David Wolf has been an editor of the Long Read since the UK-based Guardian launched the section 10 years ago, and its top editor for the last four. The Long Read world sounds like a dream for those of us who love longform stories, and Wolf the kind of editor we want to write for.

For him, of course, the job comes with all the stresses of high-level editing, and an added challenge: The Long Read was launched as more and more publications were pulling back on their commitment to in-depth, literary journalism. Wolf and his team have to prove the value of such journalism with every story they publish.

Stress be damned. Wolf loves what he does. As he speaks to me on Zoom from his office in London, he can’t stop smiling. He gets to spend his days commissioning stories from talented print journalists from across the globe, then immerse himself in the creative work they produce.

“Hiroshima” author John Hersey was one of the earliest journalists to use the narrative writing techniques of fiction for his journalism as a way to allow “readers to witness history.” But perhaps journalism — and longform journalism, in particular, just like photojournalism — can go further. A well written piece, like the Guardian’s “How child labour in India makes paving stones beneath our feet,” goes beyond bearing witness; it provokes the reader’s empathy for those in the story.

This is the heart of why Wolf’s work at The Long Read matters. Change, after all, begins with seeing and hearing the other, whose reality is often far removed from ours, and feeling a sliver of what they might feel.

“I don’t tend to think about storytelling in terms of empathy,” Wolf says when I point that out. “But the human element of it rings true. I think empathy is a downstream effect of good writing. I think of it as the product of understanding and clarity. And that’s what’s at the forefront of my mind when I get a first draft and I’m editing it.

“If you write short pieces, you have to assume knowledge on the part of the reader,” he adds. “Whereas the foundation of everything we’re doing The Long Read is to assume the reader is an intelligent person who knows nothing about the subject, and we give them everything they need to know to fully understand the story. And a lot of this will be describing things in human terms. So, if you feel moved by it or understand the situation of people within the story, that’s the product of telling the story properly.”

The landscape of longform

Guardian is, of course, not the only publication to offer deep insights into the human experience. The New York Times Magazine, for example, or Harper’s, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The Atavist, The New Yorker, Wired, Esquire and Politico, and in the UK, 1843 of The Economist, all publish longform journalism by some of the most sought-after journalists — even though the halcyon days of print magazine journalists like Hersey, Joan Didion and Gay Talese are long past. That’s because readers want human stories, Wolf tells me: “Stories that make sense of the world around us.”

Recent times in the print journalism industry has been dominated by downsizing, layoffs and closures in the English-speaking world alone. The climate is worse for journalism and journalists in Hungary, Hong Kong, Mexico, all over the Middle East, in the Philippines, Haiti, Zimbabwe and Russia.

And yet.

“We all have that thing,” Wolf says. “You’re casually doom scrolling on your phone and you’re seeing horrible thing after horrible thing, but the reality of it doesn’t come home to you. Good journalism — and it doesn’t have to be long — is about getting underneath the generic words that you’re used to seeing in the news.”

As an example, he cites endless news stories about corruption: “Everyone kind of knows what the word corruption means, but it’s also become meaningless. For most readers, including me, it’s a lot of half-understood stuff. I can give you an example of corruption, but I don’t necessarily feel it; I don’t necessarily have a really visceral sense of how devastating it can be — unless I’m engaging with it through a story. If you tell a story that says, ‘This is what corruption actually looks like,’ that’s different.”

Here, Wolf mentions a story from 2015 about a hospital in Ukraine. The story follows cancer patients who bribe doctors to get the cancer care they need. It also shows how, despite feeling compromised, doctors who accept these bribes don’t have much choice: They don’t make enough money to feed their families, or they have to pay their own bribes to teachers, tax officers and even plumbers. For the patient, the bribe means the hope of staying alive; for the doctor, it means putting food on the table. “That’s what corruption actually means,” Wolf says. “That’s when you start actually understanding.”

At its inception, The Long Read aimed to become the place for doing stories few other places in the UK were doing. Longform journalism is first and foremost an American phenomenon, and although it has’ existed in the UK for decades, not least in the pages of the Guardian, Wolf says, it was not as celebrated as on the other side of the ocean.

What it takes

Costs of such journalism is a real consideration.

First and foremost, there’s the cost to the writer. When I ask Wolf if a freelance journalist can survive on longform journalism alone, he shakes his head: “The question is, how big is your family trust fund? Because otherwise, it’s really, really hard.” The reality is that most freelance journalists who write longform need a second job. A few can supplement their income by writing nonfiction books, but the sometimes generous advances from publishers in the U.S. is rare in the UK.

And there’s the cost to the news organization to produce deeply reported longform journalism. “It takes a lot of time,” Wolf says. “It’s difficult to predict the results. You can have a great idea for a piece, you can have a great reporter looking into something, and maybe in the end it’s not going to be a good Long Read piece. Maybe it should be a 1,000-word piece, or maybe we shouldn’t do it at all. In a world where journalistic resources are scarce, I can understand why people would think, ‘Do I want to spend money on things that don’t have a set result?’” While The Long Read has the backing of the Guardian, Wolf and his team are careful about what they commission.

The Guardian Media Group has only one shareholder, The Scott Trust. The Trust’s goal is to ensure the Guardian’s financial and editorial independence in perpetuity. It invests its profits back into journalism, which is why the Guardian has been able to produce The Long Read section for 10 years now.

Wolf cited three pieces published between 2014 and 2017 that helped define The Long Read and grow its readership to a global one.

The first one was a 2014 story by Martin Chulov about the origins of ISIS. “It was just an amazing piece,” Wolf says. “He (Chulov) had incredible sources and was telling this urgent story in a way no one else had at that time. Then, seeing Jonathan Shainin, who was editor at the time, working on the story and bring it to its absolute best form was amazing, because I had recently arrived and I was learning a lot from him. The piece worked on all fronts: It was breaking news, it was globally read, but it was done in this unique way. It felt to me that the piece was kind of like ‘proof of concept’ — as in, it showed that The Long read  had been a good idea after all.”

Then, there was the 2015 story about “The Great British Bake Off” by Charlotte Higgins. A profile of a TV sensation, the piece set standards for culture writing in The Long Read.

Then there’s the 2017 piece by Sam Knight probing the cascade of security responses in the event of Queen Elizabeth’s death. It’s that piece, Wolf says, that established The Long Read on the global scene.

“That was by far our biggest one,” says Wolf. “I think it’s had 7 million hits in its lifetime, and after that, anyone who was interested in journalism in the UK and even globally, maybe, went, ‘Okay, the Guardian has this Long Read section.’”

Long Read’s reputation is defined by the quality of reporting, but also of writing. The latter starts in part with the relationship between journalist and editor. By the time they’ve done a couple of pieces together, Wolf likes to push his writers to go beyond their comfort zone. “If you’re a music journalist, and you’re good at that, you’re going to be good at writing about other things too,” he says. “And I always think, ‘Oh, I wonder how that person would do if they write about this other subject.’”

Defining great storytelling

The question remains, though: What characterizes good writing in longform journalism?

“I always struggle with defining what good storytelling is,” Wolf says. “There are so many components to it, and there’s not just one way. There are probably universals in good storytelling. But I can think of people who write so differently, and yet they are all brilliant storytellers.”

He cites a story he listened to rather than read, because Wolf loves audio versions of longform journalism, too. He and I take a moment to reminisce on the joys of the now defunct Audm, a longform-to-audio app that for years published audio versions of stories from dozens of publications, and where Wolf would sometimes discover journalists whose work he had never read before. (Full disclosure: The Audio Long Read podcast, a narrated version of The Long Read, is now my daily go-to. RIP, Audm.)

This particular story, though, Wolf listened to on NYT Audio, an app The New York Times established after it bought and cancelled Audm. The story, originally published in The New York Times Magazine, is a profile of sorts of Michael Stipe, the R.E.M. frontman and singer, and speaks of Stipe’s journey as he tries to put a solo album together. Written by Jon Mooallem, it reads like a dream.

“I’m not interested in Michael Stipe or R.E.M.,” Wolf says. “But this is a great example of a story that you love even if you’re not interested in the subject: It’s such a mixture of specificity about this very particular guy who’s had a totally unique life. But it’s also about good writing, in the sense that the more true you are to the specificity of his experience, the more universal it becomes. Stipe’s doubts and misgivings about the whole idea of creating art, the way he references a book about pretentiousness that he didn’t even read — all of these details.”

Wolf marvels at how much time Mooallem spent with Stipe: “For profiles for The Long Read, for instance, I’ll say to the writer, ‘Sure, let’s do this, but only if the subject is genuinely up for it.’ If the subject is reluctant and says, ‘Yeah, I can meet you for coffee,’ but they don’t seem to want to do more than that, and you will be pushing, pushing, pushing, then there’s just no point — it’s not going to be possible for the writer to do the kind of piece we’re aiming for. Obviously, it’d be different if you were writing about a politician or a powerful businessman. But when we’re writing about cultural figures like Paul Gilroy or Nina Gold, you want it to be a unique piece. It is very difficult to get people to agree to letting you spend meaningful time with them, and if they don’t, then we don’t write that profile.”

Along with profiles and original issues stories, The Long Read offers its platform to extracts of nonfiction book extracts and to stories that from smaller and less well-known publications, like n+1, or non-English-language newspapers, like NZZ. “It’s just a way of putting more good journalism in front of more people,” Wolf says.

Not on his radar: story ideas about America. “The U.S. is the most covered country in terms of longform journalism in the world,” Wolf says. “It’s not that it’s oversaturated — there are news deserts in America — but it’s by a factor of 100 the most covered country by journalists. Second, The Guardian US is a big operation now, and they have their own features strand. So, for most U.S.-based stories, if it seems like a good idea, I’d suggest the writer to get in touch with an editor at the Guardian US.”

This doesn’t mean Wolf doesn’t accept story ideas from U.S. journalists. “I always tell writers that we’re not really looking for stories about the U.S., but we’re happy to run stories from the U.S.,” he says. “We just published a story (about the science of death) by Alex Blasdel, an American writer, which is now one of our most widely read pieces ever. And we did another story that I love, by Jordan Kisner, about humanity’s long struggle with rats. Jordan is based in the U.S., and her reporting mainly took place in New York. But humanity’s struggle with rats is a global story.

“The key to all of this is the specific and the universal at the same time,” Wolf says. “It’s all about clarity, and making it engaging and telling the human story right. Every reader likes that.”

****

David Wolf is the editor of the Guardian Long Read. You can follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @davidedgarwolf. Follow The Long Read at @gdnlongread.

* * *

Ania Hull is a multilingual editor, writer and journalist who writes about immigration, poverty, conservation and environmental justice. She is currently based in New Mexico.

The post A longform editor on immersive storytelling and its role in journalism appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Swiss journalist Andreas Babst roams South Asia and the Middle east as a correspondent for the German-language Swiss daily Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ). He lives in India, and when time allows, works on his favorite side projects: feature stories. One of these stories, “Inside the Taliban’s Luxury Hotel,” came out last September in NZZ, first in German and soon after in English. In early October The Guardian Long read published it on their site after acquiring the right to the English translation.

The story takes readers on a behind-the-scenes tour of the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, a landmark in Afghanistan whose walls witnessed, so to speak, more than a half-century of Afghani history, from military and communist coups, to the end of the country’s monarchy, to wars, invasions, political assassinations and everything in between. The more prosaic events of life — weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, vacations — threaded throughout.

More than that, however, Babst’s story is about the people who’ve been running the Intercontinental Hotel side by side since the fall of Kabul in 2021, after U.S. troops pulled out of Afghanistan and the Taliban retook the country and, by extension, the hotel. Employees are Taliban and non-Talib Afghanis alike. In other words, two groups of people who need to work and live alongside each other, and are still figuring out how to do that.

Before reporting for this story, Babst had already written extensively about Afghanistan. In fact, he had made a point since moving to India in 2020 to go to Afghanistan every six months or so. “Right after the fall of Kabul, especially, journalists could go wherever they wanted,” he told me from his apartment in New Delhi. “But now that honeymoon phase is over for the international press. For this story about the hotel, when I first tried to return to Afghanistan, my visa was denied.”

Determined, Babst took to writing the Afghani authorities long emails of why they should grant him entry. “I finally acknowledged in an email that the situation in Afghanistan is complicated, that there is a lot of misunderstanding about it abroad, and that for those reasons, that story would be great and would help foreigners get a better idea.” He got his visa.

Babst pepper his floor-by-floor profile of the Intercontinental with characters and scenes, and points out key areas: a room where a famous person was assassinated; the rooms where Osama Bin Laden may have stayed and the pool where his people may have lolled; the basement gym where Talib employees exercise after work in Under Armor clothing; the off-limits room where the secret Taliban police listen on both employees and guests.

On the surface, the story echoes of Wes Anderson’s film “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” or Alec Le Sueur’s memoir “The Hotel on the Roof of the World,” or Amor Towles epic novel “A Gentleman in Moscow.” Babst’s prose is light but very direct, and the narrative stops for exposition only where that exposition adds an interesting detail. The characters are all tangible, some with a great sense of humor, others a little uneasy, and the reader feels for all of them, regardless of the sides they were and are on.

At times, the story reads like a tale from a different world.

And so, my initial reaction to “Inside the Taliban’s Luxury Hotel” was, unsurprisingly, delight — a strange feeling indeed, given that the story is in great part about the Taliban and humanizes individual Talibs whose organization denies women and other people of their basic human rights and favors public executions.

Soon, however, upon a second or third reading, hesitation replaced that initial feeling. I wondered whether a story that humanizes men who would rather spray a woman with acid than let her go to school has any place in journalism. Should we, as journalists, I asked myself, humanize the foe? Should we give people who torture others a voice and individuality, and even their own life stories? What is the value in that?

“I think that’s the issue that some people have with that story,” Babst said in response to my concerns. “To be clear, I do not support how the Taliban came to power or support their policies. But in the end, the Talibs are human like everyone else. Afghanistan was taken by foot soldiers who joined the movement as teenagers and who are now traumatized. All they know is how to fight.”

With “The Taliban’s Luxury Hotel,” Babst does not ask us to agree with the Taliban, or to sympathize with its members; he simply shows us something that we, as consumers of news, are not usually privy to.

“This story is meant to give you a peak behind the Taliban curtain,” he said. “The Talibs I met are very lonely and very traumatized. They come from a context and from families who have suffered a lot under the Americans. They (the Talibs) only know war, and don’t know another life. They long for that life, they long for the next fight, and that has and will have severe consequences for the region. And you can only begin to understand what may happen next when you start understanding how Talibs think.”

The original German published in the Swiss newspaper NZZ, and its English NZZ translation, was published on September 26, 2023. The Guardian Long Read bought the rights to republishing the story in English, and edited it a little, but also removed a few paragraphs. The Guardian’s version reads better in English than the translated NZZ version, and is the version that went viral. Andreas Babst notes a few differences in his answers below between the German version and NZZ translation, and The Guardian’s translation.

Annotation: Storyboard’s questions are in red; Babst’s answers in blue. To read the story wihtout annotations, click HIDE ANNOTATIONS in the right-hand menu of your monitor or at the top of your mobile screen.

Inside the Taliban’s luxury hotel

Once the site of legendary parties, the Intercontinental in Kabul is still a potent symbol of who rules Afghanistan – and what its future might hold

By Andreas Babst

[dc]A[/dc]t the first barrier, a Talib smiles; he has orders to smile. How do you know this?  At the second barrier, a sign: Weapons Handover Point. Those who deposit their Kalashnikovs here will receive a locker number and get their weapon back upon leaving the hotel. The road winds up the hill between circular trimmed hedges. At the third barrier: a body search. Then, behind a metal gate, the driveway to the hotel finally appears. Car tires squeal on the marble slabs in front of the entrance.

The Intercontinental Hotel towers over the Afghan capital like a castle. Kabul, this war-ravaged city. The noise of its car horns can no longer be heard up here.

The Intercontinental Hotel, Afghanistan’s first luxury hotel, opened in 1969. It was built in a time that feels much further away than the year suggests. Afghanistan was at war for more than 40 years. Rulers came and went, and every one of them was here, at the Intercontinental. Its former luxury has faded, but the Intercontinental has remained a symbol: those who rule Kabul rule Afghanistan, and those who rule Kabul rule the Intercontinental.

Today, the hotel is run by the Taliban. They entered Kabul on 15 August 2021. Although they have been in power for two years, they have remained enigmatic. Only horror stories seem to leak out: for two years now, women and girls have been forbidden to attend secondary schools and universities. Women are no longer allowed in public parks. Women and men are whipped for adultery. You mention the brutality of the Taliban rule on the people of Afghanistan only a few times. Why did you choose to mention it here? And why did you not elaborate more? I felt it was important to place this paragraph at the beginning. I have reported on the Taliban’s brutality in the past — many journalists have. Its mention has to be at the beginning of this story, because it's a terrible fact and is the stage on which this story is set. But the story is not about that, and that’s also why I make the break away from it in the next paragraph with "However.” How it feels to be surrounded by Talibs at the hotel infuses in the rest of the story.

However, the Taliban’s biggest experiment has gone almost unnoticed by the rest of the world. It’s taking place at desks across the country. The new government is forcing Taliban and non-Taliban to work together – in the administration and in government-related businesses. Young men share an office with young fighters they once feared, and young fighters sit next to young men they once despised. A lot depends on this experiment. It will help determine whether peace will last, whether there may be reconciliation, or at least a normal life – together, as far as possible.

This great experiment can be observed on a small scale inside the Intercontinental. And there might be no better place to glimpse Afghanistan’s future than here, where past and present meet. When did you become aware of this “experiment” in Afghanistan? Was it during your reporting for this story or before?I learned of this when I travelled to Afghanistan shortly after the fall. In September 2021 you could travel quite freely around the country as a journalist, on the condition that you registered with the concerned district administration. We’d have to wait a long time for our papers to be cleared, so we’d talk to the people who worked in these offices. They were regular men who wanted to keep their job, and to do so they had to adapt themselves to the new regime. That's when I became aware of this for the first time.This mention of the “experiment” also reads like a nut graf. When and why did you decide to use this as your summar graf?It became the nut, and basically the thread throughout this story, after I had compiled all my materials for this piece. The more you think about it, the more you realize how essential this experiment is to Afghanistan. This is a country that wants to rebuild itself after years of war. How people will forgive each other and adapt to each other will decide if peace will last and whether a future without conflict is even possible. So, in this story, I discuss how Faqiri and Niazai learn to work together. How do they behave toward each other? The answers to these questions can help us imagine what will happen with Afghanistan in the coming years.

Reception

You structured the narrative by hotel area, so the story reads like a walk through the Intercontinental. Why did you decide on this walk-through movement? I had so many scenes and so many conversations with so many people, and I knew that I needed a clear way to organize all this so that readers could follow me through this story. I decided to take the reader by the hand on a walk around the hotel.

The automatic sliding doors rattle with age as they open. The Intercontinental welcomes its guests at a massive marble counter. Behind it, a wood-panelled wall with four clocks – Kabul, New York, London, Dubai: cosmopolitanism in a closed-off country. The Intercontinental does not accept credit cards, since Afghanistan is largely cut off from international banking. A guest arrives with a plastic bag full of cash.

Only every second chandelier in the lobby is lit. “We’re saving electricity,” says Samiullah Faqiri. Faqiri is responsible for marketing at the Intercontinental. He was immediately enthusiastic about the idea of letting a foreign journalist look behind the scenes of the hotel for a few days. You had to get all sorts of permits to be allowed to report about the Intercontinental Hotel. Why did you not mention this in the story? And can you say a little more about that process? I didn’t think it’d be interesting to the readers. But in short, we went up there to the hotel, we talked to Faqiri, and he said he would agree if we have the right documents, and we spent the next days getting all the relevant signatures. In the end it was a letter, which we carried from office to office, and all relevant parties had to sign it. We sent it to Faqiri, and he gave it to his boss, to whom we presented the idea. He agreed, and then we were good to go.

Faqiri is 28 years old, his beard neatly trimmed over his round cheeks. He has been working at the hotel for two years, since the Taliban came into power. “I’ve been marketing like crazy,” he says in fluent English, telling us that he invented the hotel’s new slogan: “Intercontinental for everyone.” He had the words printed on billboards in Kabul. Faqiri knows, of course, that only very few Afghans can afford a meal or a night in a luxury hotel right now. According to the UN, nine out of 10 families cannot even afford enough to eat. One night in the cheapest room costs £80, which for many is a month’s wages.

But Faqiri has a goal to reach in terms of how much profit he needs to make. The hotel belongs to the government. All profits go to the state, which then releases money for wages, maintenance and renovation. Although Faqiri works for the Taliban, he himself is not one of them. When Faqiri speaks of the Taliban, he says “they”. “If I don’t reach the target, they won’t kill me,” he says, laughing. When Faqiri laughs, his nose starts to wiggle, then his shoulders, his belly – a very physical, very contagious laugh, usually bursting out of him after sentences that would otherwise sound gloomy.

Faqiri comes from a family that lacks nothing. His father is a university professor. The whole family lives together in a house very close to the hotel. Faqiri studied business administration in India. Before the Taliban took power, he liked to wear basketball vests. Today, like almost everyone, he wears a shalwar kameez, a traditional Afghan garment.

To meet his target, Faqiri needs more rooms at the hotel to be occupied.Do you think Faqiri hoped that the story you were writing would serve as a sort of publicity for the Intercontinental, and hopefully bring more customers? Why was he so thrilled about a foreign journalist reporting on the Intercontinental, especially as the Taliban was watching? I think he was just very curious about us. Of course, all press is good press, so why not tell the world that the Intercontinental was open for business? He is a nice guy, maybe a bit vain, so he may have thought, why not let the world know how good of a job he is doing (which he is, given the circumstances). The Intercontinental has 198 rooms in total. About a fifth of them are in use, Faqiri says. As long as no country in the world recognises the Taliban, there will be no busloads of tourists. But Faqiri doesn’t give up. When the Canadian government evacuated endangered Afghans, he made a deal with the agency organising flights: the Intercontinental became the meeting point for the evacuees fleeing Afghanistan. Faqiri rented out 120 rooms and managed to get those fleeing the Taliban to check into their hotel before leaving.

Faqiri works until the early afternoon. A young Talib is standing at the reception, leaning against the black marble. His name is Mohammed Elyas Niazai. Faqiri introduces him as “the night shift”. Faqiri and Niazai are part of this big experiment at the Intercontinental, a normal Afghan man and a Talib, two young men who are supposed to work together under the big plan.

Fourth Floor

Niazai rides up in the golden elevator, his contorted reflection visible on the walls of the small cabin. Niazai is 23 years old, his beard unruly and a bit patchy. His eyes are awake, but his gaze is unsteady, making him appear like both hunter and hunted at the same time. This line is so vivid that. Were you taking notes all along, or did you only take notes at certain times during the reporting? I always have my notebook with me. I was once told that it's a good thing to make yourself visible as a reporter; you’re part of the situation unfolding in front of you, but you're not part of it at the same time, and your little notebook protects you from being too involved. So, I take notes randomly, depending on the situation. Like in this elevator, I took notes two minutes later, when we were walking in the corridor. There is also an argument for noting down things on your phone, as it is less disruptive, and people feel less observed. I guess both methods have their pros and cons.

Niazai occupies room 311 on the third floor. You stayed on the third floor, too, but don’t mention in the story that you stayed at the hotel. I had mentioned it in an earlier version of the story, but we took it out. It might have helped for transparency reasons, but would it have helped the story? I did not want to be a protagonist in the story either. My NZZ editor and I believe that if you use "I" in a story, it has to serve something; if you use “I,” you are a protagonist and as every protagonist you must have a reason to be in this story. The best thing in these cases would be a little box at the end of the story, something like "Behind the story," so the readers would get a sense of how this all came about. Unfortunately, NZZ does not follow this format. It has standard furnishings: heavy moss-green curtains, thick carpet with an intricate pattern so the stains aren’t as visible, ashtray. This is a wonderful detail about hotel carpets with intricate patterns meant to hide stains. It also reminds the reader that this hotel is perhaps not as updated as it ought to be. How did you come by the reason behind these intricate carpets? I asked myself why they were patterned like and went down a hotel-carpet rabbit hole on the internet. Unlike Faqiri, Niazai lives in the hotel. He says he is the human resources manager. He, too, studied business administration: “The hotel business is a good business, hardly any risk.” You told me that Niazai spoke to you through an interpreter, but you never mention this in this story. Why not? I didn’t think it’d help the reader, although it might have helped with transparency. I value transparency and I don’t mind telling readers how everything in a story came about. But I think what we as journalists feel it’s also important to think from a reader's perspective, and I felt that this detail about my interpreter might have been less important to readers. I report from many countries where I don't speak the local language, and because I mention phrases that Niazai specifically says in English, I think that most readers will assume that I have a translator with me. Lutfullah (who is an excellent translator) is mentioned at the end of this story as a contributor. There’s not a single personal item in the room, but maybe it’s not actually his. He says he has a second, secret one. It’s where he keeps his weapons: an M4 assault rifle, captured from French soldiers, and a Glock 22. Did you ask him that or did he offer that information? And did he show you the secret room? He showed me photos of it and told me the story. I fact-checked that the assault he mentioned took place: There had been weapons captured and the French soldiers had indeed used M4 rifles.

