I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them

1. Be Polite but Have a Plan to Kill Everyone You Meet

WINTRIC ELLIS, NEWLY ARRIVED, pushes his size 8 boot into the spongy ground and feels the subtle give of the earth run through the ball of his foot, up his leg, and settle in his camouflaged hip. Green grass in Afghanistan, he thinks, water somewhere. He smells damp soil and grass, unexpected but familiar—Little League center field, Kristen in a California meadow—and attempts to make this thick-bladed greenery stick alongside the everywhere, suck-you-dry desert he had imagined.

“Eyes open, everyone,” Big Dax says.

Although Wintric knows today is a low-risk humanitarian mission, the words slide him back into his default, visceral nervousness: Bombs, somewhere, everywhere. Already he has been told that roadside means nothing in this country. Big Dax and Torres have shared stories with him — everything from far-afield livestock to massive diesel trucks igniting the barely buried hell, not to mention the bombs strapped to men, women, children, dogs. Bombs the size of tennis balls, soccer balls, tackling dummies. Under the rising sun Wintric replays the refrain repeated among his platoon for each of his eight days in country: Don’t go looking for a fair fight.

Wintric watches the relaxed movements of the most experienced soldiers and he feels his body breathe. He pulls out his knife and crouches in the valley amid a mist of gnats. He plunges the blade into the soil and levers up a clump of grass. Silently he rises and collects his first sample of war in a plastic bag that he fists into a cargo pocket.

Nearby a group of mangy goats bleat in a grove of white-blossomed almond trees, their shepherd talking with the interpreter. For the first time since Wintric arrived the wind doesn’t howl, and he wonders if any kind of omen awaits in the warming air, but he pushes the thought from his mind when he can’t think of a single positive forecast. The size of tennis balls, soccer balls. He breathes and rubs his eyes. The shepherd laughs and nods and moves his hand to the interpreter’s shoulder, then hugs him.

“Ten minutes till the party starts,” Big Dax says. “Going to be hot. Hydrate now.”

Wintric observes the men start toward the small mountain of bottled water. Torres passes by and slaps his shoulder.

“Drink up.”

Wintric isn’t thirsty, but he keeps his mouth shut — when they say drink, he drinks. He straightens up, pats his cargo pocket, and steps and stops. He looks back at the straightening grass and watches the indentation of his boot print disappear.

Ten-thirty and the children and limbless adults are starting to arrive, and Wintric scans the group heading his way, wondering if he’ll be the one ordered to pat them down before the inoculation and prosthetic limb giveaway. He pushes his index fingers into his temples, then removes his camouflage blouse and tosses it on the hood of the dusty Humvee. Big Dax and Torres have been decent enough to keep him out of trouble for his first week, but they outrank him, and each has only a few months left, so he knows he’ll soon be the one palm-to-body with these incoming strangers.

Wintric studies his two superiors as they watch the arriving crowd. Big Dax towering and thick-shouldered, brick of a chin, dark, random freckles, scarred forearms, hands on his hips; Torres slim and handsome, black hair, sideburns, flat nose, outline of a mini-Bible in his pocket, hands interlocked on the top of his head.

“Ellis,” Torres says, “check them. Old ones first.”

Wintric nods and slowly walks over to the now settling group. The interpreter has his arms up, directing traffic, shouting at the dirty and quiet kids to stay in a single-file line along an outcropping of beige rocks. The adults are told to wait behind. On his short march over Wintric focuses on the adults, most missing a foot, a leg, or a portion of an arm. Light layers of clothing shield their bodies from the late-morning sun; various pant legs and shirtsleeves hang limp. He will have to touch all of these people.

Before Wintric begins the pat-downs, the interpreter says, “Don’t touch ass, crotch. Easy with kids. No problems here. Medicine here.”

“You know these people?” Wintric says.

“No.”

“So you don’t know shit.”

