Joao Silva

Reporting from Deh-e Kuchay, Afghanistan

The New York Times

Aug. 21, 2025, 8:58 a.m. ET

Fifteen years after a combat photographer lost his legs to a land mine, he returned to the place in Afghanistan where it happened.

The village elder was out in his pasture, as he is every morning, crouched low in waist-high alfalfa. He ran his sickle through the thickets, and he and his grandsons gathered the plants into heaping bundles, lugging them on their backs to the two cows sheltered behind the walls of the family’s homestead.

The last time I was in this small farming community in southern Afghanistan, these simple tasks were impossible. The village was a front line in an interminable war. Buried beneath the earth was an endless arsenal of explosive devices, the Taliban’s weapon of choice against American forces.

“We were afraid of being killed, of explosions, and of bullets,” the elder, Haji Muhammed Zarif, 58, told me recently, his weathered features deepening as he squinted into the early sun.

One of those explosions he remembers distinctly. On Oct. 23, 2010, U.S. soldiers were searching Mr. Zarif’s apricot fields when a blast rang out in a nearby compound. A small cloud of smoke rose into the sky as he watched from a safe distance. Minutes later, a helicopter landed, and Mr. Zarif could see soldiers carrying someone toward it.

That distant figure, I told Mr. Zarif, had been me. While working as a photographer for The New York Times, I stepped on a land mine and lost both of my legs.

From the moment I picked up a camera again, I had wanted to return to this village, Deh-e Kuchay, in the fertile Arghandab Valley. That became possible after the war ended in 2021. And now, more than 30 years since my first visit to Afghanistan and nearly 15 years after my injury, I was allowed back, seeing the country as I had never seen it before: at peace.

I was here in search of closure, but not the emotional kind. I had unfinished journalistic business. My time in Afghanistan had ended abruptly. I had missed the U.S. withdrawal and the Taliban takeover, and I was sad that I had not seen the story through. But now I would pick it back up in a new chapter.

I had no idea what life would now be like under the Taliban, and was open to whatever I would see. I harbored no anger toward the Taliban. My legs had been lost to an act of violence, but I did not take it personally. The mine was buried for whoever came along first. I had not been surprised, after the war had killed or maimed so many, that I was next.

On that long-ago autumn day, I had been on a patrol with a platoon from Task Force 1-66 of the U.S. Army’s Fourth Infantry Division, documenting mine-removal operations with a Times correspondent, Carlotta Gall. It was the height of the American presence in southern Afghanistan, months into President Barack Obama’s troop “surge” aimed at turning around the faltering war effort.

Setting out from their combat outpost, the soldiers intuitively fell into single-file formation. As they approached an abandoned Taliban checkpoint, a prime location for roadside bombs, the patrol was ordered to halt. Three soldiers then pushed forward, sweeping the road ahead.

Two of them — Sgt. Brian Maxwell, who handled the sniffer dog, and Sgt. Anton Waterman, who provided security — continued on to a destroyed compound. They stepped inside, and I followed eagerly in tow, determined to keep my camera close to the action.

I don’t recall hearing an explosion, but there was a metallic click of sorts, followed by an immeasurable electric shock that ripped through my lower body, overpowering all my senses. I collapsed into a rising cloud of smoke and dust.

“Guys, I need help!” I remember saying. As I lay in the dirt, I instinctively tried to take pictures of my shredded legs but failed. I managed to shutter three frames of the soldiers I was with — they suffered concussions but were otherwise uninjured — before the pain took hold, forcing me to drop the camera.

Within seconds, I was being carried to the relative safety of the nearby road. I asked for a cigarette. When Carlotta materialized at my side, I used the satellite phone she was carrying to call my wife, Vivian, back home in South Africa. I figured that it would be better for her to hear the news from me rather than from an editor in New York. Part of me also wanted to hear her voice one more time, just in case.

I asked for another cigarette, but my request was declined as medics worked frantically to keep me alive. My memory fades as I was loaded into the medevac helicopter.

I returned to Deh-e Kuchay in May, I first met Mr. Zarif, the village elder, outside a small police outpost. He said he had thought that the person who was hit by the explosion that day in 2010 had died. “But today, I’m happy to hear that the person was you, and that you are alive,” he said, his eyes burrowing into mine.

He told me how much had changed now that the country was free of war.

“In the past, we were only living. We couldn’t enjoy our lives,” Mr. Zarif said. “But now, since there is security, we enjoy every moment of life, and have come to realize that we are truly alive.”

