Flat on their bellies with no cover and mortars raining down on them, two Oklahomans, Sergeant Shane Ayres and Staff Sergeant Tyler Mobra, looked at each other and communicated an unspoken message, “What the hell are we doing here.”

It was October 31, 2008 and Combat Outpost Lowell, Nuristan, Afghanistan was under attack again. Lowell is the most attacked U.S. base in Afghanistan and on Halloween day, Afghan insurgents treated the scouts of 6/4 Cavalry, Ft. Hood, Texas, with a barrage…

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…

In the War To End All Wars (World War I ended nothing), artillery barrages, poison gas attacks and trench offensives came at predictable times. Much of that war was fought just before and after sunrise and at dusk. To be ready for the war’s prime killing times Allied soldiers began a tradition that became known as “stand to”. Translated, it meant stand towards the enemy, and be ready before they attacked.

90 years later, at a small U.S. post in a…

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…

It is an unfortunate fact that sometimes stories are lost in the maelstrom of information that seems constant and, at times, overwhelming. Events that should be brought to our attention are often buried, relegated to a series of words at the…

May 1st, Observation Post Bariali was overrun during a surprise attack by Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. Three American soldiers, along with two Latvians and five Afghans died in the fight. Little notice was made back home of the horrible battle here. Swine flu was the topic number one in the American media. Death on an Afghan mountain top was lost somewhere in that day’s events.

Situated along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, Bariali overlooks three river valleys that serve as…