I woke up this morning before sunrise and after catching up on the latest news on the CNN Breaking News Box --- about the India Parliament attack and about what was going on over at Tora Bora --- I reviewed the description of the Khyber Pass I’d highlighted in my travel guidebook. Just in case I get to go there today. It called the place “dangerous” and “uninviting” but said it possessed throughout the ages, “A romantic notion of passages of civilizations through it or blocked by it.”

 

            Today I passed back into Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass where (as a regular pissed-off American -- white with foam) I’d wanted to get to since September 11. Only about four or five miles inside, I suppose. But I had a dozen F-18 and F-14 fighter-jet sightings while I was there as they ripped the sky on their way in and out of the al-Qaida Tora Bora cave complex area in the nearby Afghan White Mountains in the Spinghar Range. I heard the roar of too many B-52 and B-1 bombers to keep track of and I saw the exhaust streaming behind some of them in the distance as they sped in for the kill. Once I saw what I took to be a B-1 bomber take a low-level swipe at the battlefront. And several times fighter jets flew back and forth across my sky from bombardments and the like on what the CNN Breaking News Box told me later when I got back to my Peshawar hotel was the Al-Qaida Last Stand at Tora Bora. Powerful, relentless, bloodthirsty bombing. Crushing Osama bin Laden’s last surviving organized pack of cronies and delivering to them their due justice.

            I and two Spanish freelance journalists --- who I never really got to know but who were kind enough to offer me a lift on their way to Jalalabad --- were turned around by machine gun-toting Afghani tribal escorts because

a new alert for journalists had been issued on our route due to another attempted attack on a media caravan halfway between Jalalabad and Kabul . Of course, if the Spaniards could come up with another --- say $500 or so --- then the hired guns told them they could, “Absolutely guarantee your safe arrival in Jalalabad”  by adding their weight to the two guns the Spanish had already been forced to hire for $150 apiece at the border.

            Instead, we turned back to Peshawar with little information and hardly an opportunity to take pictures of anything, the Spaniards planning to wait the four or five days they thought it would take them to wire for more bribe money and to outlast the complications the al-Qaida and Taliban flight from Tora Bora was causing them on that road. Making the historically hazardous route to Jalalabad an even more chaotic and unstable place in more turmoil than it typically is. As the desperate terrorists head our way and pass by us and the waiting Pakistan army. Like happened to me and my friends yesterday at the refugee camp school on the border. Seeking sanctuary as the American Coalition air forces relentlessly pound the holdouts in their caves and search for retreating hot spots on the sides of the roads to target. Such as the three of us, our driver-guide, and our crew of eight Pashtun tribal guards probably appeared at that time from the eye in the sky.

 

            It was an edgy situation, and I wasn’t comfortable with the hot spot issue. But there I found myself with time to reflect at a peanut-gallery view of the historic rout. And as I stood there watching those war jets dart about the sky, I became eerily satisfied --- surrealistically becalmed and content. Suddenly at peace with myself for the first time in three months and at peace with where I’d ended up getting to on this streetphoto trip. Standing there watching a 90-degree slice of the air war from the cheap seats, I became resigned to the fact that I wasn’t going to be able to afford access to or otherwise get lucky enough to weasel a shoot on either the streets of Kabul or now on the streets of Jalalabad either. But I know what I’m seeing while I’m seeing it --- and I was truly satisfied with my right place at the right time fortune.

            Frighteningly satisfied and grateful.

            For getting over the Khyber Pass to that hot spot on the side of the road on the most vicious day of bombing at the Tora Bora rout and for getting the opportunity to watch from so close up and so first hand this historic act of civilized retribution --- the Al-Qaida Last Stand.

