I spent most of the month of May in Kandahar. I walked opium fields, and got to experience the Taliban's first wave of their spring offensive. I was embedded with the US Army Civil Affairs (CA).

The 492nd CA were on their last mission before returning back to Phoenix. They are Army reserve, and after a year, were happy to return to their civilian lives.

Instead of showing around the new officer to the schools, roads, and other projects in the area, we ran into about 200 or 300 Taliban.

Shortly after 11 AM, we stopped at a school about a two-hour drive northwest of Kandahar city. The school was empty, some of the rooms burned, and the books laying on the floor with pages torn out.

Used condoms dotted the floor. Numerous people told me that the Taliban fighters enjoy each others' company in more ways than one.

I was the fifth person traveling in the armored Humvee and we were the only US citizens there. We were attached to the Canadians, who numbered well over a hundred, plus another 100 Afghan soldiers

Just past the school, the Taliban started shooting AK-47s and RPGs at us. This went on for the better part of 20 hours.

We were in very rural Afghanistan. No electricity or running water. Just fields--opium fields and marijuana--covered the land between the mud walled compounds.

We knew something was going down. As we drove past the abandoned school, which was built with US dollars and completed in January 2006, woman in burkas were literally running. Three-year-old children were carrying babies--running away from where we headed.

These fighters come through the porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is not the Afghan people doing this fighting, but they do hide the fighters, not always by choice.

By sunset, Capt. Nichola Goddard of the Canadian Army was dead, as was one Afghan soldier. In response to the rocket-propelled grenade that killed Goddard, the Canadians called in a US B-1 Bomber and dropped a JDAM "Bunker Buster" at night into the heart of the village that the Taliban were firing from. We watched in horror as a giant black cloud filled the night air after the impact. That stopped the Taliban from shooting--for about an hour. The fighting continued through the night. At dawn, the guns were hidden and these guerrilla soldiers pretended to be farmers and tried to leave the area. Coalition forces arrested every fighting-age male and let the Afghan Army decide who was actually from there and a farmer.

A week later, in Kabul, while I was packing for Baghdad, the riots hit. These were much worse than the riots from the Muhammad cartoon. The looters had maps and were directed to neighborhoods of expatriates, where they proceeded to rob houses. Just another head of the Taliban popping up, like a snake on Medusa's head.

With my head still spinning from being shot at, and the riots of Kabul, I found myself flying up Iraq's Tigris River in a Black Hawk helicopter. Just days before I got to Iraq, CBS lost part of their news crew to roadside bomb. Traveling by air is the preferred method of travel.

I embedded with another CA team, the 414 out of New York state. They are at Camp Taji and work in the northwest corner of the Baghdad province. We drove to the Ministry of Oil and they talked about problems with propane and propane accessories. Insurgents blew up the pipeline two months ago. They killed the workers sent to fix the propane pipeline. Trucks are used to transport propane, and they do not get to their proper locations. Most of the propane seems to hit the black market. There is a shortage of gasoline and propane here.

Isn't that funny in an oil producing country? Farmers cannot get water for their fields and people have no air conditioning in the 120 degree weather.

Gas was about 45 cents a gallon three months ago here. Now it is about $2.75 gallon. Skilled labor pays about $25 a day and unskilled is $10. Afghanistan: $2 a day unskilled, $6 skilled, with an average wage of $35 a month. In Afghanistan, a soldier makes $70 a month and the family gets a little over $500 if he gets killed.

All they have in Afghanistan is poppies, not oil. For the Iraqis, it is frustrating to have oil but no electricity.