The village elder was out in his pasture, as he is every morning, crouched low in waist-high alfalfa. He ran his sickle through the thickets, and he and his grandsons gathered the plants into heaping bundles, lugging them on their backs to the two cows sheltered behind the walls of the family’s homestead.
The last time I was in this small farming community in southern Afghanistan, these simple tasks were impossible. The village was a front line in an interminable war. Buried beneath the earth was an endless arsenal of explosive devices, the Taliban’s weapon of choice against American forces.
“We were afraid of being killed, of explosions, and of bullets,” the elder, Haji Muhammed Zarif, 58, told me recently, his weathered features deepening as he squinted into the early sun.
One of those explosions he remembers distinctly. On Oct. 23, 2010, U.S. soldiers were searching Mr. Zarif’s apricot fields when a blast rang out in a nearby compound. A small cloud of smoke rose into the sky as he watched from a safe distance. Minutes later, a helicopter landed, and Mr. Zarif could see soldiers carrying someone toward it.
That distant figure, I told Mr. Zarif, had been me. While working as a photographer for The New York Times, I stepped on a land mine and lost both of my legs.
From the moment I picked up a camera again, I had wanted to return to this village, Deh-e Kuchay, in the fertile Arghandab Valley. That became possible after the war ended in 2021. And now, more than 30 years since my first visit to Afghanistan and nearly 15 years after my injury, I was allowed back, seeing the country as I had never seen it before: at peace.
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