 

*Borrowed Access:

Right Place -- Right Time

 

 

The Streets of Peshawar

 

 

                        I met the two Spanish freelance journalists late on Wednesday afternoon at the nearby Green’s Saddar Bazaar Hotel just down the street from my place while I was out beating around the streets taking streetphotos and trying to get a grip on the mindset of the people I was meeting and studying with my cameras. Green’s Hotel was a place that costs $25 per night and which provided tenants a much more formidable machine- gun guard at its door then the raggedy man guarding my raggedy hotel down the street at Khani’s. The freelancers were slumming it down here at 2000 rupees a night, but neither would stoop to the 500-rupee place I slept in, and they told me so. It was a brief meeting, as they were on the fly to arrange tribal papers for the passage of their vehicle and their driver-guide over the Khyber Pass, but they were impressed with my method and my poise and agreed if we had the chance to hook up that they might have enough spare room in their taxi-van to allow me to accompany them as far as Jalalabad, perhaps on Friday afternoon.

            I had a big day Thursday in and out of Afghanistan at the refugee camps with Shahid and his wife, getting the streetphotos I’d flown here to get.

After getting back from the camps I crashed hard with my flu during the late afternoon, but even after oversleeping I found I hadn’t missed the Spanish journalists and we met again briefly in the lobby of Green’s Hotel on Thursday evening and made a date to head west on Friday afternoon. I was so stoked by the news that I may have weaseled a ride, that I ignored the fact that I might be arraigning a ride too far into harms way and I spent two hours photographing Saddar Bazaar as the sun went down --- ending up getting my best shot of the extreme night-time mood of Peshawar.

            It was of several angry Taliban cheerleaders as they menaced me out on the street.

            The incident was short but scary.

 

 

 

            Three of them got in my way on the sidewalk, so I used my camera as a shield, and pulled it up to my eye and made a streetphoto of them menacing an American and claiming victory for the Taliban. That made them laugh for a moment and as they were giggling to each other I slipped past them and walked away toward a more crowded alley without ever looking back or responding to their catcalls --- taunts I only understood in abstract.
 

 

 

 

            And then after a long night divided between sleep, writing, and watching TV, I spent this morning photographing Saddar Bazaar in a festive end-of-Ramadan Juma’h (holy Friday) holiday mood.

 

 

At one point I scared myself by straying into a Friday noon prayer session on the streets. A dangerous time when the streets close down to motor traffic and are blocked in many places by huge chanting prayer groups and when afterward --- depending on what they hear that day from the mullah --- political tensions build up to the burning of American flags. I’d have liked to have photographed an after-prayer flag burning (capturing more of the anger and extremism I think I may have captured last night in the bazaar), but before prayers were over I’d already hooked up with the freelancers and in a matter of five minutes notice we were off on our little drive to the west.

We drove as madly as the freelancer’s driver-guide dared (scary fast) and everyone in the SUV-like taxi-van seemed anxious, including the hired machine-gun-toting “escort” we’d been forced (the Spanish had been forced) to hire for $175 to guide us through the 45-mile trip to the border. We sped past smarmy frontier trading posts and up the Khyber Pass ...

            The Khyber Pass is remarkably unimpressive as a mountain pass. Brown and littered and teeming at places with smarmy tribal (smuggler) outposts; an old fort here, an abandoned rail line over there. A neglected building at the border that looked like it had once either been an army barracks or maybe a hotel or tourist welcome center. Switchback climbs and descents with mostly un-magnificent broad, brown, and baron views that only closed in on the road occasionally. Places I was under the order of the gun not to film.

            As we sped and bumped along past another outpost our driver told us was called either Smuggler’s Market or The Gun and Poppy Bazaar, I got the feeling our un-smiling hired guide (sitting next to me on the back seat) was guarding his tribe from us more than he was guarding us from bandits, the Taliban, or al-Qaida. Because on that one occasion when I did reach around to get my cameras and to test the guard’s no photos resolve, he wagged the tip of the mussel of his Kalashnikov (which was pointed straight up toward the roof of the truck) back and forth at me, and shook his head no as well.

            The border itself was more passive and uncluttered with people than it had been when I first saw media clips of it on the CNN News Box two or three weeks ago while I was still in Lawrence. Since most of the new refugees had already headed east and south ahead of the Tora Bora campaign. And since the busloads and mass caravans of journalists headed west just before the area was made the front lines by the retreating Taliban and al-Qaida forces and by the advancing Pakistan Army, American Marines, and anti-Taliban Alliance ground forces.

