Kabul, Afghanistan
October 2003:

This is a resubmission. The lonely street in war-torn downtown Kabul. This burqa-covered woman hovers like a ghost down the dusty avenue amidst the skeletal remains of the devastation from US airstrikes in October 2001. We are led to believe that a full-scale military invasion could be planned, organized and mobilized in less than a month with the post-9/11 assault on Afghanistan. We are led to believe that the end justifies the means and as few "collateral" incidents as possible were the result of "our" precision air strikes and "smart" weapons. We are led to support "our" troops in an unbridled aerial massacre which left thousands, untold, dead and wounded. Civilians, non-combatants...women, children, elderly, fathers, mothers, daughters, grandmothers...lives...ruined.

I met a devastated woman later that afternoon. I do not remember her name. Her face will haunt my waking days for eternity and steel my resolve to do everything I am able to end the mechanism called war. She left with her oldest son to visit her sister outside of Kabul just before the US air invasion in October. After safely delivered to her relative's home, she bid farewell to her firstborn child as he made his way back to the family home. She would never see him alive again. He joined his 7 brothers and sisters and their father one last time before a steel-bellied behemoth swooped down from the heavens and made a living hell out of their city and made a mother of 8 children and wife of 25 years, a war widow. That nameless woman lost her entire family that day. I see that single tear roll across her withered cheek. No burqa could ever mask her pain. That vengeful moment. That sorrowful moment. That unkind moment, "my" country stole her life away.