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The past few years have drastically changed how we think about our relationship to work, perhaps permanently. However, they haven’t changed the fact that billions of people on this planet spend about half their waking hours exchanging labor for money in order to secure food and shelter. As such, work has remained an inescapable part of one’s identity. “What do you do?” is still a small-talk question not because the answer is usually interesting, but because the answer tells you something about the skills and knowledge that person has amassed. And when the answer is interesting, it’s hard not to feel some measure of admiration for someone whose experience falls so outside your own.

I’ve always been fascinated by those whose daily occupations carry meaning, promise adventure, or are in any way out of the ordinary. Of course, everybody’s dream job is different, but imagine swapping sitting at a computer or working on a production line for clearing landmines, dodging tornadoes, or braving the icy waters of the Bering Sea. Not for everyone, of course—but what astonishing ways to earn a living. 

The examples you’ll encounter below range from the inspirational to the unfathomable. Who would want to toil 18-hour days, or climb to dizzying heights with little to no protection? For some, that sort of life holds a deep appeal, and herein lies the hook that draws you into these stories: In attempting to understand the motivations of others, we are by reflex attempting to understand ourselves. Each of these pieces moved me in some way, and I hope that they move you also.

Chasing Tornadoes (Priit J. Vesilind, National Geographic, April 2004)

As this mesmerizing article points out, it was the 1996 film Twister that first brought the occupation of “tornado chaser” to widespread public attention. Twister was a big deal upon its release, and I can vividly recall being spellbound by the then-cutting-edge special effects: dark and furious tendrils reaching down from the sky to pluck people, cars, and houses into the sky, spinning like toys, seemingly cut adrift from gravity itself. That film, as all movies do, exaggerated the hazards faced by its protagonists—but, judging by this primary account, not by very much. That meteorologists are still throwing themselves at deadly storms nearly 30 years on tells much of the complexity behind this destructive and spectacular weather phenomenon. 

In order to study tornados, you have to get close enough to manually drop heavy probes in their path, sometimes less than 100 meters from an approaching maelstrom. In a way, it’s comforting to know that, for all our technology and sophistication, we are in no way removed from the natural systems that surround us. Nature can always outdo us, will always win. That’s not to minimize the human cost, however, nor the bravery and determination of the tornado chasers. From the very beginning, in which an entire village is sucked into the air, this piece delivers mind-boggling drama, immersing us in a disparate group of specialists who race across the United States to seek out something most others would sooner avoid—all in the interest of furthering our understanding of an uncontrollable phenomenon.

But we’re late, and out of position. If we try to drive around the storm, we won’t have enough daylight left to see it. So we decide to “punch the core” of the thunderstorm, forcing our way into the “bear’s cage,” an area between the main updraft and the hail. It’s an apt name: Chasing tornadoes is like hunting grizzlies—you want to get close, but not on the same side of the river. Sometimes you get the bear; sometimes the bear gets you.

And so we head straight into the storm and find ourselves splattering mud at 60 miles an hour (97 kilometers an hour) on a two-lane road, threatening to hydroplane, visibility near zero. Anton is less than comforting. “The hail in the bear’s cage smashes windows and car tops,” he shouts, grinning. “The smaller stuff is kept aloft by the updraft, and only the large chunks fall. It’s like small meteorites banging down. Ha-ha-ha!”

In The Race For Better Cell Service, Men Who Climb Towers Pay With Their Lives (Ryan Knutson and Liz Day, ProPublica, May 2012)

Once again, we encounter a piece that draws aside the invisible curtain to glimpse the grueling efforts that enable our everyday creature comforts—in this case, the world of mobile communications networks. If you’ve ever shuddered at a TikTok video of a worker balanced precariously atop a tower at vertigo-inducing heights, this article probably isn’t for you. Yet, for such a dangerous job—cell tower climbing routinely claims up to 10 times the number of human lives as the conventional construction industry—it pays a relatively modest wage. What is it, then, that drives people to take up such work?

As a project manager quoted in the piece says, “You’ve got to have a problem to hang 150 feet in the air on an eight-inch strap.” Yet the workers featured in this piece, despite some suffering horrible injuries, clearly love their jobs. It’s not hard to understand the buzz that must come from routinely doing something that most people could not (and would not) do, along with sense of freedom that must come with climbing aloft to look down upon the world. As with the cobalt mining industry—itself the subject of another story in this list—there is a dark underside to this business, as sub-contractors routinely cut corners and take risks in the quest for a few extra dollars.

The greatness in Knutson and Day’s article, as with others collected here, lies in its ability to bring to life the stories and personalities of the people whose hard work makes life easier for us all. If you’re reading this on your smartphone, take a moment to consider the often-obscured reality behind mobile technology—a technology that, by its very nature, is largely invisible.

The surge of cell work forever altered tower climbing, an obscure field of no more than 10,000 workers. It attracted newcomers, including outfits known within the business as “two guys and a rope.” It also exacerbated the industry’s transient, high-flying culture.

Climbers live out of motel rooms, installing antennas in Oklahoma one day, building a tower in Tennessee the next. The work attracts risk-takers and rebels. Of the 33 tower fatalities for which autopsy records were available, 10 showed climbers had drugs or alcohol in their systems.

The Cobalt Pipeline (Todd C. Frankel, The Washington Post, September 2016)

This is where mobile technology begins: the dangerous and dirty business of mining for cobalt, a mineral essential to the construction of smartphones and laptops. As a species we are finally becoming aware that every modern amenity carries an ecological price, and that price is often paid most dearly (and ironically) by nations that are monetarily poor but resource-rich. In our relentless drive “forward,” it is often the most vulnerable who pay the price. Mining is not a calling for these men; it is a necessity.

However, there is hope to be found in this troubling story—specifically, the very fact of its existence. The best journalism reduces global issues to a human scale, and by taking us into the lives of Congolese miners risking life and limb in pursuit of the rare metal, writer Todd C. Frankel forces us to ask ourselves some uncomfortable questions.  

