We packed up our gloves and bats and drove away from the field and straight into a line of tanks driving down a main thoroughfare. “It’s a coup!,” I cried. “Nonsense, darling,” my mother said. “It’s a parade.” That was before she noticed the soldiers’ guns were cocked and pointed. We spent the night stranded at a friends’ house, huddling away from windows and listening to Russian MiGs strafe the presidential palace. It was indeed a coup-the toppling of President Muhammed Daoud by leftists. They were aided, of course, by Afghanistan’s “Great Friends to the North,” the Soviets, who swiftly made their official claim on the country in January 1979, when they rolled in and kick-started multiple chains of events that eventually led to last week’s horror in New York-and the potential for new horrors to come in Afghanistan itself.

You haven’t seen nostalgia until you talk to anyone-Afghan or foreign-who had the luck to live in Afghanistan before its destruction. In the 1970s, the country was poor but relatively peaceful. The foreigners who came, either as earnest Peace Corps volunteers, development consultants or diplomats, wore their missions lightly. (Indeed, some say too lightly: there were rumors, inevitable and never confirmed, that one of my Little League coaches was CIA.)

In the late 1970s, Afghanistan was considered a diplomatic and political backwater, but for many foreigners living in Kabul, it was an enchanting one. Instead of military experts and MiGs, hippies traipsed through in search of cheap hash and easy enlightenment. The legendary melons and grapes were sweet, the Afghans bright and hospitable, and for ordinary people like my parents, the challenge of trying to help the country develop wasn’t weighed down by any Great Games. My father was a law professor who was sent to Afghanistan as an advisor to the minister of justice. The idea was that he would help modernize the country’s legal system. He’d set off in the morning on his Raleigh bicycle to ride to the “Dr. Zhivago”-like palace and pore over legal codes. He’d address law societies, with French-trained Afghan lawyers and miniskirted female lawyers in attendance.

My mother, a literature professor, taught Afghan students “Death of a Salesman,” and Emily Dickinson’s poetry at the American Center. We lived in a house that, with its neat concrete walls and bland boxlike modernism, could have passed for a suburban home in Southern California. Mornings, my brother and I would trundle off in yellow school buses to the American International School. Servants and relative wealth allowed foreigners their harmless foibles: friends of ours had a pet wolf named Virginia; we kept 20 rabbits in our spare room. Provided you followed the rules-no overt drinking of alcohol, no bare arms or legs on women, Afghanistan felt safe: Even at 10, I was allowed to wander around Kabul’s bazaars on my own, bartering for jewelry and chatting in Persian. Weekends, when we weren’t playing baseball, the family would drive across Afghanistan to look at old Greek and Islamic monuments, or take picnics up to Paghman, the royal summer palace. Paghman, with its rose gardens and fountains, was destroyed by the war in the 1980s. Our faux-Californian house, I found, when I went back for NEWSWEEK in 1998, was, like most other Kabul homes, bombed to a shell.

Perhaps it was naive, but like many foreigners there, my parents and their friends hoped to give Afghanistan exposure to the best of the West-its legal codes and literature, its engineering training and medical technology-without messing up the local culture or imposing their own. Before the Iranian Revolution, it seemed so clear what “development” was-a steady march toward improved education and health, with the gradual embrace of Westernization and secularization. How wrong they were: when the mullahs toppled the Westernized, secularized Shah of Iran, it popped the stock development myth of a steady march toward Westernization in the Islamic world. In Afghanistan, we thought we’d discovered a paradise, one that could be made better by a little American know-how and development money. From the vantage of an era of sanctions and hard-liners, bombs and retaliations, how childlike such an attitude seems now. How simple-minded. A bit like the memories of a Little League game under a bright blue sky.