But it was just the medical chopper taking off from the hospital near my apartment, and it took me a little while to work out what it was that I found disturbing about the idea of being left behind.

After all, I loved Afghanistan, and there was never a day that I regretted being there.

But still, I guess, no matter how much you like Afghanistan, it’s just not the kind of place you want to miss your ride out of.

Four years now after the fall of the Taliban, at a time when the country is more prosperous, more open, more secure than it has ever been in the lives of most young Afghans, it’s still a stunningly backward, difficult, dangerous place.

I say this even though, in two months there, I scarcely heard a shot fired in anger.

I’ll say now that, in that sense, good luck seemed to follow me in Afghanistan.

I don’t consider myself superstitious, but I guess I am enough so that I didn’t want to say this while I was still there for fear of committing irony – a particular fear of journalists, I think, simply because we know how other journalists think. ("Ironically, the fatal rocket attack came just days after Roy had written about how peaceful Afghanistan was ...") But the truth is the war, if that’s what the sporadic violence in Afghanistan still is, often seemed far away, despite the check points and the razor wire and the often not very well disguised hostility that the Americans there face.

One base I stayed at for a week had been rocketed every full moon for months, except when I was there.

Convoys on the road to Kandahar were ambushed the day before and the day after ours, but our 10-hour ride was uneventful – enough so that I fell asleep.

When I was at a remote northern base near the border of Turkmenistan, it was so peaceful that we slept in the open air on the roof of the building, climb into the back of a Humvee an hour or two before dawn wrapped in the security, real or imagined, of your bulletproof vest and the steel armor around you and the sergeant in the front seat says into his headset something like, "Dagger Six, this is Victor Three – we’re up," and in a minute or two you roll out of the front gate and into, well, you never know.

But two months of that passes more quickly than you would imagine, and I felt a little guilty telling the soldiers I was going home already.

It’s hard to say who was the most envious that I was heading back to the U.S. – the Americans who face another eight months there, or the Afghans themselves.

For many of the Afghans I met - the more educated ones especially, who were literate and could speak English and were working with the Americans - the idea of coming to the U.S. was simply a dream that they know won’t come true.

They were all curious about America, what it’s like and how people live. And though I tried to tell them about it, it was clear from their questions that to them, the U.S. was as mysterious and unknown as Afghanistan had seemed to us before we got there.

I thought about that when I was in Frankfurt on the way home, because things I never would have thought twice about before were a little startling even to me: the spotless streets and buildings, the expensive cars and coats, and so many women in public. What would the Afghans I had met, especially those from the remote villages so removed from everything we think of as modern, think of this? Would they stare at the women in short skirts or with bare midriffs the way I had stared at the tiny little figure of a woman in a burqa I had seen carrying a live goat on her back?

Friends have asked since I returned what I will remember most from my time in Afghanistan, and I see now it’s the thought that passed through my mind almost every day I was there - whether it was when we were exploring the ancient citadels in Herat and Farah, or drinking tea with Afghan soldiers or sitting cross-legged on the floor of the governor’s palace in Kandahar sharing dinner with a roomful of frowning mullahs.

But the time I remember the thought most clearly was at the small forward base in Qal’eh-ye Naw, a place that seemed as remote from the modern world as could be possible – a place where, aside from the pickup trucks and the new cell phone tower and the noisy rattle of generators, life was probably not much different from when Alexander the Great passed through Afghanistan two thousand years before.

He kept going, turning back only after founding a city even deeper into Asia that he called Alexandria Eschate – "Alexandria at the end of the world."

But the place made me wonder why he had felt the need to go any further because at night with the moon lighting the long ridges of mountains in the distance it seemed easy to believe the world really did drop off just over the horizon.

It was Ramadan, when the Muslims fast through the day, and I would lie there at night in my cot on the open roof, listening to the Afghans prepare for their late-night feast, and in the moonlight you could still see the evidence of the Soviets who’d tried, so long after Alexander, to conquer the Afghans – the burned out remains of their tanks scattered around the town, the black scars of their battle trenches snaking across the hillsides.

What I thought then, lying awake watching the shooting stars fall through the Milky Way, was something that I now see was true: Someday, I thought, this will all seem like a dream.

It already does.

But I still spent some time trying to figure out what would seem the strangest to most Americans if they traveled here: The police at the airport entrance who pat you down for weapons before they let you in the terminal? Or the airport bathrooms, which have no toilets, only holes in the floor?

It still seems incredible that you can go so quickly from somewhere that is so backward to a place where everything is modern and clean and works and in a couple of hours be eating a nice rabbit pie with butter spatzel and listening to Christmas songs like Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas.”

But I did notice that the more beer I drank the more sense it all seemed to make.

In the back of his pickup truck there was a big box covered with a tarp, and he asked me, "You don’t mind riding around with 20,000 rounds of ammunition, do you?"

I didn’t, but I did think later that maybe it wasn’t the best place to be riding if you were hit with a roadside bomb.

I almost caught a ride with some military contractors who were taking some of their employees to the airport, but they got cold feet at the last minute.

I suspect the problem was they freaked out a little when they found out I was a reporter, but their boss said it was because of "legal issues."

