The sound of gunfire and explosions fill the air, summer has come, and once more war has come to Helmand Province. In one of the largest military operations seen in Afghanistan since the start of the war, Marines from the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade have launched a wide ranging operation deep into the Helmand River Valley, a major poppy producing region, and a hotbed of Taliban activity.

Operation Khanjar

The operation has been dubbed, “Khanjar,” and commanders are calling it the largest…

I sit in a broken green lawnchair, writing. It is hot here: the sunlight is overwhelming, and even in shade the temperature is easily in triple digits; nightfall-the only respite anyone can hope for-is a long way off, and in the meantime there is little to do except sweat, and wait. Everything takes longer than it should: sand trickles through the hourglass in fitful spurts: the sky is swollen with the day’s heat, throbbing with its own pulse. I sit…

People often call the conflict in Afghanistan “The Forgotten War,” a broad statement that misses the point on why the going has been so slow, 8 years this October, and why, until recently, there has been little spoken of it. Afghanistan was not forgotten so much as poorly-remembered; picked up and dusted off whenever pundits and politicians saw use in it: whether to compare it to its brother-war in Iraq,  held up as an example of International Cooperation, or used…

The village of Kamu is only a brief walk from COP Lowell, and every month a MEDCAP mission is dispatched to provide medical assistance for locals.  As the doctors work on the villagers a crowd of young boys swarm about the doctors like a cloud of gnats, waiting for the sweets inevitably passed out. Every one of the boys old enough to walk a straight line is armed with a slingshot, home-made, an obvious source of pride in a place…

In daylight the mountains that surround Lowell took on a new, more dangerous significance. While at night they stood as singular, monolithic entities, the sun revealed them to be a mass of trees and valleys, stone wrinkles and ridgelines that provided ample cover to anyone who cared to attack the base, which, I was assured, was often.

I had known before coming to Lowell that it was under frequent attack, but the sheer volume of action it saw shocked me: COP…

At long last we have arrived at Combat Outpost Lowell, but whatever relief I may feel at reaching our destination is tempered by knowledge of the certain danger we face here. Lowell is as far out as US forces go in this part of the world, and the degree of isolation faced by the soldiers here is something that anyone who has traveled here can attest to: my own experience in getting to Lowell certainly backs up this claim.

Our flight…

The attack on Bariali did a great deal to diminish its infrastructure; much of the outpost had been burned, broken, or simply collapsed in the chaos, leaving little for International Forces to work with in the following days. This proved to be a matter of critical importance for the…