Again and again, someone calls Niazai on his mobile phone. It’s the GDI, the Taliban’s secret police. How does Niazai react to these phone calls? Why did you choose not to include his reaction? Maybe his reaction did not seem surprising or extraordinary to me. He seemed calm, explaining to the GDI that we were supposed to be there. He was slightly annoyed after a while. They ask him why a journalist is roaming the hotel. Nothing goes unnoticed. They are hiding somewhere, watching. There are cameras in the hallways, but supposedly not in the rooms.

Niazai joined the Taliban when he was 16 years old. A special army unit had killed his uncle and cousin, and foreign soldiers had allegedly been involved. Niazai’s jihad, his holy war, was born out of revenge. He studied at a university in Kabul. He claims that he spoke very good English back then, but he has forgotten a lot of it now. On his smartphone, Niazai shows us photos from that time: a young man with a fashionably blow-dried fringe and chin beard. Niazai spied on his fellow students on behalf of the Taliban. Did Niazai show any emotions (pride, regret) when he said this? Did you ask him how he felt? Or did you just let him talk? I just let him talk. He liked to brag a bit, and he definitely felt pride, as if he had fulfilled his duty. When his studies allowed it, he fought outside Kabul against Nato troops and the Afghan army. He claims he can build a bomb with a plastic bottle and $2. Did he say how he built these bombs? No. That’s why it was important for me to add "he claims." Like I said, he liked to brag a bit.

When he used to arrive late and his professor would ask him why, Niazai would reply in English: “Legends are always late.” He’s proud of this sentence, he still knows it by heart.

All this was years before the fall of Kabul. The capital was supposed to be the heart of the new Afghanistan that the Americans and their allies had built with billions of dollars in development aid over the course of 20 years. But the loyalties in this city were never as clear as some would have liked to believe.

On 15 August 2021, Kabul fell into the hands of the Taliban. There was little resistance. Late at night, the Taliban drove up to the Intercontinental in their pickup trucks. In the hours before, the hotel’s security guards had abandoned their posts. Some stormed the lobby and stole the computers. The Taliban put their fighters up in the hotel and sent the staff home. Two days later, they called the hotel staff and told them to come back, and said the Intercontinental was open again. “At first, the employees were afraid of us,” Niazai says, “but we had orders to be nice to them.” Did Niazai say how he felt about these employees at first? He was suspicious of them. The Talibs treat people they consider less "faithful" than them as below them, the way many religious fundamentalists do with people who have not found the "right path."

Fifth floor

The golden lift stops on the fifth floor. This is where the entire history of the Intercontinental comes together. On the left, next to the elevator, is the entrance to the Pamir Supper Club. Starting in 1969, lavish parties were held here. The first Afghan pop musicians with long hair and guitars performed at the Pamir Supper Club. Afghanistan still had a king back then, Mohammad Zahir Shah. In 1973, his cousin, Prince Mohammad Daoud, overthrew him in a coup; Daoud was assassinated by communists five years later. The parties went on. Months after the murder, the Intercontinental invited guests to a Bavarian festival at the club, including an early drinks buffet and “schnapps on the house”, sponsored by Lufthansa. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The American officials at the Pamir Supper Club made way for Russian ones.

While the country descended into civil war, the Intercontinental remained a world apart. When the Russians left in 1989, the Afghan president, Mohammad Najibullah, pulled up in front of the Intercontinental in his black Mercedes. In 1992, the Mujahedeen marched into Kabul, groups of Islamist holy warriors equipped and trained by the US to fight the communists. The Mujahedeen ate at the Intercontinental free of charge and were soon fighting each other in the capital. Rockets flew into the hotel. The notorious guerrilla commander Ahmad Shah Massoud and his men took it over.

On the fifth floor, on the right, at the end of the long corridor, is the Khyber Suite, the Intercontinental’s penthouse. A balcony winds around the suite, affording guests a view over all of Kabul. When I visited, the UN was hosting a course: how to solve interpersonal conflicts. With respect to “I visited:” What German verb did you use in the original? “Visited” made me think, as a reader, that you did not stay at the hotel, although you actually did. Would you have preferred the translation to have used “stayed” instead? And what about the use of “I”? So here my whole argument about not using "I" breaks down, because of the English translation. I did not realize that the translators had inserted me into the story. In German, it reads: “Gerade findet in Kurs ther Uno statt.” Which I would translate to: "At the moment, the UN is hosting a course." I should have checked the translation better. And because now the "I" is in there in the English version, of course I could have said that I had stayed there for four days and that I had a translator and photographer with me.Did you have a chance to speak with representatives of the UN who were there? If not, why not? They weren’t representatives of the UN, only people who did logistical work, and it was all background. I also decided not to mention anyone who did not explicitly know that I was a reporter or had not agreed with speaking with me for the story, mainly so as not to cause them any problems.Here Massoud is said to have planned his attacks, studying his targets through binoculars. But in 1996, new and even more radical Islamists came from the south and conquered Kabul for the first time. They were the Taliban. They castrated and executed Najibullah, the ex-president with the Mercedes, dragged his body around the city and hanged him in public. The Taliban removed the chairs in the hotel bar and sat on carpets.

There are no windows in this long corridor on the fifth floor. Neon lights on the walls brace themselves against the darkness. The carpet smells like dust and something else, something sour. The hotel’s employees don’t like to be on the fifth floor. It’s haunted, they say.

Two days after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, the Taliban held a press conference at the Intercontinental. The Taliban foreign minister said they didn’t know where Osama bin Laden was. “I only know he’s not here,” he said. It was a lie. Bin Laden was a guest of the Taliban. The Americans invaded Afghanistan a few months later.

After the invasion, the Intercontinental once again became the meeting place of foreign diplomats, business owners and rich elites. The new government renovated the place with the help of contractors, but it wasn’t the same. One company closed the balcony in the dining room, where guests could feel the breeze from the mountains while enjoying their coffee. The idea of people in the past enjoying their coffee in the mountain breeze is a beautiful detail. How did find out about it?One of the waiters told me. Another company added another dining room; it has clouds painted on the ceiling and looks like a cruise ship. Another sold off the marble slabs in the garden. The hotel staff says that corrupt officials just took what they wanted from the Intercontinental, as they did with so much in Afghanistan. “Those cursed people destroyed everything. All that’s left is the name,” says one longtime waiter. “Apart from that, there’s nothing left from the old days.”

For years, the Taliban fought underground. They gained strength despite the presence of thousands of Nato soldiers in the country. In 2011, they attacked the hotel. Nine suicide bombers killed 12 people and themselves. The last attacker detonated his bomb on the fifth floor, in room 523. The room has since been renovated. The bathroom is now decorated with pink tiles. Then, in 2018, another attack. For 12 hours, four or five assassins occupied the hotel. They murdered 40 people. Guests barricaded themselves in their rooms, hiding in the bathtubs. A clergyman who was staying in room 519 was killed in the attack. The man who now cleans on the fifth floor swears he hears him showering sometimes. Your description of this likely makes the cleaning man easy to identify, and yet you don’t mention his name. Why? There were already so many protagonists, and I didn’t mention his name so as not to confuse the readers. And what he told me is in itself quite innocent.

In 2021, just three years later, the Taliban captured Kabul for the second time. One of the guards outside the hotel knew some of the suicide bombers. “They were incredibly brave,” he says. Sirajuddin Haqqani, who orchestrated the attacks, is now minister of interior affairs. He gave a speech in the ballroom of the Intercontinental, thanking the families of his assassins. The hotel room doors are a reminder of the attacks: brown paint on bulletproof steel.

Kitchen

Why did you move the story from the 5th floor to the kitchen? We already met Faqiri, and then and Niazai, and then we visited the fifth floor. And since Faqiri and Niazai are the main protagonists, I felt like the next “chapter” had to take place somewhere where we’d have a scene with both of them together.

In the kitchen, Faqiri, the marketing manager, points to a large pot with a lamb simmering inside. “I sold that for $230. Write that,” he commands. This quote by Faqiri is really funny. Why did you choose to add subtle humor here, especially as this is part of a story in which the presence of danger is palpable throughout the narrative? Because it shows Faqiri’s character: He is an amazing salesman. Two families have rented a conference room, and the men are negotiating the bride price before their children’s wedding. Faqiri persuaded them to stay for dinner as well.

The pots in the kitchen contain food for 900 people. At noon and in the evenings, there is a buffet. Today, the kitchen staff are also cooking for the Ministry of Defence – 700 people. The food will be delivered to the ministry by truck with an armed escort – the Intercontinental is also the Taliban’s caterer.

The head chef is Sayed Mazaffar Sadat. He came to the Intercontinental before the Taliban took power. Sadat says he never considered leaving the country even after the Taliban took over. He will soon be representing Afghanistan in a cooking competition in France, and his friends tell him he should just stay there. Was it dangerous for Sadat to say this to you?Niazai was sitting there when Sadat said this. So Sadat would not have considered saying this as something dangerous. Also, leaving the country is quite normal right now in Afghanistan. There's a  common sentiment: Most of those who can leave, leave somehow. To hear someone say "I'm staying” is surprising. He would be just one of countless young men leaving Afghanistan, legally or illegally, hoping to find a better life elsewhere. An estimated 1.6 million Afghans have fled since the Taliban came to power, and most of them are living in precarious conditions in neighbouring Iran and Pakistan. Sadat says, “My philosophy is: death will come anyway – it will come for you even if you leave your country.”

In the heat of the kitchen, one of Sadat’s cooks gives orders to a Talib who is standing idly by: “We don’t need you here. Go to your office.” This line really took me aback. As a reader, I didn’t expect non-Talibs to be allowed to speak to Talibs like this. What was the unspoken hierarchy in the hotel? Was it by professional rank, or by membership in the Taliban? How did the Talib react, and why did you choose not to show his reaction? The Talib shrugged his shoulders. I wanted to include it, as it shows a bit the interaction between Talibs and non-Talibs; they are still getting used to one another and not everybody is happy to now have a Talib as their boss. The unspoken hierarchy is clear, though: The Talibs rank above all others.

When the Taliban first ruled in the 1990s, they only placed one of their own at the head of the hotel. This is a great example of “reader think,” where you discuss what the reader may be wondering just now. Why did you decide to place this very explanatory paragraph here in the story, and not earlier when we first meet the two main characters?I work in a region many of my NZZ readers don’t know much about, so I have to explain a lot because it's very far removed from their lives. I think it's better to have these explanatory paragraphs at the time you need them, otherwise nobody would ever find their way into my stories. I basically thought this paragraph fit here. Generally, when I write, it's a lot about feeling rather than explanation. This time around, they have put their fighters in every office, integrated into several levels of hierarchy: Taliban and non-Taliban are forced to work together. All of the hotel’s female employees are at home. They are still supposed to receive their wages, but are not allowed to come to work. The only woman in the building works downstairs at the entrance of one of the security gates, screening female guests. She covers her body and hair, but she refuses to cover her face. She is too old for that, she says.

Faqiri rules the kitchen. He’s always on his phone, trying to solve a problem. Niazai tries to look busy. This is a wonderful contrasting image between the two men. Why do you think Faqiri seems so busy all the time, and Niazai feels the need to look busy? This paragraph is better in German: Faqiri herrscht durch die Küche, rudert mit den Armen wie jemand, der sein ganzes Leben lang Anweisungen erteilt hat. Er ist ständig am Handy, um irgendetwas zu klären. Or, in English: Faqiri rules the kitchen, waving his arms like someone who has been giving orders all his life. He is constantly on his cell phone, trying to sort something out. The "waving his arms” part got lost in translation, but it is actually important: Faqiri is used to giving orders, and he grew up in a household with at least one servant. Niazai, on the other hand, is new to all of this and to being in charge. He sometimes lifts one of the bread baskets in the kitchen and then puts it down again, turns a single kiwi in his hands or eyes the expiration date on a can of Coke. He is also responsible for quality control, he says. This is another line that speaks to the humor of some of these situations you observed. Did you laugh a lot in the company of Faqiri and Niazai? We did laugh a lot together. They are funny. I think we felt a general sympathy toward each other, apart from me being a journalist and somehow strange to them.

The Taliban are considered willing to learn. The leadership paid for training for some of them, and former guerrillas are now taking computer courses. The new rulers have decreed peace and reconciliation. And yet it remains a strange situation for many: the rebels everyone feared for 20 years are suddenly sitting in their offices. A former employee of the Intercontinental says, “One of the fighters was my subordinate. But what orders was I supposed to give him? He had a gun.”

Garden

Why did you move from the kitchen to the garden? I wanted to stay with one of my main characters, and the scene in the garden lend itself well to this.

Niazai looks around the hotel’s dilapidated tennis court. The net is missing and a referee’s chair is rusting in one corner. The tennis coach has fled to Spain, or so Niazai has heard. It’s his first time here: “Who knows how to play tennis?” Niazai has had many roles at the hotel in the past two years, and now he happens to be the human resources manager. He receives a salary, £450 a month, and is saving for his wedding. It’s supposed to be a lavish celebration – some day. He hasn’t met his bride yet. When did Niazai start trusting you enough to share such personal information? Or is this information not as dangerous or problematic as other information? Personal information is just personal information. Niazai would have had problems had he talked to me about the structure of the Taliban and his units. He opened up to me on my second day at the hotel. This was also thanks to my translator, Lutfullah, who is probably the warmest person I've ever met.

“If they order me to clean rooms tomorrow, I won’t ask any questions,” Niazai says. He follows orders. The Taliban have a chain of command that is difficult to understand. What’s clear is that the emir in Kandahar and his confidants sit at the top, followed by the ministers in Kabul and their deputies. But there are powerful local commanders, in Kabul and outside. Is this something Niazai told you or that you learned elsewhere? I learned this from all the analyst reports. Thankfully, there are still a few Afghanistan analysts left — for example, at the Crisis Group or CTC — who report regularly on the country. The Taliban are a less homogeneous movement than it sometimes appears from the outside. His commander once ordered Niazai to cut off his beloved long hair. He did it immediately.

He’s waiting for an order that will send him back to the front, any front. If the order came, he wouldn’t leave the next day, he says, but right away. “This hotel is like a prison for me,” he says. He misses the mountains, the forests and the cold rivers. When Niazai walks on the grass in the garden, he takes off his shoes and walks barefoot. He wants to feel the grass on the soles of his feet. Then, he says, all negative thoughts disappear. Is this — Niazai’s need to feel the grass on his soles — the reason why you decided to share this scene in the garden with your readers? Yes. It makes him human.

Second floor

The Hakimi family is staying on the second floor of the Intercontinental, in rooms 238 and 239. There aren’t many guests at the hotel. There is a group of Russians staying on the third floor who are picked up every morning in a white SUV. A development worker from India. A Pakistani businessman who sells lamps made from Himalayan salt. And the Hakimis.Why did you move the narrative from the garden to the second floor? Now that we know Niazai a bit better, we can take a break from him and give space to the Hakimis, who add a feeling of nostalgia to the narrative.

Hayatullah Hakimi, 67, and his wife, Aziza, 64, fled Afghanistan in 1988. Hayatullah used to own a jewellery store. Then he came to the attention of the secret service. You told me that meeting the Hakimis was one of those lucky reporting moments. They do bring an interesting dimension to the narrative, a different perspective on the hotel’s past and on Kabul. How quickly did they agree to speak with you? Were there questions they refused to answer? They agreed very quickly. We approached them the first day, or rather our photographer, Elise Blanchard, did because one of the Hakimi daughters started speaking to her.

The Hakimis have experienced the Intercontinental’s good times. Hayatullah used to close his store on Friday afternoon, and he and his wife would come to the Intercontinental. “We liked the Beatles at the time – pop music was just coming to Afghanistan,” Hayatullah says. Bands were playing concerts by the pool. Female tourists were swimming in bathing suits. The hotel was surrounded by pine trees, and in the garden, speakers piped out music by Ahmad Zahir, the Afghan Elvis. The Hakimis have photos from back then: he is sporting a thick moustache, long hair and shiny belt buckle, she is wearing bell-bottoms.

Hayatullah says: “A customer once offered me a visa to the US. But I didn’t want to leave. Kabul was the best place in the world.” Where did you interview the Hakimis? The hotel was basically empty, so we sat down in the coffee shop, and there was nobody there except us.

Aziza says: “Nobody wanted to leave the country, nobody wanted to go to Europe or America. People came to us.”

The Hakimis now live in Canada. They have come to Kabul to show their grown daughters the city they once left. They spend a lot of time driving around streets they don’t recognise.

Aziza says: “Everyone in this hotel wore beautiful suits. Men used to only wear their traditional clothes at home. It’s painful to see all these changes.”

Hayatullah says: “I cry every night. I hope the hotel stays open. It’s part of our identity.”

Lobby

Why did you move the narrative from the second floor to the lobby? We got to know Niazai a bit better in the garden. So now I wanted to focus on Faqiri. The order of the rooms is mainly driven by the scenes I experienced with the protagonists, which then informed where I placed each room in the story. The hotel may give the structure, but it doesn’t command it.

You can’t get into the Intercontinental without good connections. Faqiri’s father was one of the hotel managers during the first Taliban rule. They called him again after Kabul fell and asked if he wanted to come back. He sent his son instead. During the first period of Taliban rule, Mullah Omar, founder and head of the Taliban, once visited the hotel. The hotel had no guests, and he asked Faqiri’s father: “Why is no one here?” Faqiri’s father told the Taliban leader: “People aren’t coming because they’re afraid of you.” So Mullah Omar announced over the radio that all foreigners who wanted to be safe in Kabul should check into the Intercontinental. The next day, the hotel was full – at least that’s how the story goes. Did Faqiri tell you this story? And if so, how did you fact check it? I asked Faqiri’s father. I went to his house and interviewed him.

Faqiri has ideas about how to fill the hotel. Enlarging the ballroom, building a helipad. Or moving one of the university faculties on to the huge hotel site, or a hospital perhaps. But all of this costs money that nobody has right now.

In the past, large wedding parties took place in the ballroom of the Intercontinental. Afghan weddings are attended by hundreds of guests, and traditionally have a men’s and a women’s area. Under the Taliban, it is forbidden to play music at weddings, but at some it can still be heard in the women’s section. Afghan women always find a way somehow, and the Taliban do not dare control the women’s area. But in the Intercontinental, the hotel owned by the Taliban, music is strictly forbidden. Was the hotel loud or quiet? What sounds did you hear as you walked around? There were no sounds to speak of. All were swallowed by the thick carpets.

Faqiri could have fled as well. On 15 August 2021, the day Kabul fell, a friend of his was at the airport. He would have secured a spot for him on one of the evacuation flights. But Faqiri stayed. He didn’t want to leave on his own: he wanted to marry his fiancee first. The wedding later took place in the grand ballroom of the Intercontinental. His wife gave birth to a son soon after the wedding. He hasn’t completely given up on going abroad yet. He would like to study for a doctorate. But, for now, he’ll stay here. Does he miss the old Afghanistan? “Of course I miss it.” Did Faqiri feel safe saying this?I thought a lot about this sentence. There were sentences more explicit in this conversation I decided not to use. “Of course I miss it” is just an expression of longing, and many would say similar things on the record. Also, a small part at the beginning of this “chapter” didn’t make it into The Guardian’s version. This is how it went: Faqiri leans over a desk which is not his. His is in a corner of the office, but he sits down at the big one in the middle as a matter of course. It belongs to his supervisor, a Talib who is rarely there. Faqiri is typing on his smartphone. Today is the Afghan Independence Day, which celebrates the peace treaty with the British, and other wars, the Great Game, things that took place in the early 20th century. Faqiri is tinkering with a post on social media, and it ends up being a photo collage, with Faqiri on the bottom, and a waving black-red-and-green flag at the top. The flag of the old Afghan Republic, replaced by the white flag of the Taliban. ‘We have good memories of this flag,’ he says, referring to the black-red-and-green one. Faqiri says, ‘Most people have girls at home and hope that things will eventually get better for them. I hope everything will be fine. I don't want to go, I want to see how things go first.’ Fleeing Afghanistan is expensive and complicated. So many Afghans just hope that life will eventually get better under Taliban rule. Or that they can wait until it's over. Last time, the Taliban were in Kabul for five years. Only this time, there is little sign of resistance in the country. Kabul looks like a city in hibernation, and no one knows how long it will last. Those who do not flee come to terms with the situation, and that is most of the population. ‘We have to work with the Taliban. They’re the government,’ Faqiri says.Posting the flag shows that Faqiri is quite comfortable with showing his views.

The golden lift stops on the first floor. Osama bin Laden briefly stayed here, rooms 196 and 197. Right next to the elevator, thick cables wind under a door and disappear under the fitted carpet, into room 114. Here, the secret police sit in front of their video monitors. They will hide the cables better in the future, one of the agents says in a contrite tone. How did you manage to get access to the secret police room?They described the room to me. I was not allowed in there, but of course I saw the cables. Down the hall, room 122, is the hotel president’s office. Hafiz Zia-ul-Haq Jawad has taken a seat in his armchair. “The image of the Taliban is that we are here to break things. But we’re here to build,” he says. Whenever you mention someone’s name in this story, you always share a small personal backstory about their lives. You don’t do that with Jawad. Did he not allow you to ask personal questions? Or did you not want to say more about him? This was quite a formal setting. He did not want to talk about himself.

It pains Jawad to see the rooms in the hotel deteriorate. It’s no longer worthy of its five-star rating, he says. He tells us that he wants to renovate it, rebuild it, make it accessible to all. Since the Taliban took over, the people of Kabul – Taliban and non-Taliban – sometimes come up to the hotel to take a picture of the view. In the past, they would have been turned away at the first security barrier.

Jawad says he doesn’t discriminate between Taliban and non-Taliban when it comes to his employees. He says he only cares that everyone works hard, is honest, serves the nation. “Sometimes I go down to the kitchen. I show everyone: I am one of you. We don’t want anyone to think that the Taliban are only here for a short period of time.” Was Faqiri present during this interview? Or someone from the hotel who is not a Talib? How sincere do you think Jawad was with you? It was only Jawad and his assistant. I cannot say how truthful Jawal was. It's often like that with the Talibs: They say one thing and do another.

There’s a photo from the hotel’s best days on the wall of his office, showing people swimming in the pool. Someone has painted over the women on the deck chairs with white paint.

Pool

In the evening, bats flutter over the Intercontinental’s pool, chasing mosquitoes that swarm over the stagnant water. A greenish residue lurks in the deepest part of the pool; it will supposedly be filled with fresh water eventually. A mosquito lands on Niazai’s french fries. He filled his plate at the buffet like he does every night. Faqiri is sitting next to him at the table. I thought Faqiri doesn’t work in the evenings and that Niazai takes over. Or did he stay because of you?He came back that evening to pick something up and sat with us for a bit. Above them hangs a string of lights.

The decay, the cracks, so obvious in the piercing daylight, are now softened by coloured lights. The wind rustles through the pine trees. Faqiri has put his hand on Niazai’s chair. He says they are friends. And for a moment, it really looks as if they are, two young men, both smiling. The sentence “And for a moment, it really looks as if they are” makes me think that you didn’t believe Faqiri when he say that they’re friends. Do you think Faqiri and Niazai are friends? I remain skeptical. They are definitely friendly toward each other. Faqiri smokes thin cigarettes. Niazai doesn’t smoke.

Most of Faqiri’s friends have left Afghanistan. Those who stayed have always been Taliban; he just didn’t know. At university in India, they once recorded a funny video, he tells me, him and his fellow Afghan students, dancing in front of the university. After the fall of Kabul, one of his fellow students called him to ask if he could please delete the video, because he was a Talib.

For Niazai, being a spy, waging a war in secret was a game. “Now the game is over,” he says. The Russians are sitting in a dark corner by the pool. They have been invited by the Ministry of Defence, and tasked with making old Russian helicopters airworthy again. This is such an incredible image. Did you try to speak to the Russians or were you told not to? I was instructed that they wanted their privacy. The Russians also expressed that non-verbally to me.

Later I ask Faqiri what he likes about Niazai. “He’s a good guy. He never says no when it comes to getting work done,” he replies. Faqiri says the Taliban need him and the other non-Taliban in the hotel. Niazai and the other Taliban are only very slowly learning how to run a hotel like this. Faqiri forms a kind of bridge between the Taliban and the other employees, as well as between the Taliban and the customers. It’s not easy with the new rulers. “I need to understand them. But they never explain themselves.”

I ask Niazai the same question: what does he like about Faqiri? “He’s got a pure heart. And he’s never jealous.” In general, if he doesn’t like someone at the Intercontinental, their days at the hotel are numbered anyway, he says. Formally, he and Faqiri are equal, but he is more senior because he’s a Talib, he explains. This is a lovely pre-conclusion to the story, and in a way, it’s an answer to the nut graf, where you say that there’s a quiet experiment happening in Afghanistan right now, where Talibs and non-Talibs are learning to work together. Why did you add these two questions here, almost at the end of the story? I wanted to tie them together at the end. What do they really think about each other? And also, how is the experiment going?

Niazai loves to ride his motorcycle. For years, the Taliban rode into battle on old Hondas, always with a blanket on the saddle to sleep on at night, always moving fast. Faqiri has never ridden a motorcycle. He says working at the Intercontinental is his dream job. He wants to make £2-3m in profit this year, that’s the goal. “I can do it,” he says.

At some point during the evening, Faqiri gets up and goes home. His wife and son are waiting for him.