But Mayamba, 35, knew nothing about his role in this sprawling global supply chain. He grabbed his metal shovel and broken-headed hammer from a corner of the room he shares with his wife and child. He pulled on a dust-stained jacket. A proud man, he likes to wear a button-down shirt even to mine. And he planned to mine by hand all day and through the night. He would nap in the underground tunnels. No industrial tools. Not even a hard hat. The risk of a cave-in is constant.

“Do you have enough money to buy flour today?” he asked his wife.

She did. But now a debt collector stood at the door. The family owed money for salt. Flour would have to wait.

Mayamba tried to reassure his wife. He said goodbye to his son. Then he slung his shovel over his shoulder. It was time.

Making Our Home Safe Again: Meet the Women Who Clear Land Mines (Jessie Williams, The Observer, January 2021)

War leaves scars on every country it touches, sometimes literally: one of its most insidious instruments is buried explosives, set to trigger at the touch of a human foot. Land mines have been a topic of discussion for many years, catapulted to the front of the news in 1997, when Princess Diana raised awareness by walking through a field of live explosives in Angola. (She was a guest of the Halo Trust, an organization that undertakes the arduous and dangerous task of clearing such places for the local populace.)

Little can be more terrifying than the knowledge that each step you take could be your last. It’s a sudden, senseless, death, one without discernment or mercy. But in this inspiring story, life comes full circle, as Hana Khider returns to her ancestral homeland of the Sinjar mountains in northwestern Iraq. When Khider was a child, her mother told her stories of the family homeland they were forced to flee; now, as an adult, she works as part of a team of deminers, making that homeland safe once again. As meaningful as this work is, it also carries with it the deadliest of dangers: an average of nine people a day still fall victim to these terrible remnants of conflict.

At the start of this month, a 24-year-old man working for MAG was killed in an explosion at a munitions storage facility in Iraq’s Telefar district – a reminder of the dangers these deminers face every single day. Iraq has around 1,800 sq km of contaminated land (an area bigger than Greater London) stemming from multiple conflicts, including the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the Gulf War, the 2003 US-led invasion, and the Isis occupation of 2014. The Iraqi government has a target deadline of February 2028 to clear the country, which Morgan thinks is optimistic. “Last year, operators cleared just over 15 sq km,” he says. Covid-19 hasn’t helped. This year MAG has managed to disarm 1,200 mines; usually it would be 6,750 mines.

Dispatches: Life on an Alaskan Crab Boat (Andy Cochrane, Men’s Journal, April 2021)

We have always projected a certain romance onto the idea of working on the high seas, and a dignity upon those individuals brave enough to do so. For this piece, journalist Andy Cochrane signs up for a week’s work on the fishing boat Silver Spray, one of just 60 such vessels responsible for supplying all of North America with snow crab. Facing long hours, rough water, and freezing conditions, the work is as grueling as could be imagined, but surprisingly Cochrane encounters only good humor, pragmatism, and an inspiring sense of brotherhood amongst the crew.

This is work that is as fundamental to human existence as can be found. People have to eat, after all. But what really strikes me about this piece—and is a sentiment echoed by its author—is the remarkable positivity of the fishermen, which surely can’t be put down to a sense of pride and decent wages alone. Perhaps it’s the extreme conditions and the hardships that help foster such a sense of togetherness and wry determination. Whatever the cause, this is another absorbing peek into a job few of us would wish to undertake.

I was curious how these guys found their way to the industry and how they hadn’t burned out. Attrition is incredibly high, for obvious reasons—freezing temperatures, rough seas and long, exhausting hours. All three laughed off my greenhorn question, and we returned to tips on how I would survive the week.

Jose, an immigrant from El Salvador and father of two, has lived in Anchorage since the ’90s. Quiet, always smiling, and always working, he’s fished his entire career. Leo, raised in Samoa and now living in Vegas, also has two kids. Even with frozen fingers and toes, he never stopped making jokes. Jeffery, who lives half the year in the Philippines with his wife and three kids, would often give me a fist bump and say “you’ll be all right, everyone goes through this” after I puked, which happened 11 more times the first day.

Chris Wheatley is a writer and journalist based in Oxford, U.K. He has too many guitars, too many records, and not enough cats.

Editor: Peter Rubin
Copy Editor: Carolyn Wells

Understanding the integral relation between the warriors at home and abroad is crucial to understanding the war. So is understanding how this war’s apologists are constantly flipping upside down hierarchies of race and capital, and moral universes altogether. Where the slightest aggressions of the dominated get sold as existential threats, and the regular, disproportionate death-dealing of status quo devotees is marketed as noble necessity.

After Neely’s killer turned himself into authorities, received a second degree manslaughter charge, and was released on bail, Florida governor Ron DeSantis tweeted:

We must defeat the Soros-Funded DAs, stop the Left’s pro-criminal agenda, and take back the streets of law abiding citizens. We stand with Good Samaritans like Daniel Penny. Let’s show this Marine . . . America’s got his back.

DeSantis encouraged his followers to contribute to the killer’s legal defense fund, an effort reminiscent of the right rallying behind Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three men, killing two, during protests against the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Yet DeSantis himself is a former JAG officer credibly accused of complicity in suspicious deaths and abuse at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. So his rhetoric supporting Penny’s actions should also call to mind Trump’s pardons of arraigned war criminals like Eddie Gallagher and Mathew Golsteyn, or further back, chauvinist support for Lieutenant William Laws Calley after the My Lai massacre.

When you’re the eternal good guys, it’s remarkable all the bad things you can get away with doing. Here or anywhere. Plain-clothed or uniformed. The gap between the virtuous mythology and vicious actuality keeps expanding, just like your imperial birthright.

On a human level, Miran’s story is an anatomy of a kidnapping, an underreported scourge on unstable countries like Iraq. Thousands of Iraqis and foreigners living and working in the country have been kidnapping victims since the U.S. invasion in 2003, many disappearing without a trace even after ransoms have been paid. Most kidnappings in Iraq are conducted by militias and criminal gangs for money, but Miran’s kidnapping was one of the unusual cases that had both political and financial overtones. Miran is also one of the few high-profile kidnapping victims in Iraq to escape, survive, and tell her story.

