Why Books?

When I think about how books have impacted my life, I think of a perfect smile on a hot, sunny

day, on a nameless dirt road that ran through a nameless village in northeast Afghanistan. We

were on what was called a “presence patrol.” A simple mission. Let the Taliban know we were

there. Wearing our salt-crusted uniforms, big guns, and weary eyes, we spread out through the small settlement. I stood with our interpreter under the shade of a tree just off the road, scanning a football-field sized orchard between traditional-styled mud houses.

A ten-year old little girl smiled at me. She was with a melee of other kids both older and

younger. She wore a backpack and clung to a heap of books cradled in her arms. She had

honeycomb-colored eyes speckled with jade flakes and a smile worth fighting for. She stopped to show me her collection of books, beaming like she’d just won the lottery. I asked the interpreter to find out why she and the other kids weren’t in school.

“The Taliban came into our school house. They said to go home now because there was going to be a fight,” she said through the interpreter.

She continued to show me those books and goggle over them, like bullets weren’t about to start ripping the air around us to whining shreds. Finally, the other kids grabbed her and fled.

Books can’t make you free, but they can give you a taste... a glimpse... a feeling. And the result... that smiling girl clinging to those books like she was holding the cure for cancer, like keys to every locked door, the answers to all of her war-torn country’s problems.

Maybe she was.