They call this place Dashti Margo, or “Desert of Death.” There’s nothing here but sand and rock and endless baking horizon. If the homemade bombs don’t kill you, the heat will. This is Helmand province, the Taliban’s heartland.

For this project, I want to gain an intimate window into the lives of this one platoon. I’m hoping to capture something of these men’s hopes and fears, their nationalism and pride, the thrill and the terror, the impact of a never-ending war. I begin by asking each Marine to write down their answers to a simple question: “Why are you a Marine?” I leave my small notebook with them over many days so that each man will have time for reflection and to write something personal. I shoot a series of candid Polaroid portraits of the Marines around the base, and give each of them a positive copy as a gesture of thanks.

First the big picture, and on March 13, 2006 – the day Stephen Dupont made these photographs – the big picture in Kabul is more bombs, more drugs, and more poor. It’s an old story by now: the foreign promise unfulfilled, the failed reforms, a country immune to money, schools, and eight-part programs, always reverting to its savage nature. It doesn’t help that Stephen and I spent the better part of the last three weeks in a mental hospital. Whatever other effects that may have had, it turned this city into a sort of violent burlesque and in my mind’s eye I see, as undoubtedly he does too, a kaleidoscopic cascade of junkies, electroshock patients, and amputees.

This series is not about the big picture. It’s about all the small ones, the forty-seven like-no-one-elses you see here. As journalists we use individuals as emblems, symbols, small faces to make big judgments. But obviously, any single Afghan, any single story, is more ambiguous, more murky than that....

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