Pam Mandel | Longreads | February 2019 | 14 minutes (3,605 words)

In 1982 travelers’ wisdom dictated it was a liability to have a stamp on your passport for Israel. This traveler’s wisdom, we relied on it all the time, though I could not tell you where we picked it up, exactly. And it did not help us when we went to Greece, where we’d hoped to find work and found nothing but vacationers and a few abandoned construction sites. Traveler’s wisdom guided us to take the ferry to Haifa, Israel, where we picked up farm work, enough to line our pockets with what little cash we heard we’d need for our target destination. This unofficial information was how we’d planned our route, leaving London in winter, our sights set on India.

Word was India would not issue you a visa if you showed up with a passport covered in Israeli stamps. You could, however, get a second passport issued from the embassy in Cairo and use that for traveling in parts of the world that were anti-Israel. We had been working in Israel, harvesting bananas, cleaning houses. Egypt was the launch pad to nations further east, a stepping stone on the way to India. That’s why we were going to Cairo, to get new passports.

We. Me, a California girl of 18, swept up in the transient population of unemployed British and German 20-somethings after a summer tour of Israel. That thing where Jewish kids go to The Promised Land to become one with the tribe, to form a bond with Israel. It didn’t work on me. I was instead drawn to the backpackers, the first edition of Lonely Planet’s India guidebook, and a middle class English non-Jew, Alastair, in his 20s, tall and skinny with deep-set blue eyes and a simmering anger at the world. We worked, we saved, and one day we decided we had enough money to go to Cairo and get new passports, and from there, continue to New Delhi.

***

The port at Sharm el Sheikh was a cinder block building on a flat dry arrowhead of land. There were some oil tankers offshore, a few dusty trailers. The town felt empty, temporary. There must have been a real village somewhere, but we did not see it as we lingered in the shade of the austere ferry terminal until it was time to board.

Word was India would not issue you a visa if you showed up with a passport covered in Israeli stamps. You could, however, get a second passport issued from the embassy in Cairo and use that for traveling in parts of the world that were anti-Israel.

The Sinai Peninsula had gone back to Egypt as part of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979, which went into effect in 1980; the stories about what would happen to the land were conflicting. Sometimes we heard it was being developed for tourism, something the Israelis had not done much of. Other times we heard the Egyptians were blowing up the reefs to eliminate the mines the Israelis had supposedly anchored in the waters. All of it broke my heart a little because Sinai was where I’d slept under the stars with the Israeli boyfriend I’d met early in my tour. Later, when I was attending Hebrew language school — after I’d broken up with the Israeli — I went back there, with my roommate. We had coffee every morning, just out of the sun in the doorway of a palm leaf shack. I wanted Sinai to stay like I remembered it forever, as if I could, at any time, return to drink gritty coffee out of a hot glass in the shade of dry palm leaves or weave my way between the coral, knee deep in the shallow waters of the Red Sea while looking at the brightly colored fish just below the surface.

The ferry from Sinai to the mainland part of Egypt was a passenger boat with benches under an awning with a small cabin up front for the captain. There were no other Western travelers, just Egyptian and Israeli businessmen, and rugged workers. The ferry shuttled us across the channel, along the towering hulls of container ships and oil tankers. At the top of the gangplank on the other side, we boarded a bus to Cairo. It felt downright luxurious, with its reclining seats and curtains in the windows. I’d been used to rattling beat up Israeli long haul buses, which had no amenities. I pushed the curtains aside and looked out the windows at the countryside, date palms, beehive-shaped clay ovens, walled villages, people walking in the same kinds of fields I’d worked in Israel, cotton and citrus, under hot skies.

The bus dropped us in the middle of Cairo and we walked, using a map in our guidebook, to a recommended traveler’s hotel. The city was loud and strangely dark brown — and I don’t mean the people, though many of them were brown too. It was the buildings, the light, the buses and cars, like everything was made of walnut. There was stone and concrete and new modern apartment and office buildings, but somehow, everything seemed the same kinds of colors, everything filtered through a spilled coffee light.

To get to the hotel we had to go up a wide flight of spiral stairs to the second floor in one of these brown buildings, built in the 30s or 40s. There was a small cage elevator with a rattling gate, but I did not trust it. The hotel lobby was open to the stairwell; to the right there was a tall desk, behind it a quiet man who gave us a key from a mailbox cubby and wrote the price of the room on a scrap of newsprint.

The hotel was a strange dream, also brown, like Cairo outside, but quiet, muffled, the light softened by yellowed window glass, sepia colored, an old photograph. The ceilings were high overhead to keep the heat down, and the halls were lined with big, heavy brown wood furniture. The place was filled with wardrobes and chests of drawers and headboards, a flea market of furniture in the hallways. And nearly every surface was covered with stacks and stacks of faded Arabic language newspapers.

If there were other guests besides a trio of talkative German guys, we didn’t know about it. We never saw them. The German guys had been robbed a few weeks back in Sudan. We hung out with them in the restaurant downstairs at street level, drinking light Egyptian beer and eating plates of fuul — fava bean stew — and pita bread, talking about travel. The German guys wore leather pants and had almost no belongings. They’d been driving a Land Rover south when they’d been stopped by armed Sudanese rebels who took their car and left them at the side of the road with little more than the clothes they’d been wearing. They did not fight, the German guys said. Why would they? They were unarmed. They were not going to win. They handed over the keys and sat at the side of the road until someone drove by. They had hitchhiked back to Cairo and were hanging out at this empty hotel trying to figure out what to do next. They weren’t broke, but their plans to drive the length of Africa to Cape Town were interrupted. They were in good spirits for people who had been carjacked on a desert highway. Maybe they were rich kids? Or maybe they’d had nothing to lose when they set out, so this was just another story in their adventure.

***

Urban Cairo disappeared into the desert shortly before the Great Pyramids. We took the bus out to see them, these giant structures that made me laugh, so exactly were they like I had always imagined them, and also so much more impressive. It was strange to recognize them so completely and to be so surprised by the idea that they were real. I ran my fingers down the seams where the giant stone blocks that made up the pyramids sat tightly against each other, and they felt familiar and warm. We had stopped frequently on our journey from London and anytime we encountered an iconic work of art — the Great Pyramids, the Mona Lisa, the Acropolis in Athens, I was bright with the joy of recognition. Seeing any of the masterworks, from the modest-sized Leonardo to the massive stone pyramids, was like greeting a friend I didn’t know I’d missed so much.

