When asked, "So, you wanna go to Afghanistan?" most thinking human beings would respond, "What? Go where? Are you nuts?!"
I got that invitation from a guy who sent me to Iraq to embed with the Marines and who has worked side by side with me in Somalia, Rwanda and any number of other "Really Bad Places." That guy is Leroy Sievers, an old friend and colleague and executive producer for Ted Koppel at the Discovery Channel.
Leroy and Ted had invited me to head east and embed with U.S. forces in Afghanistan to report for Ted's latest Discovery special, Our Children's Children's War.
The thing you viewers don't get to experience is how programs like this are pulled together out in the field, and just how crazy and out of control things actually get. You can get the story of the adventure behind the story in the emails I wrote home and pictures I sent from the road during the shoot.
In Afghanistan, the war is currently being fought both on the combat and civic fronts. The battle there has become one of more that just real estate and firefights. Construction projects, medical clinics, social infrastructure, job training — it's all going on right now in places like Jalalabad and at the famous Khyber Pass on the border with Pakistan.
Inside the U.S. we don't hear much about it, but American troops and other U.S. government agencies are hard at work trying to turn "hearts and minds" deep inside the war zone.
After Afghanistan, the plan was to take a trip to Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, to see how an even less reported U.S. government operation was working to make friends and preemptively stop the spread of the type of religious extremism that threatens operations in other places.
The whole gig would take a bit more than a month, not including the roughly five days it would take just to get there and back to the states.
I’m based in Los Angeles, Calif. My crew came out of Miami, Fla. — Manny Alvarez on the HD camera and Manny Garcia on audio. To keep things simple, I just called them "Manny 1" and "Manny 2."
