had something to prove, because I wanted people to think I was brave? I started to realize it might have been more the latter. Some of it had to do with notions of masculinity, the idea that real men did combat journalism. I realized I had been ignoring the human toll all around me.

I was wrong to have believed that experiencing combat was the pinnacle of war reporting. As I gained more experience, I began to see how reports from journalists with that attitude tended to be more about how badass they were for being in the thick of the action than about the people who were fighting, suffering, and dying. Many journalists were narcissistic and ambitious. Some were damaged.

From 2012 to 2014, I reported full-time from Kabul—I was NPR’s last correspondent to be based there. In those years, I reported on the deaths of numerous friends and colleagues as the Taliban began targeting foreign civilians.

The last year, I was part of a group embed in Helmand when I overheard an American correspondent say, “I’m only happy when I’m being shot at.” In 2009, I might have felt the same, or at least empathized. In 2014, after years of covering conflict, it struck me as about the most defective thing I had heard in a war zone.       

Back in D.C., I had difficulty readjusting. One morning, a car bomb went off outside my condo—or at least, that’s what it sounded and felt like. I shot up out of bed and stood pulsing with adrenaline. I looked outside the window and saw no smoke or debris. What I did see were storm clouds gathering. What I thought had been a car bomb was an epic clap of thunder. It took me at least an hour to calm down.         

I knew that I had been altered by years of covering death, destruction, and devastation, but I had no idea how damaged I was. I had no reentry care or support. I felt isolated and had difficulty interacting with friends and family. I made a series of bad life choices. I hit bottom and found the will to keep living ultimately because of my obligation to Squeak. She was a cat I rescued from the streets of Kabul shortly after moving there. I took pity on the dusty little kitten, and she became my battle buddy. Little did I know then that the decision to save her would, years later, save me.  

Two years after the fall of Kabul, I am still processing. I believe it will be years, at least, before we as a country can understand the consequences of the 20 years of war that followed 9/11. And it will take at least as long for me to understand all of the ways I was changed by a doomed war that I felt was likely to fail from the time I first set foot in Afghanistan.

My experience has brought clarity about one thing: the need to support civilians who work in war zones. Though there is growing support for veterans’ mental health, the same cannot be said for the thousands of civilians—journalists, aid workers, diplomats, and others—who also risked their lives to help the people of Afghanistan. Many of them are dealing with the trauma of witnessing combat and its impact, but also with the painful reality that their work made little lasting difference—that the Afghan people are largely back to where they were before 9/11. Among the many lessons we ought to learn from America’s failures in Afghanistan is one we can do something about now: Take better care of one another.

This essay was adapted from the book Passport Stamps: Searching the World for a War to Call Home.

Over the past several weeks, Israeli and American officials have teased a possible deal to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Such an agreement has the potential to be a diplomatic triumph: Successive U.S. administrations, going back decades and from both parties, have considered the security of both Israel and the Arabian Peninsula to be vital interests that Americans would fight and die for if necessary. A deal that advances both objectives by normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia would be—should be—greeted with much fanfare and near-universal approval in Washington.

Precisely because they will come under pressure to celebrate any deal that’s announced, however, U.S. policy makers need to be clear about what is and is not a “win.” Congress in particular should be prepared to ask hard questions about any deal. A deal that commits the United States to an undiminished or even a growing presence in the region, whether in the form of troop numbers or policy attention, is a bad deal. So is one that rests on any Saudi motive other than a genuine desire to normalize relations with Israel.

[From the April 2022 issue: Absolute power]

A good deal is one that formalizes already warming relations between Israel and the Gulf states while allowing the United States—which has spent immeasurable blood and treasure on the region over the past three decades—to focus less time and money on the Middle East.