The Sphinx sat quietly in the low sandstone trench in which she’d been built. We walked around the edges at about her shoulder level, looking at her distinctive profile, her neatly shaped paws, her powerful lioness body. I knew her already from history classes, but here she was, right in front of me, her broken nose detracting not at all from her strength.

Here and there hawkers asked if we wanted camel rides; we stayed on foot and wandered around — and into — the monumental tombs. We were alone in one of them, with only the attendant, and he gestured towards Alastair that he could climb into the empty, lidless sarcophagus. Alastair declined. The next day we wandered the cavernous and uncrowded Egyptian museum through gallery after vast gallery stuffed with stunning artifacts, painted coffins, stone relief carvings, gold and lapis lazuli jewelry and scarabs and staffs. The kohl-lined eyes of past Egyptian royalty watched us wander around their treasures, and our footsteps echoed in the poorly lit rooms. Every now and then we’d encounter a khaki clad guard who would nod our way, silently, or maybe there’d be another pair of tourists, spotted through a glass case that held a gold leafed headdress, and then, we’d lose sight of them. I didn’t understand why there weren’t more people here. Athens was a hive of tourists, Paris the same. Cairo, home to the pyramids and the kind of artifacts that made our imaginations go crazy since King Tut’s tomb had been cracked open, was full of people — but hardly any of them were tourists.

***

Getting new passports was an administrative task, simple enough to complete — the staff had heard the story before. At the American and the British embassies, we filled out papers, handed over our street corner passport photos. Mine were completely blown out. There were dark shadows where my eyes were; my face was featureless and pale. The pictures were completely unacceptable and the embassy took them, along with my application. I paid my fee and was told it would take about a week — come back in a week. With our wait time, we would try to see Egypt, parts of it, anyway.

***

When we left Cairo city limits the light opened up. In the city, the light felt as though it were filtered through amber glass, but outside the confines of Cairo’s traffic and noise and high-rises, there was a lot more color. Everything was bright blue sky and the pale cream color of sand.

We took a bus to the end of the line and walked out a hot sandy road to see the Coptic churches. I didn’t know what the Copts were, but I had seen pictures of the icon paintings — saints with dark skin and almond eyes backed by gold leaf halos — and I wanted to be in their presence, so off we went. We had no idea how far the walk was to the churches from the end of the bus line, and we were used to Israel, where you could always get a ride. A taxi came along and picked us up — it was cheap — and dropped us in a silent complex where a whispering monk in black robes took us to wash our hands before leading us to a chapel full of exactly the icons I’d wanted to see.

We had not made any plans for the return trip, and as we set back out on the dry road, I wondered if we would be able to make the walk all the way back to where we’d got off the bus. It was hot, there were no cars, and Alastair was starting to get angry when a car stopped beside us and the driver asked us if we needed a ride. We were so grateful, and he seemed amused to find us. He would not take the money I insisted Alastair offer him.

We went to Alexandria, but beyond the beach there was little reason for us to be there. I knew it had been home to a library once, one of the great wonders of the ancient world, and I had imagined there would be remains. I was wrong; there was nothing to see. That was fine, but we became hopelessly lost in the back streets while looking for something, anything that would give us a reason to be there. Boys playing in the streets pulled up their long white gallabiyah to mock Alastair’s shorts as though he was walking around in his underwear. So far from the center of town he must have looked crazy, half dressed, far from anywhere an outsider should be. We wandered in circles until we found someone who spoke English, though all he could say was, “I’m sorry, I cannot help you.” I do not know how we found our way back into town but we got a hotel and walked on the beach until sunset. We were so out of place, always dressed wrong, standing out in our western clothes, our legs bare, my head uncovered. We wandered around looking at everything like we had never seen buildings or cars or people before, when really, we were the ones who were strange there. While we were looking for a place to get dinner, a man stalked us down side streets and alleys, and finally, Alastair turned and confronted him.

“Why are you following us?” His anger was right on the surface. I wondered if they would get into a fight.

“I just wanted to talk to you,” the man said. His English was good, clear. He looked scared.

“I don’t want to talk to YOU.” Alastair threw the words at him and pulled me away down the street. I looked back and the man was standing where we’d turned away, his shoulders slumped inside his clean white shirt. I believed him, and I was sad. He was curious but did not know how to break the ice with us. My guess is he had been trying to work up the nerve to say something. What he had been doing was creepy and wrong, but when I looked at him, I believed he just wanted to talk and he did not know how to approach us. He’d followed us like we were stray animals he was trying to attract so he could see where we belonged.

***

Back in Cairo we went to the central station to buy train tickets to Luxor. Afterwards, we had a fight on a pedestrian overpass, and when Alastair pulled me close to apologize, some men yelled at us to take that behavior back to our own country. Women were only a tiny percentage of who we saw out on the streets, and young women were not out on the streets in the company of young men, not with their hair flying free, not with their legs bare, ever. I saw some couples walking side by side, the women wearing long skirts and long sleeves, their heads covered in scarves. They were stylish, with makeup and jewelry, but so modest, and they did not hold hands with their husbands. It was the men who walked around holding hands. In their white shirts and dark pants, they looked like school children, and they had a companionship that I had never seen grown men exhibit before.

You could go overland all the way to Pakistan from Egypt, but it meant crossing Iraq and then, Iran…In addition to the basic logistics of getting across the two countries safely, neither was a great place to be a woman — and it was not ideal to be American, either.

I was another species entirely; women did not behave as I did in Egypt and as such, were not respectable. Though once a young man stopped me on the street to ask me about my t-shirt — it had the Hebrew name of my kibbutz on it. It was the rare moment when I was out alone; I had gone to buy postcards and stamps at a shop around the corner from the hotel. The young man had been to Israel, and his English was good. I greeted him with suspicion at first, not only because of what had happened in Alexandria. Because I was clearly not a good woman, men would shout after me, or press up against me on the bus. I had taken to making Alastair stand in front of me, using his body like a shield to keep the men from putting their hands on me. The streets were okay; the shouting just turned into noise. But I hated taking the bus because I did not just have to dodge the stares. The hands were everywhere too, and once, a man pressed his lips on my arm as I hung onto the rail to keep myself upright.