Seventeen pat-downs later Wintric comes to a man who seems whole, tiny sweat streams around his eyes.

“Thank you,” the man says before Wintric has touched him. Wintric glances back at the interpreter, who nods, then shakes his head.

“No problems here,” he says.

“What’s he doing here? He’s not missing anything.”

“No problems.”

“Goddammit.”

“Thank you,” the man says.

“Yeah.”

As with the others Wintric starts with the man’s shoulders, pats down his arms to his wrists, up his sides, down from his clavicle, chest, to his belly, where Wintric feels something bulging, soft, ball-shaped. He pauses for a moment, and when the bomb vision arrives, he whirls around, head down, and sprints. In the slow-motion frenzy he hears the man yell something, sees his own arms reach out in front of him, and he knows he will die, right now, that the searing blast will take him from behind, open up his back and skull, liquefy his body. He is all heartbeat and screams “Bomb!” takes two more strides, and dives to the ground.

Behind him the man has lifted his shirt up to his neck, baring his torso, pointing at a fleshy protrusion.

“Na!” the man yells. “Na!”

“No!” the interpreter says. “No. Please. Nothing. No. Only.” He pauses. “Skin. How do you say it?”

Wintric lies face-down in the grass, eyes closed, body flexed. He hears skin and pushes himself up onto his elbows. Big Dax and Torres run toward him.

“Crazy cells,” says the interpreter.

Wintric still hears his heart in his ears, and he squeezes his hands, then opens them. He cut his left hand during the dive and wipes the fine line of blood off on his pants. He stands, still dizzy, and peers back at the man, who cups the ball of flesh below his ribs. Wintric shakes his head and glances down at his palm, where fine dirt is mixed with coagulating blood.

“Goddamn,” says Big Dax. “Deep breath, Ellis. Breathe.”

Big Dax touches Wintric’s arm and Wintric shakes him off.

From the side, children’s laughter.

“Cancer,” Torres says. “Could be cancer.”

“Ah, yes,” says the interpreter, nodding. “Cancer.”

Wintric stands in between Big Dax and Torres as they plunge syringes into children in the narrow valley. Three more soldiers from their squad occupy a similar station several feet away, and a med tech shuffles back and forth, observing.

The girls and boys come forward with lesions and growths, unhealed wounds.

“What day is it?” Wintric asks, still trying to shake off the embarrassment and confusion. It’s been twenty minutes and nothing has worked.

“Doesn’t matter,” Torres says.

“School not in?” Wintric says.

No one answers.

“No school?”

The interpreter laughs.

“What?”

“Universities all on break,” the interpreter says, grinning. “Maybe U.S. builds one right here?”

“Fuck you.”

“I got candy bar in my pocket. Maybe bomb?”

“I got dick in my pants. Smack your face?”

“Easy,” says Torres. “Dude is with us.”

The interpreter smiles.

“Build one or not, I don’t care. After this war I get my visa. I will move to Nevada.”

“You’re not moving to Nevada,” Wintric says. “I’ve been to Nevada.”

“Las Vegas.”

“You’ll lose all your money,” Wintric says. “One, two days of slots. Good luck with that.”

“No. You misunderstand. I will work at the casino.”

“What?”

“Work there. Roulette. I’ve seen it. Wave your hand, put white ball in the spinner. Easy.”

“There’s more to it,” Wintric says.

“No. That’s it. Wave hand. Spin ball. Money.”

“Never happen.”

Wintric lifts a boy’s sleeve up to the nub of the boy’s shoulder joint and fumbles with, then drops, the cheap syringe. He selects another syringe and drops it.

“Hey. Relax. Focus on the kids,” Big Dax says. “Hold their hands, sing, do whatever you need to do. Keep your mind working on the good shit.”

“I don’t need friends.”

“Careful, Ellis,” Torres says. “It’s a long walk back.”

Wintric pushes a new syringe against the boy’s shoulder, presses the plunger, and the clear liquid slides in.

