Search Results for: Afghanistan

5280 Magazine's Geoff Van Dyke: My Top 5 Longreads of 2011

Geoff Van Dyke is deputy editor of 5280 Magazine in Denver. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Outside, and Men’s Journal.

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• “The Food at our Feet,” by Jane Kramer, The New Yorker

Kramer can almost make you smell and taste the stuff she’s picking: mint, asparagus, fennel, mushrooms. Plus, maybe my favorite lead sentence of the year: “I spent the summer foraging, like an early hominid with clothes.”

• “The Kill Team,” by Mark Boal, Rolling Stone

The disturbing investigation into an Army unit in Afghanistan that was killing civilians for sport.

• “Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts,” by Jonathan Franzen, New York Times

I kind of didn’t want to like this piece, but Franzen’s assessment of “consumer technology products,” and our fraught relationships with them, feels right on.

• “The Day that Damned the Dodgers,” by Lee Jenkins, Sports Illustrated

As a lifelong San Francisco Giants fan, it was heartbreaking to read this chronicle of how the Giants’ greatest rival, the Los Angeles Dodgers, have gone from one of the most respected organizations in sports to one of the most dysfunctional.

“What Really Happened to Strauss-Kahn?” by Edward Jay Epstein, The New York Review of Books

A fascinating investigation that suggests Dominique Strauss-Kahn was set up, perhaps even by people associated with French president Nicolas Sarkozy.

BONUS

Pretty much anything by Charles P. Pierce at Grantland, but especially his piece on the beginning of the end of NCAA sports and his unflinching essay on Jerry Sandusky and Penn State.

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Depending where you fall on the spectrum between civil liberties absolutism and homeland security lockdown, Palantir’s technology is either creepy or heroic. Judging by the company’s growth, opinion in Washington and elsewhere has veered toward the latter. Palantir has built a customer list that includes the U.S. Defense Dept., CIA, FBI, Army, Marines, Air Force, the police departments of New York and Los Angeles, and a growing number of financial institutions trying to detect bank fraud. These deals have turned the company into one of the quietest success stories in Silicon Valley—it’s on track to hit $250 million in sales this year—and a candidate for an initial public offering. Palantir has been used to find suspects in a case involving the murder of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent, and to uncover bombing networks in Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. “It’s like plugging into the Matrix,” says a Special Forces member stationed in Afghanistan who requested anonymity out of security concerns. “The first time I saw it, I was like, ‘Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.’”

“Palantir, the War on Terror’s Secret Weapon.” — Ashlee Vance and Brad Stone, BusinessWeek

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Palantir, the War on Terror’s Secret Weapon

Longreads Pick

Depending where you fall on the spectrum between civil liberties absolutism and homeland security lockdown, Palantir’s technology is either creepy or heroic. Judging by the company’s growth, opinion in Washington and elsewhere has veered toward the latter. Palantir has built a customer list that includes the U.S. Defense Dept., CIA, FBI, Army, Marines, Air Force, the police departments of New York and Los Angeles, and a growing number of financial institutions trying to detect bank fraud. These deals have turned the company into one of the quietest success stories in Silicon Valley—it’s on track to hit $250 million in sales this year—and a candidate for an initial public offering. Palantir has been used to find suspects in a case involving the murder of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent, and to uncover bombing networks in Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. “It’s like plugging into the Matrix,” says a Special Forces member stationed in Afghanistan who requested anonymity out of security concerns. “The first time I saw it, I was like, ‘Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.’”

Source: Businessweek
Published: Nov 22, 2011
Length: 15 minutes (3,912 words)

The battlefield honor, which he knew his son would have cherished, did nothing to ease Dave Brostrom’s anguish. Beyond the grief, he felt a heart-crushing mix of anger, guilt, and betrayal. The anger was unfocused but rooted in his earlier suspicions that his son’s platoon had been inadequately supported and directed. The guilt was more insidious and ran deep. He felt terrible for how the lifetime of competition between himself and Jonathan had fed his son’s ambition. He felt guilty about having pulled strings to get Jonathan into the 173rd. That was where the sense of betrayal was rooted. He had done his homework before approaching Preysler. In 2007 all of the official reports from Afghanistan had been rosy. The fighting was all but over, the assessments read; the work was all humanitarian projects and nation building. Brostrom now saw that as propaganda, and he had fallen for it.