            All our papers and passports and permits were in order. And after a few bribes paid for by the more-and-more cash-strapped freelancers and an invitation by Pakistani soldiers to continue (but only after the Spanish hired an additional set of armed Afghani-sanctioned tribal guns) we drove about eight or nine kilometers into Afghanistan to the first checkpoint. A parked Toyota pickup truck loaded down with six kames-garbed machine-gun-toting Afghani tribal forces.

            We were told we’d be able to use our cameras at the second checkpoint, but as it turned out on this day, we were never to see a second checkpoint. Only the first. The tribal fighters told us that the road was closed because of its proximity to the conflict in the adjacent White Mountains. They mentioned the uncertainty, “Even where we stand now,” of running into desperate Taliban fighters or a group of foreign terrorists trying to flee to Pakistan. And they indicated that there might have been some trouble up ahead on the road this morning, a trouble they said they were not at liberty to discuss with us. They did indicate to the Spanish that if they had a lot more cash than the Spanish had, that they would have taken the chance of smuggling us through to the second checkpoint. But the Spanish had almost run out of their budgeted bribe money and certainly didn’t have near the gunmen’s asking price in their pockets for just another ten-kilometer guarantee to the next checkpoint (and probable next passage fee negotiation as well).

            Unlike the depressed United Nations airfare to Kabul that I found back in Islamabad (was $4800 -- now $2400), the cost of travel around here had risen considerably since the big-buck corporate journalism boys and girls started blowing through here a couple of weeks ago with their wads of network cash.

            During the hour and a quarter of debate between the freelancers and the gunmen (broken Spanish, broken English, a lot of primitive hand signals, and a few drawn maps of the Tora Bora combat zone in the road sand that I’d have loved to have photographed if permitted,) I sat under the air theater and I passively watched American Coalition jets and bombers zipping at and rumbling over the White Mountains past the closest White Mountain ridges just to our southwest and watching the fighter jets re-forming right above us and even behind us for further attacks. The fighting this afternoon (as I understood later from TV reports) was mostly centered on the ridges in between the hazy mountain foothills off in the distance that screened our view, and we could neither see the exploding bombs nor hear the sound of the bombs exploding under the waves of bombers roaring overhead. The bombs probably falling at least a couple of dozen miles (perhaps a horizon or two) away, but the frantic air theater was happening all around and directly above our heads.

            Leftover jet contrails littering the sky all around us.

            And I’ll be damned if it didn’t feel good to be there!

            Just a regular global-minded American artist, chain-smoking Marlboro cigarettes and watching the civilized world-supported American forces bomb the soul-less bastards who committed September 11 into next week. World-class louts who manipulated the insane and weak and who’d hijack an entire religion, an entire peace-loving world. Who ran civilian jet airplanes into civilian buildings just because they could. Who’d killed thousands of innocent global citizens and who now are principally culpable for nearly 4000 Afghani civilian deaths as well. Either before the American Coalition started dropping bombs on them while the extremists went medieval on the people, or after America began fighting back against the kind of cowards who’d use women and children as human shields during battle. All just to show us how large they viewed the value of their own existence, their own stinking manhood.

            And I sat there, and I leaned against the bumper of that taxi-van, thumbing my nose at that goddamn shrinking manhood. Accidentally-on-purpose being at this place at this time and thumbing my nose at the terror. Smiling at the thought of their emasculating defeat and the carnage being done to them over that ridge --- --- --- right over there where those two fighter jets just went in ...

            It looks like I won’t get the chance to kill him myself,” I thought, “but the games must go on ...”

            The CNN Breaking News Box reports that I watched after getting back to my hotel room combined with my small eye-witness slice of the air war left me feeling as though I’d finally caught up to September 11. Watching the fighter jets and hearing the thundering bombers roaring over the red line on the CNN War Map at the outskirts of the battle, I’d finally caught up to the instant I saw that second jetliner smash into the World Trade Center in New York at 3:03 p.m. in Amsterdam on September 11, when I knew I’d be coming to this war. I’d caught up to and overcome the grip of helplessness and sorrow I’d suffered since then. I’d caught up to and overcome the perplexed state that the tragedy had left crying inside of me.

