Our Man In Kabul… In Hamden

It is a scary place. He’s been there 20 months. He flies back tonight and I worry.

“This is the German Embassy. Here’s the British Embassy.”

My friend Farrell was doing the talking while sketching on a napkin at the Hamden Townhouse. He drew another rectangle.

“We’re here.”

It was his TV station.

“They launched the rockets from here.”

He’s in the states on leave, but some of those rockets hit his workplace in Kabul this past weekend. Taliban fighters infiltrated what should have been a protected zone.

It is a scary place. He’s been there 20 months. He flies back tonight and I worry.

Farrell runs a TV station. He is helping bring Afghanistan the kind of political and social discourse they’ve never had.

I wish it was somewhere safer.

From The World Capitol Of Peace And Love: Kabul

My friend is the consummate ex-pat. He’s been the American everywhere. Kabul is just another stop.

I just had one of the most surreal conversations of my life. I was on Google Talk videochatting with a friend in Kabul, Afghanistan. He’s running a TV station there.

It was as if I was in his office visiting. People walked in and out. He took a couple of phone calls (there is cell service in Kabul and he carries an iPhone).

On one call he spoke to someone who would be driving over. My friend described the locale and the traffic he’d experienced today. In Kabul you try your best to avoid traffic lest you get ambushed.

We’re only a few hours past the incident at the Intercontinental Hotel. It scared him. He doesn’t scare easily.

“No longer part of the chain,” he said referring to the hotel as it was pre-attack. It lost its affiliation years ago, but in Afghanistan it’s tough to force someone to remove your name from their hotel.

Pretty much everything is tough to do in Afghanistan.

My friend held a piece of paper in front of the camera. It was embossed stationery from the Intercontinental Hotel. He received this invitation hours before the attack for an affair scheduled on Sunday. I’m guessing it’s been canceled for now.

The Afghan citizens worry about these attacks as much as ex-pats like my friend. It’s a dangerous place.

As I listened he went about his daily life treating these major threats as inconveniences, no more. His on-the-phone traffic report was delivered matter of factly.

I can’t imagine.

My friend is the consummate ex-pat. He’s been ‘the’ American everywhere. Kabul is just another stop. At one point he wanted to live in Switzerland. Now I think he’d prefer Dubai.

He spoke with the wife of the American ambassador yesterday. “It’s the world capitol of peace and love,” she joked.

I guess you have to be there.

Inside 9/11: Zero Hour

I am about to write about a TV show while I’m watching it. That’s very unusual for me.

I came home, washed up and headed downstairs. My plan was to play a little poker, watch some television and call my Cousin Michael in California.

I watched Jon Stewart as usual and then started grazing on my preferred channels. Interestingly, Helaine, Steffie and I have different channels we frequent – and there’s little overlap.

Channel 111, NY Times/Discovery had a documentary on US Special Forces in Afghanistan. 110 Discovery Science had Nubia: Kingdom and on 109, National Geographic Channel was Inside 9/11: Zero Hour. I started working my way down.

I got to Channel 109 and realized this was not just another 9/11 documentary.

Following the timeline of 9/11, this documentary had found all the footage and much of the available sound (two way radio transmissions, phone messages, ATC communications, etc.).

The story was told in the same order it unfolded. It was a story that couldn’t be told when it unfolded, because of the fragmented nature of what we knew at the time.

This is very powerful TV. I am literally quivering as I watch it. It was terrorism and I’d been lying if I said I wasn’t terrorized by what transpired.

If you see this show repeated (and it is cable after all. Everything gets repeated), make sure you watch it, tape it, or both.