By Matt Apuzzo '00

In the middle of the night, the house shook. Somewhere, 10,000 feet above the Afghan city of Kandahar, an AC-130 war plane was dropping bombs. Dan Harris '93 missed the whole barrage. "I'm actually rather embarrassed about that," said Harris, who slept through "copious" bombing the first night of his four-day trip through what was then a Taliban stronghold.

Harris, "our man in Kandahar," as ABC News anchor Peter Jennings called him on the air, was one of two American correspondents in the first group of reporters to visit Kandahar in early November as guests of the Taliban.

"The tremors were strong enough to shake the walls and windows. Or so I heard the next morning," said Harris. "But I was so nervous the night before we left for Afghanistan, I'd barely slept."

It was the best night's sleep the 30-year-old reporter for ABC News would get during his stint behind enemy lines.

Because of the time difference he awakened to file a story via satellite. It was 4:30 a.m. Kandahar time when crews in New York were putting the finishing touches on World News Tonight. After that segment, Harris tried to catch a few hours of shut-eye before the 8:30 a.m. deadline for Nightline.

For the record, the Pentagon did not want Harris in Kandahar at all. A heavy bombing campaign was underway and the U.S. military's top brass made it clear they could not guarantee the safety of a reporter crazy enough to venture into the area. In self-defense, Harris used a hand-held GPS and his satellite phone to feed his location to ABC's Pentagon correspondent, who relayed the coordinates to the military.

"I didn't know if it would make a difference," he said. "We just figured we'd let them know where we were. They didn't bomb directly downtown when we were there. Of course, nobody will say that's because we were there."

Dan Harris reporting from Kandahar. Harris was one of two western reporters in the city during U.S. bombardment.

Harris said he could tell when bombing was about to start. "It's not like the bombing in World War II," he said. "The planes fly so high up, you never see them, and we never heard an air-raid siren. When something was coming, our satellite phone would go dead. They'd jam the satellites and we'd know."

But that only told him bombs would be coming--not where. "It was eerie, a little," he said. "But mostly we were just so focused on all the work we had."

A former reporter and anchor in Portland and Boston, Harris was spotted by ABC two years ago when he was working for New England Cable News. ABC managers called him to New York to interview for a job for which he had never applied. "They just asked me what I might like to do for ABC," he said. "I told them I'd do custodial work if they'd hire me. We all laughed, but I was only half kidding."

ABC hired him to be an overnight anchor, but it never quite worked out. "Part of the problem, I think, is that I still look like I'm fourteen," he said. "Nobody wants someone who looks fourteen sitting behind a news desk."

So ABC sent Harris into the field. He covered the hijacked plane that went down in Pennsylvania on September 11 and then went to Pakistan. There, he landed a slot on the Taliban-sponsored tour. The ruling party wanted to show the world that the U.S. campaign against Afghanistan was killing innocent people. "I was skeptical," he said, "because we just had no way of verifying their claims. I'm looking at a big hole in the ground. The Pentagon says it was a Taliban encampment. The Taliban says it was a village."

Touring the region, he was surprised by the friendliness of Afghan civilians, he said. "Everyone wanted to talk to us in whatever English they knew. They wanted to stare at us, even touch us. They can distinguish between American policy makers and U.S. civilians. It's an amazing disconnect. It really is a highly evolved civil attitude, especially when I hear about Americans killing Sikhs because they look Arab."

Back in New York in late November and watching the Taliban crumble, Harris said he was surprised. "It was so quick," he said. "They were always telling us, ‘We're not afraid of death. We'll fight to the end.'"

Harris's next project was to be a tour of the cavernous expanse beneath the rubble that was the World Trade Center. It's all part of ABC's plan for him. "Dan is one of the brightest lights we have seen here in a long time," said anchor Peter Jennings. "He's a fine, sensitive reporter who has been a great addition to the news division."