Basement

The chandeliers in the hotel have been extinguished. It’s after 11 pm. Only now, at this point in the story, do I realize that the structure of the story is two-fold: a map of the hotel, room by room, but also a chronological narrative of sorts. You start in the morning at the reception and end at night in the basement. What came to you first? The hotel-room structure or the time-of-the-day structure? How much was the hotel-movement narrative influenced by the time-of-the-day structure?The time of day structure came later, more as an accident. I wanted to end with this scene that took place at night. the main structure is the hotel-area structure. The laundry in the basement is closed, the sauna and beauty salon are barricaded. Only the gym casts a shimmer of neon light on to the white tiles. Niazai is pedalling on an exercise bike. Every night, he and his friends exercise here, he says, his friends being the Taliban guards around the hotel. But today he is alone. He has shed his traditional garb and is wearing an Under Armour tracksuit, a sports brand once popular with American soldiers in Afghanistan. Does he tell you this or do you learn this from a different source? This is a known fact: Under Armour is a popular brand with US armed forces. They became popular because apparently they made the best underwear and rash guards for military action in the desert. The trash cans are filled with empty Red Bull cans.

Niazai once told me: “Peace is good for Afghanistan. But it’s boring for us.” He is afraid of getting used to this life. He was never afraid to fight, and now he worries that he will one day be afraid to go to war again. Did you reply something to what Niazai told you here? Did you have a conversation about it with him? No. It all depends on the person and the situation, but here I just let Niazai talk. He wanted to tell me things, not hear my views.

A lot of the equipment in the gym is broken. The handle of the rowing machine is missing; a friend of Niazai’s tore it off with a particularly hard pull. The punching bag was also destroyed. It’s quiet, and only the whirring of Niazai’s pedals disturbs the silence. He says he doesn’t sleep much; none of his friends do. Did he tell you why he and his friends don’t sleep much? No, it was a thing he just said. It may be unsaid but these men are severely traumatized. The only life they have known is one full of violence. They had been basically child soldiers, and I wanted to stress that fact in this paragraph. He sometimes sits alone in the lobby with his headphones on, watching videos of Taliban operations across Afghanistan, shared in WhatsApp groups. He doesn’t have to follow the news, Niazai says. He knows better than the journalists what is happening in the country. His oiled hair falls into his face as he leans over the handlebars. In his tracksuit, he almost looks like an ordinary young man spat out by the war. Why did you choose to end the story on this line? I didn't. The Guardian ended there. My original story ends with one more paragraph: The Intercontinental is submerged in darkness. Niazai doesn’t yet know when he’ll go to sleep.

Additional reporting by Lutfullah Qasimyar. Can you tell me more about your interpreter/translator, Lutfullah Qasimya, and the additional reporting he does for your stories about Afghanistan? What protocol do you follow to know that what he reported to you is factual?He’s been my translator for three years now. I trust him with my life (and had to on several occasions). It would have been more accurate to say that he "contributed to this story.” Two years ago, we did a long story together with Kiana Hayeri, a photographer who speaks perfect Dari. Lutfullah was translating an interview and Kiana told me she never heard a more precise translator in Afghanistan. This was enough for me to trust his translation skills.

* * *

Ania Hull is a multilingual editor, writer and journalist who writes about immigration, poverty, conservation and environmental justice. She is currently based in New Mexico.

The post How a profile of a Kabul hotel became a profile of today’s Afghanistan appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Unless he’s at the keyboard, writing or editing his work, this is what Luke Mogelson takes with him to work: an old desert-camouflage bullet-proof vest, a Kevlar helmet, a GoPro clipped to the front of his vest, his iPhone and two medical pouches that he keeps permanently attached to his vest. “I try to carry enough medical equipment for myself and one other person at least,” says the former National Guard medic.

Mogelson, who’s been a contributing writer at The New Yorker since 2013 and who previously wrote for The New York Times Magazine, has covered the wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and social unrest in the U.S. He is the author of “The Storm Is Here: An American Crucible” and of the short story collection, “These Heroic, Happy Dead.”

He now covers the war on Ukraine, where the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and the Ukrainian Armed Forces seldom allow journalists to embed with frontline infantry units. Nonetheless, he’s managed to embed himself several times already and reports from combat zones, which in Ukraine often translates to reporting from the tree line and the trenches.

In January 2023, The New Yorker published a feature story by Mogelson titled “Trapped in the Trenches in Ukraine.” To report for this particular story, Mogelson had embedded himself for two weeks in November 2022 with an International Legion reconnaissance team. The story’s narrative is immediate, personal, down to the smallest human detail. “Trapped in the Trenches” reminds me, in feeling, of Robert Capa’s point-blank, say-it-as-it-is photographs from the battlefield.vka

To do his job the way he intends it, Mogelson insists on seeing everything first hand. His is a reporting style that crosses from the immersive into the perilous and life threatening. He does this for two reasons.

“The essense of any war,” Mogelson says, pointing to the first reason, “is groups of people, typically groups of men, trying to kill each other. With whatever means they have. If you don’t see that, if you don’t have any sense of what that looks like, what that feels like, what that smells like, there’s just a huge absence at the center of your understanding of the conflict, whatever conflict it might be. I think that this is the situation in Ukraine right now.”

Mogelson’s second reason for reporting from combat zones is to give soldiers a voice. “When you go to the very frontline,” he says, “and meet with soldiers who are actually doing the killing and the dying in any conflict, they’re usually people from marginalized or economically challenged communities. And they don’t have very much agency or choice. So if a reporter shows up, for them that’s a rare opportunity to have some kind of role in the narrative about the conflict in which they’re the most important actors.”

“These guys,” Mogelson adds, “they can literally die any minute of any day. And they’re all desperate to have their stories told, have their names recorded.” He cares deeply about the people he meets at the frontline, and this comes through in his prose. So much so, that in one instance in his story, when he and others are hiding from heavy artillery, Mogelson quotes himself asking one of the soldiers not to go out, not to risk it. He doesn’t interfere, but he can’t not be there, either.

In “Trapped in the Trenches,” he shows foreign volunteers cooking. Laughing. Hunkering down. Wondering where home is. In the case of Turtle, one of Mogelson’s main characters, Mogelson shows Turtle thinking of death, and wondering how to bring back and finally repatriate the Russian-confiscated body of one of his fellow New Zealanders, so that his friend could be honored with a haka, a ritual Maori dance.

Not the end of the story

In the months following publication of “Trapped in the Trenches in Ukraine,” the unit Mogelson had embedded with for the story suffered horrific casualties. “Pan was killed,” Mogelson says of a Ukrainian soldier who features in the story. “Herring was pretty badly injured.”

And then Turtle died in early spring. “He was killed during an assault on a Russian trench,” says Mogelson. “He confronted a much larger element of Russian soldiers.” At the time, Mogelson was embedded with a Ukrainian infantry unit not too far away from where Turtle was.

When embedded with a unit, Mogelson also carries a belt bag with extra batteries for his GoPro, an external battery bank for his iPhone, a Moleskin reporter’s notebook with two pens and a small handheld Olympus voice recorder the size of two lighters, to take audio notes. He keeps his press card on a lariat that he wears around his neck but keeps inside his shirt, against his chest, so that he can take it out if he needs to.

He carries business cards, too, with his name and his WhatsApp and Signal numbers. He gives them out to whomever he crosses paths with, even if in “actively kinetic environments” where things blow up and everyone runs. “So they’re not just left there,” Mogelson says of the human beings he meets. “They don’t have to, but if they want to, they can reach out to me and they can ask me about what I’m doing and who I am.”

One member of the team Mogelson was embedded with when reporting for “Trapped in the Trenches” reached out to him after Turtle was killed:

“He sent a link to a livestream of the funeral and the haka, the whole ceremony. It’s devastating.”

In phone, email, and text conversations with Storyboard for an annotation of the story, Mogelson describes his reporting, writing and fact-checking processes and strategies from and about combat zones in Ukraine and elsewhere. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

ANNOTATION: Storyboard’s questions are in red; Mogelson’s answers in blue.

Trapped in the Trenches in Ukraine

Along the country’s seven-hundred-mile front line, constant artillery fire and drone surveillance have made it excruciatingly difficult to maneuver.

by Luke Mogelson

The New Yorker

A Reporter at Large

January 2 & 9, 2023 Issue

ONE SUNDAY IN EARLY OCTOBER, I had lunch at an outdoor restaurant on Andriyivsky Descent, in downtown Kyiv, with a thirty-seven-year-old American who went by the code name Doc. I’d rented an apartment on the same cobblestone street back in March, while the Ukrainian military was repulsing a Russian assault on the city. At the time, the neighborhood had been deserted, and a portentous quiet was broken only by sporadic explosions and whining air-raid sirens. Now Andriyivsky Descent was thronged with couples and families promenading in the autumn sun. Local artists sold oil paintings on the sidewalk. A trumpeter and an accordionist played for tips. Doc sipped a Negroni. Long-bearded, square-jawed, and barrel-chested, he wore a green tactical jacket and a baseball cap embroidered with the Ukrainian national trident. A thick scar spanned his neck, from a bar fight in North Carolina during which someone had sliced his throat with a box cutter. Toward the end of our meal, an older man in a leather fedora approached our table. “International Legion?” he asked, in accented English. I pointed at Doc; the man extended his hand and told him, “I just wanted to say thank you.” Why did you choose to start and finish your story with that Kyiv moment with Doc?One task of the first paragraph is to signal to readers what kind of piece they’re getting into—its style, mood, reportorial approach, and so on — not just what kind of subject matter will be addressed. To that end I always try to open with a scene that I witnessed firsthand, rather than with exposition, because witnessed scenes will always comprise the majority of the text. I chose this particular scene because I wanted to bookend the piece with it. Unlike the other characters, Doc was an American veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for me this was as much a story about the fallout of those disasters as it was about Ukraine.

Doc scrutinized his glass, embarrassed. After the man left, I remarked that such recognition must feel good. “It feels weird,” Doc replied. This transition between what you expect Doc is feeling and what he’s really feeling is so powerful, and in terms of choice of words, is just perfect. How did you compose it?The extent of the journalist’s presence in a story is always a delicate balance to strike. I try to follow two basic rules. 1) Readers should always know when the journalist is recounting something he has witnessed himself and when it is something that has been recounted to him. There should never be any ambiguity about this, and nor should there be a deliberately postponed revelation that a dramatic lede or description was actually as-told-to (a sleight of hand that is becoming increasingly common, unfortunately). Sometimes the easiest and least stilted way to do this is simply to insert a first-person sentence, such as “I noticed a red book on the table.” 2) While it’s important to assure readers that you are a direct observer of a scene, it’s always preferable not to feature as a participant in the scene — not to interact with anyone or anything in the scene. That includes dialogue. It’s much better if characters talk with one another than if they talk to the journalist. Of course, that’s not always possible, and in this case, because we were alone, I had to nudge Doc to get him to articulate what he was feeling. So, yes, I said, “That must feel good.” By not quoting myself, I hoped to emphasize Doc’s words rather than mine. For whatever reason, putting words in quotes makes the person who spoke them a more specific identity, and I don’t want to be that in the text — I want to be a cipher or a foil. (Or maybe it’s more honest to say that I want the text itself, which is essentially one long quote of mine, to convey my specific identity.) He’d been a marine in his twenties, and had fought, as a machine gunner, in Iraq and Afghanistan. It had always made him uncomfortable when American civilians thanked him for his service. When his contract ended, in 2011, he’d been eager to put war behind him. “It was a hard cut,” he said. “I was never going back.” Shortly after being discharged, he moved from North Carolina to New York City, where he’d been accepted at Columbia University. Using the G.I. Bill, he majored in computer science, with a minor in linguistics. He did two summer internships at Google, and when he graduated the company hired him full time.

While Doc was working as a software engineer, in Manhattan, his view of Big Tech progressively dimmed. He was disillusioned by the Presidency of Donald Trump, and he blamed social media, in part, for the country’s polarization. This past January, he notified Google that he was quitting. He was unsure what he’d do next. “I didn’t really have direction,” he recalled. Then, on February 24th, Russia invaded Ukraine. From Doc’s perspective, “it was pretty serendipitous.”

The next afternoon, he visited the Ukrainian consulate in midtown. The reception area was swarmed with Ukrainian immigrants seeking information, and Doc was asked to come back after the weekend. That Sunday, Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, announced the creation of an International Legion and issued an “appeal to foreign citizens” to join. Volunteers would be defending not only Ukraine, Zelensky insisted: “This is the beginning of a war against Europe, against European structures, against democracy, against basic human rights, against a global order of law, rules, and peaceful coexistence.” When Doc returned to the consulate, an official advised him to go to Poland, giving him a phone number for someone who would guide him from there. What is the most important part of this kind of reporting process for you?With any article, I want as much of it as possible to be conveyed in scenes: characters interacting with each other or the environment, in real time, as I observe them. I want as little of the article as possible to be contextual — the history and politics of the conflict. People can get that from other sources. I think that, more and more, there’s an alarming death of frontline correspondence illustrating the reality of war, and that’s what I want to provide.

Two weeks later, Doc landed in Warsaw with a duffle bag containing medical supplies and body armor. He texted the number and was directed to a motel near the Ukrainian border. Several groups of men, “obviously military guys,” loitered in the parking lot. A few had unrolled sleeping bags in the lobby. Nobody would talk to Doc. The details in this story bring a multitude of layers and dynamics to a reader’s understanding of what it’s like to be a foreign volunteer. How did you negotiate fact-checking with your characters? For example, how did you fact-check these details about Doc, as opposed to those above about his move from North Carolina to New York?The New Yorker fact-checkers are unrivaled in their diligence and meticulousness. They spend hours on the phone with every character in every article, corroborate with secondary sources and compile extensive dossiers of substantiating documents. But there are limits to what even they can do. Did we find C.C.T.V. footage of the guys loitering in the parking lot? No. In such instances, when we’re mostly taking someone at his or her word, the question becomes how to signal that to the reader. There are various methods, and which one you employ depends on what you want to telegraph about the source. If, for example, I wrote, “According to Doc, several groups of military guys loitered in the parking lot,” I think that would read as if I were urging leeriness of Doc’s account. Sometimes that’s exactly the effect you want, but it wasn’t here, because I actually had a high degree of confidence in Doc as a source and because the fact-checkers found nothing to undermine or contradict his account. So, instead, we put “military guys” in quotes, which we hoped would remind readers that this is an as-told-to passage attributable to Doc. Paranoia about spies and infiltrators was acute. The previous day, Russian cruise missiles had targeted the main training camp for the International Legion, in Yavoriv, a Ukrainian city about an hour’s drive away. Though no foreigners had died, dozens of Ukrainians were killed. A friend of mine—a Canadian Army veteran who’d joined the Legion—had survived the attack. When I’d reached him by phone, he’d described the scene as “a bloodbath.”

Doc had been waiting at the motel for about six hours when a cargo van pulled up. The driver told him to get in. “That’s all he said,” Doc remembered. “I was, like, All right. Fuck it.”

Half a dozen volunteers from South America crowded into the back with him. They were brought to an abandoned school and then, eventually, to the base in Yavoriv. Of the hundreds of foreigners who had been at the facility when it was hit, many had returned to Poland. According to my Canadian friend, this was for the best. Although some of the men had been “legit, values-driven, warrior-mentality” veterans, others were “shit”: “gun nuts,” “right-wing bikers,” “ex-cops who are three hundred pounds.” Two people had accidentally discharged their weapons inside his tent in less than a week. A “chaotic” lack of discipline had been exacerbated by “a fair amount of cocaine.” Why did you choose to use partial quotes here to show what your Canadian friend said, rather than just rewrite his words in your own? I’m thinking of words like “shit” or “chaotic,” for instance.I think I just liked the specificity of his language. But I guess this was another place where I wanted to be clear about where the information came from.

The attack functioned as a filter. “It was almost comical to watch all these tough guys just shit themselves and run away,” my friend said. By the time Doc reached Yavoriv, a higher proportion of the volunteers were committed fighters. The main branch of the Legion fell under the purview of the Ukrainian Army, but the G.U.R., the Defense Ministry’s intelligence directorate, was also recruiting foreigners for specialized assignments. After an interview with a G.U.R. officer, Doc was placed on a thirteen-man team composed of Brazilians, Portuguese, Brits, and others. They were deployed to Sumy, in the north, to conduct reconnaissance on armored columns moving toward Kyiv. Do they keep written records of these deployments? And if so, were you ever given access to any such records?No, the Ukrainian military is not cooperative with such journalistic requests, and the GUR even less so.

In April, Russian forces retreated from northern Ukraine in order to concentrate on the Donbas, in the east. The G.U.R. sent Doc and his comrades to a region there called Donetsk. The fighting intensified. Over the spring and summer, two members of Doc’s unit were killed and several injured. Others went home. When we met in Kyiv, his team had dwindled to five men, and the contraction reflected a broader trend. In March, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister had stated that twenty thousand people, from fifty-two countries, had expressed interest in signing up for the International Legion. That month in Kyiv, I’d met numerous Americans and Europeans eager to join the war effort, and a room in the train station had been dedicated to welcoming such new arrivals. The Legion refuses to disclose how many members it now counts, but it is nowhere near twenty thousand.

Many foreigners, no matter how seasoned or élite, were unprepared for the reality of combat in Ukraine: the front line, which extends for roughly seven hundred miles, features relentless, industrial-scale violence of a type unknown in Europe since the Second World War. The ordeal of weathering modern artillery for extended durations is distinct from anything that Western soldiers faced in Iraq or Afghanistan (where they enjoyed a monopoly on such firepower). “Once you’ve been dropped on heavy—ninety per cent of people can’t handle that, even if they’re combat-experienced,” Doc told me.

At our lunch, Doc seemed conflicted himself about whether he would continue fighting. Two weeks later, though, he decided to return to Donetsk. I asked to go with him. Did you have other leads in case Doc wasn’t going to back?Not really. I spent those two weeks scrambling to put together an alternative plan but never quite succeeded. I don’t think I was overly concerned, though. I’ve never gone to a war and not come across half-a-dozen unbelievably compelling stories; unfortunately, that’s always the case when groups of people are killing each other. During those two weeks that I was in Kyiv, waiting for Doc, I ended up doing a pair of stories for the New Yorker website, one about a devastating cruise missile strike and the other about a kamikazee drone strike. Both happened a few blocks from my hotel. The Ukrainian military has been extraordinarily opaque about how it is executing the war, and journalistic embeds are almost nonexistent. Despite the historic magnitude of the conflict, our concept of the battlefield derives largely from brief, edited video clips released by the government or posted by soldiers.

The G.U.R., however, appeared to exercise a degree of independence, and, rather unexpectedly, it allowed me to accompany Doc.

IT WAS A TEN-HOUR DRIVE to the town where Doc’s team was based, not far from Pavlivka, a frontline village about fifty miles north of Mariupol. Where do you draw the line when describing locations that you’d rather not fully reveal so as to keep your subjects safe?For any information or descriptions that might raise what are called “operational security” issues, I always try to error on the side of caution and, whenever possible, consult directly with the people who might be affected. In this passage, the proximity to Pavlivka wasn’t an issue — there are dozens of such villages—but I had concerns about mentioning the stream overgrown with reeds. When I checked with Doc and the team to see whether they were comfortable with those details, they had no objection. That kind of due diligence is important, but something worth noting here is that when you work in coordination with military press officers — something I do my utmost to avoid — you need to be wary of their invoking operational security to censor reporting they simply don’t like. Most civilians had fled the area, and the landscape was now battered and pocked with craters. In May, the building where the foreigners had been living was struck by cluster munitions; a Portuguese fighter was gravely wounded, and shrapnel was lodged in Doc’s right buttock. Their current quarters, in a quaint brick house on the bank of a stream overgrown with reeds, resembled less a military billet than a communal squat. A salvaged barbecue grill stood in the yard; socks and underwear dried on a line. Logs split by a hatchet fuelled a wood-burning stove.

Doc went into the basement, which was teeming with ammunition boxes, anti-tank weapons, and rocket launchers, and unfolded a mat on the concrete floor. Tai, a former member of the New Zealand Defense Force, and T.Q., a German who had served in the French Foreign Legion, also slept down there. Another Kiwi, called Turtle, and a U.S. Army veteran whose code name was Herring occupied the first floor. Several Ukrainians lived upstairs, and a motley entourage of dogs and cats roamed the property. This is such a delightful clause (and detail), and one that adds a moment of comic relief to the serious scenes that run through the story. How did this description of these dogs and cats come to you? Why didn’t you simply write, “and dogs and cats roamed the property”?These dogs and cats had been left behind by residents of the village who’d evacuated; they’d gravitated to the house for the food, and maybe, to a lesser degree, for the companionship. I tried explaining that in an early draft but this was a tricky part of the narrative where momentum was paramount. I had a lot to do in a small amount of space: set the scene at the house, introduce Turtle, provide an overview of the battlefield situation in the Donbas, and tee up the transition to the upcoming mission. The additional sentences about the pets created too much drag and had to be cut just for the sake of propulsion. I still felt like there should be a little something extra, however, so I preserved this detail. We’d shown up at dinnertime. In a cramped kitchen decorated with elaborately patterned wallpaper, the men took turns heating instant noodles and washing dishes. Black tarp was taped over every window: even faint traces of light could attract the attention of Russian surveillance drones. Nearby blasts had shattered some of the panes, chipped the walls, and opened gaping holes in an adjacent field. By way of welcome, Turtle cheerfully assured me of the advantage of residing in the basement: if a Russian missile hit the house, the stockpiled ordnance would provide the mercy of an “instant death.” Why did you choose not to add your reaction to the “instant death” comment?For the same reason I didn’t quote myself in the opening scene with Doc. I’m just a foil here for Turtle. The point of the exchange is to reveal something about his personality, not mine.

Turtle was the team’s leader. He’d enlisted in the New Zealand Army in 2002, when he was seventeen, done a tour in Afghanistan, and gone on to work in multiple countries as a private security contractor. An ethnic Maori, he had a forceful, gregarious personality that balanced sober professionalism with bombastic humor. His room had been the homeowner’s study, and later I found him sitting at a desk before a wall of books, writing on a notepad. He was planning the team’s next mission. How did you manage for members of this International Legion unit to trust you?The only way to make soldiers comfortable, earn their trust, and convince them to let you accompany them on missions and stay out for longer periods of time, is to go through something with them. Whenever I join a unit, I say yes to everything — I go out on whatever they let me go out on. You have to show them that you can handle yourself in a hostile environment, under fire, under bombardment, whatever, and that you won’t panic or become a distraction for them while they’re doing what they need to do. For this story, I think the guys started to open up after the photographer and I joined a night mission with the drone operator and the Ukrainian team leader. We were using night vision goggles, moving through an area close to the zero line, trying to be as quiet and invisible as possible. That was really helpful in terms of showing them that we wouldn’t be a liability for them.

In 2014, Vladimir Putin had backed a separatist rebellion in the Donbas. After Russia launched a full-scale invasion, in February, its control of the region expanded to Pavlivka; the Ukrainians retook the village in June, and since then a stalemate had prevailed. Because of the rural terrain—open farmland interspersed with occasional towns—a breakthrough from either direction would require troops to traverse sprawling fields exposed to enemy fire. Both Russia and Ukraine had focused their resources on more strategically vital theatres, so neither was equipped to mount such an offensive.

In lieu of major advances, the two sides vied to extend their presence by exploiting a network of parallel and perpendicular tree lines that divided up the no man’s land, or “gray zone,” between their fortified garrisons. “The tree lines offer concealment,” Turtle explained. “Nothing else here offers that ability to skirt around.” The team’s primary responsibility in Donetsk was reconnaissance: sneaking through the underbrush, probing the gray zone, locating the forwardmost Russian trenches, and establishing new positions for Ukrainian troops to backfill.

But the tactic of using the foliage to obscure their movements, Turtle told me, was expiring: “The leaves are falling. In a month’s time, there won’t be anything left.” Before that happened, he intended to secure one more tree line, which would give the Ukrainians a stronger footing from which to defend any winter assault on Pavlivka.

As Turtle described in granular detail various ridges, valleys, rivers, and roads, I was struck by how thoroughly he’d internalized the local geography. His family had been troubled, he said, when he’d begun referring to the town where we were as “home.” In New Zealand, he’d been “planning out the rest of my life with a girl.” Before coming to Ukraine, he’d ended the relationship, quit his job, and sold his house and car. “In hindsight, it was very selfish,” he acknowledged. Although he may have suggested to his friends and relatives that Russian atrocities—in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha and elsewhere—had instilled in him a sense of obligation, such moral posturing had been disingenuous. “It was just an excuse to be in this environment again,” Turtle said. If the “self-satisfaction” of testing his grit remained a factor, however, the months he’d spent in Ukraine had complicated his motives. “I actually do love these people and I love this country,” he said. “I can’t go home because this is home now. It really does feel that way.” The men you encounter in this story all end up sharing with you some very intimate thoughts. How long did it take for Turtle to open up like this to you?Whenever you embed with troops, there’s always an initial period of wariness while they feel you out. I guess that’s true with any assignment. An advantage of combat reporting is that you can build trust and form bonds much more quickly than under normal circumstances. In my experience, as soon as you demonstrate that you’re not going to leave when things get spicy, and that you’re committed to understanding and chronicling what they’re going through, nearly all frontline fighters are eager to share their stories and experiences with incredible openness and honesty.

On one of the bookshelves, Turtle had lined up several hand grenades in front of a row of novels. I also noticed, hanging above the desk, a black tag with a barcode and the word “dead” on it.