“It’s not that long,” he says.

“These kids,” says Big Dax. “This one right here.” A young girl missing her left nostril rests her neck in his hand. “She risks getting her arm cut off to come see us. It’s why we only see the worst.”

This seems like an exaggeration to Wintric, though he isn’t sure of anything in this place. Another boy steps up for his shot.

“We’re as safe as we’ll ever be,” says Torres. “You can almost relax for a few hours. No one ever shoots when the army inoculates and clothes and hands out money.”

Wintric sees Torres glance over at the meandering goats.

“Still,” Torres says, “stay close to the kids, especially the boys. They hate losing boys.”

“That makes no sense,” Wintric says. “We’re safe, but stay close to the boys?” He glances at the naked mountain peaks above them.

“You from San Francisco, right?” Big Dax asks Wintric, hoping to help.

“Four hours north.”

“Oregon?”

“No. California. The good part.”

“Redwoods?” Torres chimes in.

“Two thousand people. A lake. Think Montana, but Bay Area assholes in the summer.”

Wintric takes a drink of bottled water and motions to the next in line.

“They take our water,” he says.

“A’s or Giants?” Big Dax asks.

“Giants.”

“You like Barry Bonds? ’Cause he’s a prick. Probably got nuts the size of gnats.”

“Hit three-forty-something, forty-five homers. He’ll beat it this year. You’d take him in a heartbeat.”

“Shit. Yankees don’t need him. Don’t make a hat big enough for his planet-sized ’roid head.”

“Oh, damn,” Wintric says. “Yankees fan.”

“Maybe that’s what we’re giving these kids — some nice, fatten-you-up steroids,” Torres says and rips another rubbing-alcohol pad from its wrapper. “Creating a superrace of Afghanis that can hit a baseball a mile.”

“Torres, you dumbass, have some compassion,” Big Dax says while tending to a girl with a goiter. She stares at him as he tries to wave her on.

“You’re done,” he says.

She doesn’t move.

“Done. Go. Now.”

She blinks twice.

“Go.”

“She wants candy,” the interpreter says.

“No candy,” Big Dax says. He joins his right thumb and index finger, brings them to his open mouth, and shakes his head.

“No. Candy. No. Candy.”

The girl stands still. The goiter bulges from the side of her neck, the flesh brushing her deltoid.

“No. Candy.” He nods at the interpreter. “Translate, please.”

“She understands you.”

Big Dax grabs the girl beneath her arms, lifts her, turns her away from him, and sets her on the ground. He places his huge hands on her lower back and pushes her just enough so she takes her first step away.

“Come on now,” Torres says, “where’s the compassion for the greedy one?”

“They have nothing to do with us being here.”

“You don’t know that. These kids could have plenty to do with this,” Torres says.

“Don’t piss me off, Torres.”

“Doesn’t take much strength to dig a foot down, put something in the hole, cover it up. Bet some of these arms have done some digging.”

Wintric sees Big Dax’s left boot tap the ground.

“Fight your urge to be a little bitch,” Big Dax says.

“We got staying-alive problems,” says Torres. “So you’re right, I’m a bitch. Guess I’m a scared bitch that wants to live.” Someone off by the goats laughs. “I don’t want the fucking dirt road exploding on our way back.”

“Don’t listen to him, Ellis. The road’s fine. And Torres, don’t talk shit about these kids. You know the life expectancy of these dudes?” Big Dax asks, straightening his six-foot, eight-inch body. He pauses, and Torres scratches his neck. “Low thirties.”

“I must’ve checked the Doctors Without Borders block instead of the U.S. Army,” Torres says. “My mistake.”

“If it was your kids in line here, you’d think different. If it was your kids that wouldn’t see thirty-one…”

“These aren’t my kids.”