            It still wasn’t September 12th for me yet -- but it was close ...

            For an hour and a quarter I was right in the middle of the anvil in the hammer-and-anvil maneuver on the red line on the 24-hour CNN Breaking News Box War Map. And in those 75 minutes, I got what Janet got at the Eiffel Tower in Paris a week after the September 11 attack. I’d succeeded in reaching the Zen of my own personal nose-thumbing expectations. After three lousy months of watching the distress on the CNN Breaking News Box, I’d come to a therapeutic understanding of my own uncivilized bloodlust capabilities in light of years spent hounding those who found such bloodthirst an acceptable way of life (in light of less-acceptable, more obscene circumstances) to declare unnecessary war in my name. It occurred to me then that it was time --- watching the jets zip by and the bombers bomb away --- to begin suppressing the horrible events of September 11. To begin drying up all the tears of the months gone by since. To stop worrying so much and to just start feeling comfortable with the hypocrisies of the polar notions of peace and self-defense and in this case to fight evil with evil for the sake of civilization and even for the sake of pacifism --- no matter how obscene that sounds.

            The logic of self-defense eludes the pacifist ideal, I’d heard a TV commentator say. But today I found the logic of pacifism eluding the self-defense ideal.

            I was at peace.

            I’d thumbed my nose at terrorism. At those evil bastards who’d ruined what I saw as a pretty good post-Cold War era of peace and prosperity and who’d killed some of the finest people from 90 countries on Earth because they felt inferior and trapped inside vacuums of mostly their own conjuring. I felt, there on that Afghan road, that I’d duly honored the flag and the president of the United States and the mayor of New York City and all those public service announcements I’d heard on the CNN homefront Breaking News Box all fall. The appeals that kept urging me to pitch in on the war effort by going about my normal life. Who kept encouraging me to thumb my nose at the terrorists by not letting their crime stop me from going about my normal life. I followed that advice, and I came out here to practice street photography at the edge of the fury on streets in turmoil. And in that time on these roadways in Pakistan and Afghanistan, I’ve succeeded in doing my part to the best of my abilities.

            As happens, and in spite of my own reservations, I’d ended up in harms way to get this far. But the Spanish had run out of both money and arguments with our tribal handlers, and we were also about to run out of time for getting to a locked room in either Jalalabad or Peshawar by sundown. So we turned the taxi-van around and headed back over the border and over the brown Khyber Pass and back down to our hotels at Saddar Bazaar in Peshawar.

            Past the Pakistan Army searching for fleeing al-Qaida. Past the Pushtun tribal force searching for customers. Past the refugees and otherwise displaced by the war. And past the merchants selling guns, drugs, and Osama bin Laden tribute T-shirts at the smuggler bazaars. Back to my cigarette-burns-in-the-carpet/ cold-water room for the night in the edgy and increasingly more-defeated and more-remorseful Saddar Bazaar in Peshawar.

            Made to feel like a liberator yesterday in the Afghan refugee camps and made to feel like a winner today while watching the air war on the Khyber Pass.

            Feeling relatively balanced for the first time since that awful Amsterdam afternoon on September 11, 2001.

            Feeling like the calendar had finally flipped from September 11 to December 14...

            Feeling like a goddamn bunker-busting daisy-cutter bomb on the Fourth of July ...

 

 

*REVENGE

    Inform Them of an Excruciating Pain

 

 

 

            “As for those who reject the signs of God and kill prophets, alienated from truth, and kill those who call for justice for the people, inform them of an excruciating pain. They are those whose works are futile in this world and the hereafter; and they have no helpers or protectors.”                                                                                                                                                                                                 the Quran

 

 

                        Getting myself under the Tora Bora air war --- especially as close as I got today --- wasn’t bittersweet. It should have been bittersweet, I suppose, but bittersweet just didn’t turn out to be the right way to put it, because suddenly, I wasn’t bitter any more. Making my impressions of an extraordinary moment in a rarefied place full of people in flux. Caught between civility and barbarism, religion and reality, good and evil. It was extremely sweet, what happened to me today, because my calendar had finally and surprisingly turned from September 11 to December 14. Sweet because I’d been given the opportunity through fate and determination to watch thousands of innocent global lives (souls disturbed by means beyond their control) addressed. Debts settled from Kenya and Tanzania, from New York City and Washington DC. And especially somehow for me from that farm field in Pennsylvania.