I decided not to ask about it yet. This line propels the narrative forward in several directions in your readers’ minds. Why did you choose to add it here?The death of Dominic Abelen hung over the whole team but especially over Turtle—so much so that Abelen’s toe tag literally hung over Turtle’s desk. It didn’t make sense, structurally, to tell Abelen’s story this early in the narrative, but I wanted to intimate that a previous tragedy haunted the men. Literary devices like foreshadowing can sometimes feel heavy-handed or gratuitously artificial in longform journalism; in this case, however, I really did wait to ask about the tag and only learned about Abelen later. So the reader’s progress tracks with mine; you learn and experience things at the same time that I do. The gradual penetration of a world and community, jointly by the journalist and reader, is often what gives frontline dispatches arc, because military embeds, unless they organized around a specific event or operation, seldom have an obvious beginning, middle or end.

THE FIRST PHASE OF THE MISSION was to conduct aerial surveillance of the tree line—a duty that fell to the team’s thirty-year-old drone operator, Herring. After five years in the U.S. Army, Herring had become a deckhand on a purse seiner off the coast of Maine. He had the callused, knotty fingers typical of that trade, along with a shaved head and narrow, dark eyes that glinted with a readiness for mischief or danger. His nose had been slightly crooked since June, when it was broken in a blast in Kyiv. The first time I read this story, I only became aware of your use of the past tense here, in this particular paragraph. Why did you choose to write the entire story in the past tense? Did you ever consider writing it in the present tense?The New Yorker doesn’t allow present tense, and I’m fine with that. Some magazines use present tense to kind of ratchet up the intensity, which often feels to me like compensation. If your story is truly intense, the best thing you can do is tell it straight.

In 2018, Herring had bought a drone and taught himself to locate schools of fish by tracking the whales and sharks that fed on them. When he realized that drones would play a role in Ukraine, he said, “it was hard to sit on the sidelines, knowing you could help.” He added that he had grown up in Illinois, and, “as a Midwestern dude, I’ve always hated Russia—the whole ‘Red Dawn’ thing.” You use your direct quotes very carefully. Why did you cut Herring’s speech here in half and report the fact that he had grown up in Illinois in indirect speech instead, rather than in a direct quote?I always try to select quotes that reveal something about the people who speak them that wouldn’t be revealed if I paraphrased instead. It could be an idiomatic remark, a joke, a profanity, a cliché — but ideally the specific words and timing of a quote will help flesh out the character in addition to conveying whatever information it contains. There’s nothing uniquely Herring about “I grew up in Illinois.” However, “as a Midwestern dude, I’ve always hated Russia” is something that only he would say. It can’t be paraphrased.

A few days after I arrived at the house, I accompanied Herring to a forward position within drone range of the target tree line. He was joined by Rambo, the leader of the Ukrainians who lived with the foreigners. The Ukrainians belonged to a reconnaissance company in the 72nd Mechanized Brigade, which was responsible for the area around Pavlivka, and to which the foreigners were officially attached. Rambo was thin and scrappy, with a sly grin that seldom broke into laughter. He’d served three years in the Ukrainian Army directly after graduating from high school, in 2005. As a civilian, he’d been a pipe fitter for an engineering company that sent him to Europe, Africa, and the United States, where he’d learned rudimentary English.

Rambo and his men had moved in with Turtle’s team in August, after their own house, next door, was bombed. As we headed to the front in two dilapidated vehicles, we passed one building after another that had also been destroyed. Incinerated cars sat on the roadside. Missiles and rockets had lodged in the fields, their protruding metal tubes resembling strange bionic crops. We parked in the dystopian ruins of a coal mine whose silos, conveyors, and concrete warehouses had been severely shelled. Why did you choose here, and elsewhere in the story, to either not share your feelings with your readers at all, even in the face of traumatic events, or to share them but only to the very minimum?I guess my hope is that my “feelings” infuse the entire text. The point is to make the reader feel what you feel. Somewhat paradoxically, though, telling the reader what you feel seems to get in the way of that. Another soldier from the 72nd then transported us in a van to a wide tree line running toward the gray zone, where an air shaft led into underground tunnels.

Above the shaft, a utility room had been converted into a makeshift command center. A few Ukrainians monitored radio traffic from the trenches. Herring began preparing two compact drones and several improvised munitions: explosive material packed into short metal pipes that had been augmented with fins made on 3-D printers. An inverted nail emerged from the head of each pipe, serving as a firing pin; the fins caused the pipe to spiral vertically, pushing the nail into a blasting cap on impact. Sometimes, Herring weaponized his drones with disposable plastic cups containing hand grenades. “It’s a risky method, but it’s a method,” he said.

This meant that Herring and Rambo needed to move forward from the air shaft. It was preferable to do so at night, both to mitigate their exposure and because one of the drones had a thermal camera, and spotting the heat signatures of bodies and tanks was more difficult during the day. At around 8 p.m., the men departed on foot, wearing night-vision devices. I followed, using a borrowed set. What instructions did they give you before you set out?Make as little noise as possible, and if something happened we would meet back at the air shaft.How do you assess risk when reporting from the war zones?When you’re embedded with a military unit, you relinquish a certain amount of control and outsource some of your risk-assessment to whomever you’re with. You don’t have your own vehicle, you don’t have your own system in place to be evacuated if you’re wounded. Embedding with the U.S. military in Iraq or Afghanistan was kind of ideal because you can’t do much better in terms of contingency planning. But when you’re with local forces, or, in this case, the International Legion, you’re often extremely exposed. Anything can happen any day, and you’re not going to be able to radio for air support or have a quick-reaction force come in and save you. At the end of the day, we’re talking about war. Risk is inherent. People die. People get killed — soldiers, civilians and correspondents alike. We’re no different, we’re not special, and I don’t think we should think of ourselves as different or special..Do you ever get used to this kind of danger?You don’t want to get used to it because once you get used to it, or once you become inured to the intensity of conflict, your writing will suffer and your reporting will suffer. Combat is a singular experience and it should feel that way in your work. Your eyes and ears and nose should be wide open the whole time, voraciously consuming all the sensory and emotional experiences. The moment you start becoming jaded or cynical, that’s probably a good time to step back. If not for yourself, then for your subjects and readers.

In the grainy, green world of the phosphor screen, the stars gleamed like bioluminescent plankton. You use a GoPro that’s attached to your vest to record everything when out in the field. Do your GoPro have infrared night vision, or do you need to rely on a different recording method when out at night?I don’t use the GoPro at night on the front line because the back screen emits a faint glow. Instead, I use my handheld dictaphone and narrate — in a whisper — what is happening. Herring and Rambo moved deliberately between the black silhouettes of trees, many of which had been splintered and contorted by artillery. I was looking at a tilled field to our left when a shimmering tail arced overhead, collided with another streaking light, and radiantly detonated. Herring said that it was a Russian missile intercepted by an anti-aircraft weapon.

We soon stopped advancing through the trees. While Rambo kneeled amid the deadwood, pulling security, Herring stepped out from under the canopy, draping a poncho over his head to hide the glow of his controller’s monitor. The drone’s four miniature rotors whirred into action, lifting it into the sky. Artillery whistled back and forth, over the field. After a while, I heard Herring curse.

“Jammers,” he told Rambo.

The Russians and the Ukrainians employ two main countermeasures against each other’s drones. One is a futuristic-looking contraption, fired like a rifle, whose transmissions force emergency landings. The other is a signal-jamming system that scrambles, over a broad zone, the satellite networks on which drones depend for navigation. Herring had run up against the latter, which had triggered an automatic response in his drone to race in the opposite direction, depleting its battery. He eventually retrieved it—correcting its course with small flicks of the joystick—and we returned to the air shaft. Although multi-rotor drones are relatively inexpensive, thermal ones are not, and Herring could not risk losing his.

Apart from their weapons, the foreigners had acquired much of their equipment on their own. Doc had bought helmets, scopes, binoculars, range finders, ear protection, ammo pouches, and other essential items for the team. Each night-vision device had cost thousands of dollars. T.Q. had traded a bottle of whiskey for American smoke grenades. Their two vehicles—a pickup truck and an S.U.V., both Nissans—had been donated but were forever breaking down, requiring parts and repairs.

Back at the command center, a soft-spoken Ukrainian officer told Rambo the brigade had received information that the Russians were preparing an attack. Rambo nodded, and then the officer turned to Herring. For a moment, they regarded each other uncertainly. At first blush, Herring could seem abrasive. His booming voice was seldom modulated, his sense of humor often lewd. I wondered what the officer thought about this brash American.

He had just one question, it turned out: “You will fight with us?”

“Of course,” Herring said.

The men clasped hands.

TRUST BETWEEN INTERNATIONAL VOLUNTEERS and the Ukrainian military was crucial yet precarious. Language was an obvious hurdle. When Doc first rotated to Donetsk, a Portuguese team member whose parents were Ukrainian would translate from Ukrainian to Portuguese, which a Brazilian member would translate to Spanish, which an American member would translate to English. Each link in that chain had since left the country. Turtle had persuaded a Ukrainian friend who spoke English to come to Donetsk, but he was a civilian, and so he mostly stayed at the house.

Another persistent obstacle was the fact that both Ukraine and the Legion were constantly losing and replacing men. The 72nd Mechanized Brigade had assumed control of the area in August. Before that, the foreigners had worked with another brigade, the 53rd, which had fully integrated them into its operations and had furnished them with coveted Javelins. On near-daily missions, the team had pushed forward Ukrainian positions, ambushed enemy tanks, and planted mines behind Russian lines.

The 72nd had shown less interest in collaboration. Before coming to Pavlivka, the brigade had been stationed in Bakhmut, another city in Donetsk, where an enormous number of soldiers had died, and even more had been wounded. Did they give you a specific number, or did you have to deduce the enormity of loss?The Ukrainian government is extremely secretive about casualty figures, and no specific numbers are known for either Bakhmut or for the war in general. However, NATO officials have said that about one Ukrainian was killed in Bakhmut for every five Russians, and at the time of this article General Mark Milley had stated that Russia had already suffered at least 100,000 casualties, a substantial portion of them in Bakhmut. Casualties include severely injured soldiers as well as fatalities, but these numbers offer a sense of the scale of Ukrainian losses. The trauma of Bakhmut had unnerved many of the survivors, and they now seemed wary of outsiders.

While the 72nd was settling in, Doc had gone on vacation, to the Spanish party island of Ibiza. Before his return, the team had undertaken to secure a tree line where, Herring’s drone surveillance indicated, Russian soldiers occupied a trench system. The foreigners left Pavlivka late in the evening. Although they had briefed the 72nd on their route, a Ukrainian unit opened fire on them as they approached. The team shot back. “We won, they didn’t,” Turtle told me.

While the Ukrainians evacuated their casualties, the team proceeded with its mission. Turtle and Tai established a machine-gun position in a field; everybody else continued on foot. T.Q. and Herring were there, as were four Americans, a Frenchman called Nick, and a third Kiwi, Dominic Abelen. The men followed a trench until they came upon a complex of dugouts and bunkers full of Russian troops—far more than they had anticipated. Most were asleep or just waking up. A frenzied close-quarters fight ensued. Using rifles and grenades, the team killed at least a dozen soldiers. Turtle and Tai, from across the field, assailed additional Russians with the machine gun. How did you verify this with members of the unit?I interviewed each team member individually about his experience of that day, and then cross-referenced the accounts. Later, a fact-checker did the same, by phone. Also, immediately after the firefight, the surviving team members had returned to the area and Herring had flown a drone over the trench. So they’d been able to see, in the video, some of the bodies.

As the sun rose, and the foreigners lost the advantage of their night vision, they became overwhelmed. Abelen was shot in the head while attempting to withdraw from the trench. He died instantly. One of the Americans, a twenty-four-year-old Army veteran named Joshua Jones, was wounded in the thigh. A bullet pierced Nick’s hindside. Another American, a former marine who went by Saint, was struck in his elbow and foot.

Jones, bleeding profusely, screamed for help. But Russian mortars had begun to zero in on the machine-gun position, and any effort to retrieve him or Abelen would have been suicidal. This reconstructed scene is so vivid. Was it based solely on what Turtle told you, or were you able to talk to others about it as well?I talked to everyone involved extensively, including Saint, whom I later visited in Kyiv, where he was still recovering from his wounds in a Ukrainian military hospital. In early drafts I described Saint’s evacuation, by helicopter and train, from the Donbas to the capital, but I ended up cutting that section so as not to distract from the principal characters. The team retreated, linked up with Turtle and Tai, and delivered Nick and Saint to a hospital. A round had smashed into Turtle’s chest plate, and Herring found a bullet hole in the crotch of his pants. That afternoon, they attempted to return to the trench, but heavy shelling forced them back. When Herring flew a drone over the scene, the bodies were still there. Two days later, the Russians had collected them.

The debacle had further strained the team’s rapport with the 72nd. No Ukrainians had died in the exchange of friendly fire, and Turtle didn’t know how many had been injured, but he allowed, “That might be why some people don’t like us in this area anymore.” The leeriness was mutual. Members of the brigade’s reconnaissance company—with which the team was supposed to coördinate—had followed the foreigners partway through the tree line, and had agreed to provide additional backup if anything went wrong. Yet none of the Ukrainians had joined the battle with the Russians. (One of them later told me that their radio had malfunctioned and they had not heard the team’s call for help.)

“There’s always gonna be some soreness there,” Turtle said. While other Legion members were less restrained about their frustration, Turtle hewed to a philosophical detachment that I came to appreciate as central to his efficacy as a soldier. “Until then, we’d been lucky,” he told me. “And our luck ran out that night.” He was most concerned about the fallout within his team. After Jones and Abelen were killed, fear and trepidation had crept in, eroding the unit’s esprit de corps. Shaking his head at the memory, Turtle said of the trench, “I don’t know if we ever got out of that thing.” The more I read this line, the more it seems to be the very heart of the story — or rather, the big story behind the narrative: that perhaps no one who’s ever experienced combat like this ever leaves the war. This is also where the title of the story — "Trapped in the Trenches" — takes on a deeper meaning. When did you decide to use this sentence in your story? And why use it here rather than, say, in the lede?I think I knew that I’d use the quote as soon as Turtle said it. But it wouldn’t have worked in the lede because you have to know about Abelen’s death for the line to land. As for the resonance with the title, I can’t take any credit for that. I’m terrible at titles. My editor, Daniel Zalewski, always does that at the end of the process, and he’s a master at it.

THE ACTING COMMANDER of the Ukrainian reconnaissance company, code-named Grek, was a thirty-year-old historian who had written a doctoral thesis on ancient Thebes. He and his men (with the exception of Rambo’s group) were stationed in another house in town, a short drive away. As an undergraduate at Kyiv University, in 2012 and 2013, Grek had spent one day a week attending a reserve-officer-training-corps program. At the time, a year of military service was mandatory in Ukraine, and many young academics opted to earn their commissions rather than be conscripted. When Putin launched his campaign to take Kyiv, Grek was assigned to the reconnaissance company, which was then commanded by an experienced older officer. After the ferocious combat in Bakhmut, the unit was reduced from a hundred and twenty-eight men to eighty-two. Grek and his superior both suffered concussions in an artillery strike, and the latter never fully recovered; shortly after Grek was released from the hospital, he was temporarily put in charge of the company. A month later, when the 72nd rotated to Pavlivka, another experienced officer was sent to relieve Grek. But the day after the officer arrived he was fatally wounded by a Russian shell.

When I noted the irony of Grek’s becoming an officer to avoid military service, only to end up a frontline commander, he said, “Times change, people change.” Nevertheless, he retained the languid demeanor of a scholar. His posture was hunched, his expression one of aloof amusement. “I’m not a professional soldier,” he told me more than once.

Two days after Herring’s drone mission, Turtle and Grek visited the same tree line. Turtle wanted to create new positions there, deeper into the gray zone, which would offer better angles for fire support during the impending operation. Grek was unconvinced that the benefit warranted the risk, and they had agreed to take a look, together, at the forwardmost trench.

On our way to the coal mine, Grek asked Turtle, “You stay the winter?”

Turtle laughed. “Yeah, that’s when all the fun happens.” Why did you choose to use “laughed” here, rather than the quieter and more invisible “said”?I guess I thought that without describing him laughing it could misread as posturing or bravado. It was still sort of that, of course, but in a light and humorous way that was characteristic of Turtle.

“Crazy man. I’ll probably go to New Zealand.”

“We’ll change passports—you go to New Zealand, I’ll stay here.”

We switched to a four-wheel-drive truck at the mine, and Turtle and I rode in the bed as it followed muddy tracks past the air shaft with the command center. When the truck could go no farther, we walked. Rain made the ground a slippery morass. After a while, we reached a Ukrainian encampment with a few soldiers, hand-dug foxholes, and a fire pit under camouflage netting. Grek was talking to an infantryman with gray stubble and glasses when a shell crashed in the fields. We took cover in a shallow bunker reinforced with logs and scrap lumber. A rusty pot sat over dead coals; an archaic telephone was connected to a wire that ran back to the air shaft. The bespectacled man introduced himself as Grandpa. He was a fifty-four-year-old farmer who had not left the encampment for two and a half months.

When the artillery subsided, Grek and Turtle resumed moving up the tree line. The path dropped into a narrow trench, and, after slogging through ankle-deep water for ten minutes or so, we arrived at the terminus. A middle-aged soldier was posted there; as he and Grek spoke in Ukrainian, Turtle filmed them with a GoPro mounted on his helmet. (Later, at the house, his friend would translate the exchange for him.)

“Everything beyond here is mined and booby-trapped with trip wires,” the soldier warned Grek. “Some of our guys were already blown up.”

“We’ll go with de-miners,” Grek said.

“They already tried. That’s who was blown up.” This is such a powerful exchange, and so surreal, as though straight from a movie (are as so many of your other dialogues). Was this originally in Ukrainian? If so, who translated this for you? How does The New Yorker fact-check translated dialogue lines?The exchange was in Ukrainian, yes, and I filmed it on my GoPro. As soon as I return home from assignments in Ukraine, I spend a week or so sitting with an interpreter, translating and transcribing all of my video and audio files. The interpreter watches the videos on a laptop and translates out loud while I type the dialogue into a Word document on a separate computer. Sometimes we listen to or watch the same exchange half a dozen times or more. For most assignments, I end up with around a hundred pages of transcripts to work with. When I’ve finished a draft, I upload all of my video, audio and photos to a DropBox folder that the fact-checkers can access. The New Yorker has superb Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking fact-checkers, and they are usually able to corroborate every line of dialogue and description of action with either a video or audio recording (in addition to speaking with the all of the subjects by phone).

There were other dangers: the tree line narrowed and thinned significantly, offering scant protection, and it sloped into a defilade, ceding the high ground to Russian snipers. “It’s not a good idea to go down there,” the soldier said. “I’m telling you like it is.”

“A lot of mines,” Grek said, in English.

Turtle shrugged. “We’re going. That’s just happening.”

On our way back, we stopped at another Ukrainian encampment, where a soldier with a digital tablet pulled up drone images and provided a detailed overview of the proximate Russian positions, their likely directions of attack, and how to defend against them.

“You’re the commander of this zone?” Grek asked.

“Me?” the soldier said. “I’m just a dancer.” Who translated this exchange for you? When did you realize you absolutely had to use it in this story?Grek spoke good English and translated for both Turtle and me when we were in the trenches. After this exchange with Vitaliy, he turned to us and exclaimed, “This guy is a dancer!” I was recording with my GoPro, and I knew that later I would go back and find and translate the exchange so that I could make a scene with the two of them interacting with each other, as opposed to Grek talking directly to me.

His name was Vitaliy, and before the war he’d belonged to a Ukrainian folk-dance ensemble.

Many of the professional soldiers in the 72nd had been killed or injured in Bakhmut. Conscripts had replenished the ranks. Some had attended a three-week basic infantry course in the U.K., with instructors from across Europe, but most had received only minimal training before being given Kalashnikovs and dispatched to the front. I had watched Turtle and the team train several dozen Ukrainians in close-quarters battle, or C.Q.B., a foundational doctrine among Western militaries for urban combat: how to enter rooms, move as a squad, shoot from windows. The Ukrainians were unaccustomed to handling rifles or wearing body armor, and, when Turtle asked if any of them were familiar with C.Q.B., only one raised his hand.

At the same time, the team had learned from the Ukrainians, especially when it came to the historical anachronism of trench warfare. Once, while the foreigners were visiting a trench that came under heavy bombardment, they had scrambled into a foxhole that was eight feet deep, in an L shape, with stairs and a roof of felled timber. For the next five hours, as Russian tank rounds and mortars burst around them, they had shared the shelter with an older infantryman who had been fighting in the Donbas since 2014. T.Q., the German who’d served in the French Foreign Legion, told me, “If he hadn’t had the experience and taken the time to dig out that position—with enough space not only for himself but also for other people—we would have had casualties.”

Staying alive in a Ukrainian trench requires a daunting combination of stamina, vigilance, and luck. The daily misery induces a mental fatigue that dulls alertness and subverts morale. But even the most disciplined soldier, with the most elaborate foxhole, can fall victim to a well-aimed munition, and the menace of sudden death plagues every Ukrainian infantryman charged with the imperative, terrible job of holding the line.

Before we left the encampment where Vitaliy, the dancer, was stationed, I gave him my card. He later texted me a photo of himself onstage, brandishing a sword in Cossack garb. It was an image, in more ways than one, of another world and another time. When I checked in on Vitaliy a few weeks later, he was in the hospital: a tank round had landed in his dugout, wounding him and killing a comrade. This is such a perfectly crafted paragraph, with a small, perfect narrative arc inside it. How far into the process of writing this story did you compose it? And why did you add it precisely here?The article focusses on the specialized reconnaissance work that the International team with which I was embedded performed. That is distinct from the daily grind of regular infantrymen who live in the trenches full-time. I knew that I needed to address this feature of the war, and that I should structure the passage around one of the individual infantrymen I had met. It could have been any of them. Every soldier on every front line in every war is fascinating. I chose Vitaliy after he was injured.

I expressed my condolences, and Vitaliy replied, “Yes, but this is war.” He planned to return to the front as soon as possible.

WHEN TURTLE AND I GOT BACK to the house, there was news. The remains of Joshua Jones had been recovered, as part of a prisoner exchange in the southern region of Zaporizhzhia. CNN had aired footage of the handover which showed Ukrainian forensic investigators, in biohazard suits, carrying a body bag and a white flag away from a group of Russian soldiers. The U.S. State Department had announced that Jones would “soon be returned” to his home town, in Tennessee.

The team’s reaction was subdued, which confused me. When I retired to the basement, I found Tai, the former New Zealand Defense Force member, lying on his mat with one of the cats purring on his chest. Since I had arrived, Tai had been the hardest team member to draw out. The twenty-nine-year-old son of Chinese immigrants, he was sleeved in tattoos that included, on his right hand, a five-petal orchid—the symbol of his family’s native Hong Kong. “Tai” was a facetious reference to Taiwan, which many volunteers believed would be attacked by an emboldened China unless Russia was humiliated in Ukraine. The reason behind Tai’s name is so layered and powerful, including in relation to what has been happening in Hong Kong for the last few years. When did you find out about what his name meant, and did you learn that from him directly, or from someone else? What did it take for you to draw Tai out in the end?Tai also slept in the basement. Living in a basement with people affords a lot of opportunities for conversation. With Tai, it took a little more time than with the others, because he was shy and introverted by nature, but after the first week he started to open up.

After some stilted small talk, I brought up Jones, and asked Tai whether he felt any sense of closure.

“I’m concerned about my mate,” Tai said. He meant Dominic Abelen, whose body remained in Russian custody. Tai had known Abelen since 2017, when they served together in Iraq. After Tai and Turtle joined the International Legion, in August, Abelen requested that the G.U.R. assign them to Donetsk.

The two Kiwis both spoke of Abelen with reverence, describing him as an expert soldier whose courage and enthusiasm had been a reliable source of inspiration for his comrades. Before the unit had left the house on Abelen’s final mission, he’d given Turtle the black tag, marked “dead,” that I’d noticed in Turtle’s room. It was a digital I.D. that New Zealanders carry with them on deployments. You come back to the black tag here, 10 pages after you first mention it. Why did you mention Abelen here, rather than on Page 6 in passing?I decided to explain the story behind the tag at this point because this is where I flesh out Tai as a character, and my impression was that Abelen’s death impacted him at least as much as it did Turtle, perhaps more so, which I needed to show. Given that I explain all of that here, mentioning Abelen in passing on Page 6 would have created a redundancy. “You’ll need that,” Abelen had joked. Turtle talked a lot about his own death. Sometimes jokingly, sometimes not. He told me several times that he did not expect to make it out of Ukraine alive. The fonder I became of him, the more these comments disturbed me. I don’t think that he was suicidally reckless. He just had a realistic understanding of how dangerous that place was and how risky his job was, and he’d made peace with it. The probability game of artillery in Ukraine is such that you have very limited control over what happens to you, and anyone who spends enough time on the real front eventually ends up, out of necessity, embracing a kind of morbid fatalism. Still, Turtle’s preoccupation with his mortality was something else. So, obviously when he was killed, the “DEAD” tag and all those remarks of his felt, in retrospect, a bit portentous, as if he’d had a premonition. All of that seems to be in the story already, though, which is a bit upsetting. But no, I wouldn’t change it.

After Abelen was killed, Tai had informed the G.U.R. that he was going home. He spent a week in a hotel in Kyiv and bought a bus ticket to Poland. The morning that he was to leave, however, he returned to Donetsk. He’d joined the Legion to escape his “mundane and boring” life in New Zealand, he told me, where he’d worked as a mail carrier since being discharged from the Army. In the end, the prospect of resuming that existence had been more intimidating than staying in Ukraine. “I knew that, as soon as I got home, there’s nothing there I’d rather do,” he said. “So I came back.”