I could have disappeared here easily enough, a black scarf, a modest blouse, a long skirt. I would have looked like any of the Egyptian women, but it did not occur to me to do so. I dressed as modestly as I could in my only below-the-knee skirt, but it was not enough. I took a deep breath and turned to answer something the young man had asked me. He really did just want to talk. He asked me what I had been doing in Israel, told me he had worked there, and wished me safe travels.

***

The train to Luxor was quiet and clean, we were the roughest looking people in the car. A young girl ran up and down the aisle playing with a bright green parakeet and smiling. The bird was docile and clearly attached to her, and hopped in and out of her hands. Her family looked at us and smiled, shaking their heads indulgently. In Luxor we rented bicycles to see the towering statues of the pharaohs, the hieroglyph-covered tombs, the tulip columns, the partially excavated obelisks. The place seemed absent of visitors, just as vacant as the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

The sky was so blue, the carvings still so sharp. I carried a bundle of cheap newsprint paper and made pencil rubbings of the reliefs, the scarab shaped seals, and the profile of a princess with perfect braids, each twist of her hair in exquisite detail. At the entrance to each tomb we would trade a stack of battered piasters for a printed ticket, and then the attendant would turn a broken scrap of mirror to reflect the sunlight from outside into the fresco covered chambers. The light was imperfect. There were dark corners into which we could not see, and the rooms were empty save for the paintings on the walls, maybe a heavy stone coffin emptied of its occupant, in the middle. The objects I’d seen at the museum in Cairo, or the British Museum in London — this is where they’d come from, these cool stone rooms. It’s where they were meant to still be, hidden behind the sandy crenellated cliffs, were it not for archeologists and thieves waking the pharaohs from thousands of years of sleep to steal their jewelry. The avenues were lined with towering columns and nothing seemed quite real, including the silence. Every now and then we’d see another pair of visitors, over there, but then they’d be lost in the sprawling complex. How could we have this place to ourselves. Where was everyone?

***

The Germans were still in the traveler’s hotel when we returned to Cairo from Luxor. They had made plans and, like us, had set their sights on India. But there was another administrative hurdle: India visas meant mailing off your passport and waiting for weeks and weeks for it to come back. I was not keen on spending more time hanging out in Cairo. There was the relentless brown light, the noise, and it was getting to me that I could not do things on my own as a woman, without being harassed.

There was a faster way to get a visa, though you’d have to buy a plane ticket, the Germans told us. You could fly to Karachi, Pakistan, where getting a visa meant a visit to the Indian embassy, passport in hand, and you’d get your visa that same day. Then you could travel overland to Lahore, crossing into India in Punjab, in the north. You could go overland all the way to Pakistan from Egypt, but it meant crossing Iraq and then, Iran. The two countries were at war, and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s oppressive government was in control of Iran. In addition to the basic logistics of getting across the two countries safely, neither was a great place to be a woman — and it was not ideal to be American, either.

For a few hundred dollars, we could fly east and leapfrog all of that. We’d land in Pakistan where what money we had would go even farther than it had in Israel, where there was little we needed to spend it on, or Egypt, where things were just cheap. We decided spending the money was a better idea than tackling the Iran-Iraq border. We went to a travel agent and bought plane tickets to Karachi. We had money for a cab but Alastair rarely wanted to pay for something that was easy when the hard way was so cheap. For the last time, we took the bus from downtown Cairo to the airport, where we boarded a flight to Karachi. India was that much closer and though I did not know why I was going, I was breathless with excitement all the same.

* * *

Pam Mandel is a travel writer and ukulele player from Seattle, Washington. She’s currently seeking a publisher for her travel memoir.

Editor: Sari Botton

Pam Mandel | Longreads | February 2019 | 14 minutes (3,605 words)

In 1982 travelers’ wisdom dictated it was a liability to have a stamp on your passport for Israel. This traveler’s wisdom, we relied on it all the time, though I could not tell you where we picked it up, exactly. And it did not help us when we went to Greece, where we’d hoped to find work and found nothing but vacationers and a few abandoned construction sites. Traveler’s wisdom guided us to take the ferry to Haifa, Israel, where we picked up farm work, enough to line our pockets with what little cash we heard we’d need for our target destination. This unofficial information was how we’d planned our route, leaving London in winter, our sights set on India.

Word was India would not issue you a visa if you showed up with a passport covered in Israeli stamps. You could, however, get a second passport issued from the embassy in Cairo and use that for traveling in parts of the world that were anti-Israel. We had been working in Israel, harvesting bananas, cleaning houses. Egypt was the launch pad to nations further east, a stepping stone on the way to India. That’s why we were going to Cairo, to get new passports.

We. Me, a California girl of 18, swept up in the transient population of unemployed British and German 20-somethings after a summer tour of Israel. That thing where Jewish kids go to The Promised Land to become one with the tribe, to form a bond with Israel. It didn’t work on me. I was instead drawn to the backpackers, the first edition of Lonely Planet’s India guidebook, and a middle class English non-Jew, Alastair, in his 20s, tall and skinny with deep-set blue eyes and a simmering anger at the world. We worked, we saved, and one day we decided we had enough money to go to Cairo and get new passports, and from there, continue to New Delhi.

***

The port at Sharm el Sheikh was a cinder block building on a flat dry arrowhead of land. There were some oil tankers offshore, a few dusty trailers. The town felt empty, temporary. There must have been a real village somewhere, but we did not see it as we lingered in the shade of the austere ferry terminal until it was time to board.

Word was India would not issue you a visa if you showed up with a passport covered in Israeli stamps. You could, however, get a second passport issued from the embassy in Cairo and use that for traveling in parts of the world that were anti-Israel.