Stretching his arms above his head, Armando Torres examines the diminishing line of children. Not a single child appears nourished, and as he touches their arms and hair and holds their hands and the anger inside him, he thinks of his two daughters. His mind goes to Camila, his oldest and the prettier one, who refuses to eat anything unless she has a dollop of crunchy peanut butter on her plate. Four years old and tearless at his base sendoff. He was proud of her strength, but now he fears the indifferent expression she wore as he walked away.

Torres used to sing the ABCs to his girls every night while he tucked them in, and the tune comes to him now, in this gorge. It calms him. After a while he leaves out the letters and hums.

Wintric says, “You know any Metallica?”

Torres ignores him and continues to hum. He considers the minuscule amount his daughters are growing each day, how Camila will be old enough to play catch when he returns, how they might want to tuck themselves in.

“Incubus? Deftones?”

After delivering the shots, the men wait around with some of the now antibodied kids and a collection of Afghan amputees. The wind has picked up, and the injured glance up every now and again, waiting for their limbs to fall from the cloudy sky. The C-130 is late.

“Jim Abbott had one arm,” Big Dax says as the men sit and pick at the ground.

“Who?” Wintric asks.

“He had an arm,” Torres says. “Was missing a hand.”

“Threw a no-hitter,” Big Dax says. “For the Yankees.”

“Did he use?”

“Why would you use if you have one arm?”

“One hand,” says Torres.

“Jesus, Torres, who cares if it’s an arm or a hand?”

“It’s a big difference.”

“He didn’t use,” says Big Dax. “Not like your boy Bonds.”

“They’ll never prove it,” says Wintric.

“Look at a photo of him with the Pirates side by side with one of him on the Giants,” says Big Dax. “I’m a Jersey-educated man and I can tell the difference. It’s not broccoli.”

“Your Yankees signed Giambi,” says Torres.

“Yep. And he’s sure as shit dirty. You see, that’s how it’s done. Just admit the worst and move on. What’s jacked up is that everyone on the West Coast wants to believe. No one trusts their eyes.”

Nearby an old man unfurls a red-and-brown rug as the children gather around and join the limbless adults in prayer, their voices echoing off the valley walls.

“They know not what they say,” Torres says. Wintric guesses he means the children, repeating the chant they’ve heard since birth, but maybe he directs the jab at the entire group, kneeling and bowing and rising in unison.

“And they’ll kill that one before too long,” Big Dax says, nodding at a young man, maybe sixteen, standing and running his fingers through his dark hair as the others pray. “‘Motherfucking infidel’ is what the rest are thinking. They seem like they’re praying, but they’re begging for that dude to be hit by lightning.”

“He’s not praying,” Wintric says.

“Holy shit, Ellis,” Big Dax says. “You’re a genius.”

“But.”

“Think about it, brother,” says Torres.

“But the dude is… local.”

“Do you know there’s someone, right now, playing the trombone in Afghanistan?” says Torres.

“What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

“There’s an Afghan right now, in this country, looking at porn,” says Torres. “Someone planting a bomb, reading Hemingway. Someone building a bridge, listening to Celine Dion, getting off, not praying.”

“Yep.”

“Don’t let it surprise you,” Torres says.

“Fine,” Wintric says.

“Not everyone wants to kill us,” Torres says.

“Seems like they do.”

“You haven’t been here long enough to say that. You haven’t done shit. You’re a baby.”

“I’m in this valley,” Wintric says.

“You’re a kid.”

“I’m here like you are.”

“You heard of the saying ‘Be polite, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet’?”

“No.”

“Too bad,” Torres says. “It’s some Marine shit, but it’s perfect.”

“Yep.”

“There are a ton of people praying that we all die,” Torres says. “Enough to keep us sharp.”

