When the Taliban Are in Your Bedroom

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As fortified Taliban audited the New York Times office in Kabul, they were attended by a intelligencer who used to be aU.S. Marine. The print of him in livery was plain for all to see, and consider.

KABUL, Afghanistan — When the Taliban are in your bedroom and there’s a snap of you on the wall holding an American flag, a rifle and dressed like a recruiting commercial for the Marines, you have to keep it together.
Also there’s the kitschy mug on your office that you picked up from a shop just as Bagram Air Base closed in July. It reads, “ Been there … done that/ Operation Enduring Freedom.”

And the empty beer can in your trash that you drank the night before Kabul fell in August when you had a feeling this might be the last beer you drink in Afghanistan for awhile because the mutineers- turned- autocrats do n’t take kindly to booze.
And that print of you in livery? Taken just before the largest operation against the Taliban of the American war in Afghanistan, when you were a Marine in Helmand Province further than a decade agone. That was when the mutineers were murk in the contrary tree line, but now, in October, they ’re bases down, standing next to your bed, separated by a decade and a lost war.
But the Taliban are n’t then to take anything or kill you, indeed though they had plenitude of chances to do just that when you stationed in 2008, and in 2009. Or when you were a intelligencer in the country times subsequently.

But they still managed to kill some guys in your unit and blew others in half, commodity not lost on you as they pick up and put back a honorary cuff engraved with the names of your musketeers (Josh, Matt and Brandon) and a line from a John McCrae lyric “ We lived, felt dawn, saw evening gleam.”

These Talibs contend they ’re then to make sure nothing has been stolen from what was once the New York Times Kabul office, and that everything is right where we left it when all of the review’s staff members fled the country, like thousands of other Afghans and nonnatives did, in August as the Afghan government collapsed.

And everything is right where I left it. There’s the new Xbox I bought at Dubai International Airport when I flew back into Afghanistan in late July, just about two weeks before Kabul fell, allowing that Kabul would n’t fall and that I ’d have plenitude of time to play Microsoft Flight Simulator. My dirty laundry is in the hinder. My bed is made. There’s a thin subcaste of dust on everything.