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In August 2021, I found myself somewhere off the coast of Alaska on a small cruise ship with my wife and her family. It was a beautiful, serene time — a trip of a lifetime gifted to us by my father-in-law. One of the best things about the cruise was a lack of internet or phone access that allowed for some much-needed peace and quiet.

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Every now and then, depending on where we were along the coast, I’d get a few bars on my mobile phone, and that allowed me to log on to the ship’s free, limited internet service, which included a lite version of the New York Times. One day, when I logged on, I saw the image of a Taliban soldier resting on the hood of a Humvee — Afghanistan had fallen to the Taliban after the United States left the country.

For a moment, the peace and serenity that enveloped me on that ship was shattered. It brought back visceral memories of my own, scant time in Afghanistan when I embedded with the 82nd Airborne in Khost province. I’ve always looked back on that time and have wondered what happened to the very young soldiers I spent time with. But even more than them, I’ve always wondered what has become of the Afghan people I passed while seated in a Humvee kicking up dust along the countryside wadis.

As it turns out, I am, by far, not the only one whose memories were tugged back to another time. Photographer Ben Brody, who served in Afghanistan with the U.S. Army and then returned there to work as a journalist, was also thinking about it. As the country was falling to the Taliban, Brody’s longtime interpreter reached out to him, fearing for his life and his family’s future.

Brody and a group of other military vets tried to do what they could to help in this nightmare scenario. Here’s Brody in his own words:

“I and a few other military veterans pooled our resources and did the best we could to help our Afghan friends escape Kabul on military aircraft. Many veterans and experts did the same, in an effort that was described as the “Digital Dunkirk.” It would have been a more apt analogy if the English Channel had been fogged over and most of the boats crashed into each other and sank. For weeks we coordinated spotty intelligence reports and assembled State Department paperwork that would allow our Afghan colleagues to get on a plane to the US. The problem was navigating the oceanic crowds at Hamid Karzai International Airport, running the gauntlet of violent Taliban checkpoints, picking the right gate, and presenting the right password to the right Marines at the gate.

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“For eight days, connected on WhatsApp, we all agonized over every meter to the airport from 300 meters away (where the crowds began) to the gate itself. It only worked for a couple of our friends who flew to safety. Most of our friends are still in Afghanistan, contending with the reality of Taliban rule, and what that means for their wives and daughters’ prospects for education and equality.”

Back in 2011, Brody took a toy camera that made 360-degree photos with him during Kandahar’s annual poppy harvest. He mostly took it along as an icebreaker to tamp down any tension that might come up between him, working as a journalist, and combatants. At the time, he was mainly using digital cameras for his work and didn’t really have any plans for the images he made with the toy camera.

In the winter after Afghanistan’s fall to the Taliban, Brody began working on a book composed of the images he made with that toy camera. He thinks of the book that ensued, “300m,” (MASS Books, 2022) as a kind of epilogue to his blisteringly original first book about his time in Afghanistan, “Attention Servicemember.”

“300m” is an exquisitely unique book all on its own. The images made with the toy camera are beautifully imperfect. Their imperfection magnifies the chaos of “being there.” The sloppiness of the images creates a kind of poetic, interpretive aura.

The “cheapness” and imperfection of the image quality also helps transmit a feeling of being there on the ground. Everything flashes by quickly and fragmented and fleeting and fragile and brittle. It evokes the feeling I had while scuttling along Afghanistan’s arid landscape in a Humvee where the radio is constantly klunking out or pulling up to a mess tent to load up on carbs — everything coated with a fine layer of dust.

The construction of the book is also unique. It collects Brody’s 360-degree panoramas in an accordion format, and as he told me, “You can flip through it like a regular book, or lay it on the floor where it stretches out 16 feet. There is something surreal about the images, and the structure of the book pushes me to try and make sense of them, which is impossible.”

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When you open the cover of the book, you’re greeted with a haunting WhatsApp chat from Brody and Co.’s last attempt on the airport gate, a harrowing experience that is re-created through the cacophony of the imagery inside, shattering one’s sense of peace and serenity. This is fitting. The war, and its aftermath, has done a lot to magnify pain and uncertainty for so many lives.

You can find out more about the book and buy it here. And you can see more of Brody’s work on his website here.

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