The Sinai Peninsula had gone back to Egypt as part of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979, which went into effect in 1980; the stories about what would happen to the land were conflicting. Sometimes we heard it was being developed for tourism, something the Israelis had not done much of. Other times we heard the Egyptians were blowing up the reefs to eliminate the mines the Israelis had supposedly anchored in the waters. All of it broke my heart a little because Sinai was where I’d slept under the stars with the Israeli boyfriend I’d met early in my tour. Later, when I was attending Hebrew language school — after I’d broken up with the Israeli — I went back there, with my roommate. We had coffee every morning, just out of the sun in the doorway of a palm leaf shack. I wanted Sinai to stay like I remembered it forever, as if I could, at any time, return to drink gritty coffee out of a hot glass in the shade of dry palm leaves or weave my way between the coral, knee deep in the shallow waters of the Red Sea while looking at the brightly colored fish just below the surface.

The ferry from Sinai to the mainland part of Egypt was a passenger boat with benches under an awning with a small cabin up front for the captain. There were no other Western travelers, just Egyptian and Israeli businessmen, and rugged workers. The ferry shuttled us across the channel, along the towering hulls of container ships and oil tankers. At the top of the gangplank on the other side, we boarded a bus to Cairo. It felt downright luxurious, with its reclining seats and curtains in the windows. I’d been used to rattling beat up Israeli long haul buses, which had no amenities. I pushed the curtains aside and looked out the windows at the countryside, date palms, beehive-shaped clay ovens, walled villages, people walking in the same kinds of fields I’d worked in Israel, cotton and citrus, under hot skies.

The bus dropped us in the middle of Cairo and we walked, using a map in our guidebook, to a recommended traveler’s hotel. The city was loud and strangely dark brown — and I don’t mean the people, though many of them were brown too. It was the buildings, the light, the buses and cars, like everything was made of walnut. There was stone and concrete and new modern apartment and office buildings, but somehow, everything seemed the same kinds of colors, everything filtered through a spilled coffee light.

To get to the hotel we had to go up a wide flight of spiral stairs to the second floor in one of these brown buildings, built in the 30s or 40s. There was a small cage elevator with a rattling gate, but I did not trust it. The hotel lobby was open to the stairwell; to the right there was a tall desk, behind it a quiet man who gave us a key from a mailbox cubby and wrote the price of the room on a scrap of newsprint.

The hotel was a strange dream, also brown, like Cairo outside, but quiet, muffled, the light softened by yellowed window glass, sepia colored, an old photograph. The ceilings were high overhead to keep the heat down, and the halls were lined with big, heavy brown wood furniture. The place was filled with wardrobes and chests of drawers and headboards, a flea market of furniture in the hallways. And nearly every surface was covered with stacks and stacks of faded Arabic language newspapers.

If there were other guests besides a trio of talkative German guys, we didn’t know about it. We never saw them. The German guys had been robbed a few weeks back in Sudan. We hung out with them in the restaurant downstairs at street level, drinking light Egyptian beer and eating plates of fuul — fava bean stew — and pita bread, talking about travel. The German guys wore leather pants and had almost no belongings. They’d been driving a Land Rover south when they’d been stopped by armed Sudanese rebels who took their car and left them at the side of the road with little more than the clothes they’d been wearing. They did not fight, the German guys said. Why would they? They were unarmed. They were not going to win. They handed over the keys and sat at the side of the road until someone drove by. They had hitchhiked back to Cairo and were hanging out at this empty hotel trying to figure out what to do next. They weren’t broke, but their plans to drive the length of Africa to Cape Town were interrupted. They were in good spirits for people who had been carjacked on a desert highway. Maybe they were rich kids? Or maybe they’d had nothing to lose when they set out, so this was just another story in their adventure.

***

Urban Cairo disappeared into the desert shortly before the Great Pyramids. We took the bus out to see them, these giant structures that made me laugh, so exactly were they like I had always imagined them, and also so much more impressive. It was strange to recognize them so completely and to be so surprised by the idea that they were real. I ran my fingers down the seams where the giant stone blocks that made up the pyramids sat tightly against each other, and they felt familiar and warm. We had stopped frequently on our journey from London and anytime we encountered an iconic work of art — the Great Pyramids, the Mona Lisa, the Acropolis in Athens, I was bright with the joy of recognition. Seeing any of the masterworks, from the modest-sized Leonardo to the massive stone pyramids, was like greeting a friend I didn’t know I’d missed so much.

The Sphinx sat quietly in the low sandstone trench in which she’d been built. We walked around the edges at about her shoulder level, looking at her distinctive profile, her neatly shaped paws, her powerful lioness body. I knew her already from history classes, but here she was, right in front of me, her broken nose detracting not at all from her strength.

Here and there hawkers asked if we wanted camel rides; we stayed on foot and wandered around — and into — the monumental tombs. We were alone in one of them, with only the attendant, and he gestured towards Alastair that he could climb into the empty, lidless sarcophagus. Alastair declined. The next day we wandered the cavernous and uncrowded Egyptian museum through gallery after vast gallery stuffed with stunning artifacts, painted coffins, stone relief carvings, gold and lapis lazuli jewelry and scarabs and staffs. The kohl-lined eyes of past Egyptian royalty watched us wander around their treasures, and our footsteps echoed in the poorly lit rooms. Every now and then we’d encounter a khaki clad guard who would nod our way, silently, or maybe there’d be another pair of tourists, spotted through a glass case that held a gold leafed headdress, and then, we’d lose sight of them. I didn’t understand why there weren’t more people here. Athens was a hive of tourists, Paris the same. Cairo, home to the pyramids and the kind of artifacts that made our imaginations go crazy since King Tut’s tomb had been cracked open, was full of people — but hardly any of them were tourists.

***

Getting new passports was an administrative task, simple enough to complete — the staff had heard the story before. At the American and the British embassies, we filled out papers, handed over our street corner passport photos. Mine were completely blown out. There were dark shadows where my eyes were; my face was featureless and pale. The pictures were completely unacceptable and the embassy took them, along with my application. I paid my fee and was told it would take about a week — come back in a week. With our wait time, we would try to see Egypt, parts of it, anyway.

