"This was not some kind of indiscriminate bomb-the-village kind of thing," Nicholson said.
There is no cellphone service in most of Bala Baluk at night, so villagers were unable to summon help, and they were too frightened to make the drive to Farah City. The wounded who weren't lucky enough to be unconscious shrieked themselves hoarse until morning finally came.
After the bombs
Bilquis Roshan's phone rang early on May 5, and did not stop ringing. An outspoken provincial council member, she is a well-known figure throughout Farah.
"People rely on me to get things done," she said with no small amount of pride.
By midday, she had visited the first victims arriving at Farah City's rudimentary hospital. Speaking to families she knew, Roshan began compiling a list of the dead. One family gave her 19 names, another 11. The toll she compiled quickly grew to 100, then 150. She alerted news media and human rights contacts in Kabul, the Afghan capital.
Almost immediately, cracks began to show within the provincial government. Roshan, along with some others, complained that the governor, Rohul Amin, initially downplayed the extent of the disaster because he has close ties to the Americans.
By late afternoon, angry villagers showed up outside the governor's compound with two truckloads of bodies, about three dozen in all. Two days later, hundreds of angry demonstrators besieged the governor's compound, shouting anti-American slogans.
Amin denied any foot-dragging in response to the reports from Garani, but acknowledged that he sometimes felt tugged in two directions by his loyalties to his restive public and to the U.S. officials on whose largesse he depends, in a city where the zone of relative safety extends about six miles, and no more.
"The public and the Americans," the governor said with a small, tight smile. "It's like trying to balance two babies in your arms."
'Want this child?'
Eight days after the bombardment, a doleful procession made its way to the governor's compound. A high-level government panel sent from Kabul had compiled a list of 140 dead in Garani, and their families had come to receive condolence payments: crisp bills doled out from a battered black suitcase, in a mournful ritual that would last two days.
