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I certainly didn’t want that. So we threw the party, and most people came, filled with that need for alcohol and numbness that by now I knew accompanied any terrorist attack. (Tammy stayed home—she was too depressed about Pakistan.) At the end of the night, fueled by booze, socks, and a treacherous marble staircase, I fell. The next morning, I woke up with a knot the size of a golf ball on my forehead. I left Pakistan a few days later with a concussion and slight double vision, and without telling my bosses. And that, I later realized, was how Pakistan should always be left. With a head injury.

Pondering my options on the flight home, I realized I would rather scoop out my eyeballs with a rusty spoon than go back to my life from seven years earlier. This came as a shock. The newspaper industry was hemorrhaging jobs left and right—by the end of that year, more than forty thousand jobs would be cut. I should count myself lucky to hold on to any job at any major newspaper. But after covering these countries, after writing about life and death and chaos and war, I knew I couldn’t just write about frenzied families and carefree couples in Chicago, the paper’s new target demographic. I couldn’t move backward. My heart wouldn’t be in it because my heart would still be somewhere halfway around the world, wearing a flak vest.

I decided to do something I had never done before. Quit. And, in a move that many deemed insane, I decided to go back to Afghanistan to have a quiet place to figure out what I wanted to do next. Maybe it was the story, which had burrowed into my bloodstream, or the concussion. And maybe it was the newspaper industry, and the fact that no one was willing to pay for the news anymore. Only a few weeks after I quit, the bare-bones Tribune newsroom would be forced to lay off more than fifty people. The same day, the company’s bosses would ask the U.S. Bankruptcy Court to pay more than $13 million in bonuses to almost seven hundred people deemed essential to the future of the company. Still, Sam Zell couldn’t stop talking about Afghanistan. That same night, he would tell a group of college students: “I’m not going to the Chicago Tribune for news about Afghanistan.” Of that, I was absolutely certain.

CHAPTER 27

HOTEL CALIFORNIA

Unemployed, with no backing and no concrete purpose, I flew back to a war zone, to Kabul, the closest place I had to home. I moved in with a friend who charged me bargain rent. Some days, I watched entire seasons of TV shows on pirated DVDs. Some nights, I worked as a bartender at my friend’s bar. I was burned out, so much so that I lived in a new country, one that contained only my room, or more accurately, my bed, piled with notebooks, ideas, DVDs, and socks. I thought about what I would do next.

The weeks ticked down to the Afghan presidential election, which I viewed with the kind of anticipation that others reserved for cultural events like a new zombie movie. I pretended that I was still part of this world, that I still mattered. I researched freelance stories and a book idea. One night I tagged along with some friends to the Red Hot ’n’ Sizzlin’ restaurant, a low-slung and low-key steak house on the outskirts of Kabul. Past guests had scrawled graffiti in black marker on the brick arches inside the restaurant, nicknames such as “Mighty Mick,” helpful household tips such as “Up UR bum no babies.” People came here for meat, for main dishes like Bacon Wrapped Hamburger Steak and Gold Rush Pork Chops, flavored with condiments like Cowboy Butters. The drink list was equally creative. Shooters were called 3 Dollar Hooker, A Kick in Crotch, Hand Job, Monkey Brain, Minty Nipple. Cocktails ran $6.50, with names such as Mexican Sexy Lemonade, Sex on the Boat, Sex on the Sofa, Sex Peak, After Sex, and Gloom Raiser.

Halfway through the Texas-sized Onion Loaf, the trouble started. An American woman known for asking for threesomes as cavalierly as Afghan children demanded “One dollar, lady,” stood up from her computer and spotted a security guy at our table whom she blamed for losing