Eulogy

by J.R. Godwin

Disclaimer: "Labyrinth" belongs to Jim Henson & Co. There's no money being made off of this.

Rating: M (for violence and graphic depictions of wartime)

"Peace is not an absence of war."

-Baruch Spinoza

"A person can only be born in one place. However, he may die several times elsewhere."

-Mahmoud Darwish

1.

Toby? Baby, wake up, you're dreaming.

I gasp awake to silence. It lasts a second before our daughter's cries split the air. "Cassie," I mumble, "can you ...?"

Reality slams down like a coffin lid and chokes off my breath. Oh, right, Cassie's not here. She never will be.

I dread waking up nowadays. Sleep erases my short term memory, obliterates images of doctors and pallbearers and casseroles I don't have the stomach to eat. Sleep resets everything in my mind to happier days.

I had a terrible nightmare the other night. I dreamed Cassie had died, that a drunk had hit her, that the mother of my child was gone. I woke up to find the cat sleeping on my chest and heard Looney Tunes playing in the den (Lucia's figured out how to turn on the TV), and I realized it was a dream.

Relieved, I turned over to tell Cassie about it, but her side of the bed lay empty and cold. Then I remembered she'd died the week before.

Lucia's crying again. I stumble from the bedroom and down the hall, which isn't long. We live in a 5th floor apartment on 80th Street; New York is known for roaches, not closet space. I find Lucia sitting up in bed and rubbing her eyes. When I hit the lights, she gazes at me, looking as raw and brittle as I feel.

"What's up, little bird?" I ask.

She says nothing, just holds up her arms: toddler language for carry me! I oblige, scooping her up and kissing her cheek. Lucia's the spitting image of her mama, with bright shining eyes, and beautiful black skin, and dimples that make her look like she's laughing even when she's not. But all that laughter vanishes whenever Lucia has nightmares, which she's been having a lot of. Then my baby will sob and cling to her daddy like I'm a life preserver.

Lucia insists on sleeping with me, and I never say no. Ever since Cassie died, our bed has felt like a black hole.

Cassie would have known what to do. Cassie was great with children. She always wanted kids, came from a big Haitian family with more cousins than you could shake a stick at, and everybody was in each other's business. It felt like a tribe. You always had someone to go to with your problems. I never had that growing up. It was just my folks and me, and a dog, and a ghost.

I tuck Lucia into Cassie's side of the bed along with her friend, Kermit the Frog, and climb in with her. Lucia cuddles against my chest and hiccups.

Cassie would have known what to do. When I sigh, the sensation reaches into the marrow of my bones as if trying to suck me dry. "All better, baby?"

"No," Lucia mumbles.

"You had a bad dream, sweetie. It's not real. You're okay now." I wonder if I'm speaking appropriately to a toddler. Everything's scary to little kids. Wasn't I spooked of the boogeyman, when I was little?

Lucia rubs her face again. "She scared me."

"Who?"

"The lady."

I freeze. "What lady?"

"The lady in my window."

I wait until Lucia falls asleep before slipping from the bed. There's nobody in Lucia's window, of course. We're five stories up facing a busy intersection. Trees belong to suburbia, not Manhattan. As I peer out the window, I hear the honking of taxis and, further up the block, a truck backfiring.

Just a kid's dream, I think, but I don't sleep the rest of that night.

As with many instances in my life, I met Cassie through dumb luck, with the emphasis on the stupidity being mine. I tripped over her while coming out the front doors of Terminal 1 at JFK. I'd just returned from deployment in Afghanistan, and I was jet-lagged from stopping over in Germany.

I remember it like it was yesterday: the glass doors slid open, and suddenly BAM. I walked into a body, which went over like a ton of bricks, and I realized I'd plowed right into some woman. Talk about embarrassing.

She was pissed, too, all 5'6" of her. A real live wire. Read me the riot act and didn't give a crap that I was surrounded by ten towering dudes in uniform. My ears burned as they snickered behind me. If there's anything that's pounded into you in the military, it's discipline and restraint. I didn't even flinch.

"Sorry, miss," I said. "I don't see much from up here, and I have big Dumbo feet." By the time I was fourteen, I'd already hit 6'. Drill Sergeant Stevens told me my first week of Basic: You ain't never gonna be made a sniper, Williams. Know why? You and those huge fuckin' feet, that's why! The enemy's gonna see you from a mile away. You're so tall we can run a flag up you and sing the Star-Spangled banner. Oh, you find that funny, Williams? I'm so glad you do. Drop and give me twenty, you piece of maggot shit!

Anyway, when I replied to the woman, she gaped a bit. I guess she'd been expecting an argument. She wore a pleated black skirt with a fancy jacket and these strappy heels. Her clothes were definitely not off the rack at the local thrift shop, but I couldn't tell you the designers. Guys don't memorize that stuff.

She wore her hair long and locked, showing off the graceful curve of her neck. I didn't know they were called locs back then. Cassie would school me on that later and tease me for my ignorance. I'd been to Asia and back, but I still had a lot to learn about the world. Still do.