The contract that international fighters sign with the government in Kyiv makes them Ukrainian soldiers and grants them the same benefits accorded to local troops: medical care, a base salary of about twelve hundred dollars a month (with additional pay for hazardous duty), and legal-combatant status under the Geneva Conventions (though Russia considers them mercenaries ineligible for prisoner-of-war status). The critical difference is that foreigners are free to leave when they want. They can also refuse to carry out specific requests or tasks. Everything they do is voluntary.

To a civilian, this may sound appealing. But any service member knows that such an arrangement not only contradicts the basic premise on which functioning militaries are built; it also imposes an oppressive burden on individual soldiers. On our way to Donetsk, Doc had explained to me, “In the Marines, it didn’t matter what shit you threw at us,” because disobeying orders was never an option. He attributed the Legion’s high attrition rate to the stress of having to constantly choose whether to participate in risky missions: “It’s a cumulative effect. It stacks up in your mind.”

Similarly, whereas Doc’s tours in Iraq and Afghanistan had scheduled end dates, Legion members must decide for themselves when to stop fighting. The fact that Ukrainians like Rambo and Grek lack such agency makes quitting all the more fraught. Doc agreed with President Zelensky’s assertion that the war was about much more than just Ukraine—that no less than the future of democracy might be governed by its outcome. “And this is the problem,” he told me. “Because how am I different from these Ukrainian soldiers, then, if I believe that?”

FIVE DAYS AFTER the soft-spoken officer at the air shaft warned Herring and Rambo of a looming attack, Russian forces mounted a multi-pronged armored offensive. From the house, we could hear a major spike in artillery, cluster bombs, and tank fire. Ukrainian helicopters shuttled overhead. Rockets dragged contrails across the sky. Turtle received word that the Ukrainians in the trenches we had visited—where I’d met Grandpa and Vitaliy—had destroyed two tanks, using shoulder-fired weapons. A larger Russian contingent, however, had captured a southern neighborhood of Pavlivka.

Turtle gathered the team outside. “It might be a day where nothing happens, it might be a day where everything happens,” he said. Then he turned to Doc. “Are you in this?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Doc said.

Grek, the reconnaissance-company commander, advised the team to report to the battalion headquarters in Vuhledar, the next Ukrainian-held town after Pavlivka. The foreigners left in their two Nissans, while Rambo and his men followed in a Hyundai that a network of friends and relatives had bought for them. The main route was exposed to Russian tanks, so we had to travel off-road. Rockets were clobbering Vuhledar. We parked outside an apartment tower, and the men hustled into the stairwell. Turtle and Rambo went to find the headquarters.

There was no electricity, heat, or working plumbing in Vuhledar, and the only remaining tenant in the building appeared to be a middle-aged woman in a shabby coat and a tracksuit, named Lena. Alcohol seemed to have enhanced her delight at having guests.

“Where do you want to go?” she asked. “I can tell you the way. I’ve lived here since I was two.” Herring gave her a cigarette, and Lena gestured for him to light it. “I’m a lady,” she said. This is such a lovely moment of spontaneous joy in an otherwise heavy scene. Why did you add this here, amid all the other moments of dread, violence, or trauma? Did you want to write more about Lena?War is full of such moments, and I wanted a scene that reflected that. I also wanted to show that there were civilians living in this frontline city, as there are in every frontline city in Ukraine. Lena was an amazing character, but my previous article had focused entirely on the civilian population in the besieged city of Lysychansk, so I couldn’t dedicate too much space to the theme, for fear of self-plagiarizing.

An extended salvo shook the building. One shell screamed into a playground across the street, throwing up a splash of flame and dirt. Shrapnel tinked against the concrete walls.

“Well, they found our vehicles,” Herring said.

When Turtle and Rambo reappeared, they informed the team that the battalion commander wanted them to remain in Vuhledar on standby. It was the same story the next day, and the next: driving to Lena’s building and waiting in her stairwell, only to be sent home. By the third night, the team was bitterly demoralized. I found Rambo and Turtle in the kitchen, sharing a bottle of whiskey. You use adverbs sparingly throughout, but also don’t shy from using them on occasion to make an image stronger. Why did you add “bitterly” to “demoralized”?Looking at it now, I probably could have cut it.“Three days, we just suck fucking Chupa Chups,” Rambo said.

“We’re trying to make something happen,” Turtle replied.

Soldiers in other companies had been sending Rambo videos of dramatic firefights and attacks on Russian tanks. “They kill a lot of guys in this time we sit in fucking Vuhledar,” he lamented. Why did you use “lamented” here instead of “said”?I wanted to make clear that he was complaining. Sometimes a more descriptive verb is needed to prevent ambiguity. If I’d just used “said” here, it could have been misread as Rambo celebrating the fact that his comrades had killed a lot of Russians.

“We’re stuck,” Turtle agreed. “But we can get out of it.”

The next day, he drove to Vuhledar with only his friend who served as an interpreter. Returning to the house, Turtle summoned Rambo’s men and his. “We have a mission,” he told them.

THE 72nd HAD ASSESSED that six hundred enemy troops and thirty armored vehicles had entered Pavlivka. The village was divided between Russian forces in the southern neighborhoods and Ukrainian forces in the northern ones, though the fronts were fluid and ambiguous. The center of the village could be accessed by a tree line from the east, and the brigade wanted the foreigners to see if it was possible to traverse its length, or how far they could go before encountering Russian positions.

On a whiteboard in the living room, Turtle drew a map. The team would travel by vehicle to a collection of summer cottages, or dachas, across a river from Pavlivka. You don’t really refer to any other Ukrainian cultural term but for dachas. Why did you choose to use “dachas” instead of “cottages” starting there?I use the word “dacha” multiple times in the following section, so it was necessary to define it here. I chose to keep “dacha” because I wanted a single noun (rather than, say, “vacation home” or “small house”) in the later action sequences, and “cottage” conjures specific associations for many Americans that were incongruous with the scene. But you’re right that it’s an exception. Sometimes when anglophone correspondents preserve the local language for certain words it feels to me as if they’re trying to inject a kind of exoticism into the text (for instance, when white Americans write “daesh” instead of “ISIS”). I think the only time you should do that is when there is no direct translation, or when the translation reads so awkwardly that it becomes a distraction. “Dacha” is one example; another, in Ukraine, is “babushka.” In most English versions of Russian novels that I’ve read, the translators tend to keep these words in Russian as well. Once it was dark, Turtle, Doc, T.Q., Rambo, and another Ukrainian would depart from there on foot, pass over a bridge, and enter the tree line. Herring would remain in one of the dachas to provide real-time intelligence from his drone, identifying any Russian soldiers, tanks, or artillery that might attack the team. If all went well, they’d be home before dawn.

Tai’s name did not appear on the whiteboard. When the others visited a firing range to rehearse their movements and practice shooting with night vision and thermal optics, he didn’t participate. “Tai’s out,” Turtle told me. There was no animus in his voice, and indeed the team seemed to be going out of its way to reassure Tai.

I rode back from the range with Doc. During the rehearsal, he’d been the point man, a dangerous and demanding responsibility when navigating hostile, unfamiliar terrain littered with mines. “It’s not what I came here to do, but it’s what needs to be done,” Doc said. When he joined the Legion, he’d assumed that the Ukrainians would use him in an engineering or communications role. It wasn’t just that he had worked at Google. His tours in Iraq and Afghanistan had taken a toll on his body, and in 2021 he had broken both knees and fractured a vertebra during a paramotor accident in the Hudson Valley. “I thought I was too old and too broke to fight,” he said. Nonetheless, he hadn’t protested when the G.U.R. recruited him for the reconnaissance team. Knowing little about such techniques, he’d scoured the Internet for manuals and studied them on his phone. Still, he was not a natural—not like Dominic Abelen, who’d been the point man on every mission until he was killed. “He was so careful,” Doc said. “You want someone who’s obsessive to a fault.” Combat was fast and frenetic, reconnaissance painstaking and slow. You took a few steps, then stopped and listened. You had to diligently suppress a powerful instinct, amplified by adrenaline and nerves, to speed up. “That’s not me,” Doc said.

When we’d met in Kyiv, he’d been working on pivoting from frontline operations to safer projects, such as fund-raising. “But, at the end of the day, I’m still a soldier,” he said. In any war, the abstract or ideological reasons that lead someone to take up arms often dissolve in the highly personal crucible of combat, which produces its own logic. A desire for revenge can take hold, or a need for redemption, or an addiction to risk. Doc seemed to be contending with a sense of guilt. “The most shit I’ve ever felt about anything in this war,” he’d told me, was being absent when Abelen and Jones were killed. “When two of your guys die and you’re sitting on a beach in Ibiza . . .” He’d trailed off, grimacing.

THE TEAM LEFT THE HOUSE the following afternoon. A photographer and I rode in the Hyundai with Herring and a Ukrainian soldier called Pan. You don’t mention the photographer by name. Why not?The photographer, David Guttenfelder, is phenomenal. But he’s not a character in the story. He doesn’t have any lines. Everyone I name talks at least once. Anyway, that’s the rule I try to follow. Given that precedent, naming David would have created a false expectation for the reader. On the way, Herring stuck his hand in a pocket and brought out a yellow rubber duck. In March, he said, he’d distributed clothing to displaced civilians arriving at the train station in Kyiv. He’d given a jacket to a young boy, who reciprocated with the duck. The boy explained that it had helped him survive the siege of Mariupol. “He said that it would keep me safe,” Herring said, his jokey façade falling away. Why did you decide to add this detail at the end?In my early drafts, I dialed in on this a bit more, because I thought that it revealed something important about Herring. Originally I had the following sentence after Herring’s quote: “There was no trace of his characteristic irony or blitheness, which only confirmed that these were mere façades for a deeply sincere person prepared to risk his life for a cause that he believed in.” It got condensed during the editing process.

We joined the rest of the team in an abandoned dacha riddled with holes. Other soldiers from the 72nd were also staging there, preparing to enter Pavlivka with about a dozen anti-tank weapons. Artillery was landing close; we could hear the clatter of small arms not far off. In a disarrayed living room, Doc tried to lighten the mood, speculating about the calibre of the projectiles outside.

“You all right, man?” Doc asked him in the dacha.

T.Q. shrugged.

THE NIGHT BEFORE, Doc had told me, “If we do our job correctly, they’ll never know we were there.” He’d then qualified the assurance. The trees were almost bare, the roads carpeted with leaves. An Orlan, the Russian fixed-wing drone, would have “perfect observation.” Ultimately, Doc said, it was “a game of chance.”

More and more members of the 72nd were congregating at the dacha, and Herring and Pan, the Ukrainian soldier, decided to station themselves elsewhere. As the photographer and I followed them, along a dirt lane dotted with small homes, all of which had been partially demolished, something whistled toward us—loud and fast. We dove into the mud, then got up and ran. You don’t use “we” very often in this story. Why the shift (beyond the sudden danger you were in)?I think this gets back to your initial question about when do you include yourself as a presence in the narrative. For me, it’s just a matter of making the scene as clear and easy to follow as possible. If I had written, “Herring and Pan dove into the mud,” some readers might have understood that to imply that the photographer and I did not dive into the mud, which would have raised the question of what we did do, which, if left unanswered, would have lingered and kind of dragged on the flow of the sequence. Arriving at a larger, gated property, we entered a foyer, and as Herring shut the door behind us another shell slammed to earth, blasting shrapnel against the walls.

The foyer was full of glass and debris. Floral-patterned drapes hung over a shattered window. A door leading to the next room was barricaded shut by rubble on the other side. I was relieved to see a hole in the floor with a wooden ladder descending to a root cellar. This is one of the only moments in this story where you show your readers what you’re feeling. Why do you decide to use this particular word — “relieved” — here, and why did you choose to show your own fear to your readers?I wanted to convey a very specific sensation that close artillery instills: the physical desire to get underground. I also thought that describing my relief at getting underground would help highlight the courage that Herring and Pan demonstrated by remaining aboveground. When the photographer and I climbed down, we found that the shelter was too shallow to stand in.

The rest of the team, still at the original dacha, waited for night to fall. Then Turtle radioed that they were heading out. He had substituted himself for Doc as the point man, and had secured a member of the 72nd to guide them around Ukrainian mines.

Herring went into the yard of the gated property, draped a blanket over his head, and launched the drone. Soon, a renewed barrage pounded the neighborhood. The photographer and I hunkered down in the root cellar. After one incoming strike, I could hear Pan, in the foyer, shout, “Herring O.K.?” It seemed insane to me that Herring was still outside. Only after a giant explosion brought chunks of ceiling crashing into the foyer did he and Pan join us under the floor.

“That’s the closest it’s ever come to hitting me,” Herring marvelled. He’d managed to land the drone in the yard, but had sprinted inside before he could retrieve it. He’d also lost his radio. Borrowing Pan’s, Herring said, “Turtle, this is Herring.”

There was a long pause. Then: “This is Doc. Be advised, we’re taking fire.” As soon as the team had crossed the bridge, Ukrainian troops in a dugout on the Pavlivka side of the river had warned them that an Orlan had spotted them. The team had decided to continue the mission but had quickly become pinned down.

“Roger that, Doc,” Herring said. “We’re taking near-direct hits on this house. I had a good visual on you guys. I just landed.”

“Roger. We’re taking what seems like tank fire. Over.”

“Roger that. About the same story here. I got a good scan of that tree line. I saw zero, I repeat zero, signatures along it.”

Doc asked Herring to locate the Russian tank. “It’s coming about ten degrees from the left,” he said.

“I gotta wait for this to subside to run out and grab the drone,” Herring told him.

Another strike near the house made Doc’s response inaudible.

“I gotta get that drone,” Herring said. If he could pinpoint the location of the tank, Rambo could transmit its coördinates to the 72nd Brigade, which could neutralize it with artillery.

It was pitch-black in the cellar. Even when three of us sat with our knees drawn up, the fourth person could fit only by standing next to the ladder. In the claustrophobic space, I could feel Herring debating what to do. He was lighting a cigarette when a loud whooshing noise, like a cascade of water, roared toward us. “Down!” Herring barked, though there was nowhere farther down to go. I bowed my head and pressed my palms into the dirt floor, which quaked as three successive impacts left a ringing in my ears.

“Fucking dildos,” Herring said.

It was unclear whether we, too, were being deliberately targeted. I had recently interviewed an American who was teaching Ukrainians in the south to identify Russian drone pilots by tracing the signal of their controllers. But Herring said that this method worked only on a Chinese brand of drones favored by the Russians; his drone was made by a different company and not susceptible to such tracking.

“I think they’re just hitting the whole area,” he surmised.

The next blast was the biggest yet. Above us, wood and plaster broke and tumbled down; the windows of other houses burst.

“We’ll be all right, boys,” Herring said. He sparked his lighter and held the flame under his face to show us that he was smiling. At first, I was annoyed by what seemed like a juvenile display of bravado. Then I realized that Herring was trying to put the photographer and me at ease. “I feel safe!” he said, as half a dozen more shells detonated outside. This is the only time in the story where you share any judgment of any of your characters. Why did you choose to share this with your readers? And why did you then explain that you were wrong in your judgment?I felt like some readers would likely make the same judgement if I presented the quotes alone, without any interpretation, and I wanted to preempt that.

Doc came over the radio. The Russian tank was homing in on them. He said of the rounds, “They’re walking up the tree line. The next one will likely be on us. So please try to find it.”

“We’re getting stuffed up here pretty good right now,” Herring told him. When Doc didn’t answer, Herring said again, “I gotta get that drone.” Another munition rocked the house. Somewhere, a machine gun had begun to fire. I urged Herring not to go outside. This last line moves, for a moment, your reporting from immersive to participatory. Why did you choose to add this line here?This was less a narrative choice about how to frame the scene than it was a reflection of a choice that I made during the scene, while it was happening. Typically, I would not interject suggestions or advice in the middle of combat, or impose myself in any way. But this was an unusual situation. The photographer and I were the only other English speakers with Herring and these kinds of risk-assessment decisions under extreme pressure — for instance, do I move from my position or hunker down? — are difficult to make by yourself. It’s helpful to consult with at least one other person. So I felt obliged to share with Herring my conviction that going outside at that moment was a bad idea. I also worried about the possibility that Herring might feel tempted to act more daringly than he would have if I wasn’t there recording him. In any event, when you’re stuck in a coffin-size root cellar with someone under a relentless artillery bombardment, you are a participant, whether you like it or not. Eliding that reality in the text would have felt more artificial and mannered than acknowledging it.

“Yeah, but they need me,” he said. “Like, if I don’t do this . . .” He picked up the radio. “Doc, this is Herring.”

No answer. A few seconds later, thirteen rockets, some landing almost simultaneously, caused more of the house to crumble.

“Fuck!” Herring said.

Finally, Turtle came over the radio. “How much luck have you had with the flying?” he asked. “Are you finding out where the issue is?”

“Every time I try to get up out of this basement, we’re taking rounds pretty much right on top of this house,” Herring told him.

Turtle seemed not to have heard. “We are under pretty heavy shelling,” he said. “Try and find where it’s coming from. I know it’s a hard ask, but if you can it would be good for our counter-battery.”

“Roger that, Turtle. I’m trying.”

“Do your best, mate.”

During a brief lull in the high-pitched whizzing and booming thunderclaps of tank rounds, rockets, and artillery, Herring muttered, as much to himself as to anyone, “All right. I’m gonna get real low, crawl through the house, and make a mad dash for the drone, I guess.” Going up the ladder, he added, “If something happens, don’t come outside. I’ll find my way in.”

The drone was where he’d left it, apparently intact. Herring got it in the air, but before he could spot the tank the camera came loose, rendering it inoperative. Guided only by a digital map on the controller and by the sound of the rotors, he brought the drone back to the yard. When he returned to the house, he discovered that the drone’s camera mount had been damaged in one of the blasts.

“She’s fucked,” he said.

I climbed into the foyer. A fresh layer of debris was strewn across the floor, and when I looked up I saw that all the laths on the ceiling were exposed. On the controller, Herring showed me thermal footage of the team: each man a small black speck in the long gray tree line. They still had a ways to go, and now there was nothing for us to do but wait.

Forty-five minutes later, Doc informed Herring that they were returning to the dacha. It was too soon for them to have completed the mission, and Herring fretted that someone might have stepped on a mine. This wasn’t the case, though: the bombardment had convinced them that the Russians were tracking them, and Turtle had decided to abort.

When we ran back to the Hyundai, we found that its rear window had been blown out. Rambo arrived at the same time as us. It was 10:30 p.m. Headlights would have been like beacons for the Russians, so Herring covered the dashboard with a tarp and Rambo drove through the dark using his night-vision device. The others followed in the pickup. As Rambo turned into a rutted black field, Herring asked if everyone was O.K.

“We’re alive,” Rambo said.

AT THE HOUSE, Doc looked like a different person. His eyes were bright and tense, his face smeared with sweat and grime. Even his speech was unnaturally animated. He emanated a kind of physical energy that, in another context, might have suggested mania or narcotics. “It’s endorphins,” Doc said.

Turtle told me that he’d been “one hundred per cent” certain that they were going to die. I talked to him more about this the next day. Throughout my two weeks with the team, I’d been struck by what seemed to be a fatalistic anticipation of his own death. The “dead” tag that Dominic Abelen had given him was just one example. Turtle regularly made comments such as “When it’s your time, it’s your time,” “I wake up every morning ready to see the big guy in the sky,” and “I’ve had a good life, I can die happy.” When I asked him to relate his mind-set in the tree line, he said, “There was not a thought of regret. I was, like, It’s been a great ride. No tears. It was just acceptance. Like, Wow, here I am.”

He’d once told me that many volunteers who quit the Legion did so because they hadn’t been honest with themselves about their reasons for coming to Ukraine. “Because when you get here your reason will be tested,” Turtle said. “And if it’s something weak, something that’s not real, you’re going to find out.” He was dubious of foreigners who claimed to want to help Ukraine. Turtle wanted to help, too, of course, but that impulse was not enough; it might get you to the front, but it wouldn’t keep you there.

I asked what was keeping him there.

“In the end, it’s just that I love this shit,” he said. “And maybe I can’t escape that—maybe that’s the way it’s always gonna be.”

The photographer and I left for Kyiv the next morning. Tai came with us. So did Doc, who was flying to New York to attend a Veterans Day gala, where he hoped to solicit donations. Herring also caught a ride. He had a girlfriend in Bucha, whom he’d met on a dating app, and he was due for a visit. T.Q. was staying—but not for long. In his logical fashion, he had concluded that he could be more of an asset to the team if he spoke Ukrainian, and, given his linguistic aptitude—he was fluent in German, English, and French—he’d decided to take classes in Kyiv.

We were loading up our bags when Rambo received a call from Grek. A Russian armored unit was pushing on another tree line near the coal mine, and the infantry troops there needed backup. As we left the house, Rambo, Pan, and Turtle were donning their gear. That night, while I was in Kyiv, Turtle texted me a GoPro video: the three of them bounding through a cratered field, emptying their magazines, bullets zinging past them, a shell sending up a shower of dirt. When I called him, he said that they had been forced to pull back from the tree line but that no one had been hurt.

I asked if they would be returning.

“I fucking hope so, mate,” Turtle said. Who is the main character in your story? The more I read it, the more I make the main character to be Turtle, rather than Doc, especially because of this exchange you had with him here when you were already back in Kyiv. Is there a main character in this story?I don’t know that there’s a main character. War stories, especially stories about soldiers and the military combatants, not civilians — rarely center on individuals. Combat is conducted by groups. What is interesting is how the various members of the group interact with one another and the relationships that they form.

THREE DAYS LATER. members of a Russian brigade that was leading the Pavlivka offensive published a letter alleging that about three hundred of their troops had been killed, wounded, or captured, and that half their armored vehicles had been destroyed. In an unprecedented public rebuke, the brigade members called the decision to invade Pavlivka “incomprehensible,” denouncing their commanders for treating them like “meat.” Despite the uproar over casualties, Russia plowed ahead with its offensive, and the 72nd Brigade eventually withdrew from the village. The defeat marked the largest loss of territory for Ukraine since the summer. Russian shelling of Vuhledar has subsequently intensified, imperilling it as well. Now that the trees in Donetsk are without leaves, it is unlikely that the Ukrainians will be able to reoccupy any of their surrendered trenches before the spring. Although Ukrainian forces recently liberated Kherson, a major port city on the Black Sea, the trench and artillery warfare being waged in the Donbas shows no sign of relenting. The grinding stalemate in Bakhmut continues to inflict a horrific toll on both sides, with little ground lost or won.

On November 10th, General Mark Milley, the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, estimated that Russia and Ukraine had each sustained “well over” a hundred thousand casualties since February—a staggering number, if true. The International Legion declines to say how many foreigners have been killed or wounded. After the prisoner exchange in Zaporizhzhia, the Ukrainian government announced that it was holding Joshua Jones’s remains as part of a war-crimes investigation. Jones’s father, Jeff, a U.S. Army veteran of the Gulf War and a retired police officer, told me that he had identified his son in a photograph, and that the corpse had been “charred.” He was awaiting the results of an autopsy that would indicate whether Jones had been alive when his body was burned. Jeff said that he had spoken to Joshua on the phone in the weeks before his death, and that “he seemed content over there, like he finally found his place in the world.”

A few days after I spoke with Turtle, Rambo sent me a video of himself with a bandage over his face and his right hand bundled in a splint. The Hyundai had come under fire near the coal mine, sending him careering into a ditch. A couple of weeks later, Herring was riding in a truck through the dachas when a shell landed in the road. When he regained consciousness, the truck was on its side and wrapped around a tree. Herring climbed through a shattered window but lacked the strength to stand. The next time he woke up, a Ukrainian was slapping him in the face and he could hear muffled explosions. He was evacuated to a hospital in Dnipro, where he was told that he had four broken ribs and a punctured lung. His face and torso were covered with lacerations. When he called me from his room, which he was sharing with multiple wounded Ukrainians, he credited his rubber duck with having saved his life. “Either the duck or my helmet,” Herring quipped.

Tai, the Kiwi who quit the Legion, did not have a change of heart this time. His only regret, he told me, was leaving Ukraine without Dominic Abelen’s body, which he had hoped to escort to New Zealand. That was why he’d stuck around as long as he had. But, he said, “I realized that if I stay I’ll probably die as well, waiting for him.”

When New Zealand soldiers are killed overseas, their units welcome home their caskets with a haka—the ceremonial Maori dance. Turtle and Tai plan to lobby for Abelen to receive the same honor. If they succeed, the casket will be brought to his former unit’s parade grounds, in Christchurch, through a wooden gate decorated with traditional carvings, called a waharoa. Abelen’s comrades will stomp their feet, beat their chests, and stick out their tongues. Each battalion in the New Zealand Army has its own haka, with its own words that the soldiers hiss and bellow. The name of the haka that Abelen’s unit will perform translates as “We Are Ready.” If you were able to add a sentence, a paragraph, a word even, now, after what happened to Turtle, would you?I was back in the Donbas when Turtle was killed. I was embedded with a different unit — a frontline Ukrainian infantry battalion — not too far from where Turtle and the rest of the team were deployed. There was a small ceremony for him in country, which I missed because of my assignment. Then his body was repatriated to New Zealand. When I got home to France, I watched a video of his funeral, which included a haka. Hakas are intense in any context, but the fact that Turtle had hoped to perform a haka for Abelen, and that Abelen’s body was still in Russian custody, and that now other soldiers were performing a haka for Turtle instead, made this one pretty devastating and almost kind of surreal. On the one hand, I wish that I could write an addendum to the article about it; on the other, I really doubt that I could capture its power in words.When do you decide on a structure with this kind of story?When you’re chronicling events that are fluid and unpredictable, you don’t have any kind of built-in narrative. There’s an infinite variety of stories that you can write after spending three weeks with a fighting unit. You need to decide on which one you’re going to pursue while you’re still reporting so you can follow up on certain elements or concentrate on certain characters that you know are going to feature in the piece. The thing with embeds and most frontline reporting is that once you leave, that’s it. You have what you have. You can stay in touch with the characters by phone, but the kind of reporting that I try to do is first-hand and on-the-ground — stuff that I’ve personally observed. There’s no going back and getting more after I’ve left the zone. That’s why I need to know more or less what I’m going to write before I leave, so that I can get the material that I’ll need.