But Wintric has stopped listening. He eyes the young man combing his hair with his fingers as the others rise and bow, rise and bow, not twenty feet from him. The move is something Wintric performed a thousand times before his enlistment, and he raises his right hand and rubs the stubble on his shaved head, still sensing the phantom weight of his once-long hair. Wintric wants to know what the young man is thinking, wants to ask him how he can just stand there, doing nothing. Is he afraid? Bored? Something else? The young man scratches his crotch and the atmosphere of wonder lessens. Still, Wintric wants to rise and walk over to him, but he fights the impulse and stares at the grass between his knees. He digs a clump up and inspects the individual blades.

Wintric isn’t yet aware that Torres’s comment will stay with him: occasionally, in the future, when he witnesses something out of the ordinary — in this country or his own — he will think, Someone’s playing a trombone.

At last a C-130 lumbers overhead, drops a flagged transmitter, then circles back. High above, a parachute opens. Two crates full of prosthetic arms and legs float down to them. Torres recalls watching Air Force Academy cadets drift under blue parachutes, then he wonders out loud if the Afghans think Allah is a C-130 pilot, or the plane itself.

“Rain down the healing,” Torres says.

Big Dax says it’s all about personal will and raises his thick arms to the sky.

“Do they thank Allah for our bombs?” he asks.

Wintric stays quiet. He stares at the crease between his forearm and biceps, then fingers the skin there. At Fort Carson he saw soldiers with new carbon legs and arms, men and women, usually silent and alone, rubbing on their bodies, their stumps. He peers over and studies the armorless Humvee they will ride back to base. The hulking vehicle seems invincible, but he’s seen videos of convoy ambushes: the dark cloud, pressure shock, and heavy Humvees slamming back to earth as mangled coffins.

Wintric already longs for his 1985 Ford Bronco. He installed a six-inch lift, a tow kit, and oversized, gnarly mud tires. The tire-tread hum on the highway drove Kristen mad, but he would take her mudding, or farther still into the forest to fool around. Sometimes he’d take his revolver and throw lead at squirrels, paper plates, or posters of basketball players he used to hang in his room.

But here, deployed half a world away, his back-slung rifle has the safety on, and he doesn’t know when he’ll need to summon his shooting skill. He considers the menacing but helpless Humvee and hopes that when they’re done today, the dirt road will just be a dirt road.

Once the replacement body parts are sorted by limb, the three men help fit everyone. Most of the arms are too long or the wrong shade of skin, but the limbless smile, cry, hug the soldiers. After everyone has been fitted, a few artificial legs are left over, so the Americans send the confused villagers home with extras.

Before dark the soldiers climb into the Humvees, confirm emergency plans, coordinate with the other vehicles in their convoy, and start the engines. As they drive away, Big Dax rolls his window down and gives a thumbs-up to the newly limbed as they limp away, grappling with plastic legs piled high.

“Vote for us,” he yells.

A month and a half later, late on a hot July morning, red and yellow kites fly above Kabul. They veer and shake. One darts off, away, descending toward the roofs.

On a street corner, Big Dax, Torres, and Wintric scan the foot and auto traffic and swap stories. Smells of chai and lamb mix with exhaust from gridlocked vehicles. Wiping the sweat from his face an hour into their four-hour patrol, Torres oversells a harrowing skiing experience at Breckenridge. Someone whistles to their right before a car bomb explodes, the pressure fire blowing the men back.

Torres vomits on his boots and Wintric is knocked unconscious, then comes to with Big Dax cursing and dumping water onto his face before running off.

Bodies and flames, shit and screams litter the street. Dazed people run and stumble away.

Torres picks a scrap of metal out of his biceps, then reaches down to drag a silent girl away, and with his rescue yank the girl’s shoulder detaches, the surrounding skin separates, and her thin arm slides from her body.

A man runs in to help and Big Dax almost shoots. A bearded man in white linen snaps photos, steps over slithering bodies. He covers a charred corpse’s genitals with a blue cloth before clicking away at the carcass. He kicks the corpse before hurrying away.

Wintric tries to yell to him, but nothing comes out, and Wintric goes to walk, but nothing happens, and he feels wet inside and sees in waves. He screams but hears nothing, now aware that he is somehow trapped within his body.