I just told him I understood, but I was thinking, dude, you’re driving a big SUV with no license plates and a couple of guys with assault rifles through a war-torn city with no real judicial system. What, exactly, would be the legal issues?

Now that I am packing up, I’m glad I didn’t buy more stuff: I’m having trouble squeezing what I had already bought into my bags. And, looking at some of this stuff, I’m wondering what in the world I was thinking when I bought it. (Did I really need one of those sheepskin hats like Hamid Karzai wears?)

But I kept trying to figure out whether I’m anxious to leave or sorry I’m leaving, and I really couldn’t decide.

A little of both, I guess, is the best answer.

Some of the soldiers were hanging Christmas decorations, and the chaplains were putting garlands and trees on the porch of the chapel here at Camp Phoenix.

This afternoon, the sky was rumbling, and for a while I was surprised the F-16s were flying in this weather. Then I realized it wasn’t jets but thunder, which for some reason I hadn’t expected.  

Now that it’s dark there’s a cold rain. I don’t know if it will snow tonight, but for a while the rain on the roof of my cargo container room sounded funny, and when I poked my head out the door I was pelted by little drops of ice.

Sleet, I guess you call it? I wish one of my Afghan friends was around so I could ask what the word is in Dari or Pashto.

But I know the Dari and Farsi word for snow is “barf,” which is why that’s the name of a popular brand of Iranian soap I’ve seen for sale here and in Iraq. Can’t imagine it would ever go over well in the U.S.

At least the holidays give the soldiers a benchmark to keep track of the passing time, counting down to next summer when they can go home.

I suspect Christmas and New Year’s, just like at home, will be here before they know it. But they’ll have a long dry spell after that, and right at the roughest part of the winter weather.

It seems a little colder here every day, or at least every night. From the camp you can see the snow now on the higher mountains on the edge of Kabul, and there’s talk there might be snow here in the city next week. But I’ll be gone by then.

Unlike a lot of the other soldiers here, it was a normal workday for them, with duty on the entry gates and in the guard towers, and with a patrol after dark out in the neighborhoods around the camp.

Rodriguez, 38, an 18-year-veteran, serves with the 2nd Battalion of the 116th Field Artillery of the Florida National Guard, based in Lakeland, and works for a cellular phone company.

A veteran of Desert Storm, Rodriguez – “Sgt. Rod,” as his troops call him – has 35 soldiers under him, and his manner with them is part stern-faced sergeant, part worrying parent.

He bawled one soldier out when he caught him without his helmet on in the guard tower, but the first thing he asked them all was if they’d gotten a break to get Thanksgiving dinner.

One young soldier told Rodriguez he wasn’t really hungry, but the sergeant told him to go eat anyway. “You need to eat,” he said, sounding more like a parent than a sergeant.

When Rodriguez asked me how the Thanksgiving meal was, I realized he hadn’t eaten yet himself. I told him to make sure he got a piece of the pecan pie.

But when I left he was still working. The dining hall was set to close in about 15 minutes, and he didn’t seem in a hurry to get there.

“We try to get all the soldiers fed first,” he told me.

I hope he was able to get some of the pecan pie.

Read more about the troops' holiday in Afghanistan in this article that ran in the Orlando Sentinel on Friday.

After more than two weeks on the road, it was especially good to get back to my own shower (even if I do share it with a couple dozen other guys).

It is surprising just how much the little room really has seemed like home the last two months, especially when I would come back from a week or two away.

I always leave a set of clean clothes here when I go, so when I get back I can get a shower and get cleaned up, then take the big pile of dirty clothes over to the laundry.

I am going to miss having someone else do my laundry when I get home – even if they do throw everything from your laundry bag here into one machine (all my white socks, boxer shorts and t-shirts are blue now). They are also a lot better at folding clothes than I am.

The room has a little plywood shelf that a previous tenant built. I told the lieutenant who is moving into the room after I am gone that I’ll leave him all my improvements, but they don’t amount to much: A $5 rug, some plastic coat hangers, a new power strip and about three weeks of back issues of Stars and Stripes.

I kept thinking I would buy a lamp so I could read while lying on the bed without the overhead lights in my eyes. But the PX never had any, and I forgot to buy one when I was down in Kabul a while back, so I just lived without it.

They do sell TVs in the PX, and there is a cable hookup in the room to get the Armed Forces Network. But I figured I would never really watch it anyway, so I didn’t get one, even when a soldier who was leaving offered to sell me his for $40.

If I was staying longer, I guess I would do like the soldiers and buy a chair, get a TV or at least a stereo, and a couple of nice rugs. But I am leaving in a few days, so there’s not much point.

Here are a few photos of the room, inside (left, click to enlarge) and out (right, click to enlarge). It has air conditioning and heating, and it’s very quiet. It’s a lot more comfortable than it looks.

It also requires very little maintenance – you can stand in one place and just about reach all four walls, so housekeeping (at least the way I do it) takes about 30 seconds a day – basically throwing out empty water bottles, coffee cups and Pop Tarts boxes.

Like I said, I think I’m going to miss it.