Sean Langan

Was it the Muller?

How do you get out of there?

And you're running around in circles like balloons filled with gas, buzzing around the room, not sleeping, pacing around the room.

And I remember my fixer for two days not sleeping.

And you're not really thinking properly.

Because physically, literally the walls are closing on you, but metaphorically as well.

My fixer wife had given birth two days before this trip.

She got these pressures like, oh my God, my newborn son.

Didn't even name him.

You know, my fixer's name is Sammy.

I was avoiding saying his name.

But my fixer, Afghan, would be my trusted friend and fixer.

Fixers, we use that phrase.

It's not derogatory.

My fixer is my companion.

but my producer, my translator, and you can't operate as a foreign journalist in these parts of the world without someone by your side.

And they're more important in my eyes than an executive producer or a director producer, you know.

We're really stressed out, and you're thinking about escape.

You don't know escape's not possible, but if very quickly it dawns on you, the constant noise, and you're in the mountains, so when you have gunfire and artillery fire, it's not heavy artillery, but it's artillery, it rebounds, it's the reverb.

And the echo in the mountains is a really disturbing sound.