***

When we left Cairo city limits the light opened up. In the city, the light felt as though it were filtered through amber glass, but outside the confines of Cairo’s traffic and noise and high-rises, there was a lot more color. Everything was bright blue sky and the pale cream color of sand.

We took a bus to the end of the line and walked out a hot sandy road to see the Coptic churches. I didn’t know what the Copts were, but I had seen pictures of the icon paintings — saints with dark skin and almond eyes backed by gold leaf halos — and I wanted to be in their presence, so off we went. We had no idea how far the walk was to the churches from the end of the bus line, and we were used to Israel, where you could always get a ride. A taxi came along and picked us up — it was cheap — and dropped us in a silent complex where a whispering monk in black robes took us to wash our hands before leading us to a chapel full of exactly the icons I’d wanted to see.

We had not made any plans for the return trip, and as we set back out on the dry road, I wondered if we would be able to make the walk all the way back to where we’d got off the bus. It was hot, there were no cars, and Alastair was starting to get angry when a car stopped beside us and the driver asked us if we needed a ride. We were so grateful, and he seemed amused to find us. He would not take the money I insisted Alastair offer him.

We went to Alexandria, but beyond the beach there was little reason for us to be there. I knew it had been home to a library once, one of the great wonders of the ancient world, and I had imagined there would be remains. I was wrong; there was nothing to see. That was fine, but we became hopelessly lost in the back streets while looking for something, anything that would give us a reason to be there. Boys playing in the streets pulled up their long white gallabiyah to mock Alastair’s shorts as though he was walking around in his underwear. So far from the center of town he must have looked crazy, half dressed, far from anywhere an outsider should be. We wandered in circles until we found someone who spoke English, though all he could say was, “I’m sorry, I cannot help you.” I do not know how we found our way back into town but we got a hotel and walked on the beach until sunset. We were so out of place, always dressed wrong, standing out in our western clothes, our legs bare, my head uncovered. We wandered around looking at everything like we had never seen buildings or cars or people before, when really, we were the ones who were strange there. While we were looking for a place to get dinner, a man stalked us down side streets and alleys, and finally, Alastair turned and confronted him.

“Why are you following us?” His anger was right on the surface. I wondered if they would get into a fight.

“I just wanted to talk to you,” the man said. His English was good, clear. He looked scared.

“I don’t want to talk to YOU.” Alastair threw the words at him and pulled me away down the street. I looked back and the man was standing where we’d turned away, his shoulders slumped inside his clean white shirt. I believed him, and I was sad. He was curious but did not know how to break the ice with us. My guess is he had been trying to work up the nerve to say something. What he had been doing was creepy and wrong, but when I looked at him, I believed he just wanted to talk and he did not know how to approach us. He’d followed us like we were stray animals he was trying to attract so he could see where we belonged.

***

Back in Cairo we went to the central station to buy train tickets to Luxor. Afterwards, we had a fight on a pedestrian overpass, and when Alastair pulled me close to apologize, some men yelled at us to take that behavior back to our own country. Women were only a tiny percentage of who we saw out on the streets, and young women were not out on the streets in the company of young men, not with their hair flying free, not with their legs bare, ever. I saw some couples walking side by side, the women wearing long skirts and long sleeves, their heads covered in scarves. They were stylish, with makeup and jewelry, but so modest, and they did not hold hands with their husbands. It was the men who walked around holding hands. In their white shirts and dark pants, they looked like school children, and they had a companionship that I had never seen grown men exhibit before.

You could go overland all the way to Pakistan from Egypt, but it meant crossing Iraq and then, Iran…In addition to the basic logistics of getting across the two countries safely, neither was a great place to be a woman — and it was not ideal to be American, either.

I was another species entirely; women did not behave as I did in Egypt and as such, were not respectable. Though once a young man stopped me on the street to ask me about my t-shirt — it had the Hebrew name of my kibbutz on it. It was the rare moment when I was out alone; I had gone to buy postcards and stamps at a shop around the corner from the hotel. The young man had been to Israel, and his English was good. I greeted him with suspicion at first, not only because of what had happened in Alexandria. Because I was clearly not a good woman, men would shout after me, or press up against me on the bus. I had taken to making Alastair stand in front of me, using his body like a shield to keep the men from putting their hands on me. The streets were okay; the shouting just turned into noise. But I hated taking the bus because I did not just have to dodge the stares. The hands were everywhere too, and once, a man pressed his lips on my arm as I hung onto the rail to keep myself upright.

I could have disappeared here easily enough, a black scarf, a modest blouse, a long skirt. I would have looked like any of the Egyptian women, but it did not occur to me to do so. I dressed as modestly as I could in my only below-the-knee skirt, but it was not enough. I took a deep breath and turned to answer something the young man had asked me. He really did just want to talk. He asked me what I had been doing in Israel, told me he had worked there, and wished me safe travels.

***

The train to Luxor was quiet and clean, we were the roughest looking people in the car. A young girl ran up and down the aisle playing with a bright green parakeet and smiling. The bird was docile and clearly attached to her, and hopped in and out of her hands. Her family looked at us and smiled, shaking their heads indulgently. In Luxor we rented bicycles to see the towering statues of the pharaohs, the hieroglyph-covered tombs, the tulip columns, the partially excavated obelisks. The place seemed absent of visitors, just as vacant as the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

The sky was so blue, the carvings still so sharp. I carried a bundle of cheap newsprint paper and made pencil rubbings of the reliefs, the scarab shaped seals, and the profile of a princess with perfect braids, each twist of her hair in exquisite detail. At the entrance to each tomb we would trade a stack of battered piasters for a printed ticket, and then the attendant would turn a broken scrap of mirror to reflect the sunlight from outside into the fresco covered chambers. The light was imperfect. There were dark corners into which we could not see, and the rooms were empty save for the paintings on the walls, maybe a heavy stone coffin emptied of its occupant, in the middle. The objects I’d seen at the museum in Cairo, or the British Museum in London — this is where they’d come from, these cool stone rooms. It’s where they were meant to still be, hidden behind the sandy crenellated cliffs, were it not for archeologists and thieves waking the pharaohs from thousands of years of sleep to steal their jewelry. The avenues were lined with towering columns and nothing seemed quite real, including the silence. Every now and then we’d see another pair of visitors, over there, but then they’d be lost in the sprawling complex. How could we have this place to ourselves. Where was everyone?

