Maybe I should go back to smoking opium and find some peace. No more dreams ever again. I’m fed up with dreaming. I’ve been dreaming my whole life, and I feel weary, so weary.

“YOU’RE EARLY,” the commander of the American camp snaps. “We were expecting you three days from now.”

“That’s the problem with a free press,” I reply. I can understand his annoyance. The army is only able to keep an eye—in both senses of the term—on a limited number of journalists. The Americans would love to have more reporters they can keep under control by embedding them with their troops because then they can’t file unbiased accounts.

To get out from under the commander’s feet, I hitch a ride to Kabul on a mule cart. Greg has left me a voicemail message to announce that Time would like to ask me a few questions on my return from Afghanistan.

The scorching heat here is different from the heat in South Sudan. It’s dry and smells of fire, exhaust fumes, sweet tea, and curry. I walk along dusty dirt tracks, past stalls selling chickpeas from gray sacks, most of them old German army mailbags marked Deutsche Bundespost.

There’s an aroma of lamb sprinkled with Persian spices roasting on skewers over open fires. Vendors shout loud advertisements for the wares—figs, dates, or melons—in baskets hanging from the flanks of their donkeys. Merchants sit in the open-fronted shops among piles of silk wedding robes, European-style secondhand clothing, and electronic waste, relating dirty jokes and headlines from the Anis daily newspaper to one another. Some women stroll around the market in light-blue floor-length burqas, others in black niqabs with a slit for the eyes, but many women wear fashionable dupatta shawls that leave their faces uncovered, more reminiscent of Grace Kelly’s head scarf than forced marriage.

I’m thirsty.

I see soldiers with machine guns and legless beggars on low carts. Paper kites soar through the flickering blue air alongside a minaret. Splinters of glass on their lines, designed to cut through their competitors’ strings in midair, sparkle in the sunlight. In the distance are the snowcapped peaks of the Hindu Kush, as white as the perahan tunban—flowing trousers and knee-length shirts—worn by two passing men. I look for my confidential informant from my last visit. I steer my way through the crowds, past fat moneychangers and vendors whipping up interest for camels’ heads in wheelbarrows, past sheep intestines going gray in the sun, surrounded by clouds of buzzing black flies.

I buy some fresh peppermint tea and drink it with small, greedy sips. It soothes my mouth and throat.

I have no idea how the little boy suddenly pops up in front of me. He blocks my path, shakes his head, waves his hands, and chatters away insistently at me.