“Echoes from a Distant Battlefield.” — Mark Bowden, Vanity Fair

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Echoes from a Distant Battlefield

Longreads Pick

The battlefield honor, which he knew his son would have cherished, did nothing to ease Dave Brostrom’s anguish. Beyond the grief, he felt a heart-crushing mix of anger, guilt, and betrayal. The anger was unfocused but rooted in his earlier suspicions that his son’s platoon had been inadequately supported and directed. The guilt was more insidious and ran deep. He felt terrible for how the lifetime of competition between himself and Jonathan had fed his son’s ambition. He felt guilty about having pulled strings to get Jonathan into the 173rd. That was where the sense of betrayal was rooted. He had done his homework before approaching Preysler. In 2007 all of the official reports from Afghanistan had been rosy. The fighting was all but over, the assessments read; the work was all humanitarian projects and nation building. Brostrom now saw that as propaganda, and he had fallen for it.

Source: Vanity Fair
Published: Dec 1, 2011
Length: 53 minutes (13,492 words)

The elders estimated that more than 100 families had fled Shahabuddin because of the local police. The people were defenseless, they said, and indeed they all seemed cowed and frightened. But before we parted ways, one of them, with a note of defiance, assured me: “Nur-ul Haq has no place in this province. As long as the foreign troops are here, he is king. The minute they go, he should leave the country.” Another agreed: “I bet he can’t stay for one night in Baghlan if there are no foreign troops.” Grinning at the prospect, the old man added, “The people will rise against him.”

“Bad Guys vs. Worse Guys in Afghanistan.” — Luke Mogelson, New York Times Magazine

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Rebecca’s college roommate worried that Rebecca was mistaking empathy for romantic love and would find herself in a relationship that she could not end. “Who could break the heart of an Army officer who lost both his legs?” Sabrina recalled thinking.

“Love for wounded soldier upon return from Afghanistan.” — Greg Jaffe, Washington Post

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(Photo Credit: Nikki Kahn / The Washington Post)

Wounded in Iraq: A Marine’s Story

Longreads Pick

I am positive that every other wounded warrior’s caregiver has had to make personal sacrifices to take care of those who need them most. The situation of an Army Specialist (E-4), who lost a leg in Afghanistan, serves as a good example. His recovery at Walter Reed was expected to take 18 months, so his young wife moved from Idaho with their baby. That meant forfeiting her job, her health care, and any in-person contact with family. The wife and baby lived in a small room with the bare necessities for six months until the Specialist was no longer an in-patient. The three of them moved to a (somewhat) bigger facility for 18 months while he was an out-patient. After feeling out of control and disrespected by the staff many times over, she could not take her family home soon enough. As another caregiver put it to me, she was her husband’s chauffeur, cook, case manager, therapist, personal shopper, nurse, legal aide, job coach — and on really good days, his wife.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Sep 6, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,529 words)

Soldiers Take One Step at a Time with Prosthetic Limbs

Longreads Pick

He is wearing two “power knees,” a technological marvel developed by Össur, an Icelandic prosthetics company. Power knees is a misnomer for Berschinski, who has prosthetic legs—he lost both of his own when he stepped on an improvised explosive device (IED) in Afghanistan. Of the more than 55,000 deaths and casualties in nine years of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, 1,200-plus US servicemembers have suffered limb amputations. Each of Berschinski’s prosthetic legs costs about $40,000—when the prosthesis was developed in 2006, it was almost $100,000—and comes equipped with microprocessors and a battery-driven motor, good for 12 hours, that bends and straightens the knee.

Source: Washingtonian
Published: Aug 1, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,862 words)

The Triple Agent

Longreads Pick

The CIA believed he was a “golden source,” a top-secret informant who had penetrated al-Qaeda and brought the agency within striking distance of the terrorist group’s senior leadership. But Humam al-Balawi, a Jordanian pediatrician turned spy, was not what he seemed. In late 2009, several months before the CIA learned of Osama bin Laden’s Pakistani hideout, Balawi appeared to offer the agency the best chance in a decade to find and kill al-Qaeda’s then-No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri. But his stunning reports from inside the terrorists’ camp were part of an elaborate trap that culminated in the deaths of nine intelligence operatives, including seven Americans, at a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan.

Source: Washington Post
Published: Jun 22, 2011
Length: 10 minutes (2,543 words)