A couple of the sneering kids did ask for money, teenagers, maybe sixteen- or seventeen-year-olds. But they were planning to join the Taliban and leave Sabray, to fight for “freedom.” Gulab told me he had no intention of leaving here. And I understood that. He was part of the fabric of the village. One day he would be the village elder. His family would grow up here. It was all he had ever known, all he had ever wanted. This very beautiful corner of the Hindu Kush was where he belonged. What use was money to Mohammad Gulab of Sabray?

The last of the kids had left my room, and I was lying there contemplating the world, when there was a kick on the door that nearly took it off its hinges. No one kicks a door in quite like that except a Taliban raiding party. That was all I could imagine. But around here, where doors don’t fit, a good bang with your sandal is about the only way to get the sonofabitch open, short of a full-blooded shoulder charge.

But the sudden shock of a door being kicked in about five feet from your head is a nerve-racking experience. And I’m neurotic about it to this day. Because the sound of the crash on the door is the sound I heard before I was tortured. It sometimes dominates my dreams. I wake up sweating, a tremendous crash echoing in my mind. And no matter where I am, I need to check the door lock before I can sleep again. It’s pretty goddamned inconvenient at times.

Anyway, this was not the Taliban. It was just my own guys opening the door, which must have been shut firmly by the kids. I restarted my heart, and my room stayed kind of quiet until midmorning, when the door catapulted open with a violent bang! that shook the goddamned mountain, never mind the room. And once more I almost jumped out of my Afghan jumpsuit. And this time they were shouting at me. I could not understand what, but something had broken out, things were on the move. Jesus Christ! I had to steady this group down. There were adults and kids, all mixed up, and they were all yelling the same thing — “Parachute! Parachute! Parachute! Dr. Marcus, come quick!”

I made my way outside, aching to high heaven all the way. I resolved to have another shot of that opium soon as I returned, but for now it was all eyes upward, straight at the clear blue, cloudless skies. What could we see? Nothing. Whatever had landed was down, and I stood there trying to make them understand I needed to know if there had been a man on the end of that parachute, and if so, how many parachutes there had been. Was this a drop zone for my buddies to come right in and get me?

The upshot of this was also nothing. The tribesmen simply could not understand me. The kids, who I detected were the ones who had actually spotted the parachute, or parachutes, were just as mystified. All the hours of study we had done together had come to nothing.

There was a sudden conference, and most of the adults upped and left. I went back in. They returned maybe fifteen minutes later and brought with them all my gear, which they had hidden away from the eyes of the Taliban. They gave me back my rifle and ammunition, my H-gear (that’s my harness), and in its pocket, my PRC-148 intersquad radio, the one for which I’d lost the little microphone earpiece. It still had its weakish battery and its still-operational emergency beacon.

I was aware that if I grabbed the bull by the horns and went right outside and let rip with this communications gear, I would once more be a living, breathing distress signal, which the Amer-icans might catch from a cruising helo. On the other hand, the Taliban, hidden all around in the hills, could scarcely miss me. I found this a bit of a dilemma.

But the rearmament guys of Sabray also brought me my laser and the disposable camera. I grabbed my rifle and held it like you might caress a returning lover. This was the weapon God had granted me. And, so far as I could tell, still wanted me to have. We’d traveled a long way together, and I probably deserved some kind of an award for mountain climbing, maybe the Grand Prix Hindu Kush presented to Sherpa Marcus. Sorry, forget all that, I meant mountain falling, the Grand Prix Hindu Crash, awarded unanimously to Sherpa Marcus the Unsteady.

Outside, I put on my harnesss, locked and loaded the rifle, and prepared for whatever the hell might await us. But with my harness back, I was not yet done with the kids. That harness contained my notebook, and we had access to the village ballpoint pen.

I marched them back into the house and carefully drew two parachutes on the page. I drew a man swinging down from the first one. On the second one, I drew a box. I showed both pictures to the kids and asked them, Which one? And about twenty little fingers shot forward, all aimed directly at the parachute with the box.

Beautiful. I had intel. There had been some kind of a supply drop. And since the local tribesmen do not use either aircraft or parachutes, those supplies had to be American. They also had to be aimed at the remnants of my team. Everyone else was dead. I was that remnant.

I asked the kids exactly where the chutes had dropped, and they just pointed to the mountain. Then they got into gear and raced out there, I guess to try and show me. I stood outside and watched them go, still a bit baffled. Had my buddies somehow found me? Had the old man reached Asadabad? Either way, it was one hell of a coincidence the Americans had made a supply drop a few hundred yards from where I was taking cover. The mountains were endless, and I could have been anywhere.

I went back into the house to rest my leg and talk for a while with Gulab. He had not seen the parachute drop, and he had no idea how far along the road his father had journeyed. In my mind, I knew what every active combat soldier knows, that Napoleon’s army advanced on Moscow at one mile every fifteen minutes, with full packs and muskets. That’s four miles an hour, right? That way, the village elder should have made it in maybe eleven hours.

Except for two mitigating factors: (1) he was about two hundred years old, and (2) from where I stood, the mountain he was crossing had a gradient slightly steeper than the Washington Monument. If the VE made it by Ramadan 2008, I’d be kinda lucky.

One hour later, there it goes again. Bang! That goddamned door went off like a bomb. Even Gulab jumped. But not as high as I did. In came the kids, accompanied by a group of adults. They carried with them a white document, which must have looked like a snowball in a coal mine up here where the word litter simply does not exist.

I took it from them and realized it was an instruction pamphlet for a cell phone. “Where the hell did you get this?” I asked them.

“Right out there, Dr. Marcus. Right out there.” Everyone was pointing at the mountainside, and I had no trouble with the translation.

“Parachute?” I said.

“Yes, Dr. Marcus. Yes. Parachute.”

I sent them right out there again, trying to make it clear that I needed the mountainside searched for anything like this, anything that might have come in on the parachutes.

My guys don’t drop cell phone pamphlets, but they might have been trying to drop me a cell phone and the pamphlet just came with it. Either way, I could not find out for myself, so I had to get the guys to do it for me. Gulab stayed, but the others went with the kids, like a golf crowd fanned out to look for Tiger’s ball in deep rough.

Gulab and I settled down. We had a cup of tea and some of those delicious little candies, then lounged back on our big cushions. Suddenly, bang! The door nearly cannoned off its hinges. I shot tea all over the rug, and in came everyone again.

This time they had found a 55-90 radio battery and an MRE (meal ready to eat). The guys must have thought I was starving. Correct. But the battery did not fit my PRC-148 radio, which sucked, because if it had, I could have fired up a permanent distress signal straight into the sky above the village. As things were, I had no idea if my present weak radio beacon would reach much higher than the rooftops.