AFTER ATTENDING THE VETERANS DAY GALA in New York, Doc went back to Kyiv, where he plans to buy an apartment. He is currently raising funds to produce and distribute an innovative overhead-protection system for Ukrainian troops deployed in frontline trenches.

More than any other foreign volunteer I met, Doc seemed to be genuinely motivated by a conviction that the conflict was “a clear case of right and wrong.” I sometimes wondered to what extent his desire to participate in such an unambiguously just war was connected to his previous military career. The cause for which he is fighting in Ukraine is righteous because it consists of one country resisting occupation by another. But Doc’s adversaries in Iraq and Afghanistan viewed their causes similarly—and, in Afghanistan, that galvanizing sentiment may be why the Taliban prevailed. This is a thorny topic for veterans, and Doc was not willing to concede a moral equivalence between the U.S. and Russian invasions. However, the experience of defending a country against an outside aggressor that was superior in numbers and in firepower had given him a new appreciation for his former enemies. This may feel like a conclusion, but I think that this may, in fact, be your nut graf, even if at the very end of your story rather than at the beginning. Not that every story needs a nut graf, but this sure feels like one. Why did you choose to add this very paragraph here, rather than in the beginning of the story, when you write about your initial chats with Doc?I wanted to resituate the story in the context of Iraq and Afghanistan. I don’t mention those wars in any of my other articles about Ukraine, but I think that they are highly relevant when it comes to American involvement. That goes for politicians like President Biden, volunteer fighters like Doc, and correspondents like myself. The disaster of Afghanistan, especially, looms over all of us, and I don’t think that you can untangle it from our actions and motives in Ukraine. I thought it was important to reiterate this at the end. “I used to think, What kind of pussy fights with mines?” he said. “And here I am, laying mines.”

I also suspected another appeal in Ukraine for International Legion members. During my lunch with Doc on Andriyivsky Descent, in October, I’d been unexpectedly moved when the old man in the fedora thanked him for his service. I shared Doc’s discomfort with similar gestures Stateside, but something here was different. Why did you choose a lede-replay ending? Is it something you planned from the beginning when you first thought of the structure while still embedded with the unit?I try not to write the ending until I get there, even if I think I know what it will be. It’s good to leave open the possibility of surprising yourself, and some words only become available after writing 10,000 others. Although the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were transformative for those who fought in them, they had no real impact on most Americans and Europeans. Everyone in Ukraine, by contrast, has been affected by the Russian invasion; everyone has sacrificed and suffered. For some foreign veterans, such a country, so thoroughly reshaped and haunted by war, must feel less alien than home. ♦

* * *

Anna Hull is a multilingual editor, writer and journalist based in New Mexico.

The post Embedded war reporting with courage and common sense appeared first on Nieman Storyboard.

Jon Mooallem is a writer-at-large with The New York Times Magazine, and has published articles and feature stories with, among others, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Slate, and Mother Jones. He’s the author of two nonfiction books, “This Is Chance!” and “Wild Ones,” with Penguin Random House and recently published the nonfiction collection “Serious Face.” He is experienced and masterful at what he does.

And yet, when Sheila Glaser, his editor at The New York Times Magazine, asked Mooallem to write a story about a small town in California in November 2018, Mooallem felt intimidated and overwhelmed. He was to report on what he called the biggest thing happening in the world at the time: the Camp Fire that had just devastated the community of Paradise, California, a week earlier, and which to this day ranks as the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state’s history.

To add to that challenge, Mooallem wasn’t going to be the first journalist to report on the fire so didn’t understand where and how his work would fit in: “I just didn’t really have a handle on why I was doing this, of what my objective should be and what kind of story would add anything to what, even days after that the fire, amazing reporters were already doing.”

Then there was the trepidation about going into a disaster zone, something Mooallem had never done before in his career, and engaging with people who had barely survived and had lost homes, loved ones and a way of life. This, especially, was daunting to him. “You’re catching them at a moment,” he told me, “where they can’t just sit down and talk to you for hours.”

But Glaser reminded him that to tell a story about such a tragedy, even in the face of so many other stories already having been told, was valuable in itself. Mooallem found comfort in this. “We’re just going to hear about this person who experienced something awful,” he said. “And the Camp Fire is not a singular thing. It’s going to happen more. And it has happened more since.” The value is in the telling.

His telling of Paradise is an extraordinary feat of journalism. “We Have Fire Everywhere,” published in July 2019, tells the story of resident Tamra Fisher and the people who helped her. It becomes the story of anyone facing despair and of the community that steps up in support.

Mooallem spoke by phone by phone and email with Storyboard for a Q&A and story annotation about his reporting and writing processes and what reporting on the Camp Fire meant to him. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.

Can you describe your writing process?
I’ve learned to always start writing big features in the late afternoon. It takes the pressure off. Whatever I write at the very beginning of the process is going to seem to me horrendously bad and unsatisfying and fill me with disappointment and dread. I will feel myself in real-time, with every phrase I type, despoiling the piece I’ve been imagining and failing to put what I know and feel into words. So I’d rather do that at, say, 3 p.m., endure that failure for a few hours, then go make dinner and start again the next morning with something on the page. The alternative — which I used to do — was to start writing a feature at the crack of dawn, with an entire day to feel like a failure ahead of me. I hated those days. Ideally, too, I’ll start writing on, like, a Thursday afternoon. Thursday afternoon goes badly. Friday, if I’m lucky, a few successful things are beginning to happen. And then I get two days off! Monday comes around and things start to feel more doable.

In the case of “We Have Fire Everywhere,” I started writing as soon as I got home from my last reporting trip, during which I interviewed the firefighters and a few other people whose stories had intersected with Tamra Fisher’s. I felt like enough information had fallen into place that I could picture the structure. I actually called a friend from the road and told her the entire story on the phone.

I write once I can chart a path from a beginning to an end. That structure can change and there are often big holes that I’ll need to keep reporting out, but it’s the difference between, say, starting to build a house even though you don’t know where the bathroom is going to go and starting to cut and hammer together a bunch of wood not knowing whether you’re building a house or a boat.

How do you determine that structure?
It’s crucial for me to know where I’m heading — to see the story as a straight line. Otherwise I will just write infinitely sideways, if that makes sense. I tend to think about everything tangentially. So if I start writing sentences and don’t know what the overall point is, how those sentences are serving it or don’t have clarity about the next moment that will follow those sentences, I’ll start drifting: burrowing deeper or expanding laterally from what’s important, instead of pushing forward.

I think I have pretty good intuition for structure. I didn’t always, but it’s a muscle that got stronger over time.

As I read “We Have Fire Everywhere,” it felt as though you had predicted the questions I’d have as a reader along the way, not unlike a chess master predicts their opponent’s next move. I’ve heard Storyboard Jacqui Banaszynski refer to it as “reader think.” How do you know when and where within the story a reader will want to know something?
I love this phrase and idea. I don’t know that I even think of the question that way: What does the reader need to know? I think of it more as: I have a compulsive, somewhat destructive need to communicate everything all at once, and that’s impossible, so what is the absolute most I can communicate right now and still make this pleasing to read? That’s not easy for me; I just slowly become more aware of that trouble and more judicious about what to dole out as I go through revisions.

Walk me through your revision process.
The only strategy I know is to patiently sweat over every sentence and grind it out for a preposterous amount of time. I throw my full self at the thing until it’s good. Sometimes, with something long, I will print it out on paper, but I don’t know that it makes a difference for me; it’s just nice to get away from a screen.

I have noticed that, over time, I’ve learned to recognize little idiosyncratic problems I create for myself. For example, I will often go on a few lines or paragraphs too long at the end of a section in early drafts. I can identify that quickly now — Oh, I’m doing that thing — and slash it out, without wasting as much time trying to sniff out what’s gone wrong and experimenting with fixes.

What was the process like once you sent a completed draft of “We Have Fire Everywhere” to your editor?
I just found the email where I turned in the first draft to my editor, Sheila Glaser. It was 21,000 words and included a third storyline of a young man who’d rushed into Paradise to rescue his cat, traversing the fire on foot. He was assumed dead by his family but ultimately wound up being picked up by Tamra and Larry, just after the published version of the story ends. Sheila said to cut this third story. It just wasn’t possible to do that much.

In retrospect, I knew this was the right decision all along. But I didn’t admit that to myself. I was compelled to write it all out anyway; I had it in my head and needed to see it turned into prose. And this way, at least one person — Sheila — got to read that prose and know what happened to him. I earnestly feel this way, even though I also recognize how idiotic it is.

The next version was 15,000 words.

From there, the main narrative stayed intact but the stuff around it changed dramatically as other editors got involved. My early drafts had versions of the explanatory sections on fire in California (the ecology and recent history) and PG&E’s role in the fires, but it did not have the loftier, nut-graffy section at the beginning — “Fisher wasn’t just trapped in a fire; she was trapped in the 21^st Century” and in the “How did it end?” conclusion. Editors asked for those. Their sense was that we had to zoom out from this very claustrophobic narrative and hammer home its wider significance, and that the prose should rise to that ambition stylistically. I wasn’t sure at the time but they were a thousand percent right.

On the other hand, I had to argue quite strongly to keep the material about PG&E toward the end in the piece. The top editors wanted to cut it. They felt that kind of reporting and that kind of information didn’t fit tonally with the rest of the story. I found this a little deflating, because that was the section where I felt like I’d done real journalism — meaning journalism in a more righteous and public-service-oriented sense. At the time, I wasn’t quite convinced there was value in presenting purely a disaster narrative like this. I thought it was crucial to understanding the issue and felt some obligation to spell out both PG&E’s culpability and the somewhat impossible situation they found themselves in. I didn’t want to sacrifice it to prioritize aesthetics or literary pleasure.

How did you prepare yourself and go about interviewing sources who had just been through this kind of extreme trauma?
I didn’t have a toolkit for that. All I could do was be as kind and patient and human as possible, and demonstrate that I didn’t feel entitled to any of their time or cooperation. I could only ask.

As for me, it wasn’t good. Doing this story affected me deeply and still does. “Trauma” is the only word I know for it, and I hope I can use it without taking anything away from the trauma of people who’ve actually lived through wildfires from other journalists who cover these disasters more directly. Still throwing my mind and my imagination so deeply into the experiences of the people in this piece made me hypervigilant about fire in ways I’m a little too embarrassed to go into. It made this kind of disaster real to me.

ANNOTATION: Storyboard’s questions are in red; Mooallem’s answers in blue.

"WE HAVE FIRE EVERYWHERE"

the American imagination — and a preview of the American future

by Jon Mooallem

From The New York Times Magazine

July 31, 2019

The fire was already growing at a rate of one football field per second when Tamra Fisher woke up on the edge of Paradise, Calif., feeling that her life was no longer insurmountably strenuous or unpleasant and that she might be up to the challenge of living it again. When we spoke, you said that you could have started the story anywhere. Why did you choose to start it with Tamra Fisher in her garden?She was the main character. We are following her path through the fire and through that day. So, it seemed like a no-brainer to start with her, where her story starts. She was 49 and had spent almost all of those years on the Ridge—the sweeping incline, in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada, on which Paradise and several tinier, unincorporated communities sit. Fisher moved to the Ridge as a child, married at 16, then raised four children of her own, working 70-hour-plus weeks caring for disabled adults and the elderly. Paradise had attracted working-class retirees from around California since the 1970s and was beginning to draw in younger families for the same reasons. The town was quiet and affordable, free of the big-box stores and traffic that addled the city of Chico in the valley below. It still brimmed with the towering pine trees that first made the community viable more than a century ago. The initial settlement was poor and minuscule—“Poverty Ridge,” some called it—until a new logging railroad was built through the town in 1904 by a company felling timber farther uphill. This was the Diamond Match Company. The trees of Paradise made for perfect matchsticks. This last sentence is just perfect, and so evocative. Why are the latter two sentences so short compared to the ones before that?I think, like a lot of writers, I hear rhythms of prose in my head. Sometimes you know you need a long sentence and sometimes you know you need a short one.

Like many people who grow up in small communities, Fisher regarded her hometown with affection but also exhaustion. All her life, she dreamed of leaving and seeing other parts of the world, not to escape Paradise but so that she could return with renewed appreciation for it. But as the years wore on, she worried that she’d missed her chance. There had been too many tribulations and not enough money. She was trapped.

Then again, who knew? That fall, Fisher was suspended in a wide-open and recuperative limbo, having finally ended a five-year relationship with a man who, she said, conned her financially, isolated her from her family and seized on her diagnoses of depression and a mood disorder to make her feel crazy and sick and insist that she go on disability. “What I thought was love,” she said, “was me trying to buy love and him stealing from me.” But now, a fuller, bigger life seemed possible. She’d tried community college for a semester. And just recently, she got together with Andy, a big-hearted baker for the Chico public-school system, who slipped out of her bed earlier that Thursday morning to drive down the hill to work. Fisher was feeling grounded again: happy. It was odd to say the word, but it must have been true because there she was, getting out of bed at 8 a.m.—early for her—energetically and without resentment, to take her two miniature schnauzers and Andy’s lumbering old mutt into the yard to pee.

She stepped out in her slippers and the oversize sweatshirt she slept in. She smelled smoke. The sky overhead was still faintly blue in spots, but a brown fog, forced in by a hard wind, was rapidly smothering it. “I’ve been here so long, it didn’t even faze me,” Fisher said. Small wildfires erupted in the canyons on either side of Paradise every year. But then the wind gusted sharply and a three-inch piece of burned bark floated lazily toward her through the air like a demonic moth. Fisher opened her hand and caught it. Bits of it crumbled in her palm like charcoal. She took a picture and texted it to her sister Cindy Christensen. “WTF is happening,” she wrote.

Cindy knew about wildfires. In fact, she’d spent every summer and fall fixated on fire since the “fire siege” of 2008, when Paradise was threatened by two blazes, one in each of the canyons alongside it. One morning, as the Humboldt Fire approached from the east, the town ordered more than 9,000 people to evacuate as a precaution, Cindy among them. But when Cindy pulled out of her neighborhood, she instantly hit gridlock. An investigation determined that it took nearly three hours for most residents to drive the 11 miles downhill.

Sitting in traffic that morning, Cindy felt viscerally unsafe. Ever since then, she obsessively tracked the daily indicators of high-fire danger on the TV weather reports and with apps on her phone. “It consumed me,” Cindy said. She spent many nights, unable to sleep, listening to the wind plow out of the canyon and batter her roof. Many days, she refused to leave home, worried a fire might blow through her neighborhood before she could return for her pets. She didn’t just sign up to get the county’s emergency alerts on her phone; she bought her own police scanner.

It pained Tamra to see her sister fall apart every fire season; Cindy seemed irrational—possessed. It was hard to take her seriously. “That’s just Cindy,” Tamra would say. Now, standing with her phone in one hand and the charred bark in the other, Tamra needed Cindy to be Cindy and tell her what to do.

“Evacuate,” Cindy wrote back.

“Answer me!!” Tamra texted again. “It’s raining ash and bark.” Neither realized that some texts weren’t being received by the other. Then the power went out, and Tamra, who had dropped her cellular plan to save money and could only use her phone with Wi-Fi, was cut off from communicating with anyone.

“Leave, T. Paradise is on fire,” Cindy was texting her. “Leave!!”

By then, Cindy was almost off the Ridge, bawling in her car from the stress and dread. Forty-five minutes earlier, she learned that a fire had sparked northeast of town, and she immediately didn’t like the scenario taking shape. The relative humidity that morning, the wind speed and direction, which would propel the fire straight toward Paradise—it was all very bad. “In my mind, I pictured exactly what happened,” she explained. She’d spent years picturing it, in fact. She left right away.

This time, there was no traffic; Cindy says she saw only two other cars the whole way down. Later, she spotted her home in aerial footage of Paradise on the local news. Her aboveground swimming pool was unmistakable. Nearly everything else had burned into a ghostly black smudge. Why did you decide to use these very last few details — a foreshadowing of sorts — as you close your lede?These are instinctual decisions, but if I had to intellectualize it, I’d say it felt appropriate to bring Cindy’s story to a close somehow here — to explain that she got out but lost nearly everything. I didn’t want to just leave her there, suspended in time.

By the time Fisher got in her yellow Volkswagen, the sky had transformed again: It was somehow both shrouded and glowing. Many other residents had learned to keep a “go bag” packed by the door, with water, medications and copies of important documents; a woman from the local Fire Safe Council, a volunteer known affectionately as the Bag Lady, held frequent workshops demonstrating how to pack one. But Fisher was indecisive and moving inefficiently. It had taken her nearly 40 minutes to commit to leaving, wrangle the dogs and scramble to grab a few haphazard possessions.

It was now 8:45. So many calls were being placed to 911 that a dispatcher interrupted one man reporting a fire alongside Skyway Road—the busiest street in Paradise and the town’s primary evacuation route—with a terse, “Yeah, sir, we have fire everywhere.” Your editor chose this very quote to use as the story’s title. It is superb. Did you have your own working title for the story? And does “We Have Fire Everywhere” work for you?I never give my stories working titles. I just don’t think to do it. This works for me as a headline because it’s so simple and stark, and particularly because — here, in context — you recognize that it was such an off-handed comment. Something about the dissonance between the way it’s said in the moment and its bleak and total explanatory power is very nice. Officials had started issuing evacuation orders about an hour earlier; Fisher’s neighborhood was among those told to clear out first. Her street was plugged with cars. A thick line of them crept forward at the end of her driveway.

There are five routes out of Paradise. The three major ones spread south like the legs of a tripod passing through the heart of town and continuing downhill toward Chico and the valley below. The simile of a tripod is striking and unusual. It also helps ground the reader spatially. When did it come to you? And why a tripod instead of, say, a fork?I struggled for a while, trying to give a reader what they’d need to visualize this. The story ultimately ran with a map, but I felt it was my responsibility to do as much as I could in writing. It just looked like a tripod to me, given the angle at which the streets are arrayed. Fisher lived in the northern part of town, on the easternmost leg of the tripod, Pentz Road; she rented a bedroom from a woman who worked at a nursing home in town. Why did you choose to introduce these details about Fisher’s living arrangement here rather than earlier, maybe even in the first scene?I honestly can’t say. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’d tried to work it in earlier and just felt it clunking up the momentum. It baffled her to see that all the cars in front of her house were heading north on Pentz, cramming themselves away from the center of Paradise, away from the valley, and further uphill. The opposite lane, meanwhile, was totally empty. It seemed obvious to Fisher that, if the fire was approaching from somewhere in the canyon behind her house, there would be plenty of Paradise left in which to safely wait it out. So she pushed across the traffic, into the empty lane. But she barely went 100 yards before a driver sitting in the jam alongside her rolled down his window and explained that Pentz was blocked up ahead.

“Great,” Fisher muttered. As she turned around and took her place in line, she wished the man good luck.

“You, too,” he said.

She was recording everything on her phone, compelled by some instinct she would strain to make sense of later. Here it seems you foreshadow that Fisher will survive the Camp Fire. Why did you decide to let your readers know this here, rather than a little later or even near the end?That wasn’t the intention behind this passage for me. For me, this was a way to communicate how I knew all this stuff I was saying and give you confidence to trust me as the story moves forward and the details become more extreme. This was a way to spell out my reporting methods and credibility while still keeping the narrative somewhat inside Tamra’s experience. She wanted people to know what happened to her and presumed, nonsensically, that her phone would survive even if she didn’t. Maybe, too, she wanted someone to be with her while it happened. Her phone created the illusion of an audience; it was the best she could do.

It was suddenly much darker. Everyone had their headlights on. The sky was blood red in places but waning into absolute black. The smoke column was collapsing on them: The plume from the wildfire had billowed upward until, at about 35,000 feet, it froze, became heavier, and fell earthward again. Powerful image. What source materials did you use to describe this plume of smoke? Also, why did you choose not to use a simile here as you often do elsewhere?This is me basically parroting back how firefighter John Jessen described it to me. I liked the way he said it. It’s an odd phenomenon that was completely unfamiliar to me — a smoke column rising then collapsing. Best not to overcomplicate its description by comparing it to something else. Outside Fisher’s passenger-side window, the wind snapped an American flag in someone’s yard so relentlessly that it seemed to be rippling under the force of some machine. Then, a mammoth gust kicked up, spattering the street with pine needles. It sounded like a rainstorm and, when it subsided, bright orange embers appeared beside Fisher’s car: trails of pinhole lights, like fairies, skittering low over the shoulder, chasing each other out of the dry leaves, then capering off and vanishing in front lawns.There is so much poetry in this line. Why did you decide to personify the ambers? And why a fairy-tale simile?I actually don’t like this line at all. It seems at least one degree overdone to me.

Fisher noticed a minivan struggling to merge just ahead—people weren’t letting the driver in. She stopped to let it through, then suddenly screamed: “Oh, my God! There’s a fire!” She yelled it again, out her window, as though she worried she were the only one seeing it: the tremendous box of bright, anarchic flame where there used to be a home. struggling Why did you choose to write “Fisher noticed a van struggling” rather than, say, “A van struggled to merge…”? Why did you choose to use Fisher as a camera of sorts?Intuitively it makes sense: she is our camera. She is how we know this, and we are seeing it through her eyes.

It was 9:13 a.m. Fisher had been in her car for nearly half an hour and traveled altogether nowhere; in fact, the burning house appeared to be only a few doors down from her own. There was a second structure aflame now. The fires were multiplying rapidly.

“I don’t want to die!” Fisher shouted. The mood had shifted. People started honking. Fisher honked, too. She began to sob and scream, to open her car door and lean her head out, asking what she should do. Later, she felt embarrassed. She would see so many YouTube videos of people calmly piloting their cars through the flames. There was one guy who went viral, singing to his 3-year-old daughter as he honked and swerved, commenting on the encroaching inferno as though it were an interactive exhibit at a science museum. (“Be careful with that fire!” the girl says adorably. The father replies, “I’m going to stay away from it, O.K.?”) It didn’t make sense to Fisher that she would be the only person screaming. Even the three dogs with her were silent, though two of them were deaf and mostly blind and the third was shivering, eyes locked open, too shocked to make a sound. “I’m scared!” Fisher shouted. “Somebody!”

“O.K., calm down,” a voice called. The person urged her to turn around again. She did and suddenly, still crying wildly, found herself shooting south again, through the other, wide-open lane of Pentz, following a white truck with a Butte County Fire Department decal on it. She tailed the fireman intently, coasting past one burning house after another. Some were being steadily, evenly devoured; others angrily disgorged flames straight up from their roofs. Fisher knew the people who lived in many of these houses—this was her neighborhood. “This is Pentz Road!” she yelled as she drove. “These are people’s homes.” Then added: “I’m sorry. I am so sorry!”

When she got to the corner of Pearson Road, a major east-west artery, she saw someone directing cars to take the right turn, where she and the fireman found they could accelerate even more, winding along S-curves through a wooded area that was almost entirely aflame. Fires speckled the slopes along Pearson so that, in the dark, the hillside looked like a lava flow. “It’s so hot,” Fisher said. “Keep going! Keep going!” But then, they shot around another curve and the fireman’s brake lights came on. They had hit a wall of cars, across both lanes.

“No!” Fisher yowled. “What did I do?”

She was silent for a moment. Then something started beeping. It was the low-fuel alert. She was almost out of gas, though it ultimately wouldn’t matter. Moments later, her car caught fire.

Afterward, you could feel your mind grinding against what happened, desperate to whittle it down into a simple explanation of what went wrong, who should be blamed, what could be learned. What a fantastic example of “reader think!” As I read “Moments later, her car caught fire” (an incredible sentence), I felt the need to know, right away, how this disastrous fire in Paradise had come to be. How did you know what your readers would want to know after you mention Fisher’s car catching fire?Don’t know! But glad it worked. There were many credible answers, specific mistakes to call out. But it was easy to worry that, given the scale of this particular disaster, the principal takeaways might be only humility and terror.

From the start, the Camp Fire was driven by an almost vengeful-seeming confluence of circumstances, many of which had been nudged into alignment by climate change. Paradise had prepared for disasters. But it had prepared merely for disasters, and this was something else. In a matter of hours, the town’s roads were swamped, its emergency plans outstripped. Nine of every 10 homes were destroyed and at least 85 people were dead. Many were elderly, some were incinerated in their cars while trying to flee and others apparently never made it that far.

