A Rope and a Prayer Read Online Free PDF Page A

blocks from the two burning towers. Ten full stories appeared to be ablaze. I scribbled a few words in my notebook: “smoke from something on the ground. Debris all over the ground.” I walked closer and ran into Sherry Day, another reporter from the paper, and scribbled more notes: “Debris cascading. People snapping pictures. Smoke rising.”
    I heard a sharp crack and what sounded, oddly, like a waterfall. Somewhere above us, thousands of panes of glass shattered as the south tower buckled. Looking up, I saw the top half of the skyscraper begin slowly plummeting toward the ground. I grabbed Sherry’s hand and we sprinted away from the tower as a roar filled our ears. I felt her hand pull away and turned back to see what had happened. She was gone and a thick cloud of dust—like a giant wall—surged up the street.
    I ran around a corner and down a flight of stairs into a subway station, the dust engulfed me and the world turned white. A few feet away, a woman began screaming. After several moments, we took each other’s hand, walked upstairs, and emerged into what we thought was the street. We could see nothing in front of us. Finally, a gust of wind revealed a speck of blue in the sky to our right. I told her to walk in that direction and she disappeared.
    I tried to find Sherry. White dust covered cars, buildings, and streets. Car alarms wailed. Pieces of office paper cascaded to the ground like oversize snowflakes. Filled with a vague idea of somehow helping survivors, I walked toward the towers. The story—any story—no longer mattered. I simply wanted to help. As I walked, I realized I had no medical or rescue skills to offer. I felt like a vulture with a notebook. A man appeared on the street covered head to toe in dust. I asked him, “Is there anything I can do?” He replied, “There’s nothing anybody can do.”
    Over the next two weeks, the heroism of thousands of volunteers from New York and across the country amazed me. I found Sherry and learned she was unhurt and had run into a store. Still nagged by my sense of helplessness that morning, I considered joining the military or becoming a paramedic. Two weeks after the attack, editors asked me to go to Afghanistan and I leapt at the chance. I had covered religious extremism in the Balkans and thought my stories could investigate, examine, and expose militant Islam. With thousands dead in my home city, I also hoped my journalism might somehow help prevent future attacks.
    On September 25, 2001, a rickety, Soviet-built helicopter operated by the Northern Alliance—the ragtag Afghan anti-Taliban group—dropped me and several other journalists in the Panjshir Valley, one of the few areas in the country the alliance controlled.
    On the ground, the epic scale of what the United States faced in Afghanistan was humbling. Dozens of burnt-out Soviet tanks lined the valley, a maze of mountains and ravines that seemed to epitomize Afghanistan’s reputation as a geographic and cultural fortress. With billions in aid from the United States in the 1980s, the Afghan “mujahideen”—an Arabic term that means “strugglers” or “fighters for justice”—had defeated the Soviets and fulfilled the mountainous country’s reputation for repelling foreign armies and humbling empires.
    In the 1990s, civil war had erupted with India, Pakistan, and Iran backing the Northern Alliance and Pakistan backing Taliban fighters from the south. When I arrived in 2001, the Taliban and their foreign militant allies controlled roughly 90 percent of the country. The depth of the country’s poverty was staggering. Most towns had no paved roads or electricity. Farmers used oxen and wooden plows to till their fields. Twenty years of conflict had shattered government and social structures. Afghanistan was the world’s fifth poorest nation. Fifty-five percent of men and 85 percent of women were illiterate. The average life expectancy was forty-three.
    When the Taliban front lines