Missionaries

go to the next tier, where maybe I’d find where I belonged. Natalia, ever certain of where she belonged, was plugging away at her certification as a CPA. The relationship had escalated fast—we were already friends for years, we’d shared some serious things with each other before even getting romantic, so the whole thing felt fast-tracked, maybe even destined if either of us were romantic enough to believe in destiny—and I’d spent the whole weekend with her, Wake Forest being not the most terrible of drives from Fayetteville. We were just hanging out on Natalia’s bed, goofing around. I was playing with her hair. “I’m making you beautiful,” I said, as I pulled thick curls over her face, or bunched them up on top of her head. And she was laughing and taking photos of me as I did this, and then taking photos of both of us, her hand stretched out so the camera would maybe get both of us in the shot, though when we developed the film it was just the craziest of angles, my head cut in two or just the top of her hair sticking out everywhere like crazy. And I suddenly had this premonition—the thought of us in middle age, laughing like this. And then later, old age. The two of us like my grandparents, who toward the end had been in a room together at a hospital, where they’d reach out from their separate hospital beds and hold hands briefly each night before they went to sleep, a ritual that kept them alive until, of course, it didn’t. And in the midst of that goofing around with Natalia I felt the most profound sense of sadness at the thought of my own death coming toward me, because I knew that would be the end of times with her. When I drove home that night, I drove the speed limit, my life suddenly more valuable to me because of her.

You don’t live for your teammates. You prepare yourself to die for them. This is a very different thing. So I screwed up my courage. First by talking to God. And I told God that perhaps it was the ugliness in my life that was worth sharing with my wife, and I wrote her.

You know the little fake Christmas tree you and the rest of the wives sent us, with all the ornaments that had pictures of the guy’s kids in them? Ocho and Benjy took all those baby photos out and put in porn, or pictures of Halle Berry or Britney Spears. I didn’t tell you that because I was ashamed, and because I didn’t say anything when they did. Actually, I was relieved when they did it. It’s hard to look at my baby’s face constantly, and then go out on missions. I think something about being a father has changed this job for me.

Here’s a small story. A simple raid from last week, not very serious—we had night vision, they didn’t. They’re shooting blind from inside a building, then we hear a boom and whoosh, and then a rumble and crash. Some muj had fired his RPG from inside the building, not thinking about the backblast. It overpressurized the mud hut and blew out the walls, sending the ceiling crashing down.

Jefe radioed our stats back and we got word that the main assault element was done, the targeted personality KIA on objective, prep for exfil, helos twenty minutes out, so we do a quick SSE on the hut. Four bodies. One was old, or Afghan-old, mid-40s. The other three were also military-age males, though younger, teenagers maybe though it was hard to tell, and one with barely any beard at all, a young teenager, still holding the used RPG tube.

Jefe got mad. Fucking Taliban. Using fucking kids. Later that night, I asked Ocho if he thought we’d ever clear the south of Taliban and he just laughed and laughed and laughed, and I asked what were we doing here, if we weren’t going to clear Helmand, and he was like, What are we doing here? Knock knock.

Who’s there? I said, and he said, 9/11, and I said, 9/11 who? And he put on this angry face, pointed his finger at my chest and shouted, You said you’d never forget!

A pretty good joke, I thought.

Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you all this. I don’t really have any grand moral or lesson. I was so excited when 9/11 happened, in Ranger Battalion, where we all felt like the lucky ones, the ones blessed to be in just the right spot to do exactly what every American wanted, to get some payback, to do something righteous. And I still feel that. There’s some bad, bad people here. But there’s also young kids who join in the fighting because they’re young kids. It pisses me off and also kind of fucks me up a little bit.

Don’t get me wrong. Most days, I love what we’re doing. Mission by mission, this is the best deployment I’ve ever been on. And I saved Carlos’s life. Me. I did that. How could I think I should be anywhere else, doing anything else, than this?

After that, the letters got a lot more real, realer in terms of minor things—“Oh, thank God, I have been waiting and waiting to tell you how much I hate Diego’s wife . . .”—and major, almost too real things—“when I feel like I’m failing as a mother, which is often, sometimes I comfort myself by telling myself it’s not me that’s failing, it’s you, you failing by not being here, by insisting on being in a stupid war nobody cares about at all. Which means I can relax. If Inez grows up fucked up I won’t be the one to blame . . . and then, of course, I feel horribly guilty.” And she told me of the balance of joy and stress that is raising a child, and how my absence had tilted that balance to the almost unbearable,