A shotgun marriage between Israel and Saudi Arabia, then, is not a win. The peace deal between Israel and Egypt offers a cautionary example. At the time, the accord was welcome, because the two countries had fought four disastrous wars in three decades, and the deal, backed by U.S. military aid to the Egyptians, peeled the Arabic-speaking world’s most populous country away from the Soviet orbit. But the Egyptian people largely detest Israel today. The two countries have very few meaningful social or economic ties, and Egypt—which is currently entangled in a mess of political and financial problems—views Israel with suspicion rather than as a partner.

The peace between Israel and Jordan is similar. The two relationships depend on U.S. dollars, autocratic regimes in Amman and Cairo, and cooperation among the affected countries’ military and security services. And both peace deals have fostered a sense of entitlement among their participants: Governments in Egypt, Israel, and Jordan all believe they are owed billions of dollars in annual military aid and react angrily at any suggestion that such aid might be reduced. The problem is especially acute with Egypt, whose military is the country’s most powerful political actor but depends on aid in order to provide jobs and protect its economic interests.

The burgeoning relationship between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, following the 2020 Abraham Accords, somehow feels different from those with Egypt and Jordan. Leaders in Israel and the UAE see the rest of the Middle East similarly to one another (and often, it should be said, differently from Washington). Mohammed bin Zayed and his sons and brothers view the threats posed by Iran and Sunni Islamists, for example, with as much alarm as any Israeli does, and the synergies between the UAE’s ambitious sovereign-wealth funds and Israel’s start-up ecosystem hold promise too. Israelis have reason to visit Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and Emiratis have reasons to visit Haifa, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. Each country has something to contribute—capital from the Emiratis, innovation from the Israelis—to the other.

The same should be true of Israel and Saudi Arabia. The Gulf, in general, is one of the very few economic bright spots in the world at the moment. Flush with cash from oil and gas revenues, the sovereign-wealth funds of the Gulf are spending liberally both at home and abroad, while Western private-equity and venture-capital firms seek to raise funds in the region.

Saudi Arabia has the largest consumer base of any wealthy Gulf state, which is why retailers and makers of consumer goods spend more time there than in, say, Qatar or the UAE. The economic reforms of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have made doing business in Saudi Arabia much more attractive than in years past, and more Western companies—under pressure from Riyadh, to be sure—are basing their regional operations in Saudi Arabia rather than in the UAE.

Israelis may wish to invest in Saudi Arabia, and Saudis will almost certainly want to invest in Israel. That incentive for normalizing relations between the two countries should be enough, and the United States should not feel obligated to offer much more.

[Read: Israel and Saudi Arabia–togetherish at last?]

Nevertheless, rumors have circulated that the U.S. plans to increase its commitment to Saudi and Israeli security, and this prospect worries me. Peace between Israel and its neighbors should allow the United States to base fewer resources in the region, not more. But U.S. diplomats often underestimate the commitments they are making on behalf of the Pentagon.

The Iran deal of 2015 provides a useful example. The Pentagon was, for some very good reasons, excluded from the negotiations between the United States and Iran, which the more optimistic members of the administration hoped might lead to a new era in U.S. policy toward the region. But the deal itself effectively locked in a robust U.S. force posture nearby to enforce Iranian compliance: Shifting U.S. troops from the Gulf to East Asia became harder, not easier, following the deal.

I worry that any formal security commitments made to either Saudi Arabia or Israel might similarly promise tens of thousands of U.S. troops to the Middle East for decades more. Moving U.S. forces into the Gulf in a conflict is harder than you might imagine, so to respond to contingencies, much of what you would need has to be deployed to the region in advance. (Approximately 35,000 U.S. troops were semipermanently garrisoned in the Gulf at the end of the Obama administration.) The U.S. should not make a new security commitment to the Middle East—the scene of yesterday’s wars—at the expense of prioritizing the Pacific theater.

I understand the enthusiasm in Jerusalem and Washington, though. Despite my worries about the ill-advised and ultimately unnecessary commitments the United States might be tempted to make in order to bring the deal across the finish line, the Biden administration—and, yes, the Trump administration before it—deserves a lot of credit for having gotten us this close to what would be a momentous achievement for Israel, for Saudi Arabia, and for U.S. diplomacy.