![]() ![]() Five years later, the Marja district collapsed to the Taliban, except for a few outposts. I went home from Afghanistan in July 2010. He wasn’t fighting in a war that seemed like it would never end. He was no longer an enemy but a man sitting on the floor, pondering his next sentence. But now that it was no longer needed, it was little more than a mass of plastic and steel, and it had no bearing on how I interacted with Marja and Mr. The rifle was a familiar tool, once an extension of myself and always within arms reach. Marja was as I remembered, but some things had changed. Abandoned military and police outposts dotted the highway like sporadic Stonehenges. ![]() The pavement was pockmarked with craters from the roadside bombs the insurgents had once placed beneath them. ![]() The roads were busy with motorbikes and trucks packed with cotton. In November, my drive back to the district, now controlled by the Taliban, was easy enough. Now, as a journalist for The Times, I wanted to return to report on what had changed, and what hadn’t, on and around these former battlefields. With the war ending this August, the places where I had once fought as a Marine are now reachable again - stretches of land where my friends died and I watched my country’s military failures unfold. The insurgents suffered their own casualties. By the end of the day, a Marine engineer was dead and several others wounded. I told him that the fight for Marja had been important in the eyes of the United States, but that most people had heard only one version of the story of the battle. I was his guest, along with two of my colleagues from The New York Times. Gulab, now a high-level commander, was sitting with me in Marja’s government headquarters, a mess of a building the Americans had refurbished years ago. With the insurgents’ victory in that 20-year war secured this summer, Mr. He didn’t know it when we recently met, but I was a corporal in a company of Marines that his fighters attacked that winter morning so many years ago. Mullah Abdul Rahim Gulab was part of a group of Taliban fighters trying to defend the district from the thousands of American, coalition and Afghan troops sent to seize what at the time was an important Taliban stronghold. 13, 2010, Marja district, Helmand Province. And the Taliban commander I sat across from in a bullet-scarred building in southern Afghanistan had tried to kill me a little over a decade ago. ![]()
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