            I conjured up all the lowlights of my own suffering: the immediate and frighteningly primitive boiling rages I endured in Amsterdam and on returning to Kansas from Ground Zero; being terrified and distressed and confounded by it all; remembering September 11 and how I didn’t know how to react because up until that time, “I always knew what to do next;” that indescribably powerless feeling of panic and loss I had, how I had to hold my head up in my hands during the attack to force myself to keep watching the agonizing terror up on the television screen --- and to stop my head from shaking back and forth.

            I thought about that American woman at the Down Under Coffeeshop who put her three fingers up to her lips after the north World Trade Center tower collapsed, the two streams of tears leading from her sad unbelieving eyes to the three fingers stuck in shock on her shivering lips. That terrible unbelieving pose that became a monumental image for me, that I had no heart at the time to bother capturing on film.

And I remembered those haunting souls of September 11 that I witnessed getting their bad news in the rain at that green sidewalk telephone tree behind Dam Square in Amsterdam. That poor screaming woman thrashing about in the puddles while her mate struggled to grasp the meaning of his whole new world.

            All the death and horror avenged --- to a degree.

            Self-defense, liberation, and vengeance played out in the Afghan mountains at the red line on the 24-hour CNN Breaking News Box War Map.

            And it should have all been so confusing. Because the same obscene human endeavor of war that gave me post-traumatic shock syndrome and those aggravating anxiety hives twenty years before in Central America during the Cold War --- today somehow made me feel whole again. There’s no proper way to accurately commemorate a thing like that, I suppose --- how I felt so light and buoyant and so satisfied under that brutal air war today. A lot of words can go into describing what I saw and how I felt --- all just avoiding the awful truth ...

            Because the right word for what happened to me today isn’t “bittersweet.” The right word wasn’t even part of my lexicon until three months and three days ago. An unspeakable word that’s left a translucent slash across my soul.

            To know as well as I now know --- the essence of the word revenge.

 

            REVENGE!

 

            The un-apologetic satisfaction of appreciating the primal bloodlust of revenge commonly felt (as September 11 had taught us) by those wronged by evil so despicable as to be unforgivable. So inhumane as to deserve neither compassion nor even a single lick of a good man’s mercy.

            I’ve spent a lifetime suppressing my ability to work myself up to the point of bloodlust, and the ability or passion to seek revenge. Keeping those ugly and hateful instincts at arms length and hoping any thoughts of them rising would dissolve from my mind. But goddamit --- I truly do hate those bastards who blasted their airplane bombs into my life. And so I sat there under their Tora Bora dead end stand for a while this afternoon, glad they were in their final hours of rampage in Afghanistan and in this world. Now splintered and scattered to the winds all around me. Their anarchy perhaps about to give way to better rather than worse ...

            I sat on the bumper of that taxi-van today on the outskirts of World War III disturbingly becalmed. Arms folded, facing the air war, thrilled to be at that awful place at that awful time. Disturbingly becalmed yet unrepentantly thrilled to be attending the deaths of whichever wicked terrorists were in those Tora Bora caves today.

            An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.

            I’ve always believed that.

            Yet now I find myself knocked off-center of that ideal, at least for the time being. Because of the circumstances of this affair, I didn’t have the time Gandhi had to be so patient. Proving again, I suppose, that I’m just a regular imperfect American guy. But I’ve suffered and I’ve been burdened with tyranny and homicide, and this afternoon I was blind in my pain and my rage.

            In fact I’m proud to say that I carried a postcard with me today in the bottom of my camera bag that I bought from a vendor at Ground Zero the week before last. Of the north wall of the north tower of the World Trade Center burning and of the south tower being struck and exploding into flames at 9:03 a.m. (ET) on September 11.

