Michael Sallah is investigations editor and author of Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War (2006: Little, Brown and Company). He posed this question to Dexter Filkins, New York Times war correspondent, former Miami Herald staff writer and author of the critically acclaimed The Forever War (2008, Knopf, $25):

Question: Your book opens with a Taliban execution in 1998 and later jumps to Iraq where you covered some of the most brutal fighting of the war. You watched a marine shot dead while escorting you to a photo op and suicide bombers exploding in Fallujah. In all your experiences, what did you learn about people -- or better yet, humanity -- you may not have known before?

Answer: In the autumn of 1998, I found myself watching a public amputation and execution in Kabul, Afghanistan. it was being staged by the Taliban. No one knew much about the Taliban in those days. They had just come to power a couple of years before. I was in the Kabul Sports Stadium, sitting in the grass at midfield.

The whole city crammed into the stadium that day. There were a lot of orphans running around, big packs of them, curious and dirty, and the Taliban guards were beating them with whips to hold them back. Outside, the capital lay in ruins, the broken by-product of more grievances than anyone could any longer remember.

The Taliban guard cut off a man's hand at mid-field and held it up for the crowd, and I waited for a cheer to rise up from the stands. There was silence instead. Then the Talibs led a second man, this one wearing a blindfold, to a spot in the grass, where another man shot him in the head. From the crowd, there was nothing.

I went up afterward to some of the spectators. They looked tired, of course, and they were wearing different clothes, but otherwise I felt like I could have been at the end of a game anywhere; in Ohio, say, or in Florida. Some of the spectators spoke English. I asked them about the execution. ''In the West, you have television,'' one of the men told me. ``Here, there is only this.''

In the 1960s, women walked the streets of Kabul in miniskirts. The classrooms of Kabul University drew men and women both. At the Pamir Supper Club, vodka and champagne flowed as freely as the music. The waiters spoke French.

And then one day it was gone, all of it: the universities and the learning, the champagne and the fois grais, the casual tolerance that allowed women to lead their lives like men.

In America, it's normal to assume that our civilization reflects the natural order of things--that it will last forever, that it does not even require much care. People stop at red lights. Dollar bills hold value. Life is very dear.

Maybe it's true -- maybe what we have will last forever. But if you've been to a place like Kabul, Afghanistan in the autumn of 1998, if you've been to a place where civilization has collapsed and disappeared, it's enough to make you consider how fortunate we are. And fragile and fleeting our little world is.

• 4 p.m. Sunday, Chapman.

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