***

The Germans were still in the traveler’s hotel when we returned to Cairo from Luxor. They had made plans and, like us, had set their sights on India. But there was another administrative hurdle: India visas meant mailing off your passport and waiting for weeks and weeks for it to come back. I was not keen on spending more time hanging out in Cairo. There was the relentless brown light, the noise, and it was getting to me that I could not do things on my own as a woman, without being harassed.

There was a faster way to get a visa, though you’d have to buy a plane ticket, the Germans told us. You could fly to Karachi, Pakistan, where getting a visa meant a visit to the Indian embassy, passport in hand, and you’d get your visa that same day. Then you could travel overland to Lahore, crossing into India in Punjab, in the north. You could go overland all the way to Pakistan from Egypt, but it meant crossing Iraq and then, Iran. The two countries were at war, and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s oppressive government was in control of Iran. In addition to the basic logistics of getting across the two countries safely, neither was a great place to be a woman — and it was not ideal to be American, either.

For a few hundred dollars, we could fly east and leapfrog all of that. We’d land in Pakistan where what money we had would go even farther than it had in Israel, where there was little we needed to spend it on, or Egypt, where things were just cheap. We decided spending the money was a better idea than tackling the Iran-Iraq border. We went to a travel agent and bought plane tickets to Karachi. We had money for a cab but Alastair rarely wanted to pay for something that was easy when the hard way was so cheap. For the last time, we took the bus from downtown Cairo to the airport, where we boarded a flight to Karachi. India was that much closer and though I did not know why I was going, I was breathless with excitement all the same.

* * *

Pam Mandel is a travel writer and ukulele player from Seattle, Washington. She’s currently seeking a publisher for her travel memoir.

Editor: Sari Botton

As C.J. Chivers reports at The New York Times Magazine, the war in Afghanistan will soon be 17 years old. Three U.S. presidential administrations have presided over it, all the while issuing a series of politically palatable, yet hollow justifications. As seen through the eyes of Specialist Robert Soto, Chivers recounts Viper Company’s 2008 rotation in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan, a brutal, harrowing, in-your-face example of how the hundreds of thousands of men and women who signed on to protect the United States after 9/11 have become the true casualties of ever-shifting, yet obstinate U.S. foreign policy.

Specialist Robert Soto had been haunted by dread as the soldiers left their base, the Korengal Outpost.

Soto sensed eyes following the patrol. Everybody can see us.

He was 19, but at 160 pounds and barely needing to shave, he could pass for two years younger. He was nobody’s archetype of a fighter. A high school drama student, he joined the Army at 17 and planned to become an actor if he survived the war. Often he went about his duties with an enormous smile, singing no matter what anyone else thought — R. & B., rap, rock, hip-hop, the blues. All of this made him popular in the platoon, even as he had become tenser than his former self and older than his years; even as his friends and sergeants he admired were killed, leaving him a burden of ghosts.

In early October, the Afghan war will be 17 years old, a milestone that has loomed with grim inevitability as the fighting has continued without a clear exit strategy across three presidential administrations. With this anniversary, prospective recruits born after the terrorist attacks of 2001 will be old enough to enlist. And Afghanistan is not the sole enduring American campaign. The war in Iraq, which started in 2003, has resumed and continues in a different form over the border in Syria, where the American military also has settled into a string of ground outposts without articulating a plan or schedule for a way out. The United States has at various times declared success in its many campaigns — in late 2001; in the spring of 2003; in 2008; in the short-lived withdrawal from Iraq late in 2011; and in its allies’ recapture more recently of the ruins of Ramadi, Falluja, Mosul and Raqqa from the Islamic State, a terrorist organization, formed in the crucible of occupied Iraq, that did not even exist when the wars to defeat terrorism started. And still the wars grind on, with the conflict in Afghanistan on track to be a destination for American soldiers born after it began.

More than three million Americans have served in uniform in these wars. Nearly 7,000 of them have died. Tens of thousands more have been wounded. More are killed or wounded each year, in smaller numbers but often in dreary circumstances, including the fatal attack in July on Cpl. Joseph Maciel by an Afghan soldier — a member of the very forces that the United States has underwritten, trained and equipped, and yet as a matter of necessity and practice now guards itself against.

On one matter there can be no argument: The policies that sent these men and women abroad, with their emphasis on military action and their visions of reordering nations and cultures, have not succeeded. It is beyond honest dispute that the wars did not achieve what their organizers promised, no matter the party in power or the generals in command. Astonishingly expensive, strategically incoherent, sold by a shifting slate of senior officers and politicians and editorial-page hawks, the wars have continued in varied forms and under different rationales each and every year since passenger jets struck the World Trade Center in 2001. They continue today without an end in sight, reauthorized in Pentagon budgets almost as if distant war is a presumed government action.

Time eases only so much doubt. Six years after leaving the Army, Soto still spent nights awake, trying to come to terms with his Korengal tour. It was not regret or the trauma of combat that drained him. It was the memories of lost soldiers, an indelible grief blended with a fuller understanding that could feel like a curse. Often when Soto reflected upon his service, he was caught between the conflicting urges of deference and candor. He tread as if a balance might exist between respecting the sacrifice and pain of others and speaking forthrightly about the fatal misjudgments of those who managed America’s wars. “I try to be respectful; I don’t want to say that people died for nothing,” he said. “I could never make the families who lost someone think their loved one died in vain.”

Still he wondered: Was there no accountability for the senior officer class? The war was turning 17, and the services and the Pentagon seemed to have been given passes on all the failures and the drift.

Some days he accepted it. Others he could not square what he heard with what he and his fellow veterans had lived. The dead were not replaceable, and they had been lost in a place the Army did not need them to be. Sometimes, when he was awake in the restless hours between midnight and dawn, his memories of lost friends orbiting his mind, Soto entertained the questions. What befell those who sent them? Did generals lose sleep, too? “They just failed as leaders,” he said. “They should know: They failed, as leaders. They let us down.”

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