It was all more evidence that the natural world was warping, outpacing our capacity to prepare for, or even conceive of, the magnitude of disaster that such a disordered earth can produce. We live with an unspoken assumption that the planet is generally survivable, that its tantrums are infrequent and, while menacing, can be plotted along some hazy, existentially tolerable bell curve. But the stability that American society was built around for generations appears to be eroding. That stability was always an illusion; wherever you live, you live with risk—just at some emotional and cognitive remove. Now, those risks are ratcheting up. Nature is increasingly finding a foothold in the unimaginable: what’s not just unprecedented but also hopelessly far beyond what we’ve seen. This is a realm beyond disaster, where catastrophes live. Fisher wasn’t just trapped in a fire; she was trapped in the 21st century. This entire paragraph reads like the heart of the story and its universality — what the story is really about. I presume, perhaps incorrectly, that it’s the story’s nut graf. If it is, why did you choose to place it this far into the story? And if it’s not, which part did you mean to be the nut graf?I didn’t have a nut graf. For some reason, it never occurred to me to write one. I thought we were just telling someone’s story and the broader significance would be obvious. I wrote this at the direction of either Jake Silverstein or Bill Wasik (editors) a few days before it closed. Hemingway said, “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” If anything, this sentence here (“Fisher wasn’t just trapped in a fire; she was trapped in the 21^st century.”) is one such sentence. It sums up not only Fisher’s predicament but also everyone else’s on this planet. How/when/where did it come to you? Did it influence the way you wrote the rest of the narrative or the way you revised the story?This was written at the very end of the process. It was probably easier for me to write it then because my head was so deep in the story. I would never be able to write something so clear, succinct and explanatory — something from this elevation, looking down — at the beginning of the process. My mind just doesn’t see things that way.

By way of analogy, Paradise’s emergency-operations coordinator, Jim Broshears, later described giving fire-safety tutorials at elementary schools, back when he was the town’s fire chief, teaching second and third graders that if there’s fire at their bedroom door, they should go out the window, and vice versa. “Inevitably,” Broshears told me, “there’s the kid who goes, ‘What if there’s fire at the door and the window?’” And no matter what alternative Broshears provided, the kid could always push the story line one step further.

“At some point, they’ve painted you into a corner and, well, do I tell an 8-year-old kid, ‘In that case, you’re going to die?’ Do you tell a community, ‘If this particular scenario hits, a bunch of you are going to die?’ Is that appropriate? I don’t know the answer.” He added, “I think that people are going to conclude that now.” Fantastic transition between two paragraphs. Also, “a bunch of you are going to die” reads a little like a tiny and quick red herring — it definitely got me very nervous about Fisher’s fate. Why did you decide to end on this particular quote by Borshears before bringing us back to Fisher’s burning car?|I suppose this bit from Broshears would have been masquerading as my nut graf in earlier drafts. To me, it drove toward the same point as the previous passage, just never got all the way there and said it. So when I added that other material, this bumped down to the end of the section—like a little tag, or anecdote, animating the idea I’ve just stated directly.

Fisher saw the first flames skitter in the depression where her windshield met the hood. She opened her car door again and leaned her head out. Embers burned tiny holes in her leggings. She was yelling, asking if anyone had water. A contractor in a pickup behind her hollered: “You don’t need water. You need to get in my truck.” He beckoned her and all her animals over.

Fisher wedged herself among the tools and paperwork scattered on the man’s front seat, two dogs on top of her and the largest at her feet. As they inched forward, she took a picture of her burning car and was crushed to realize that she had just abandoned the few possessions she’d managed to save, including the ashes of her big brother, Larry, who, 10 years earlier, died suddenly in his sleep.

“I’m Tamra,” she told the man driving.

“I’m Larry,” he said.

The coincidence was too much: Fisher started crying again.

Larry Laczko wore sleek, black-rimmed glasses and a San Francisco Giants cap and seemed, to Fisher, almost preternaturally subdued, speaking with the slow resignation of a man enduring ordinary traffic on an ordinary Thursday morning. From here on, and for a while, we will be in close psychic distance to Laczko — Gardner’s “psychic distance,” that is — and quite removed from Fisher. Why did you choose to change POVs even with Fisher in the car with Laczko?This was the appeal of the story to me, once I had the reporting: a chance to follow Tamra, then sweep in the interiority of the people she crosses paths with, too. Sort of leapfrog between consciousnesses. It’s not panoramic, but it’s something like panoramic, since you’re getting the panorama one individual at a time.Laczko and his wife lived on the Ridge for 15 years, then migrated to Chico in 2010, after raising their two kids. For years, Laczko worked at Intel, managing 60 employees, traveling constantly. Then, one Saturday, his wife told him to clean the windows of their home in Paradise—and to clean them well this time. Laczko did some research, geeked out a little and wound up ordering a set of professional-grade tools from one of the oldest window-washing supply companies in the United States. His wife was pleased. Soon, he was washing windows every weekend, toddling around the Ridge with his tools, getting to know his neighbors and friends of friends. “I liked the work, the instant gratification of a dirty window turning clean,” Laczko explained, “but it was the interaction with people that I loved.” That was 16 years ago. He quit his job and has run his own window-washing company ever since.

Laczko was on Pearson Road by chance—or because of his own stupidity. In retrospect, he conceded, either assessment was fair. His mother-in-law lived in Quail Trails Village, a nearby mobile-home and R.V. park. She was 88 and used a walker. Laczko’s wife, who was nearby that morning, had already got her out. But Laczko wanted to be helpful. He recently installed an automatic lift chair for his mother-in-law and remembered how, after the 2008 evacuation, many people wound up displaced from the Ridge for days; it would be nice for his mother-in-law to have that chair. So he drove up the hill and cut across on Pearson, only to be turned around by police. Backtracking, he smacked into the traffic that had formed behind him: a blockade of cars, barely moving and every so often, as with Fisher’s Volkswagen, suddenly sprouting into flame.

When Fisher climbed into Laczko’s truck, the seriousness of his predicament was only beginning to catch up with him. What sounded to Fisher like extraordinary calmness was actually extraordinary focus: He was scanning his surroundings, updating his map of everything that was on fire around him—that tree; the plastic fender of that S.U.V.—while also taking a mental inventory of the back of his pickup, gauging how likely each item was to catch. How did you verify this?Tamra told me he sounded extraordinarily calm, and Larry told me he absolutely was not and described doing this. I don’t know how to verify what was going on in his head beyond that.

“We’re getting out of here,” Laczko told Fisher. He projected enough confidence that he reassured himself, just slightly, as well.

But clearly he and Fisher were stuck. Thousands of people were, on choked roadways all over the Ridge, each sealed in his or her own saga of agony, terror, courage or despair. It was like the 2008 evacuations, but far more serious—the gridlock, cinched tighter; the danger, exponentially more acute—and also harder to stomach, given all the focus on avoiding those problems in the 10 years since.

After the 2008 fires, the county created a fifth route off the Ridge, paving an old gravel road that wound through mountains to the north. Paradise vigorously revamped and expanded the emergency plans it had in place. The town was carved into 14 evacuation zones; these were reorganized to better stagger the flow of cars. Paradise introduced the idea of “contraflow,” whereby traffic could be sent in a single direction across all lanes of a given street if necessary. Maps and instructions were mailed to residents regularly. There were evacuation drills, annual wildfire-preparedness events and other, more meticulous layers of internal planning too. Paradise’s Wildland Fire Traffic Control Plan identified, for example, 12 “priority intersections” where problems might arise for drivers leaving each evacuation zone and stipulated how many orange cones or human flaggers would ideally be dispatched to each.

“The more you study the Camp Fire,” says Thomas Cova, a University of Utah geographer who has analyzed wildfire evacuations for 25 years, “the more you think: This could have been way worse. Way worse.” Cova called Paradise “one of the most prepared communities in the state.” A recent USA Today-California Network investigation found that only six of California’s 27 communities at highest risk for fire had robust and publicly available evacuation plans.

One architect of Paradise’s planning was Jim Broshears, who had spent the bulk of his 47-year career as an emergency planner and firefighter struggling to mitigate his community’s idiosyncratically high risk of disaster. After the Camp Fire, Broshears confessed that, in his mind, the upper limit of harrowing scenarios against which he’d been defending Paradise was the 1991 Tunnel Fire in the Oakland hills—a wildfire that consumed more than 2,900 structures and killed 25 people: Did Jim Broshears open up easily about this?Yes. I admired him for that enormously.“I’ll be honest,” he told me, “we simply didn’t see it being much worse than that.” You rarely refer to yourself in this story. Why did you choose to say “he told me” (instead of “he said”) here?I don’t know that one or the other has a lot of weight for me here, except rhythmically. Maybe on a subconscious level you need to know who he’s confessing to? And it also sets up the next moment, which happened in physical space between the two of us.Recently, Broshears showed me a copy of the Traffic Control Plan in a big, thick binder and said, with admirable directness, “It mostly didn’t work.” Then he clacked the binder shut and insisted, “That is still going to work 98 percent of the time, though.”

The Los Angeles Times and other newspapers would later dig up many city planning mistakes and communication failures that appeared to compound the devastation on the morning of Nov. 8. The core of the problem was that there just wasn’t any time. The fire was moving so astonishingly fast that, only a few minutes after Paradise started evacuating its first zones, it was obvious the entire community would have to be cleared.

There was no plan for evacuating all 27,000 residents of Paradise at once. “I don’t think it’s physically possible,” Paradise’s mayor, Jody Jones, told me. For a town that size to build enough additional lanes of roadway to make it possible, she added, would have seemed preposterous and like a waste of taxpayer money had anyone proposed it. Our communities, as they currently exist, were planned and built primarily to be lived in, not escaped. Fully prioritizing evacuation could mean ripping them apart. This is one of the focal points of the story, at least in my understanding of it. Is this your own conclusion or are you paraphrasing Jody Jones?I am paraphrasing Jones and also elaborating further on her argument based on having heard the same reasoning from other experts.

Paradise evolved without any genuine planning at all: Three adjacent communities just kept expanding until they merged. This produced a town of tangled side streets and poorly connected neighborhoods, often with a single outlet and many dead ends. “In towns all up and down the Sierra, we’ve got the same pattern,” says Zeke Lunder of Deer Creek Resources, which often contracts with the state on wildfire-mapping projects. “I think it’s inevitable that this will happen again.”

That morning in Paradise, streets were blocked by fallen trees, disabled cars or even fire blowing crosswise across them. Flaming roadside vegetation slowed or halted traffic on major evacuation routes like Skyway so that many of the cross streets that fed them, like Pearson, backed up, penning other drivers defenselessly into the side streets that fed them.

Just ahead of Fisher and Laczko, a woman named Lorena Rodriguez watched flames absorb the space around her car. She reached for her phone to tell her children goodbye, but then she reconsidered, worried the memory of her frightened voice would permit her kids to more vividly imagine her burning alive and keep imagining it for the rest of their lives. This enraged Rodriguez—that she had been put in a position to have such a thought. So she decided to run, sprinting in a pair of Danskos, threading the lanes of idling vehicles and moving faster on foot than all of them. She kept expecting to find some obstacle blocking the road, a reason for the traffic, but all she saw was more cars.

Rodriguez ran for two and a half miles, all the way west on Pearson until she reached Skyway. She says the street was bumper to bumper most of the way, the vehicles alongside her perfectly still. It was as if time had stopped for everyone but her.

Fisher was thinking about her father, a former fire captain who was protective to the point of pitilessness. To teach his little girls not to play with matches, he showed them gruesome photographs of bodies extracted from houses that burned down. What an incredible detail to find during your research — like a full-circle coincidence. Did you learn this from Fisher or from Cindy, her sister?Tamra told me this.

Those pictures had been flashing through Fisher’s mind all morning. Now, on Pearson Road, she sensed she was inside one. She knew there had to be people dying around her and Laczko: good people who wanted to live just as much as she did—surely, who wanted it more.

Fisher inhaled deeply to rein in her crying and told Laczko: “I gotta say something. I’ve tried to kill myself multiple times, and now, I’m scared.” You go back to this same moment several paragraphs down after introducing Joe Kennedy. This here, and the mention of Fisher’s confession after Kennedy’s introduction, feel like an anchor-point for parallel narrative threads in the story. Why did you decide to use this moment and Fisher’s confession about having attempted suicide as the anchor point? Why not pick another moment?I didn’t think of it that way. I just thought, later, you might need to be reminded where and when they were. It was true. She felt guilty about it. She also knew, in that moment, that she wanted to live.

It had been all of 10 minutes since Laczko waved Fisher into his truck. While some people might have recoiled from a stranger making this kind of admission, Laczko didn’t pass judgment or see Fisher as a burden. As a kid, he went to parochial school, though the faith never took; he asked too many questions. Still, he liked the way his wife talked about spirituality, not God so much as a form of godliness that arises whenever two human beings connect. In that moment, he told me, his only thought was, This person needs to talk, and I can certainly listen.

After getting turned around on Pearson, Laczko instantly felt deflated—and then, a little foolish too. He was starting to reprimand himself for driving into a fire. For what? A chair?

Fisher, meanwhile, was exhausted, having so far shouldered the responsibility for her survival alone all morning. “I just wanted to be with somebody,” she explained.

For Laczko, “Something clicked—now I had someone to be responsible for.”

They were together now, but still trapped, and the windows of Laczko’s truck were getting hotter. Until then, the fires blooming erratically around Paradise were spot fires, birthed from embers that the wildfire sprayed ahead of itself as it grew. Now an impregnable riot of heat and flame was cresting the hillside under Pearson Road. This was the fire itself. This last sentence is so short, compared to the other ones around, but also so powerful and to the point. In it you make the fire seem as though it were a wild beast everyone had so far been fleeing but had not yet seen. Could you describe how this sentence came to be?It’s a rhythmic thing. The short sentences emphasizes the horror. I do like this idea of the fire as a living monster. You’re making me realize I must have subconsciously thought of it that way.

There’s a dismaying randomness to how a megafire can start: What a transition! This is also the first time you use the term “megafire.” Why didn’t you use this term before? And why will you use it only two more times in the story if this is what the Camp Fire actually was?I honestly don’t know. The tire on a trailer goes flat and scrapes against the pavement, producing sparks; the D.I.Y. wiring job on someone’s hot tub melts. (These were the causes of the 2018 Carr and 2015 Valley fires, respectively. More than 300,000 acres burned, combined.) But by now, there is also a feeling of predictability: In 2017, for example, 17 of 21 major fires in California were started accidentally by equipment owned by Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), which, as California’s largest electrical utility, is in the precarious business of shooting electricity through 175,000 miles of live wire, stitched across an increasingly flammable state. “Flammable state” is such an evocative expression. When in the writing or revision process did you compose this phrase?I’m not sure. You just type words, you know? And if they’re not good, you delete them and type different ones. I hope that does not seem like a rude answer. Like I said on the phone, it’s a huge honor and quite humbling to be read with such closeness and curiosity. And yet, in the end, a lot of what I’m doing — and especially on the level of sentences or particular phrases — is instinctual. I think it would be dishonest and do a disservice to other writers to pretend, in retrospect, that I had some more methodical approach or more insightful, intellectual command over the process. For me, it's just a lot of trying and trying and trying until a certain moment feels right. Under state law, the company may be liable for damage from those fires, whether or not the initial spark resulted from its negligence. And so, PG&E found itself looking for ways to adapt.

Two days before the Camp Fire, as horrendously blustery and dry conditions began settling on the Ridge and the risk of fire turned severe, PG&E began warning 70,000 of its electricity customers in the area, including the entire town of Paradise, that it might shut off their power as a precaution. This was one of the new tactics that the company had adopted—a “last resort,” PG&E called it: In periods of extreme fire danger, if weather conditions aligned to make any accidental spark potentially calamitous, PG&E was prepared to flip the switch, preventively cutting the electricity from its lines. Life would go dark, maybe for days—whatever it took. It was clear that the unforgiving environment in which PG&E had been operating for the last few years was, as the company put it, California’s “new normal.”

Wildfires have always remade California’s landscape. Historically, they were sparked by lightning, switching on haphazardly to sweep forests of their dead and declining vegetation and prime them for new, healthier growth. Noticing this cycle—the natural “fire regimes” at work—Native Americans mimicked it, lighting targeted fires to engineer areas for better foraging and hunting. But white settlers were oblivious to nature’s fire regimes; when blazes sprung up around their towns, they stamped them out.

Those towns grew into cities; the land around them, suburbs. More than a century of fire suppression left the ecosystems abutting them misshapen and dysfunctional. To set things right, the maintenance once performed naturally by fire would have to be conducted by state and federal bureaucracies, timber companies, private citizens and all the other entities through whose jurisdictions that land splinters. The approach has been feeble and piecemeal, says William Stewart, a co-director of Berkeley Forests at the University of California, Berkeley: “Little pinpricks of fuel reduction on the landscape.” We effectively turned nature into another colossal infrastructure project and endlessly deferred its maintenance.

Then came climate change. Summers in Northern California are now 2.5 degrees hotter than they were in the early 1970s, speeding up evaporation and baking the forests dry. Nine of the 10 largest fires in state history, since record-keeping started in 1932, have happened in the last 16 years. Ten of the 20 most destructive fires occurred in the last four; eight in the last two. California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire, expects that these trends will only get worse. It’s possible that we’ve entered an era of “megafires” and “megadisturbances,” the agency noted in its 2018 Strategic Fire Plan. And these fires are no longer restricted to the summer and early fall: “Climate change has rendered the term ‘fire season’ obsolete.”

Even deep into last fall, much of the landscape still seemed restless, eager to burn. [Here and there, you give nature human characteristics, emotions, and, in this case, even desires. How did you compose this description of the landscape?] [I guess I had this idea of the fire/nature as a living organism in my head somewhere. It was just a sense I had from the way people talked about it.] A bout of heavy rains that spring produced a record growth of grasses around the Ridge—the fastest-burning fuels in a landscape. But then the rain stopped. By the time of the Camp Fire, in November, there hadn’t been any significant precipitation since late May, and July had been California’s hottest month on record: All that vegetation dried out. “Everything is here,” explained a veteran wild-land firefighter named Jon Paul. “All you need is ignition.”

The Camp Fire glinted into existence around 6:15 that Thursday morning. Cal Fire hasn’t yet released its full investigation, but the available evidence indicates that a hook on a PG&E electrical tower near the community of Pulga snapped, allowing a wire to spring free. The wire flapped against the skeletal metal tower, throwing sparks into the wind, most likely for a fraction of a second before the system’s safety controls could have flipped. Still, it was enough: The sparks started a fire; the fire spread.

In the end, PG&E chose not to de-energize its lines. Even with warm, dry air gushing through the canyon early that morning, blowing 30 miles per hour and gusting up to 51, the company claimed that conditions never reached the thresholds it had determined would necessitate a shut-off. “That revealed a failure of imagination on PG&E’s part,” says Michael Wara, who directs the Climate and Energy Policy Program at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. PG&E was largely forced into the position of having to shut off people’s power in the first place, Wara argues, because it failed for decades to invest in the kind of maintenance and innovation that would allow its infrastructure to stand up to more hostile conditions, as climate change gradually exacerbated the overall risk. But now, Wara said, the decision to keep operating that morning suggested that the company still hadn’t fully accepted the kind of resoluteness this new reality demanded. Three weeks earlier, PG&E instituted its first, and ultimately only, shutdown of the 2018 fire season, cutting electricity during a windstorm to nearly 60,000 customers in seven counties. It took two days to restore everyone’s power; citizens and local governments fumed. “One has to wonder,” Wara says, “if the negative publicity and pushback PG&E received influenced decision making on the day of the Camp Fire.” (“We will not speculate on past events,” a PG&E spokesman said in an email. “The devastating wildfires of the past two years have made it clear that more must be done, and with greater urgency, to adapt and address the issue.”)

An even starker truth: It probably wouldn’t have mattered. The lines at that particular tower in Pulga wouldn’t have been included in a shut-off that morning anyway; PG&E’s protocols at the time appeared not to consider such high-voltage transmission lines a severe risk. A shutdown, however, would have de-energized other lower-voltage lines a few miles west of the tower, where, shortly after the first fire started, some vegetation, most likely a tree branch, blew into the equipment and triggered a second blaze. How did you verify this? Who were the experts you spoke to?I spent some time with higher-level PG&E employees who actually work in the area and they walked me through their sense of the scenario. But I believe a lot of this was also in PG&E’s initial report. It was confirmed in their final report, which came out after the story was published, but before I reprinted it in my book. I was able to shore up this passage and add further details in “Serious Face.”

In a preliminary report, Cal Fire’s investigators seemed to regard this subsequent event as negligible, however. Within 30 minutes of igniting, the second fire had been consumed by the first, which was ripping through a fast-burning landscape, powered forward by its own metabolism and pushed by the wind. It had advanced four miles and was already swallowing the small town of Concow. The Camp Fire was moving too fast to be fought. How fast must a fire be for it to be too fast to be fought? Why did you choose not to include any technical details here?"Too fast to be fought” is subjective, of course, but they weren’t even able to mobilize their resources at that point.

“It was pretty much complete chaos,” Joe Kennedy said. Kennedy is a Cal Fire heavy-equipment operator based in Nevada City, southeast of Paradise. He was called to the Camp Fire at 7:16 that morning and hurtled toward the Ridge with his siren on, in an 18-wheeler flatbed with his bulldozer lashed to the back.

Kennedy is 36, a fantastically giant man with a shaved head and a friendly face but the affect of a granite wall; he spoke quietly and, it seemed, never a syllable more than necessary. He had operated heavy equipment his entire adult life, working as a contractor in the same small mountain towns around the Sierra where he grew up, then joined Cal Fire in 2014, just before he and his wife had a child. He claimed his supremely taciturn nature was a byproduct of fatherhood; until then, he explained, he was a more reckless adrenaline junkie. But Kennedy loved bulldozers, and he loved the rush of barreling toward a fire in one. “Dozer driver” seemed to be less his job description than his identity, his tribe. “In 10 years,” he joked, “they’ll probably consider it a mental disorder.”

Kennedy was dispatched to the Adventist Health Feather River hospital on Pentz Road. By the time he arrived, spot fires were igniting everywhere. The chatter on the radio was hard to penetrate. Now that he was in position, Kennedy couldn’t get in touch with anyone to give him a specific assignment, so he fell back on his training and a precept known as “leader’s intent”: If someone were to give him an order, he asked himself, what would it be?

By then, the hospital staff had completed a swift evacuation of the facility. Nurses later described doing precisely what they practiced in their annual drills but at three or four times the speed: wheeling patients through the halls at a sprint, staging everyone in the E.R. lobby, then sorting all 67 inpatients into a haphazard fleet of ambulances and civilians’ cars arriving outside to carry them away. Many didn’t make it far. One ambulance, carrying a woman who had just had a C-section and was still immobilized from the waist down, quickly caught fire in the traffic on Pentz. Paramedics hustled the woman into a nearby empty house. Others took shelter there as well. A Cal Fire officer, David Hawks, mobilized them into an ad hoc fire brigade to rake out the gutters and hose down the roof as structures on either side began to burn. How did you go about reconstructing this scene?This particular event was well documented in newspaper stories, which is how I first heard about it, though I also talked to several nurses from the hospital who had firsthand knowledge of what was happening. I believe I talked to Hawks himself, too, though I could be misremembering.

Kennedy caught snippets on his radio about this group and others hunkered in nearby houses. He’d found his assignment. He climbed into his bulldozer, a colossal Caterpillar D5H that traveled on towering treads like a tank and was outfitted with a huge steel shovel, or “blade.” It also had a pretty killer sound system, and as Kennedy turned the ignition, the stereo automatically connected to his phone through Bluetooth and started playing Pantera. How did you verify this? Was he recording or filming inside his cabin?No. I just took his word for it.Kennedy’s technical skill and experience as a heavy-machinery operator was formidable; so was his knowledge of wild-land firefighting tactics. But, given the scale of disaster unfolding around him, all that expertise now concentrated into one urgent, almost blockheadedly simple directive: “Take the fire away from the houses.”

Of course, Kennedy had no idea which houses any of these people were in. All around the hospital lay a sprawl of mostly ranch homes, packed together on small, wooded lots. A great many were already burning, so Kennedy homed in on the others and started clearing anything flammable, or anything already in flames, away from them. Ornamental landscaping, woodpiles, trees—he ripped it all out of the ground, pushed it aside or plowed straight through it, clearing a buffer around each home. He worked quickly, brutally, unhindered by any remorse over the collateral damage he was causing; it’s impossible, he explained, to maneuver an 18-ton bulldozer between two adjacent houses and not scrape up a few corners.

Before long, Kennedy lost track of exactly where he was; he hadn’t even bothered to switch on the GPS in his dozer yet. “It seemed like forever, but it was probably a half-hour,” he said. “I think I got eight or nine houses. I made a pretty big mess.”

Wildfires are typically attacked by strategically positioned columns of firefighters who advance on the fire’s head, heel or flanks like knights confronting a dragon. Earlier in the story you compare ambers to fairies. Why did you choose to use a fairy-tale like simile here as well — a dragon and knights — to describe the fire and firefighters?I don’t know — it goes back to the sense of a fire as a living being. I do remember, though, not realizing until many drafts later that dragons actually breathe fire, so it works on that level too. If a fire is spreading too rapidly for such an offensive, they instead work to contain it, drawing boundaries around the blaze—a “big box,” it’s called. Work crews or bulldozers clear vegetation and cut fire breaks to harden that perimeter. Aircraft drop retardants. Everything in the big box can be ceded to the fire; if you have to, you let it burn. But ideally, you hold those lines, and the flames don’t spread any farther.

