I want to go back. Need to. Back to the flames, the twisted metal and smell of blood. The sand. The constant hint of burning rubber from the burn pits. A smell distinct, but not even noticed by passersby here in the States. As they walk around me on city sidewalks, they have no idea where I am, back in the desert, back with the concertina wire, the hug of my vest, the comforting weight of an M-4 in my hands. Until one bumps into me and I’m brought home, empty-handed, into this world where chaos goes unacknowledged, where so few of us can see it. I can’t stay.
So I watch the needle creep.
I push until the rising red pin is all I can see—guardrails, white lines, streetlights all blurring together on the edges of my vision. Or maybe they’re tears. No, that’s wishful thinking—I never cry. I want to. I just can’t seem to make it happen.
I am here. Alone. Almost flying, pushing the transmission to its peak before each gear change. I like driving standard; it reinforces the illusion that I’m in control, the illusion that must have kept me alive back in the desert. But it was only ever that. No matter how much preparation, how many routes and reroutes and backup routes I knew, I wasn’t controlling shit. It was out of my hands as soon as we left the wire. That’s when Allah took over.
The thin red line of the needle crosses 100. I close my eyes. Cut the wheel. Relinquish all semblance of control.
One day, it was maybe May or April—early in the spring offensive—we knew we were likely to get hit. Not because of intel, really, just because we could feel it, the way you can feel when someone’s watching you no matter how hard you try to sink into the shadows of a dive bar’s corners. Maybe it was God’s eyes watching us. But the desert lent no shadows. And we had a fucking job to do.
The thing about being a mission leader, about being the guy who drives the very first Humvee, leading all your guys like ants into hellfire, is that you need to pretend, need to convince yourself that you have control, that the amount of preparation you put in is going to keep those guys alive. That if anyone’s going to die, it’s you. Because it’s your tires that are going to hit the pressure plates first, your hood that will be the first to enter the kill zone. And that’s okay. You didn’t come all the way over here expecting to make it back.
But that day we did. I did. In spite of the intel, in spite of that feeling of eyes making the hair on the backs of our necks stand up in the desert heat that should have disallowed goose bumps, we made it back to the wire that day. It wasn’t until later that I learned I shouldn’t have.
The next morning’s intel brief took place before the sun came up, red lens flashlights darting back and forth against the rocky ground between our tents and the TOC. My after action report had been dull the night before, nothing of real note had taken place. Some shady characters lingering roadside, but this was Afghanistan. Everyone was a little shady. If they weren’t actively trying to kill you, you just kept on your way. But this time, I was wrong.
The S2 filled us in. They had intercepted some communications. There was a device. The enemy tried to blow it, stop the convoy, disable the first truck—my truck—and trap us in a crossfire. But the detonation failed. It may have been the wiring, a bad signal, or they’d buried the device too deep and the signal couldn’t reach it. Either way, I was supposed to die.
They weren’t targeting me, not really. The Taliban, or whoever they worked for, didn’t give two shits about some kid from Upstate. Hell, they probably didn’t even know what “Upstate” is. They were targeting the idea of me, or what they thought was the idea of me, of the uniform. In war you can’t take death threats personally.
So I took the news I should have died and started planning the next mission. There was no time to think about it. No reason. They would get another shot at me, and that’s what I needed to focus on. I planned, I executed, I repeated. Even in a place where roads were few and far between, I knew every way to get from A to B. Up hills, across deserts, along the dried-up riverbeds, through villages that couldn’t possibly exist on maps. But I saw them. Navigated them. Knew them and all possible ingress and egress routes.
There was the cave I cleared along what we called “Death Valley.” The smoke-stained ceiling and embers told us it had only just been vacated. The 7.62mm shells strewn around the entrance told us who we’d missed.
The next week brought a high stakes mission. So high stakes they needed me to stay behind to run QRF. Nobody knew that part of the province better, and if shit hit the fan, we had to get there fast. I was anxious, pacing the tower when the first explosion sounded. I scanned east and could see the black smoke rising. The exchange of fire rattled through the radio as I mounted up, ready to tear off base and toward the ambush. But it was over almost as suddenly as it began. My QRF stayed put, the mission went forward.
There was the MRAP I watched roll down a hill in my side mirror. Camped on the hilltop, watching headlights stream into a compound owned by a known hostile, we waited for the attack to come with sunrise. I don’t know how some guys slept. We got permission to blow the downed vehicle before the attack could come. The surveillance drone footage showed men with AKs streaming out of the hill like pissed off hornets from a broken nest less than a minute after the demo team blew it and we left.
A helicopter I was on for a night insertion dodged an RPG, skipped off a mountainside, and somehow stayed airborne. I thought about middle school math class, where I’d first learned about probability and odds. When guessing on a coin flip, the impulse is to bet against what’s already come up in highest frequency, but it’s still fifty-fifty.
In the end, I made it out. Took that return trip I hadn’t banked on. They took their shots, they tried to bring me down, and I was willing, but something got in the way.
Was it just dumb luck? Poor aim? Laziness on the part of the enemy? Or was someone watching out for me. Some higher entity, imperceptible, like the pitches only dogs can hear. Either way, it doesn’t matter. I made it home. I didn’t expect to, I maybe didn’t even want to, but here I am. The worst place yet—I’d do anything to get back.
I always heard that blood tasted metallic—something about the iron. I’d seen plenty back there, smelled it, and the burned flesh that so often accompanied it. But all I can taste is salt.
There are voices, shadows, lights flashing blue and red and white. Patriotism? No, it’s the middle of winter, not the Fourth of July.
Suddenly I’m five. It makes sense. The lights, bouncing off the angles of my bedroom, the salt of my tears, the figures lifting me from bed, placing me in a car, taking me away from the place my father drew his final breath.
I’m twelve. The glaring white of the sun, the blue of the sky around it, the hint of salt that hangs in the air, clinging desperately to existence after the crashing of a wave. Yes, this is the taste I know, the salt I remember so well.
I’m seventeen. The red of my cheek, the deep blue instant bruising, the taste . . . yes! The taste of my blood, trickling from my nose, from my eye where it split on impact.
I will give all of myself to this taste, here and now, this moment. The burning rubber, twisted metal, licks of flame. The salt.
