As the war correspondent for a men’s fashion magazine in the late 1990’s, I was given one directive: There will be blood in the first paragraph!

This was a time of relative peace and calm, when it seemed the United States would rule the world for at least the next couple hundred years. My job was to go to places where people were still acting up, causing trouble, shooting and killing, and find someone who was bleeding—because this is what men (with money) in the late 1990’s wanted to read in between ads for underwear, wristwatches, and cologne.

I went to “some fucked up places” and wrote the stories, but I kept failing to follow the directive about blood. So my job was on shaky ground. Then 9/11 happened.

This story is about going to Afghanistan in November of 2001, the beginning of the war on terror. Esquire Magazine refused to send me, so I went on my own. The story I wrote, “Over There,” was published in Harper’s Magazine in 2002. This radio story, produced years later, is composed of excerpts from the print story. It was edited and mixed by Larry Massett, and was broadcast, in 2010, by the NPR program “Hearing Voices.”

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