William T. Vollmann was once an embedded journalist in Afghanistan. This was in 1982, though, and the unit he was embedded in wasn’t American: it was America’s then-allies, the holy warriors known as the Mujahideen. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan compared them to America’s Founding Fathers. They were at war with the Soviets at the time, and the Cold War made for strange bedfellows.

The Mujahideens’ brutal fundamentalist beliefs weren’t a concern then. They might have been bloodthirsty zealots, but they were our bloodthirsty zealots. Vollmann wanted to know more about them and their fight against the Soviets, and the only way he could do that was to travel to Afghanistan. It was a risky endeavor, but in the words of a famous Turkish proverb, "If the mountain won’t come to you, then you must come to the mountain."

Vollmann was only twenty-three at the time and was saving money working in the insurance industry: reinsurance, to be exact. Reinsurance is insurance for insurance companies, a strangely recursive business that held no allure for an aspiring war correspondent. He was eager to do what he could do to help the Afghans and get the word out about their fight. He left for the battlefield as soon as he could.

Vollmann found his Mujahideen, but with them he discovered that many of the ideals he held were naive, to say the least. Had "helping the Afghans" been a simple endeavor, the aid workers, diplomats, and assorted meddlers already there would have done so. He arrived with misplaced hope and left with dysentery.

The book in which he wrote about his experience, An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World, wasn’t published until 1992.

To call Afghanistan Picture Show a failure might be a little harsh. Vollmann does, though. To be sure, the affected ironic distance (he refers to himself in third-person as The Young Man) in the face of so much suffering can invoke an embarrassed cringe on his behalf from the reader, but so might crocodile tears and maudlin sympathy. In any case, all of us were twenty-three once, but very few of us recorded our own awkward thoughts while traveling in the company of armed insurgents.

Afghanistan Picture Show was a start for Vollmann. It’s a strange animal -- time jumps back and forth and erudite personal observations alternate with blunt statements from Mujahideen, military officers, and others -- but it carries the genetic code of his later works. Vollmann's mix of fiction and reportage, along with his emplacement of himself as a character in his work, clearly has its beginnings here.

In the nearly thirty-five years since Afghanistan Picture Show, Vollmann's fusion of the real and the imagined has evolved to become a literary signature of beautiful complexity that is impossible to forge. Some things have not changed since those days. Vollmann is still not content to sit on the sidelines.

Vollmann befriended prostitutes working in San Francisco's Tenderloin district before he wrote about their lives in The Rainbow Stories and The Royal Family. He spent two weeks camping out at the North Pole in preparation for writing his novel The Rifles. His nonfiction work Imperial necessitated that he wander the desert wastelands between the United States and Mexican border slipping into situations that might give the most hardened vagabond reason to pause.

This month marks the release of The Dying Grass: A Novel of the Nez Perce War, the fifth installment in his series Seven Dreams, a saga of the conflicted history of European colonizers and Native Americans. Vollmann tells the story of the bloody clash between the U.S. Army and the Nez Perce tribe as seen through the eyes of Army General Otis Howard, tasked with the pursuit and capture of Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph.

Already, critics are praising the novel ("peerless," "stunning), and while Vollmann is probably pleased to hear this he has said in at least one interview that he writes to please himself. It is difficult to imagine that traveling to a war zone or freezing in the Arctic as something that would bring happiness to very many people, but that's part of Vollmann’s allure: as a writer, he does the things that we won't try, and brings back the stories we can't tell.