Despite her surprise, she rallied quickly. Said uncertainly, "Just be more careful, okay?"

Which was a hilarious thing to say to a guy who'd just finished a tour in Bagram, but I tipped my army-issued cap at her, and she headed off to her flight. It was only then I looked down and saw the wallet.

I spent a week trying to track this woman down to return her wallet. In the meantime, I learned from her driver's license that her name was Cassandra M. Dias, that she lived in East Flatbush, and that she was an organ donor. I didn't snoop into the other contents of her wallet. Wasn't my business.

She was beautiful, though. Nobody looks good in their license photo, but Cassie did. She had high cheekbones and a smile that could power the city for a week. She wore gold at her throat and ears and looked like a queen. Something about the jut of her chin, and the calm self-possession in her gaze, all refinement and confidence. I liked her immediately.

Turns out Cassie was spending a week with family in Port-au-Prince, so she spent that whole time worried someone had made off with her wallet and was charging her Visa at every salon between here and Flatbush. She came home to discover the wallet in her mailbox along with a note from yours truly:

Hi, Cassandra. Your wallet fell out of your purse after I bumped into you. I didn't look in it, except for your license to figure out where you live. Sorry again for tripping you. Mom always told me I had two left feet. Best, Tobias Williams.

I left my number in case she had questions, but I didn't expect her to call, so I was surprised when she did. I thought maybe it was pity that prompted her, but Cassie said it was my unpretentiousness.

The first time I saw Cassie cry was on our third date. We watched Million Dollar Baby while cuddled on my couch. Cassie bawled her eyes out while I awkwardly hugged her and fed her popcorn. I remained young and naive in some ways, and women's tears still freaked me out.

The second time I saw Cassie cry was on our anniversary. We went to Chez Pierre to celebrate me passing the NYPD exam, but the restaurant lost our reservation and we had to stand at the door and wait while they found us a table. Some racist asshole thought Cassie was taking up too much room at the hosting station and got nasty. Called her the N-word and told Cassie to go back to Africa. Stupid fucker was too drunk to notice me, until I went for his throat.

I already had friends then on the force, so I didn't get charged with assault, but I've been banned for life from Chez Pierre. I wasn't wild about their stuffy food anyway.

They say you don't find many atheists on the battlefield. From experience, I've found this to be true. I never took off my crucifix in Afghanistan, even in the showers. You never knew when trouble was going to hit.

By the end of our first week in country, the members of Engineer Company had sneaked in three puppies we'd found wandering the neighboring hills. Pets are strictly forbidden on base, but the little guys were skinny and starving for affection as much as they were for food.

Sergeant Peña was not happy when he caught us red-handed. "Is that a dog, Rodriguez?" he barked.

My battle buddy winced. "Sorry, sir, he followed me home." Yeah, we actually used those stupid excuses. "I was just about to get rid of him."

"See that you do!"

Only we didn't. At any time, you could find a dozen illegal dogs on base, which the brass never officially recognized. Just a few weeks before we arrived, one private - some 20-year old kid from Nevada - had put a gun in his mouth, so they were worried about more suicides. I think they understood the healing power dogs had on us soldiers, many of whom had left behind pets at home. Dogs didn't judge you, no matter how bad your day was, no matter if your best friend had just been killed and you were crying like a baby. The dogs kept us sane. So we pretended to get rid of the dogs, and the brass pretended not to notice.

One night, three of our dogs surprised a Taliban bomber who'd sneaked past the front gates. He blew his load five-hundred feet from my bunk, killing two of the dogs and maiming the third. He had enough juice on him to take out half the base if the dogs hadn't attacked him first; the only casualties were the dogs and the bomber himself.

The two dogs - mangy mutts from the hills of Parwan Province - were given a full military funeral. 21-gun salute, Taps, and everything. The surviving animal was sent to live with a foster family in Cleveland that promised to pamper the hell out of him.

I have a picture of us playing with those dogs behind the chow hall where we thought Sergeant Peña wouldn't see us. We named them Victor, Bullet, and Daisy. They were babies, just like us.

One night, when Cassie was heavily pregnant, she petted me awake. "You were moaning in your sleep again, baby," she said. "Another nightmare."

I cupped my eyes and shivered as I always did when the nightmares came. Cassie guided my hand to her belly, where I felt our child sliding around beneath her skin. She did this to soothe me; holding her belly always calmed my nerves. Feeling our child reminded me of life.

"Was it about Afghanistan or Sarah?" she asked.

"Both," I said.

My sister disappeared when I was too little to remember. You might recall seeing it in the news, if you lived in New York then ... hell, if you were alive anywhere then. It made the news in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles. Teenage girl vanishes from family home without a trace. The story was made creepier by the fact my parents found me asleep in my crib, an innocent cherub. Whatever demons snatched Sarah hadn't touched a hair on my head.

