Out of that experience, especially dealing with the crises of women, she wrote a powerful and moving book, Kabul in Winter. In 2010, she borrowed a flak jacket, put on her combat boots, and settled into a U.S. military outpost in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistani border to see what life was like for American soldiers. ("Being outside the wire had filled me with sorrow as I watched earnest, heavily armed and armored boys try to win over white-bearded Afghans – men of extraordinary dignity – who have seen all this before and know the outcome.")

The following year, she returned again to Afghanistan, this time focused not on the "collateral damage" to Afghans from our endless war there, but on the true costs of such a war to Americans. In a country that has never stopped talking about its "wounded warriors," she alone, and not some young, hot-shot reporter from a major media outlet, followed American war wounded off the grim battlefields of that never-ending war all the way home.