            I was as bloodthirsty as all-get-out today, but it’s not just me.

            From what I’ve been hearing on the CNN Breaking News Box, an awful lot of bombs hit terrorist caves today (a few miles up the road from my hot spot) with I Y New York bumper stickers attached to them.

            We need safety and security --- --- --- and we need it now!

            The Western world and every other civilized being on the planet needs immediate peace of mind from this thing. Needs to know that the criminals capable of the September 11-magnitude attack against the world are now on the run and dying in caves rather than figuring out how best to use whatever they’ve got left in their arsenal against the civilized world. Perhaps biological or nuclear attacks. Or worse.

            Worse?

            A person with a sound mind has got to figure that the zealots --- after what happened in September --- are capable of inflicting whatever might be worse. They attack innocent people without mercy and with crazed criminal lust and with no regard for their own lives.

            What could be worse than that?

            We needed revenge today, and we’ll still need revenge tomorrow, when sometime down the road --- a month, a year, or two years from now --- when the splinters of the al-Qaida and Taliban who escaped past me this week on the streets of the red line on the 24-hour CNN Breaking News Box War Map regroup to do more harm.

            No remorse.

            No guilt.

            No apologies.

            We need revenge right now more than we need sanctity for our method of revenge and more than we need forgiveness for our weaknesses. Because today the civilized world and I both got our pound of flesh at a place called the Tora Bora terrorist cave complex inside the bloody lawless tribal region of the Peshawar/Kandahar/Jalalabad triangle.

 

            And all good rumors aside --- I was there to make sure ...

  

 

*Tora Bora Bystander:

      Finding Happiness in the Ooze of a Developing Global Muck ...

 

                         When I got under the warplanes of Tora Bora and over the red-line CNN War Map border, I felt as though I’d finally reached a point in my whole new world where optimism was possible. Where looking forward again was an option.

            Thumbing my nose at terror today with the sight and sound and feel and smell and taste of the war all around me. And with the spit and bluster and Kalashnikov stares of radical Islam in my face. Two weeks in Peshawar and Islamabad and Rawalpindi street bazaars, finally feeling as if I’d caught up and in many ways got ahead of the shock of this whole thing ...

            I was like most everyone else in America. Just like most every other civilized person on this planet --- which it turns out includes just about everyone on Earth except a twisted few. And like all of us, I’ve been in shock. I’ve been perplexed by the magnitude of it all and I’ve felt helpless watching it all happen on the CNN Breaking News Box.

            Helpless --- as planes crashed into buildings.

            Helpless --- as terrified people called home to say good-bye.

            Helpless --- as people jumped to their deaths rather than be engulfed in the flames or crushed to the ground with the building.

            We were all shocked, and afraid, and perplexed, and helpless. We were all in excruciating pain. This was insanity, what was happening up on our CNN Breaking News Boxes, and the implications terrified us all. But because I’d spent a lifetime building an alternative art career with perks that sanction working with history (even dangerous history) in order to capture intriguing human street stories, I (unlike most) had the license to get myself access to the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan and into eastern Afghanistan and near the White Mountains of the Tora Bora cave complex battlefield. In order (as it turned out) to get in touch with and catch up to my own September 11 psychosis.

            Artistic, historic, and therapeutic it was ...

            Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, Amen. Because I didn’t feel manipulated by my flag today ( as was my typical pre-September 11 condition), and for a change I even felt a little bit proud.

            It wasn’t business, it was personal...

            To hear the roar, and to watch the B-52 and B-1 bombing runs and the slicing through the air of fighter jets protecting my human right to be there avenging my pain.

            I’d caught up with September 11.

            Simultaneously vulnerable yet feeling invincible under the roar of the bombers of Peshawar and the Battle of Tora Bora, I finally found myself adequately prepared for year 2002. Ready to go on with the rest of my recovery now.

            Caught up.

