"Outside, covering everything was a pristine layer of snow, which dawn had turned pink. I started the pink HiLux. I honked the horn and it made a pink noise. Levi emerged from his pink tent with his pink ruck. I drove him down a pink road to the pink L.Z."
Photograph by Grant Cornett
"The Taliban appeared in the east at first, as a low cluster of stars. Then as phantoms. Then as men with heat rising off their backs like creeping flames. They walked in a shapeless formation, bunching up and stretching out, because without night vision they couldn’t see one another. They couldn’t see themselves."
Photograph by Carlos Javier Ortiz
"I called out to every jet in the sky. The first wave arrived just as the casevac was lifting off with Yaz. I brought the jets down in a clockwise spiral. I had them toss everything they had—five-hundred-, thousand-, two-thousand-pounders—into the ditch. A second wave of jets joined the first, then a third, and a fourth. I bombed the ditch until the mud puddles in the soybean field steamed, until the soybean shoots themselves melted, until it seemed as though I were standing in the ditch and bombing the field."
Photograph by Tim Hetherington