Smoke and sky, someone firing a rifle into the air, then Big Dax, running nearby, waving at Wintric, saying something, nodding, thumbs up, then reaching far down, lifting him up.

Ambulances arrive in the dissipating smoke, then leave. People with various flags on their uniforms fill out paperwork, take photos, then depart. Afghan men and women shriek in the streets, then go, and workers tend to the debris that covers a once-busy intersection.

That evening, as Wintric dozes off in the corner, cleaned up save a smattering of dried blood spotting his throat, Torres listens to the calls to prayer. Torres’s limbs and mind ache, and he sifts through the day’s events. He touches the bandage on his arm and ponders the size and shape of the future scar. He monitors his fingers and wills them to stop trembling, but they refuse. Emotion pools within him and he finds himself on his knees, hoping to tap into some communal source of faith and belief. He tries to focus, but soon his mind drifts to the millions of people praying against him and his country. He pictures a vast field, an enormous crowd of white-robed men and women bowing in unison, the haunting force and beauty of mass synchronization.

Torres thinks of how he has taught his daughters to pray and what to pray for: safety, food, recovery. His younger daughter, Mia, is old enough now to speak a simple offering. Torres’s wife sent an e-mail with the words Mia recited every night, said she always finished with “Thank you.” Torres envisions his wife, Anna, and Mia at the side of her bed, kneeling, with their elbows on the Finding Nemo comforter. Anna said they were working on “Amen,” but she thought that “Thank you” was just as good. For the first time Torres considers the purpose of “Amen,” and after whispering the word three times realizes he has no idea what it means. He considers waking Wintric, but he won’t know, so he says the word one more time as the melody from the minarets filters through the window. In Afghanistan everything he knows about the world has a different name and, worse, he doesn’t know the meanings of the English words he uses for salvation.

Big Dax smokes outside, his dirty, dry skin irritating him. He takes a drag and thinks of his high school friend Alston, how surprised he would be by Dax’s cigarettes, even more so by the confident, uniformed man smoking them. He remembers when Alston left town in the middle of the night with his girlfriend, headed for Key West. Alston’s last postcard had a picture of a clear lake, a small boat, and a golf course putting green floating right in the middle of the water. On the bottom: “Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.”

Dax has heard that the army is building a new public pool nearby. What he would give for a few laps without his Kevlar vest and helmet and heavy boots — to purge the dust from his ears, mouth, and chest. Dax pictures all the pools he has swum in. Not that strong in the water, he still desires the chlorinated depths. To immerse himself in a swimming pool would be to return home. He misses the cool water and the chemicals, the tanned female lifeguards, community pools, post pools, a banana-shaped pool at a Vegas resort he once visited. His neighbor’s pool in Rutherford, New Jersey, where he grew up. That one had a four-foot-tall diving board, way too high for the six-foot-deep pool, but Dax and the neighbor kids would cannonball and jackknife off the board and float in the summer air and bet each other to belly-flop, although no one did. But while he starts to dwell in his comforting memory, he imagines a shadowed man there, in his neighbor’s back yard, strapped with explosives, in a slow-motion diving board jump. The board fully flexes before launching the man high into the air, and eleven-year-old Dax and a couple of local kids watch the terrorist click the handheld detonator again and again, but nothing happens, only a violent fall into a too-shallow pool.

Big Dax wasn’t in Rutherford the day the towers fell. Up visiting his grandparents in Watertown, New York, already signed up for the army but waiting for basic training, he watched the news for two days straight in disbelief. Dax pictured himself in camouflage, taking aim at people, missing, and he felt the nerves in his body ping. He would have to kill now, something he’d hoped to avoid when he signed up for the G.I. Bill and travel. In his transforming world, this is why he despised the terrorists: people dying, diving from the towers, it was dismal business to be sure, but now, after joining the army in a time of relative peace, he would be asked to shoot, and probably be shot at.

