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Favorite childhood activity: The times when I used to go to Mt. Doom to destroy the ring of power. Also, playing on the trampoline...
...Zhari is strategically crucial, the gateway to Kandahar city from the west, the staging area for most Taliban activity in the region. It is a largely rural district straddling the Afghan Ring Road and the Arghandab River. It includes the Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar's hometown of Sangsar. The Taliban aren't outside agitators here; they are neighbors - not exactly beloved neighbors, given their propensity for violence and peremptory taxation, but more trustworthy than a deeply corrupt Afghan government and much more familiar than the foreign troops. Senjaray is the largest population center, a town of somewhere from...
...Rules of Engagement Senjaray is a warren of mud walls and unpaved streets, dust and more dust, shaped like a hornet's nest hanging from the branch of a tree. The branch is the Afghan Ring Road, a two-lane paved highway. The U.S. fort is located just north of the highway; the Taliban control the land to the south, a lush farming area, irrigated by water from the Arghandab River. The dividing line is a canal that runs along the southern border of the town; the Pir Mohammed School sits on the banks of both that canal...
Disaster A week later, Ellis was still waiting for the operation to be approved, when disaster struck - and a signature Afghan disaster at that. At about 5 a.m. on April 12, an American convoy passing through Senjaray on the Ring Road slowed on the curve in front of Dog Company's outpost. A passenger bus came up behind the convoy, traveling at a rate of speed the Americans deemed suspicious. The convoy tried to signal the bus to stop; the soldiers apparently used hand signals and pen flares, but fired no warning shots according to the McChrystal protocol...
...coincidence that the Dai, an ethnic minority concentrated in southwestern China's Yunnan province, ring in their New Year in mid-April by sprinkling each other with cold water. April is the driest month for subtropical regions like Yunnan, which depend on the coming of seasonal rains for their fertility. Historically, water-splashing has been a symbolic way of beseeching the divine to bring an end to scarcity and hasten a period of abundance. Never have the people of South China needed that abundance more than now, during the worst drought the area has seen in nearly a century...