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 where personal possessions are few and far between, and a physical connection to their past.…

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 Lowell is the most attacked post in both Iraq and Afghanistan, taking a staggering amount of indirect and assorted small-arms fire.…

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 began, as many flights do, with a seemingly endless series of delays that stretched on for days.…