Free The Taliban Shuffle by Kim Barker

traveled in convoys. Print journalists could never afford that. We gambled.
    Back at the Kabul Lodge, sitting in front of my computer and writing about the dead elderly Afghan man, I wondered what my army engineer platoon would have thought about his death. Just one of the bad things that inevitably happened in war, I supposed. I often wondered what happened to those soldiers, and to Crowley, the intelligent smart aleck hoping to go back to graduate school.
    I soon found out. Later that summer, the soldiers would tell another reporter that they felt I had betrayed them. After my story ran, Crowley and some of the other soldiers had been moved to a more dangerous base in Sharana, still in Paktika Province but near Kandahar, because of complaining that they had nothing to do in quiet Orgun-E. Crowley had also been busted to kitchen duty, frying up steaks for two weeks.
    So that was my own collateral damage, my own unintended consequences. I was not happy that anyone got in trouble, but I soon forgot about it. Only years later would I find out what had happened to Crowley that August, almost three months after I met the platoon and he got married.
    One evening in Sharana, Crowley was sent out on a last-minute mission. He was the gunner in the front vehicle, looking for land mines, for bags in the road, for suspicious cars, his eyes always scanning. But it was dusk—too dark to see much, too light for night-vision goggles. Then the explosion. His Humvee was blown up; a medic inside died. The other four men were injured. Crowley lost the lower part of his right leg. His new wife soon left him.
    And that was Afghanistan, a country that lulled people into complacency, where hospitality was continually confused with support. When I finally found out what happened to Crowley, my heart hitting my kidneys during a random Google search, I would track him down, filled with guilt. If I hadn’t written the story, he wouldn’t have been moved. If he hadn’t have been moved, he wouldn’t have been blown up. Amazingly, he was gracious and kind. Luckily, he had remarried. He had also left the army and gone back to school. “I like to think of it as the best thing that ever happened to me,” he told me. “I don’t blame you.” But that would only make me feel worse.

CHAPTER 6
MARCH OF THE PIGS
    C rouched on the dirty pavement, the fortune-teller studied my palm, shook his head, and started talking.
    “What’s he saying?” I asked.
    Dr. Ali, working with me because Farouq was busy with family obligations, shot me a look, somewhere between a smirk and sympathy.
    “He says you will have a miserable life. Nothing will ever go right for you. You will always be unhappy. Do you want to hear more?”
    “No,” I said. “I get it.”
    I should have known this would be my fortune at the Kabul Zoo. Bored with all the obvious stories before the parliamentary elections in September 2005, I had made a bold move. I had gone to the zoo, planning to use it as an interesting way to tell the history of modern Afghanistan. My hook was Marjan the lion, donated by Germany in 1978, just as a coup by a Marxist party and Soviet sympathizers in the military sparked rumors of a Soviet invasion. Back then, in the zoo’s heyday, more than seven hundred animals lived there.
    The next year, the Soviets indeed invaded, and Afghanistan became the major chip in the poker game between the Soviets and the West. The CIA, the Saudis, and Pakistani intelligence eventually decided to support the seven major Afghan jihadi parties, sendingmoney and weapons, using Islam as a rallying tool. And by the end of the 1980s, the Soviets left, followed shortly by American pledges of help. The zoo languished.
    An uncertain pall fell over the capital. The pro-Soviet government remained nominally in charge, but soon lost control of the countryside. The jihadi parties pushed toward Kabul, finally capturing the city in 1992. Their fragile warlord coalition held for only a short