As Afghanistan fell to the Taliban province by province, and American military officials struggled to evacuate those who sought to escape, I recalled a distressing incident that took place during a reporting trip to Afghanistan for National Geographic. 

I was there with photographer David Guttenfelder in the late spring of 2010 to write about how subsistence poppy farmers had been unwittingly caught up in bankrolling the Taliban’s activities after the militants seized control of the Afghan opium trade. I had been to Afghanistan once before, in 2005, to profile the president, Hamid Karzai, for GQ. As the chief Asia photographer for the Associated Press, Guttenfelder had embedded with the U.S. military in Afghanistan numerous times since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Still, even his