Where he slept in Afghanistan
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Where he slept in Afghanistan is John Kiriakou's account of his own lodging across many trips to the country, given on 22 October 2025 in answer to a viewer who asked, after hearing about the scorpions of Baja, whether Afghanistan had been more comfortable.

The premise of the question

His first answer was about fauna rather than beds. "I've been to Afghanistan a bunch of times. The last few times were, you know, bite-free." There were, he noted, no tarantulas; he saw one snake; and he saw "hundreds of foxes, desert foxes. They come out of their dens when the sun goes down. You can see their eyes shining off in the distance." Marmots were plentiful in both countries.

The progression

The accommodation improved as the American presence hardened, and Kiriakou lays it out as three stages.

"The first couple of times I went to Afghanistan, I just slept in a tent with everybody else."

The first improvement was marginal and he mocks it. "I mean, there was once where I actually had my own tent, so I was, you know, living high on the hog."

The second came with infrastructure. "And then, once we got a serious foothold there, I'd stay in the officers' quarters at Bagram."

The civilian trip

The last category is different in kind, because he was no longer working for the government. "And then, when I went as a private citizen to get those little kids out who had starred in The Kite Runner, I stayed at one of the big Afghan hotels."

His assessment of it is deliberately unremarkable: "and it was like any three-star hotel that I stayed in anywhere else."

Why the inventory is useful

The sequence is a compressed history of the American war told through where one man was allowed to put his bed. The shared tent belongs to the improvised early period; the officers' quarters at Bagram to the years of a large, permanent, walled American installation; the ordinary hotel to a country in which a foreign civilian could check in and sleep in a room like any other.

It is also a rare instance of Kiriakou answering a comfort question about a war zone without irony. He was more troubled, on his own account, by a month at a resort in Baja than by any of it, a comparison he makes without apparent embarrassment.

See also

- The Kite Runner rescue mission
- Afghanistan 2011 Kerry Trip
- The fox that ate the scraps
- Cleaning up after Tora Bora
