Hitting the ground during rebel gun battles in Tora Bora and befriending and living with old Mujahadeen commanders, a GW graduate got a first-hand look at the war in Afghanistan covering the battles this fall for the Los Angeles Times.

Interviewing Pashtun warlords and surveying the caves of eastern Afghanistan just three years out of school, former Hatchet Features Editor Megan Stack said she is “recovering” after going on a whirlwind journey that took her to the front lines of the war on terrorism.

Now serving as the Houston bureau chief for the LA Times, the 1998 graduate wrote stories at a grueling pace on a range of topics from Afghan women returning to school to anti-American protests in Pakistan.

“It’s important to differentiate between Afghans, the Taliban and al Qaeda,” she said in a telephone interview from her Texas home. “Afghans as a general rule were lovely, strong, soulful, very hospitable people.”

Stack said that Afghans offered her and other journalists food during Ramadan, when it is forbidden for Muslims to eat during the daytime.

“They were fasting, and they wanted to serve us … to call them receptive is an understatement,” she said. “You really start to consider them real people … they have endured 25 years of warfare and just want the conflict to end.”

The Glastonbury, Conn., native began her unexpected collision course with Afghanistan while on vacation in Paris on Sept. 11. She said she was immediately assigned to cover terrorist cells in Europe.

Stack noted that she felt disconnected to the country after returning to the United States in December because she was overseas on Sept. 11.

“There was a feeling when I came back that I was somewhat out of touch with what was going on in the country,” she said. “It was a strange disconnect … I have more of a sense of the war than the attacks that preceded it.”

After a month in Europe, Stack traveled to Pakistan aboard the U.S.S. Carl Vincent. She said she felt conditions in the new U.S. ally country were actually more dangerous than in Afghanistan, noting that anti-U.S. sentiment was extremely high in refugee camps on the border.

“When people are desperate, they are not the most hospitable,” Stack said, recalling times when rocks were lobbed at her caravan of Western journalists.

After a couple weeks in Pakistan, Stack felt she was on the periphery of the story and traveled with some “trepidation” to Afghanistan.

Stack described Afghanistan as a geographically and socially complicated landscape, noting that rebel soldiers fighting with U.S. aid were not motivated to fight to remove al Qaeda from the country but to end the U.S. bombing.

Stack recounted her experiences hearing about the van of journalists killed in mid-November.

“It was a very grim time,” she said. “At Thanksgiving dinner, there were definite overtones of the people killed, and you were thankful you were still there.”

Stack said she was able to concentrate on feature stories during her initial time in Afghanistan but the pace picked up as the war moved to the Tora Bora region.

“What had been tiring became grueling … I stopped getting sleep,” she said noting that she was able file stories in the early morning in Afghanistan because of the large time difference. As she attempted to report on the daily bombing and fighting outside the caves, Stack said she was caught in the middle of skirmishes.

“Often we had the distinct impression they were shooting at us,” she recalled, describing the fearful moments when a quiet landscape quickly turned into a viscous firefight.

Stack said she is “burned out” and may consider reporting abroad in the future but is “torn” between her Houston assignment and an international post.

She said she was appointed to serve as the L.A. Times Houston bureau chief in April and hopes to finally start spending time covering the south-central region, calling it the “the most interesting part of the country.”

Stack said the region is more diverse and interesting than the “monotony” of the Northeast and the Pacific Northwest.

She said she is not quite ready to sum up her experience in Afghanistan.

“I am still trying to process everything; my brain is still there,” she said. “I am still looking back, not quite looking forward.”