After returning home to three funerals in a week, Dax stayed up late replaying television clips of people jumping from the buildings. The news had stopped running them, and he couldn’t understand why. Without these clips the whole disaster was like any other demolition of steel and concrete, but these scenes showed living men and women falling through the air. This is where the pain lived, in impossible choices on a clear late-summer morning. Dax had never considered choosing between flame and gravity, but watching the people fall to their deaths, weighing which way to die, he guessed he would pick gravity.

One night his father spied him watching the clips.

“We think we’re more important than we are,” he said. “Each one of us. It’s our biggest mistake. Remember this — you can love God, but God doesn’t give a shit. You want to celebrate births and winning the lottery and graduations? You give credit to the heavens? Fine, but you better celebrate this shit as well.”

Dax hadn’t thought much about God, about intervention or justice, so he sat there in his living room and stared at his sober father pointing at the television.

“It’s okay to feel good when you make them pay.”

Tonight, in Afghanistan, Big Dax smokes his third cigarette down and snuffs the nub out on his forearm before flicking it away. Typically he performs this forearm trick in front of others, but lately he continues the move when alone, the singe becoming more and more bearable.

As he enters the room he sees Torres on his knees. Big Dax considers saying, “No one’s listening,” but he swallows it down easily and walks to his bunk, lies back, and lets the nicotine work.

One day while on patrol in a mud village in the midday heat, Big Dax, Torres, and Wintric drink tea with a man rather than detaining him because there’s no sign he’s killed four Americans and a Dane over the past five months. As they leave, the man smiles and waves at them.

Later in the afternoon, an elderly man offers what the men guess is his daughter to Wintric. It’s the opposite of what they’ve been briefed, that Afghan men would purposely disfigure — often with acid — the faces and bodies of adulterous women. Brown-eyed, short, and thin, the daughter smiles and widens her eyes when her father taps her leg with his cane. She offers her hand to Wintric in the narrow alley, and he steps close and takes back the girl’s hijab to reveal her dark hair. The men are hot in their gear, but the shade of the alley helps.

“Hey,” Big Dax says, “don’t do anything. There, I said it.”

“Second that,” says Torres, and strokes his rifle. “But seriously, don’t do anything. You have five minutes to check that house for weapons. She can help. Be careful. We’re not screwing around here.”

The father moves down the street, and Torres follows him for a few steps.

Big Dax leans on the thick mud wall of the building, waiting, thinking about the shade and the smell of roasting meat. He catches some kids staring him down from a house nearby, and he wonders if he had been born in that very alley what Afghan Dax would think of this man, with this rifle, leaning against this wall. He senses empathy there, but in scattered, fleeting fragments, not enough to care, not now, not with a few months to go.

After Wintric enters the shabby dwelling with the girl, he takes off his helmet and she turns to him and smiles. She motions him to a back room, but Wintric stays a couple steps inside the door. The girl walks back to him and touches his chest, but he can’t feel the pressure underneath his Kevlar vest. He hasn’t touched or been touched by a woman in months. She keeps her hand on his chest and raises her eyes to his. He watches the girl, not sure what’s expected of him or why he’s here, but he takes his time. On her right cheek, a tiny circular scar. Her lips are dry. She reminds him of no one and he feels a focused but nervous desire to touch her face.

Wintric reaches out and the girl’s arms fall to her sides and she closes her eyes. He stops his hand inches from her face. He lifts his left arm and senses a weight and remembers he’s holding his helmet. He sees it in his hand. He’s here, in this home. He’s in Afghanistan. When she opens her eyes, he turns and leaves.

The men walk in the dusty afternoon, and they soon pass a quail fight inside a tiny hall. Dozens of men circle a brown mat and cheer the frantic, bobbing birds.

“My state bird,” Wintric says. “Little bastards are easy picking where I’m from, and good eats.”

“Jersey doesn’t have a state bird,” says Big Dax.

