Still from accompanying video (below), edited by Miles Lagoze and Eric Schuman.

A few weeks before our unit’s operation started, Lance Corporal Loya and I stood over a wadi, waiting for each other to throw our cameras down into its dusty, hollow trench. Wadis—the streams or natural ravines that farmers in the region often used as irrigation canals—were our generation’s rice paddies; they were everywhere in Helmand Province. When they weren’t wet, it was comforting to climb inside them—womblike slits in the ground to curl up in and shoot out of. They were the last thing some of us would see before dying. Like feudal tendrils etched across the fields, the wadis in the Sangin Valley were fed by the Kajaki Dam, which provided the area with a (very) limited source of electricity. It was also the main source of water for all the nearby poppy fields. This was September 2011, and guys were already talking conspiracy theories about how the pharmaceutical industry was behind the war, how they were funding the whole thing with the aim of getting us hooked on opioids once we got back to the States all fucked up and traumatized. Read More