THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

If he finished his mission, you throw him in a potters field hole without ceremony.

— The two men had come to the common end of all human journeys. Their bodies, swathed in bloody white sheets, lay on a rocky hillside. Awaiting them were two thin rectangles of shallow graves. The city of Kabul was responsible for the burial. No mullah had been asked to preside over this earthly farewell.

“One of these guys needs a smaller hole,” one gravedigger said, laughing.

The bigger of the bodies belonged to an old man, Khan Mir. His body had gone unclaimed, and the obligations of an Islamic funeral were forgone because he was a pauper. The identity of the other man was unknown. He was only half a body really, a headless torso with but a right arm and a right leg. His interment was meant to be ignominious because he was a suicide bomber, or yak enteher kunenda.

“Cover them with rocks and throw on the dirt,” the chief gravedigger called out.

In Kabul, the burial of a suicide bomber occurs at a secret time in a secret place, the forgettable end to what most here consider an unforgivable act.

Some do not finish their mission, for them a small cell in a detention center. Some are contrite.

Pakistani members of the Taliban “came to my high school to recruit volunteers and told us if you didn’t join the jihad, you would go to hell and never see the brides in paradise,” he said. So he underwent suicide training in the Pakistani tribal areas.

But now hindsight, as well as capture, had made Farmanullah realize he was being used as a political plaything, he said. “We were told that everyone in Afghanistan was an infidel,” he said. “Now I know this is not so.”

And some are not.

At first, he said he was sorry he had not completed his suicidal mission. Then he expressed ambivalence.

“At the training camp I had allowed myself to become too emotional,” he said, mentioning that movies he had been shown were probably one-sided and had overstoked his zealotry. But while he was now glad he had not killed the Afghan governor, some of his suicidal resolve remained. “U.S. soldiers are still killing Muslims,” he said. “I still believe in jihad against America, and some things are worth death.”

But what really matters is that, somewhere, another is stepping forward to take their places and, if enough is left, fill another anonymous hole in the ground.