As wildfires get fiercer and more unruly, firefighters aren’t just unable to mount direct attacks but are also forced to draw larger and larger boxes to keep from being overrun themselves. “The big box is a lot bigger now,” one Cal Fire officer explained. (He asked not to be named, hesitant to publicly concede that “our tactics need to change.”) What did it take for your editor to agree to you quoting an anonymous source?In this case, not much, particularly since I was explaining the source’s reticence in the story.] But this strategy breaks down when the fire is racing toward a populated area. The extra space you would surrender to the fire might contain a neighborhood of several hundred homes.

Wildfires aren’t solid objects, moving in a particular direction at a particular speed. They are frequently erratic and fluid, ejecting embers in all directions, producing arrays of spot fires that then pull together and ingest any empty space between them. On Nov. 8, the wind was so strong that gusts easily lofted embers from one rim of the Feather River Canyon to the other like a trebuchet, launching fire out of the wilderness into Fisher’s neighborhood. The more I read of the story, the more circular in structure it appears to be. This line, for instance, reads like a quick circle back to the very first scene, with Fisher in her garden.It’s not circular to me. It’s just that it’s all happening in a very compact space and time, so events brush up against each other.

As this swirl of live embers descended, like the flecks in a snow globe, each had the potential to land in a receptive fuel bed: the dry leaves in someone’s yard, the pine needles in a gutter. Those kinds of fuels were easy to find. It was November, after all, past the time of year that wildfires traditionally start, and Paradise’s trees had carpeted the town with tinder. And every speck of flame that rose up in it had the potential to leap into an air vent and engulf a home. Now it is a spot fire—a beachhead in the built environment, spattering its own embers everywhere, onto other houses, rebooting the entire process.

Within two hours of the first spot fires being reported near Fisher’s house, others leapfrogged from one end of Paradise to the other. The progression was unintelligible from any one point on the ground. As one man who was at the hospital later told me, “I thought that the only part of Paradise that was on fire was the part of Paradise we were looking at.” Why did you not name this man?I can’t defend this. Journalistically, it’s better to name people. But as a human being, it’s sort of rude to ask for someone’s time and then do this to them. I guess I just didn’t want to complicate the moment by introducing a new name and having to identify the person. And, as happened with Fisher, this generated a horrifying kind of dissonance: scurrying away from the fire only to discover that the fire was suddenly ahead of you and alongside you, too.

“Take deep breaths,” Laczko said.

Fisher had just told him about trying to kill herself. They were barely moving. Embers darted by like schools of bioluminescent fish. Evergreen trees alongside them burned top to bottom. These were the town’s famous pines, stressed from years of drought; the pitch inside was heating to its boiling point and, the moment it vaporized, the length of the trunk would flash into flame all at once. This became one of the more nightmarish and stupefying sights that morning on the Ridge: giant trees suddenly combusting.

The topography of that particular stretch of Pearson Road made it a distinctly horrible place to be stranded. Beyond the guardrail to Fisher and Laczko’s left, a densely wooded ravine yawned open, with a stream known as Dry Creek Drainage far below. Already, the spot fires and burning trees on either side of the road were casting heat inward. But as the mass of the wildfire moved in, the ravine appeared to create a chimney effect, funneling flames up and over the street—only to be overridden periodically by the prevailing winds, which pushed the flames back. Everyone on Pearson was caught in the middle.

A Cal Fire branch director, Tony Brownell, told me that he was astonished to watch fire doubling back across Pearson, washing over the same land it had just scorched, only the second such immediate “reburn” he witnessed in his 31-year career. This was about 15 minutes before Fisher’s car ignited. Brownell, it turns out, was the fireman in the white pickup truck whom she initially followed into that gridlock from back on Pentz Road. Brownell managed to escape quickly, but as he turned his vehicle around and drove away, he told me, he looked at the flames in his rearview mirror and thought, I just killed that girl. All timelines and events seem to be moving toward one point of encounter/meeting point. When during your research process did you start realizing that so many individual storylines met, even if for a moment? And when/how/why did you decide to show those storylines crisscrossing? Perhaps more importantly, how did you organize your sources and the timeline of all the events, so as to be able to see such “coincidences/meeting points,” and later verify such exact details?Tamra’s videos were timestamped. So I catalogued everything happening in them in a text doc and then I inserted new material into that timeline as I learned it. I’d just finished writing my second book, “This is Chance!,” which took place over the course of three days after an earthquake, and had used this same process to organize tens of thousands of pages of source material and audio recordings. Collating six hours of events was easier.

“You’d think that people would just hurry up and go,” Fisher said.

“There’s no place to go,” Laczko told her. “They’re trying. Cal Fire’s here to help.”

He could see a fire engine a few car-lengths ahead. After fighting to weave forward, it, too, had been more or less swallowed by the same intractable traffic. Laczko silently made the calculation that if his own truck caught fire, he and Fisher would make a run for it and climb inside to safety.

This would have been a mistake. The Cal Fire captain driving the fire engine, John Jessen, later estimated that the outside temperature was more than 200 degrees, the air swirling with lethally hot gases. Cars were catching fire everywhere, and four drivers fled toward that fire truck and, one after another, crammed themselves into the cab alongside its three-man crew. When two more people came knocking, Jessen turned them away—no more room, he said. “That was probably the worst thing I’ve ever had to do,” Jessen said later. “I don’t know if those people made it to another car. I don’t know what happened to them.” When did you talk to Jessen?He was one of the last people I interviewed.

This was Jessen’s 24th fire season in California. He’d fought five of the 10 most destructive fires in state history and was beginning to feel beaten down. “When I started this career 25 years ago, a 10,000-acre fire was a big deal,” he said. “And it was a big deal if we weren’t able to do structure defense and the fire consumed five homes. We took that to heart. We felt like we lost a major battle.” Just moments earlier, around the corner on Pentz, Jessen watched fire consume dozens of homes within minutes. He was knocking on the door of another, to evacuate any stragglers, when he saw the actual fire front for the first time. It was already climbing the near side of the canyon, pounding toward town. The wall of flame was 200 feet tall, he estimated, and stretched for more than two and a half miles. That was the moment Jessen scrambled back to his truck and told his crew it was time to move.

Now, marooned on Pearson, Jessen radioed for air support. Later, he would seem embarrassed by this request, chalking it up to “muscle memory”: The smoke was too thick for aircraft to fly in. The paint on his hood started burbling from the heat. Inside, the plastic on his steering console was smoking; the stench of its off-gasing filled the cab. The barrel-shaped fuel tanks beneath the doors were splashing diesel around the truck; the brass plugs in their openings got so hot they liquefied.

Jessen, meanwhile, was making a desperate calculation of his own: If their truck caught fire, he decided, they would extinguish it quickly and take off, saving the civilians aboard by pushing other cars out of the way with the front of his fire engine.

Maybe this was the lowest point. The mega-fire overwhelmed every system people put in place to fight or escape it; now it was scrambling their consciences too. “That’s something I never imagined I would be thinking about,” Jessen confessed, “pushing people closer to the fire so that I could get out.” I imagine that this must be a very difficult thing to admit for anyone, and even more so perhaps for a firefighter.I was very impressed by the frankness of him and other firefighters I spoke to. They were all hurting.

Jessen sat there, watching for signs that his truck was about to catch fire. Laczko sat watching his own truck, ready to run for Jessen’s. Then someone shouted, “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” Laczko saw a bulldozer churn into view behind him, clobbering one burning car after another. Here the four main narrative lines meet again. Did you plan the narrative threads (Fisher’s, then Fisher/Laczko’s, Kennedy’s, and Jessen’s) to look like the map of the three main roads in Paradise — like the legs of the tripod you mentioned earlier — with Fisher representing the stem of the tripod?No. I’ve never really found that level of metaphorical understanding of a story to be helpful to me. I appreciate those things as a reader but it’s not where my head’s at when I’m writing.

Joe Kennedy had been mashing through people’s landscaping on Pentz when he heard Jessen’s distress call. There was no time for the standard, numeric identifiers. “John,” Kennedy radioed. “Where you at?”

He switched on the iPad in his dozer and found Jessen’s position near the corner of Pearson and Stearns Road. It was more than a mile away. The dozer’s maximum speed was 6.3 miles per hour. But Kennedy clipped that distance by disregarding the right angles on his street map and barging his bulldozer through backyards, then eventually barreling down the steep, wooded incline overlooking Pearson and spilling, sloppily, into the middle of the street.

He produced a spectacular ruckus as he pushed the machine down the hill on its treads. From the road, it sounded like trees crashing—and some of it probably was. As Kennedy leveled off, he came upon a group of people, including four nurses from the hospital in scrubs. They were stranded in the middle of Pearson, battered by gusts of embers roaring out of the ravine, buckling over, struggling to breathe and keep walking. One nurse, Jeff Roach, was walking straight at Kennedy’s bulldozer, with his arms in the air. Later, Roach explained that he had decided the bulldozer driver would either see him and rescue him and his three friends, or would not see him, keep advancing and crush him under the vehicle’s treads. The burning in Roach’s lungs was so bad, he said, that he had made his peace with either outcome.

Kennedy stopped. Two of the nurses climbed aboard then scampered to rejoin the others who had piled into a fire engine that appeared behind him. Kennedy began fighting his way up Pearson, toward Jessen, but found cars crammed into both lanes and the shoulder. Some people were idling right beside other vehicles that were expelling fountains of flame. Kennedy turned up the Pantera. He knew what he had to do: take the fire away from the people.

He approached the first burning car and pushed it off the embankment and into the ravine with his dozer blade, then backed up to discover a flaming rectangle of asphalt underneath it. He drove through that, pushed more cars. “I was basically on fire,” Kennedy said. A photo later surfaced of an old Land Cruiser shoved so far up the adjacent hillside that it became snared in some sagging power lines. “That was me,” Kennedy explained with a noticeable quantum of pride.

At least one of the vehicles Kennedy was shoving around had a body in it: Evva Holt, an 85-year-old retired dietitian who lived at Feather Canyon Gracious Retirement Living, close to Fisher’s house. Holt had phoned her daughter that morning to come get her—her daughter and son-in-law lived nearby and frequently came to perform for Holt and the other residents with their choral group—but there was no time. An independent caretaker named Lori LeBoa was readying to leave with a 103-year-old woman, and a police officer put Holt in her Chevy Silverado as well. The three women wound up stuck on Pearson. As the fire curled over LeBoa’s pickup, she jumped out and handed off the older woman to another driver. Turning back for Holt, she saw only fire and two arms reaching out. This is one of the most traumatic and saddest moments in the story, and one I’m sure must have been very difficult for LeBoa to share. How did you manage that conversation with LeBoa?Similar to what I said about the firefighters: People were disarmingly open with me, and I think it had something to do with the fact that they were all in such pain and grappling with the trauma of the event.

Months later, over coffee, I asked Kennedy if he remembered moving that Silverado. He did. The memory seemed painful; he preferred not to talk about it on the record, except to stress that it was clear that he arrived too late to help whoever was inside. Why did you decide to take the reader out of the scene for a moment, by mentioning when and where you discussed this with Kennedy?A similar instinct to what you asked about Cindy, earlier: It felt like you should be able to see him in the present, and particularly here because this perspective allows you to see him as a human being who’s affected by what he had to do afterward.

I asked if he knew any details about the woman, if he wanted me to tell him. “I like the story in my head,” he said. Did you learn about what had happened to Evva Holt before confirming with Kennedy if he had indeed moved the Silverado? How did you prepare to ask Joe Kennedy that question? What was the most difficult question you had to ask anyone while researching this story?Yes, I knew. Every conversation I had for this story was difficult emotionally.

Kennedy opened enough space for the stranded drivers on Pearson to maneuver and slowly advance. Moments earlier, one nurse who’d leapt into his dozer accidentally knocked into his iPad, switching his GPS into satellite view. Eventually, when Kennedy looked down at the map again, his eyes locked onto a conspicuous, bare rectangle, free of any vegetation or structures—any fuels to burn. It was a large gravel lot right near Jessen’s fire engine; the firefighters just couldn’t see it through the smoke. Once Kennedy arrived, the firefighters began herding the entire traffic jam—more than a hundred cars, Jessen says—into that clearing.

“Pull over there,” a firefighter hollered at Laczko and Fisher as they crept uphill.

“And then what?” Laczko asked.

“Hunker down and keep your windows rolled up.”

“Are you serious?” Fisher erupted. She was hoping for a more sophisticated plan.

“They wouldn’t have put us here unless it was safer than where we were,” Laczko said.

He eased his truck into place, parallel with the others. Directly in front of them, through the windshield, the frame of a large house burned and burned. For a moment, it was quiet. Then Fisher broke down again, very softly this time. “I don’t have anything,” she said. “I don’t have anything.” The repetition of “burned” adds a moment of repose in the middle of chaos, a moment of calm, as though everyone in that clearing watched, in silence, the house burn. The sentence that follows, “For a moment, it was quiet,” only reinforces that momentary human silence suggested by “burned and burned.” I’m told that wildfires are terribly loud, however. Why did you decide not to mention the fire’s roar?I’m not sure. I suppose I was working off the video of that moment, and in the video, in the cab of Larry’s truck, it was rather quiet.

Fires are unique among natural disasters: Unlike earthquakes or hurricanes, they can be fought, slowed down or thwarted. And virtually every summer in Paradise, until that Thursday morning, they had been. There was always trepidation as fire season approached but also skepticism that evacuation would ever truly be necessary and worth the hassle. “I confess my sense of denial,” said Jacky Hoiland, who had lived in Paradise most of her life and worked for the school district for 20 years. Initially, after hearing about the Camp Fire, she took a look at the sky and then made herself a smoothie.

Still, even before the Camp Fire, many people in Paradise and around California had started to look at the recent succession of devastating fires—the Tubbs Fire, the Thomas Fire, blazes that ate through suburban-seeming neighborhoods and took lives—and intuit that our dominion over fire might be slipping. Something was different now: Fire was winning, finding ways to outstrip our fight response, to rear up recklessly and break us down. That morning, in Paradise, there hadn’t even been time for that fight response to kick in. And the flight response was failing, too. Those who study wildfire have long argued that we need to reshuffle our relationship to it—move from reflexively trying to conquer fire to designing ways for communities to outfox and withstand it. And in a sense, that’s what was happening with Laczko and Fisher, though only in a hasty and desperate way: Hunkered in that gravel lot, everyone was playing dead.

After the fire, stories surfaced of people retreating into similar so-called temporary refuge areas all over the Ridge: clearings that offered some minimal protection or structures that could be easily defended. One large group sheltered in the Paradise Alliance Church, which had been scouted and fortified in advance as part of the town’s emergency planning. Another group sheltered outside a bar on Skyway and, when it caught fire, scampered, en masse, to an adjacent building and sheltered there. The Kmart parking lot became an impromptu refuge. So did an antique shop called Needful Things. In Concow, one firefighter instructed at least a dozen people to jump into a reservoir as the fire approached.

The group on Pearson wasn’t in the gravel clearing long, less than 10 minutes, it seems, from videos on Fisher’s phone. Eventually, there was a knock on Laczko’s window. “We’re going to get out of here,” a firefighter said, though he didn’t specify where they would go. Moments later, another firefighter on a bullhorn shouted, “We’re going to go toward the hospital.”

“Oh, shit,” Laczko blurted.

“We’re going back?” Fisher said. She sounded both terrified and incensed. The hospital was on Pentz Road, near where she started. The trauma of the last two hours appeared to be flooding back.

Joe Kennedy led the way in his bulldozer, crawling through the thick smoke on Pearson to batter any obstacles out of their way. The core of the fire had passed, though it had left a kind of living residue everywhere: All the wooden posts of a roadside metal barricade were still burning, and shoals of flames dotted the road where Kennedy had removed burning cars.

The cars were still burning, too, wherever he had deposited them, belching solid black smoke as the caravan of survivors slowly passed.

“There’s my car,” Fisher said and turned to film it. Fire spouted from its roof like the plume of a Roman helmet. This simile is just so unexpected. Could you describe how it came to you?That’s just how it looked! It looked exactly like that. The mascot at my high school was the “lancer” and the logo had a helmet somewhat like the Roman ones, so maybe it’s just baked more into my subconscious than the average person’s.“It has my Raggedy Ann in it!” she said. The doll was one of the few things she grabbed before evacuating. She had had it since she was 6 and had expected to be buried with it one day. “Oh, my God,” she said. “I’m crying over something so stupid!”

At the hospital, a fire alarm quacked robotically as a small outbuilding, not far from where Laczko and Fisher were parked, expelled smoke from behind a fence. A group of nurses had scavenged supplies from the evacuated emergency room and erected a makeshift triage center under the awning to treat any wounded trickling in. Laczko got out of his truck to see how he could help.

The hospital campus was ringed and speckled with fire. Some of the men were peeing on the little spot fires that danced in the parking lot’s landscaped medians. Still, the influx of firefighters that morning had largely succeeded in defending the main building when the fire front moved through. Eventually, a call went out on the radio that the hospital campus was “actually the safest place to be.”

Fisher and Laczko’s group waited in the parking lot for close to three hours. Then, those lingering fires nearby began to swell and expand, threatening the hospital again. The firefighters were losing pressure in their hoses. The nurses were told to pack everything up. The road out was clear; they had a window in which it was safe to move. Everyone would finally be driving off the Ridge.

As they pulled out of the parking lot, back onto Pentz Road, Laczko noticed his eye-doctor’s office burning top to bottom, directly in front of them.

“It’s gone,” Fisher said.

“It’s gone,” Laczko said.

“It’s gone,” Fisher repeated. “That house is gone! And that house is gone!” Fantastic dialogue and so heavy with meaning. Why did you choose to keep it so simple and not use anything else than “it’s gone” and “that house is gone”?Hearing the tape, you’d feel something powerful in the silences between them saying this, and the recognition that they were so dumbstruck by the damage that they just kept repeating the same simple words. This was probably an attempt to transmit that.

They went on gesturing at everything as they drove—or rather, at its absence: all the homes still burning and others that had already settled into static masses of scrap and ash. As happens in any small town, every part of Paradise was overlaid with memories and meanings; each resident had his or her own idiosyncratic map of associations. As Fisher and Laczko coasted down Pentz, they tried to reconcile their maps with the disfigured reality in front of them, speaking the names of each flattened side street, noting who lived there or the last time they had been down there themselves. The iconic home at the corner of Pearson, with the ornate metal fence and sculptures of lions, had been devoured: “It used to be on the garden tour,” Laczko said.

“Right here, that was my dog groomer’s house.”

“My sister is just right up here.”

“Are these the people that used to have the Halloween stuff up?”

It was 1:45 p.m. Thirty-nine minutes later, and 460 miles away, a small brush fire would be reported near a Southern California Edison substation north of Malibu. Firefighters wouldn’t contain the Woolsey Fire until it had swallowed nearly 100,000 acres and 1,600 structures and charged all the way to the Pacific, where it ran out of earth to consume. This time, as photos surfaced, all of America could find reference points on the map the fire had clawed apart: Lady Gaga evacuated. Miley Cyrus’s home was a ruin. The mansion from “The Bachelor” was encircled and singed.

“Oh, God, it’s all gone,” Fisher said again. She gaped at the east side of Pentz Road, facing the canyon, where there didn’t appear to be a single home left: just chimneys, wreckage, the slumping carcasses of cars, everything dun-colored and dead.

Five months after the Camp Fire, at the end of March, the wreckage in Paradise was still overpowering: parcel after parcel of incinerated storefronts, cars, outbuildings, fast-food restaurants and homes. Patches of rutted pavement, like erratic rumble strips, still scarred Paradise’s roadways wherever vehicles had burned. On Pearson Road, I knelt beside one and found a circular shred of yellow plastic, fused into a ring of tar: a piece of Fisher’s car. It was startling how similar Paradise looked to when I first came, 10 days after the fire. Why did you decide to mention your own presence in Paradise both 10 days after the fire, and also five months later?This is just about transparency.Except that it was spring now: Clusters of daffodils were blooming, carefully arranged, bordering what had been fences or front steps.

That week, the city issued its first rebuilding permit, though roughly 1,000 residents were already back, somehow making a go of it, either in trailers or inside the scant number of houses that survived, even as public-health officials discovered that the municipal water system was contaminated with high levels of benzene, a carcinogen released by the burning homes and household appliances, then sucked through the pipes as firefighters drew water into their hoses. Driving around at dusk one evening, letting acre after acre of obliterated houses wash over me, I spotted a lone little boy in what appeared to be the head of a cul-de-sac—it was hard to tell—with heaps of houses all around him. He was standing with his arms raised, like a victor or a king, then he hopped back on his scooter and zipped away.

Jim Broshears, Paradise’s emergency-operations coordinator, pointed out that many of the homes still standing tended to be in clusters: “A shadow effect,” he called it, where one property broke the chain of ignitions—maybe because its owners employed certain fire-wise landscaping or design features, or maybe just by chance. It showed that, while the destructiveness of any fire is largely random, there are ways a community can collectively lower the odds. “It’s really a cultural shift that requires people to look at their home in a different way,” Broshears said: to see the unkempt azalea bush or split rail fence touching your home as a hazard that will carry the next fire forward like a fuse, not just to your house but also to the others around it—to recognize that everyone is joined in one massive pool of incalculable and unconquerable risk.

The free market, meanwhile, has continued adjusting to that risk according to its own unsparing logic. Insurance companies have steadily raised premiums or even ceased to renew policies in many fire-prone areas of California, as payouts for wildfire claims will now exceed $10 billion for the second year in a row. Two months after the Camp Fire, PG&E filed for bankruptcy protection. Then it announced, along with two of California’s other major utilities, that it would be expanding its Public Safety Power Shutoff program this year. The company is now prepared to preventively cut electricity to a larger share of its infrastructure—high-voltage wires, as well as lower-voltage ones—and across its entire range. Nearly five and a half million customers could be subject to shutdowns at one time or another this summer, “which is all of our customer base,” a PG&E vice president, Aaron Johnson, told me: every single one. “With the increasing fire risk that we’re seeing in the state,” he added, “and the increasing extreme weather, this program is going to be with us for some time to come.”

In California, the prospect of life without electricity from time to time—a signature convenience of the 20th century—has apparently become an unavoidable, even sensible, feature of the 21st.

How did it end? With smoke—with colossal shapes of smoke gurgling out of Paradise behind Laczko and Fisher as they glided downhill, and with a stoic figure somewhere inside the smoke, single-mindedly grinding through neighborhoods in his bulldozer, music blaring, chasing after flames as they stampeded uphill, but mostly failing to get ahead of them as he and every other firefighter labored to keep fire away from structures that seemed, in the end, determined to burn.

The houses had revealed themselves: They were just another crop of tightly clustered and immaculately dried-out dead trees, a forest that had grown, been felled and milled, then rearranged sideways and hammered together by clever human beings who, over time, came to forget the volatile ecosystem that spawned that material and still surrounded it now. Some of that wood most likely lived 100 years or more and had been lumber for almost as long: a storehouse of energy that was now bursting open, joining with the burning forests around the Ridge into a single, furious outpouring of smoke—ominous because it was dark and high enough to challenge the sun, but also because it was largely composed of carbon: an estimated 3.6 million metric tons of greenhouse gases that, as seems to happen at least once every fire season lately, was more than enough to obliterate the progress made by all of California’s climate-change policies in a typical year.

How did it end? With smoke—with smoke that signaled the world that Fisher knew at the beginning of the day was gone and that surely signaled something just as grave for the rest of us. Why did you decide to repeat the phrase “with smoke?”This was Jake Silverstein’s idea. It was the week we were closing the piece and he felt the piece needed to hit a more elevated register at the end. It wasn’t enough to just conclude the small narrative by showing Tamra and Larry getting off the Ridge; we needed to leave the larger, more universal narrative somewhere, too. And in a more poetic way. He’d had me write that nut graf about Tamra being trapped in the twenty-first century, which made clear how the story is actually about all of us, and now we needed a bookend for that, telling us all what to make of it in the end. I had started this section with the phrase “How did it end?” and it was Jake’s idea to keep repeating it, like some kind of scary, demented mantra. I was writing under such duress that I was happy to have a suggestion to get started with and this is how it came out.Within hours, and for nearly two weeks after that, smoke would swamp the lucid blue sky over the valley where Fisher was now heading; where, for weeks, she would be afraid to be left alone and, for months, refuse to drive, terrified by the sensation of slowing down in traffic, even momentarily; where she found herself repeatedly checking the sky to make sure it wasn’t black; where she kept showering but swore she still smelled the smoke on her skin. And before long, the smoke had floated all the way to the coast, where it forced the city of San Francisco to close its schools.

How did it end? It hasn’t. It won’t. These three short sentences have been haunting me since I first read this feature piece. Why did you choose to end the narrative on such a note — I don’t want to use the word “negative” or pessimistic,” or even “realistic,” though all three would work here, in a way — rather than on one of hope?There is hope in the small narrative — in all the acts of cooperation and heroism that aligned to help Tamra get out. But now I’m dealing with the larger narrative — climate change — and I don’t see anything in the 11,000 words that have preceded this passage from which I could credibly draw hope. There are other hopeful stories to write about climate change, but this one is about the terror.

Jon Mooallem is a writer at large for the magazine. His book about the great Alaska earthquake of 1964, “This Is Chance!” will be out early next year. Katy Grannan is a photographer and filmmaker based in Berkeley, Calif. She last took photographs for the magazine for an article about the Ghost Ship fire.

Videos from Tamra Fisher

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Ania Hull is a multilingual editor, writer and journalist. She writes about immigration, poverty, conservation, and environmental justice, among other topics. She is currently based in New Mexico.

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