Lightscape: Aurora dance over the wooden carcass of an old mining tramway at the southern end of Longyearbyen. With a population of 2000, Longyearbyen is the only sizable pocket of humanity for 1000km in any direction, including north, where it's the last civilian settlement of any sort before the North Pole.
Midnight Latitudes
December 20, 2012, No Comments

In the town of Longyearbyen, on the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, one rarely goes more than a day without hearing ...

Clay Accordions.
Firework Hymns
March 1, 2012, No Comments

Of the not-insignificant number of events around the world billing themselves as "the greatest show on Earth", the Rio C ...

At Play in the Shadow of Ghosts
The Road to Kabul
February 18, 2012, 3 Comments

Kabul, rebuilt since 1992 to a reasonable facsimile of its pre-war shape, is a functioning city first and a fortified wa ...

Humvee Dust Up:
Combat Close-Out
December 19, 2011, 1 Comment

For all the ink, here and elsewhere, given to its Operation Attention training mission in Kabul, Canada's largest operat ...

Sights:
Basic Warrior Training
October 31, 2011, 2 Comments

Increasingly prized by the NATO-led international military campaign as their ticket out of Afghanistan, the eight-year-o ...

birdofwar
Flightline I: Afghan Air Power
October 11, 2011, No Comments

The newly reactivated Afghan Air Force has a long way to go before it catches up with its brother and sister divisions i ...

shoulderlook
Scenes from a Funeral
September 25, 2011, 2 Comments

One week to the hour after insurgents were engaged with coalition and Afghan forces in a fierce nineteen-hour siege that ...

stationflare
The Other Train
January 7, 2011, 1 Comment

You know how it is there early in the morning in Los Mochis when the train pulls out of the station past the goats and t ...

overview
Night on Bald Mountain
November 20, 2010, No Comments

” The Mexican … is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is on ...

prosthetic
Migration III: The Good Shepherd
November 7, 2010, No Comments

The Shelter of Jesus the Good Shepherd for the Poor and Migrant is for many of those who begin the journey from Central ...