The author checks out the cockpit of an AH-64 at Bagram Airbase in Kandahar. Michael A. Clifton

MAILBAG Peter King will answer your questions each week in Monday Morning Quarterback: Tuesday Edition. Your name: Your e-mail address: Your home town: Enter your question:

Friday, 7 a.m., Kandahar

We are lucky. Even officers here stay in tents -- fancy ones, but tents nonetheless -- but we stayed overnight in the Distinguished Visitors Quarters in a well-kept, four-bed postage stamp of a room. Packing up for our next trip (to Jalalabad, in far eastern Afghanistan, near the border of Pakistan), I noticed the sheen of desert dust on the top of my laptop even though we've been in a room with a covered window and an airtight door. I open the laptop. Same lighter sheen. It's everywhere. You know how if your floors or walls get sanded at home and you find a layer of dust four rooms away? That is what these soldiers live with every-day.

Lt. Callea Pavelka, who escorted our party seamlessly around Kandahar, and her husband, Ross, share quarters in a massive tent on base, and a dust storm Wednesday night in southern Afghanistan was a decibel-fest like Arrowhead on a Sunday afternoon. There's more than a sheen on everything they own in their microscopic quarters. But do they complain? Not a word. Maybe it's their Midwestern values -- she's from Omaha, he's from Minnesota -- or maybe it's the credo of everyone we met on this base.

Lt. Pavelka, an Iowa State grad, is a rigger by military trade, a professional packer, basically. But now, because of her outgoing and helpful personality, she's found herself a welcome-wagon host for base visitors. Fine with her. Like so many people we've met here, her attitude is something like this: Don't complain about being in this place and never being able to go off-base. Do your job, do it cheerfully and respectfully, and play whatever role you're asked to play.

I signed a photo for the Pavelkas thusly: I feel good about our country knowing that people like you are protecting us.

Friday, 1:30 p.m., Jalalabad Airbase

One of the more amazing things about this tour is the opportunity to do things that I never much envisioned doing while living the normal life in Montclair, N.J. Like riding backwards in a Blackhawk helicopter, 20 miles from the real hot spots of this war, the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. As Sgt. Chris Roysdon of the Army's 101st Airborne crew told me before boarding, "My mom called me the other day and said, "Son, you're not doing anything dangerous over there, are you?' And I'm like, 'Mom, don't ask me questions you don't want the answers to.'"

One of the misconceptions about Afghanistan is that it's not a particularly pretty place. Totally wrong. We flew over a valley and across a small mountain range -- maybe 5,000-foot peaks -- and it's utterly beautiful. Rolling farmland with Afghanistan families working on them. Craggy, rough mountain regions. Sloping valleys with grazing cattle and goats. At the end of our 35-minute flight, we saw two very interesting scenes. One, a tented family of apparently itinerant Afghanis, with a young boy chasing a family dog around the tent and two camels grazing disinterestedly. And as we coptered about 1,000 feet above another family, a father in customary white Muslim garb, bowling to his son in their backyard while his son whacked at it with a cricket bat. Now that's what I call sports illustrated.

My one question to our pilots when we got back on the ground: How do you know that some Taliban fighter with a weapon of destruction couldn't be sitting somewhere along your flight path and bring down one of these sleek machines? Sgt. Aaron Sutliff told me, "In the bigger towns, like Jalalabad, we found that the people are pretty tame and seem to either tolerate us or like us. The people in the mountains don't like us much, but I haven't been shot at here yet. And it's not something that really bothers me very much."

It sure would bother me. But that's probably why these guys are so different and so good.

Friday, Jalalabad Airbase, 10 p.m.

Nice taco/burrito dinner tonight with the Army Special Forces guys, the best of the best and the brightest. What a setting: a grand dining room in an old Soviet commander's quarters (almost a small palace, really) from the days of the Afghan-Soviet conflict almost three decades ago. Three local Afghanis provide security, two locals cook a very good meal with beef, chicken and goat.

(A brief detour about food here. It is wonderful. If this military travels on its stomach, it's going to have plenty of padding. Tommie Harris had this for lunch today: Chicken wings, roasted chicken breast, Afghani chicken kabob, corn and banana milk ... yes, banana milk, just like chocolate milk. Delicious. Anyway, we're walking out of the dining hall, and Harris, in his droll kind of amazement, says: "How is it possible to gain weight in a Third World country?'' I'll tell you how. The food system is run by Halliburton subsidiary KBR, and I have a feeling for the money they're making on feeding the forces, they could get a Ruth's Chris-type New York strip, medium rare, to Venus. With polenta fries on the side.)

The Special Forces guys, a platoon of 12, live the life of intrigue you've heard about. With the weather slated to be gorgeous Saturday, and windless, they're slated to leave by chopper for a mission somewhere in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan at 4 a.m., five hours before our scheduled departure back to the Bagram Airfield. Cryptically, one of the guys asks us what time we're leaving the base in the morning, and when he hears it's 9 a.m., he says, "Oh, we ought to be finished and back here by then. Our job won't take long.'' That's it. No details. Don't ask, don't tell.

They spend a couple of hours telling us about their lives. The stories are filtered, obviously, but what's most impressive is how they think. when you think of the Army, you think of people who follow orders from on high. That's true of every military branch. But with the Special Forces -- to some, better known as the Green Berets -- how it works reminds me of how a head coach's gameplanning and subsequent execution works. They are given an objective. Say it's to disarm and dismantle a Taliban safehouse in a little town near the Pakistan border. (Probably truer than I think.) Their job is to figure a way, any way to do it. No one tells them how. But in this group, there are two attorneys, a former corporate VP and other college grads with advanced degrees. I mean, if these want to see top Afghani officials, all the way up the president, they're ushered in, because the the government here knows they're the cutting-edge guys getting the toughest anti-Taliban jobs done.

We're standing around after dinner, chatting, and one of the Forces points to a roundish man on the other side of the room and tells me, "See that guy over there? He designed this mission. He's the one who figured everything out, then went to our leader and laid it out, and [the leader] signed off on it.'' Same thing a head coach does to his coordinators on Monday. "We've got Jason Taylor this Sunday. Figure a way to get him blocked", Bill Belichick might tell offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels. And by Tuesday afternoon, McDaniels better have a plan.

Cool stuff.

I'd love to tell you more about the evening. But if I did, I'd have to kill you.

Saturday, Noon, Bagram Airbase

After a 35-minute flight east from Jalalibad (another Blackwater flight, on a beautiful and cloudless day), we visit the base hospital, which looks to me just as good as the hospital I've experienced in Paterson, N.J., and Tommie Harris has a Taliban sighting. Amazing. "I saw 'em!'' Harris says. Two wounded Taliban soldiers have been brought into the hospital, their eyes covered and ears plugged. I'm bitter. I wanted to see it. But the two guys were rushed through the corridor by physicians with nametags off, speaking only essential words. What's this all about? One of our escorts says it's because they don't want any Taliban soldiers to see any Allied people so they'd never be able to identify them or target them -- just to keep our troops safe. Interesting.

Lucky Harris.

Saturday, 1 p.m., Bagram

Food, so far today: Tomato and mushroom omelet, with a double latte at the Green Beans Cafe in Jalalabad. Grilled chicken breast with barbeque sauce for lunch. I might enlist just for the food. Incredible.