Back in the USSR in the 1980s, my schoolteacher warned me that if I didn’t study hard, I’d get drafted into the army and sent to die in Afghanistan. I studied hard. I moved to America. Twenty years later, I found myself in Afghanistan anyway.
After finishing my PhD in Biophysics, I realized that I didn’t envy my professors’ jobs. Instead of continuing on in academia, I shipped out to Jalalabad in December 2010 to join the Synergy Strike Force.
The SSF was assembled by a neuroscientist named Dave Warner, who has spent the past decade trying to apply science and communications to the problems of poverty and isolation, particularly in war-torn regions. The primary goal of the group in Jalalabad was to blanket the city with internet, to teach residents how to keep the internet functioning. The group was technically unaffiliated with the US government, but Dave had many contacts in the military, particularly at DARPA, and they knew we were there.