A soldier's life in Afghanistan

Chief Warrant Officer John, a medic, a demolition expert, and a sniper, occupies a corner room on the ground floor. He has jet-black hair and arched, inquisitive eyebrows, and often wears a United Airlines cap while on operations, a reminder of the 9/11 attacks. A handmade wooden cabinet houses his fishing magazines (John brought a rod and reel with him, not knowing that fishing in Afghanistan would be as simple as tossing a hand grenade into a river in the company of a local warlord), along with letters from home and a diary, which he keeps meti-culously. Pinned to the wall are photographs of John's family and a "death letter" he has written to his wife.

"That's a letter I hope she never reads," John says.

Special Forces bases, especially in eastern Afghanistan, come under rocket and mortar fire so often that the shelling, inaccurate as it may be, has become routine. The safe house in Kunduz has yet to come under attack, but in the event it does, John's room doubles as an excellent fighting position. Tear down the West Virginia flag in one window, and John has a clear shot to the front gate. Behind an American flag, another window doubles as a shooting port over the front door. The window sills are stacked with sandbags and lined with hand grenades and cartons of ammunition. In case of evacuation, John will burn his diary, the letters from his wife, and his store of plastic explosives and pull the pin on a thermite grenade he has placed on his cabinet. "If it gets to that point, they're probably killing me anyways, so I wouldn't want them to get any benefit out of it," John says.

While a stick of C-4 could easily be used to rig a booby trap, and the diary of a soldier with a high security clearance could yield useful information to an enemy combatant, it's not immediately clear how letters from home could have any strategic value. But in a fight against terrorist organizations, with their predilection for soft targets, many Special Forces soldiers worry that spouses and children back home could become unwitting actors in the war on terror.

"Worst-case scenario, somebody goes to your house and kills your family," John says. Such attacks have never materialized, though US military officials say they were threatened by Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War.

Nonetheless, information security has become institutionalized in the US military. Garbage dumps like the one at Bagram are strictly off limits. At the US Army post office in Uzbekistan, return addresses are routinely cut out of pieces of mail before they are forwarded to soldiers in the field. Even so, forward-deployed troops are encouraged to burn their mail after it has been read.

Because of the sensitive nature of their missions, and because they are often collocated with even more covert groups, such as the CIA and the Army's Delta Force, Special Forces soldiers are drilled in "operational security."

But the average Special Forces soldier isn't much of a blab. Like most Green Berets, John describes himself as a private person. Back in the States, most of his friends are fellow soldiers. His wife socializes with "Special Forces wives." Even when he goes to a restaurant, he takes care to sit in the back corner, so he can cover the door.

Some of John's precautions seem excessive even to members of his unit, but other Green Berets are even more circumspect. For them, the 9/11 attacks produced a world where everything is potentially dangerous. Even as he is searching out Al Qaeda remnants in remote corners of northern Afghanistan, John is forced to consider the possibility that Al Qaeda will come to the US and find him and his family instead.

"You're hunting them, they're hunting you," John says. "I don't want to be the first to find out how serious this war is going to get."

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