spaceships:

Andrew Sullivan:

For the past seven years, David Guttenfelder has witnessed and documented the changing landscape of Afghanistan. Guttenfelder is the chief Asia photographer for The Associated Press and over the past seven years has offered the general public a close-up, intimate look at the lives of troops fighting in the mountains and remote regions of Afghanistan.

Our great failure has been to keep these soldiers constantly in our public eye, to connect their sacrifice with our security, to weigh decisions of war and peace with them in front of us - not as abstract principles but as flesh-and-blood human beings.

… One thing one takes from these images is the constant press of heat exhaustion. These soldiers are not merely fighting an entrenched, vicious and ubiquitous enemy; they are doing so in an extraordinarily tough environment. The stress and the heat and the lack of sleep and the exposure in an almost lunar landscape at times: these photos bring that alive.