When the medical group Humane Medicine went to Kabul in the summer of 2001, Morrell tagged along with a contract for a book about daily life under the Taliban. I’ve survived so much worse, he would say when I worried that he might run afoul of the Taliban’s notorious Bureau for the Prevention of Vice.

That was before September 11. Afterward, Morrell disappeared for ten days. I stopped sleeping then, although someone with Humane Medicine called me from Peshawar to say Morrell was simply in an area without access to phone hookups. Most of the team had fled to Pakistan immediately after the Trade Center attack, but Morrell had wangled a ride with an old friend heading to Uzbekistan so he could cover the refugees fleeing north. A chance of a lifetime, my caller told me Morrell had said-the same thing he’d said about Kosovo. Perhaps that had been the chance of a different lifetime.

When we started bombing in October, Morrell first stayed on in Afghanistan to cover the war up close and personal, and then to follow the new coalition government. Margent, Online, the Web version of the old Philadelphia monthly Margent, was paying him for field reports, which he was scrambling to turn into a book. The Guardian newspaper also occasionally bought his stories. I’d even watched him on CNN a few times. Strange to see your lover’s face beamed from twelve thousand miles away, strange to know that a hundred million people are listening to the voice that whispers endearments into your hair. That used to whisper endearments.

When he resurfaced in Kandahar, I first sobbed in relief, then shrieked at him across the satellites. “But, darling,” he protested, “I’m in a war zone, I’m in a place without electricity or cell phone towers. Didn’t Rudy call you from Peshawar?”

In the following months, he kept on the move, so I never really knew where he was. At least he stayed in better touch, mostly when he needed help: (VI., can you check on why Ahmed Hazziz was put in isolation out at Coolis prison? VI., can you find out whether the FBI told Hazziz’s