He took me to the exact location where I had lost my legs, but I did not recognize what I was staring at. The compound was gone. In its place stood a pomegranate orchard in flower, the petals glowing blood red in the afternoon sunlight. It gave me some comfort to see that life now grew from what had been a place of destruction.

Map located Deh-d Kuchay and the Arghandab River near Kandahar in the Kandahar Province of Afghanistan.

Behind us, the checkpoint that the soldiers of the Fourth Infantry Division had once warily approached was again controlled by the Taliban. A flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as the Taliban call their government, mocked 20 years of a futile war that killed more than 160,000 Afghans and over 6,000 Americans. A policeman sat on a plastic chair, his rifle resting on his lap, as he kept an eye on the village’s somnambulant traffic.

The checkpoint commander, Muttaqi Saheb, 43, and his crew took refuge under a mulberry tree, a rest area where tea is drunk and prayers are recited. Mildly curious, he listened to my story and asked how I was feeling now.

“I am good. Strong,” I said, and he nodded in appreciation. I had spent about 19 months recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. My injuries meant that I would never photograph combat again, but I eventually resumed my work, even if I must now allow the action to come to me instead of rushing toward it.

As tea was served, Mr. Saheb and I talked about the war.

“The United States, with all its resources and air and ground forces, could not establish security in Afghanistan,” he said. “But the Taliban, who had nothing except motorcycles and Kalashnikovs, were able to take over the entire country in a short period of time and provide security.”

Deh-e Kuchay is once again a hive of rural activity as its residents carve a living from the land. Its roughly 250 families are served by two small stores on opposite ends of the village. One doubles as a motorcycle repair shop, fixing punctures and the like.

The village school is filled with the sound of children’s laughter. Young men play cricket on an open ground that once served as a landing pad for American helicopters.

Signs of the occupation are slowly disappearing. The old U.S. base in the village is gone, but blast walls still line part of a road. Where houses for American soldiers once stood, workers were laying foundations for new homes that will be occupied by villagers.

I sought out Haji Muhammed Jan, 67, a farmer Carlotta and I had met on the day before my injury.

He has expanded the pomegranate orchard where we had gathered all those years ago. He said he was happy that peace had returned, but he complained that life remained difficult, that the economy was not good. Huge cuts in international aid, crippling sanctions related to the Taliban’s harsh restrictions on women and girls, and a postwar ban on opium cultivation have led to hardship for many Afghans.

“Since our young people don’t have jobs or employment, the rate of theft has increased,” Mr. Jan said. “Anything that can be sold, they steal and take away.”

As the morning sun cleared the horizon, we sat on a ground covering at the edge of Mr. Jan’s field, breaking bread and sipping tea, while he reminisced about the war, including the day when U.S. troops kicked down the gate to his orchard. He fondly recalled a soldier named Nick, a man he described as skinny but very strong. It had taken all of Mr. Jan’s strength to defeat the soldier in arm wrestling, he said.

A neighboring farmer with manic eyes and wild hair made a sudden appearance. He held a bouquet of roses and other flowers. The news of a foreigner’s presence in the village had spread fast. Foreign journalists working in Afghanistan face reporting restrictions, and I had been drawing a crowd when I stopped to take photographs.

“In the past, we were planting I.E.D.’s for you,” the man, Sher Ahmad, 50, said as he handed me the flowers, sitting down unceremoniously and joining us. “Now we give you flowers.”

It took me a while to process his remark. In Pashtun culture, giving flowers can be a gesture of love, respect and a sense of security. I wondered if the roses were a peace offering.

I soon learned that Mr. Ahmad’s brother was a prominent Taliban combatant and, according to the school’s principal, Mawlawi Hafizullah, had planted many bombs targeting American forces.

The fighter, who goes by the nom de guerre Sardar Agha, is well known and admired in the community. He financed an opulent mosque with a towering minaret that dwarfs the surrounding mud structures. Mr. Ahmad said that Sardar Agha had told him to “welcome the journalist properly.”

Through an intermediary, I asked Sardar Agha if he would meet with me, and initial indications were positive. But as much as I would have reveled in the chance to sit and talk, in the end he refused.

I was disappointed but not surprised, because somewhere in the recesses of my mind I knew it was a long shot. It left me to wonder whether Sardar also wants to put the war behind him, or whether he was counseled not to meet me.

As we left the village and the sky dawned in subdued hues, I felt content to have walked on that ground again, even if through the aid of prostheses, and to have come this far, even if Afghanistan itself has so far to go.

Joao Silva is a Times photographer based in South Africa.