Luke Mogelson:

Daowood's method was different. When a fighting-age male struck him as suspicious, the colonel would use his thumbs and index fingers to pull open both of the man's eyelids. Then he would lean close and stare searchingly. Usually, after several seconds, as though he had suddenly found precisely what he was looking for, Daowood would declare, in mock surprise, "He's Taliban!"

It was a joke, of course -- one that mostly made fun of the Americans. A few years ago, the coalition embarked on an ambitious enterprise to record in an electronic database the biometric information of hundreds of thousands of Afghan citizens, and a hallmark of American patrols has subsequently been the lining up of villagers to digitally register their eyes and fingerprints. Daowood's faux iris scan was in part an acknowledgment of the A.N.A.'s inferior technology. But it was also a dig at the coalition's somewhat desperate reliance on technology. Where Daowood's interactions with villagers were always intimate, it is hard to imagine a more clinical and alienating dynamic between two people than that of the NATO service member aiming his Hand-held Interagency Identity Detection Equipment at the face of a rural Afghan farmer. In such moments, the difference in the field between the U.S. and Afghan soldier is far starker than that of the foreigner and the native. It is more akin to the difference in the ocean between a scuba diver and a fish.

David Foster Wallace:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

Jared Diamond:

Americans' thinking about dangers is confused. We obsess about the wrong things, and we fail to watch for real dangers.

Charles Simic:

I found myself worrying. As my fellow Serbs say, inside each one of us lurks a turd.

Robert Krulwich:

Where, they wondered, did that poop come from?

Tim Cook:

There are always things that are unknowable.