Half a world away from New England, at 11 a.m. on March 17, my first working day as The Boston Globe correspondent in Pakistan began with an explosion that catapulted me headlong into the maelstrom that had become the U.S. "war on terror." A suicide bomber had struck a Protestant church less than two miles from the Islamabad hotel where I was staying. My translator rushed in with the horrific news, abruptly canceled our get-acquainted session and hurried me into a waiting car for a frenzied drive to the scene.

There, only a few yards from the U.S. Embassy in the heavily guarded diplomatic quarter, shattered glass and a cordon of Pakistani troops ringed the outside of a small white church. Inside, pools of blood and pieces of flesh, some blasted onto the ceiling 60 feet above the sanctuary, gave sickening testimony of the carnage that ripped apart a quiet Sunday service only a half-hour before.

Five dead, including two Americans. Dozens injured. Welcome to Pakistan.

That church bombing provided a no-waiting cultural and professional transition from the streets of Boston to a shifting, covert war zone and the deadly realities of the aftermath of September 11. In the nine weeks that followed, in cities and villages from the plains of Pakistan to the mountains of Afghanistan, the demands of a reporter's job also provided me with an eyeball-to-eyeball look at the complicated roots and troubling future of a confrontation that none of the simple, fiery rhetoric from Washington and elsewhere seems able to capture adequately.

I raised my hand for this assignment, hungry for a chance to balance the three weeks I had spent in New York City after the World Trade Center attack with a stint in the cauldron of Islamic fundamentalism that had nurtured Al Qaeda and spawned the killers of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

First stop, Islamabad, the modern, built-from-scratch Pakistani capital, where the Muslim country's tiny elite governs a nation of 144 million people sprawling from the foothills of the Himalayas to the teeming port of Karachi. My job: to report the news of the day, which after March 17 became a daily update on the hunt for the church bombers, the infiltration of Al Qaeda into Pakistani society and the day-to-day life of a complex, overpopulated and impoverished nation that is little understood by Americans.

As a general-assignment reporter for the Globe, my work is concentrated in New England but also has taken me across the country to cover breaking news--often involving the immediate drama of high-profile trials, plane crashes, sensational killings and natural calamities such as wildfires and hurricanes. Nothing, however, had prepared me for the visceral culture shock of Pakistan and Afghanistan, where information was scarce, my Western appearance made me inherently suspect to bureaucrats and ordinary people and each day was an adrenaline-pumping succession of long hours filled with palpable, low-level tension.

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