The places where we went, it was not safe to be any bigger than a two-person crew. In Afghanistan, the only way for us to operate was to try to fly under the radar of everyone.

The change doesn't come from Washington ever. Change comes from below. It comes from the pressure building amongst the American people.

Anytime you step out of an embedded reporting situation, you're always making calculations about what's safe and what's not safe, feeling out the edges of your life, of what's possible, and what risks you're putting everyone else to.

It's often frustrating when you're a war reporter and you're covering these places that far away. You're frustrated by making stories that people can't connect to in any way. It's hard for Americans to connect to Arabic-speaking Iraqis in refugee camps or Pashto-speaking Afghans in the countryside, and having a character who is a vehicle through which you're allowed to make these relationships really allowed us to gain in an emotional weight that was difficult for us to do any other way to make it all human.

The places where we went, it was not safe to be any bigger than a two-person crew. In Afghanistan, the only way for us to operate was to try to fly under the radar of everyone.

In every country, it's different, and you have to be flexible and slow and careful, and in the end rely on the experience of others who have gone before you and have begun to figure these things out.