Chestnut Hill native and GFS alumnus Jeffrey Stern, seen here during one of his stays in Afghanistan, wrote the book, “The 15:17 to Paris,” about three Americans who foiled a terrorist attack. The book was made into a movie by famed director Clint Eastwood and released in February of this year.[/caption]

by Len Lear

Part Two

There’s an old Middle Eastern saying: once the camel’s nose is in the tent, you cannot get it out. And once Jeffrey Stern gets on a case, you cannot get him off it. That is why he went back to Afghanistan numerous times after the initial year he spent there, despite the life-threatening danger that was omnipresent.

“I wound up teaching English in Kabul. What an experience! One of my students there eventually went to Stanford graduate school, which is quite an accomplishment coming from the slums of Kabul. I feel stupidly lucky to have witnessed this and to have made friends like this.”

Stern, 34, who grew up in Mt. Airy and then Chestnut Hill and graduated from Germantown Friends School, has been named both a Pulitzer Center Fellow for Crisis Reporting and a Graduate Fellow at the Stanford Center for International Conflict and Negotiation. Stern's reporting has appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Newsweek, Slate, Time and The New Republic. He has also been featured on PBS News Hour, NPR Morning Edition and Morning Joe, among others.

One of Stern's revisits to Afghanistan lasted another entire year (2012 to 2013) to work on the book, “The Last Thousand: One School's Promise in a Nation at War” (Macmillan, 2015). Stern's writing is a potent elixir of savvy, charm and humanity. He does not dip his pen in fresh blood, as do some who write about war zones.

“The Last Thousand” is about The Marefat School, an extraordinary institution in the western slums of Kabul, built by one of the country’s most vulnerable minorities, the Hazara. Marefat educates both girls and boys; it teaches students to embrace the arts, criticize their leaders, interrogate their religion and be active citizens in a rapidly changing country. But they are dependent on foreign forces for security. When the U.S. began to withdraw from Afghanistan, they were left behind, unprotected.

According to publicity for the book, “Stern explores the stakes of war through the eyes of those touched by Marefat: the school’s daring founder and leader, Aziz Royesh; a mother of five who finds freedom in literacy; a clever mechanic, a self-taught astronomer, the school’s security director and several intrepid students who carry Marefat’s mission to the streets.”

A New York Times review called the book “a beautiful, meticulously reported debut … Mr. Stern has a gift for exposition, explaining the confusing geopolitics of the region with a blessed — and welcome — lucidity.”

The firm whose agent helped Stern get “The Last Thousand” published later contacted Stern and asked if he would like to write a book about three young Americans traveling through Europe who thwarted an attack on Aug. 21, 2015, by a terrorist named Ayoub al-Khazzani on a train bound for Paris with more than 500 passengers, saving many lives.

Stern did proceed to write the book, “The 15:17 to Paris,” which was published in 2016. “I always feel lucky to get paid for this,” Stern told us. The heroic trio — Anthony Sadler, Oregon National Guardsman Alek Skarlatos and U.S. Air Force Airman First Class Spencer Stone — were later given an award on Spike TV by famed director Clint Eastwood.

“Spencer told me afterwards that Clint Eastwood told the boys that he wanted to make a movie about them,” recalled Stern. “I told him, 'That's not how it works,' but the truth is that I had no idea how it works.”

Eastwood did in fact make the movie and was so impressed with the three young men that instead of hiring professional actors, he allowed the trio to play themselves in the film, which came out in the U.S. in February of this year. Stern, who did not write the film script, said the filming took two months and that none of it was actually filmed in Paris.

Although Stern became close to the three young men, he conceded that the movie “was not very good. It was made too fast.” Critics agreed. According to the movie review website rottentomatoes.com, only 24 percent of movie critics gave “The 15:17 to Paris” a positive review.

Stern is currently ghost-writing a book about a powerful public figure “whose political views are completely different from my own.” (Stern chose not to reveal the name of the public figure.) “The people I deal with (in journalism and publishing) and I all think alike about politics in the U.S. I am doing this book because I want to try and understand the people on the other side who think very differently.”

How does Stern's family feel about his many trips to Afghanistan, including two stays of a year each? “They are afraid, of course, but I think they are kind of proud of my sense of mission and the values they instilled in me to be a good global citizen. My mom and her mom read three newspapers every day. I am very lucky to have parents like that.”

If Stern could write about anyone on earth, who would it be? “I would interview people on the wrong side of history, such as steadfast supporters of apartheid. I would try to write three-dimensional pictures of people who have done terrible things. Few people who commit evil acts think of themselves as evil.”

For more information about Stern's books and magazine articles, visit www.jeffreyestern.com