“I thought every state had one.”

“Isn’t Jersey’s the Shit Bird?” says Torres.

“We do have a horse and two ugly bitches on our flag,” Big Dax says. “That much I know.”

“We got a grizzly bear on ours, but no grizzlies,” says Wintric. “We got black bears. One ate the dog I grew up with.”

“Torres,” Big Dax says, “we found a true California hick.”

Wintric seizes the opportunity and talks about his rural hometown of Chester, about playing football on a losing team that carried fourteen guys total, about his respect for those who leave the logging town for other parts of the country.

Big Dax and Torres let him carry on. They don’t ask any questions about the girl in the alley, but later, after drinking enough smuggled booze to feel something, Wintric tells them that he began to undress her but stopped himself. He says she grabbed his hands and placed them on her bare shoulders, and he left his hands there for a moment before walking out. He says he wouldn’t be able to live with himself — a girl waits back home.

“No one’s ever waiting, my friend,” says Big Dax. “They’re living and moving on. And don’t get mad. It sucks, but it’s true.”

“That’s bullshit,” says Torres.

“You know it’s not,” says Big Dax, raising his voice. “You know about Billings and Winston and Henlish. What are their wives doing right now?”

“If you had someone at home, you’d know,” says Torres. “I feel sorry that this is all you have. It’s pathetic.”

Big Dax turns to Wintric. “Billings and Winston and Henlish are trying to stay alive over here and their wives are banging the shit out of dudes at home.”

“Okay,” Wintric says.

“Okay?”

“Okay. I don’t know them. That has nothing to do with me.”

“Fine,” says Big Dax.

“You have right now,” says Torres. “Then, when that’s gone, you have the next moment, then that’s it. What do you look forward to, man? If all it is is surviving, that’s shit.”

“I see,” says Big Dax. “I’m crazy for seeing things the way they actually are. Reality tells me it’s dangerous to believe that someone’s waiting for you back home. Their lives are shit. We stay busy, keep our minds working. They get to worry and pretend they’re fine with us dodging bombs over here. And you know they have to act as if they’re fine with it because if they don’t, if they actually speak their minds, they’re unpatriotic and bitches and everything else. You hate me for saying it. Fine.”

“Her name is Kristen,” says Wintric. “The girl at home. It’s my fault. I haven’t e-mailed. I told her not to. I don’t know why.”

“One day the people we’re trying to kill will be in charge again,” says Torres. “One day soon we’ll negotiate with these fucks, even though they’ve killed us and tortured us and today we’re trying to kill them. No one will remember 2004 or us breathing in the fucking burn-pit smoke or the bomb that almost took off my arm. None of this will have happened. So yes, I think about who’s waiting for me, because if I think about all this, I’m done. I got kids, man, so be careful.”

“I’m not commenting on Anna, your kids, or whatever,” says Big Dax, “just reality. Dude, you may be a lucky one. People change. That’s all I’m saying. They’re living every day that we live.”

“That’s enough,” says Torres. “Don’t say this shit again.”

“You guys believe what you want to.”

So Torres believes. He lives his return home in advance. He feels the departure out of Afghanistan, out of Kyrgyzstan, out of Germany, the packed jet, restless legs, nervous energy, the Atlantic, the boredom, the squiggly coastline of Maryland and Delaware, landing at Baltimore, buying a magnet of Colorado in a gift shop, flying across farmland, the Rockies bringing him to tears, into Colorado Springs. He sees his family running to him in the airport, his daughters jumping into his arms, them arguing about who gets to ride on his shoulders, walking into the home Anna bought while he was away, and after his girls are tucked in, Anna’s skin and weight pressed against him, her hands and mouth on him, on top of him, under him, the pressure build and release, home.

Wintric sees Kristen naked on the shore of Lake Almanor late at night, standing on a stump in the low beams of his Bronco, waving her arms, singing, urging him out of the water, to come to her and this place, his home, again.