            Ready to forgive myself for my bloodlust, for wishing so many people horrible death and for enjoying myself more than I had since before that afternoon of September 11 in Amsterdam, before watching the slaughter on TV. A couple of Baileys on ice and some beers, a stroll down Huidenstraat toward the Jardaan garden and pub district, an unexpected pit stop at a down under bar called the Down Under. And then all at once the announcer on the CNN Breaking News Box told me that:  

 

            “An airplane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center seven minutes ago. It was reported to have been a light aircraft...”

 

            And then a few minutes later the second jet exploded along with all its implications. First confusion. Then fear and anger. Then resolve. And now for me it’s all ended up in un-remorseful bloodlust revenge. For me it had been 3:03 p.m. in Amsterdam  for 13 weeks and three days.

            On September 11 I’d spouted off to that international bar crowd in Amsterdam about how this act of war would split the world into civilized and uncivilized camps and evolve quickly into a splintering of the terrorist’s resistance by the civilized and a ferreting out of their caves in Afghanistan by the brave as a first step in the new global war against terrorism. And in the past four days I’ve caught up to that story. Getting myself under the coalition air forces bombing the snot out of the cowards and murderers just over the hill a couple of dozen miles away from me. The last effectively organized stand of al-Qaida and Taliban terrorists dying in their cave complexes in the White Mountains.

            I recalled the fellow stranded yank I met in Amsterdam on the day after the attack on America. The guy at Cafe Chaos who told me, “I’m too old or I’d like to go over there and help get those bastards. I’d sign up for another tour right now if I still could. I’d like to be there when they get him ...”

 

            Well, for all the world, it felt like I’d done just that. Been there when they got him...

            I felt good about the rage I’d carried around with me for those months and about how I’d come to terms with that rage, using my professional reputation for imbedding myself on historic streets at historic times and taking art walks through dangerous bazaars in order to get close enough to make as dynamic street photography of it in it’s time as possible. In order to smell the story, to be caught up in the story. To come to the red line on the CNN Breaking News Box War Map, to Peshawar, and to Tora Bora with my streetphoto cameras and with my white foaming rage. And with a mental health agenda of catching up to my pain. To overtake the terror by making a meaningful artwork or two deep inside the zone I know of as: Getting Ahead of the News.

            Getting ahead of the news today (I had a slice of the story before they could tell me all about it on the TV) and getting revenge as well. A regular American fly on a wilting Islamic jihad wall, expressing himself and recovering his clock from the rubble of the ruin ...

 

   Headline News*
 Late Edition [4]

        *    Furious Air Campaign Today Over Tora Bora

        *    NY Times --- Tora Bora

                      “AC-130s sent streams of fire today at al-Qaida diehards on the sides of a mountain ridge and dropped spotter flares onto the target. Then an air strike seemed to set the very hills on fire, perhaps by striking an enemy weapons depot. Trees were splintered into fragments, small bits of clothing in the aftermath spread about like confetti and the metal remains of cluster bombs littered the ground. Before the Afghanis left the Tora Bora battlefield site for the night they collected trucks full of the splintered trees to use as firewood.”

        *    NY Times --- Tora Bora

                       “Even as American forces and their Afghan allies close in on al-Qaida fighters in the mountains here, the forbidding terrain and the stubbornness of some of the foreign followers of Osama bin  Laden are making the struggle for Tora Bora the most complex battle of the war...not to capture a place, but to capture or kill up to 1000 hardened fighters in one of the country’s most rugged mountain terrains.”

        *    “Al- Qaida is finished,” crowed Afghan commander Hazrat Ali from his battlefield perch below the caves on Friday afternoon.  “The Arab fighters,” he insisted, “were prepared to surrender, and the Chechen fighters were determined to fight on. But now they are surrounded.”

        *    “About 40 miles east of Tora Bora lies Pakistan’s Tirah Valley, a semi-autonomous tribal belt only nominally under government control. Established in the late 19th century by the British as a buffer zone between Afghanistan and British India. Once fugitives get into Pakistan, locals report, ‘They will find broad pockets of sympathy throughout the province of the Northwest Frontier.’”

        *    “Musician Neil Young said today that he’s in support of tough measures against the September 11 terrorists...”