There was no sign of forced entry or foul play. Sarah's bedroom remained untouched, so she hadn't run off. This was years before 9/11, before we started putting security cameras on every street corner. In the years since, I've often wondered what cameras would have picked up if they'd been around then, if they'd have been able to find my sister.

I never knew my father. Not really. Not as he was. My uncle Greg said before Sarah vanished, Dad was a boisterous man, which I found hard to believe. He was always quiet and serious when I was growing up, and terribly stern. Mom offered the emotional warmth Dad lacked, but she fussed over every cut and scratch and never let me out of her sight, as if she feared I too would one day vanish like a fart on the wind.

Sarah's disappearance destroyed them both and warped my childhood. Even as a grown man, I constantly feel Sarah's presence, or lack of it, like a splinter in my mind.

Near Bagram you'll find a winding road that unravels 300 miles from Kabul to Kandahar. Uncle Sam gave it a $300 million makeover, for all the good it did. Official records name it Highway 1. We grunts never called it that. To us, it was the Highway of Death. The Afghans called it the Highway to Hell.

The Highway of Death is a dusty paved road framed by dried grass and the steel carcasses of trucks. The year before my first deployment, the Taliban firebombed a military convoy and beheaded the drivers. Anytime you went out on a mission on the Highway, you brought your rosary and enough firepower to shave Kabul off the map.

I've heard a lot of my fellow Americans talk shit about the Afghan people. Nobody knows the difference between a Muslim and a bunch of Al Qaeda hooligans. Hell, most people probably can't find Afghanistan and Iraq on a globe.

Let me tell you something: I worked two tours alongside soldiers in the Afghan National Army, helping them clear houses and provide safe escorts. They didn't like the Taliban anymore than we did. I worked a lot with an officer named Sahar, and our first day he walked right up to Captain Lucas and shook her hand.

Sahar and his guys had no trouble working with women, and they thought bullies like Bin Laden were a menace. I didn't know this, but Kabul back in the 70s was like Paris - a lotta wealth and high fashion, you name it. Then the Taliban and the Soviets came to town and things went straight into the shitter. So there you go, History 101 according to Toby Williams and the ANA.

Our ANA buddies were just as desperate to oust the Taliban as we were. They wanted their girls to go to school. They wanted a strong economy. We couldn't bomb Afghanistan back to the Stone Age - they were already there.

They didn't need the Taliban, who were too busy terrorizing schoolgirls to concern themselves with building a country. Afghanistan needed engineers, doctors, schoolteachers. Those things were hard to get, because in the vacuum left by the Soviets in the 1980s, entire swaths of Afghan territory remained controlled by religious fanatics.

I remember my first month in country, I witnessed a conversation between two soldiers: an ANA guy named Azizi and one of our officers, a woman named Jones. She'd entered the army as a 2nd lieutenant with a B.A. in Chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin. She spoke three languages and had a black belt in jujutsu.

"What will you do when you go home?" Azizi asked.

"I'm gonna go to school," Jones responded.

"You will go to high school?"

"No, college. Well, I already have a college degree," Jones clarified. "I'm going back to get a second one, for nursing."

Azizi had a third grade education, maybe. I'd seen him around base reading out of a little blue book, teaching himself basic arithmetic. College was a dream on par with flying to the moon. When he heard this foreign woman not only had one college degree but was going back for a second one, his face broke.

That's actually the best way to describe Afghanistan in general. The place felt broken, right down to its people, but underneath the despair was always hope. That's why you saw guys like Azizi carting around books, teaching themselves how to add and subtract, picking up English from their foreign counterparts, hunting down terrorists. Figuring if anyone was gonna build up their country again, it'd have to be them. They had to be ready.

Around this time, we had a new member on my squad, a nineteen-year old private from Los Angeles, name of Abimana. When I first met her I said, "Abimana? Where's that name from?"

She said, "Rwanda, sir."

"Why the hell'd you wanna come to Asscrapistan?"

"To serve my country, sir."

I laughed at her. I laughed at her real good. I liked her guts, though. She'd need plenty of those. I learned later Abimana was only four when Rwanda went to hell and the Hutus started murdering everybody. Abimana's family was Tutsi, and her father'd been a government official.

In six weeks, a million people were dead, most by machete. That's a faster slaughter rate than the Nazi death camps during WWII. Abimana and her sister were the only members of their immediate family to survive, sneaked out of Kigali in the trunk of a car. The sisters grew up with an aunt in the States, and when she hit eighteen, Abimana decided she wanted to give back to the country that had granted her sanctuary.

I had to admire that. Me, I'd joined the military for selfish reasons: I couldn't think of anything else to do. I wasn't interested in college, and I'd already had a few run-ins with the authorities by the time I turned sixteen. I figured the army might give me a career. At the least, it'd give me discipline, and how. Boot camp pushed my buttons, and Afghanistan filed them off entirely.

The week after I'd turned twenty-seven and been promoted to Staff Sergeant, we got the call that the ANA needed another escort out on the Highway. Abimana stopped me in the garage and said in a worried tone, "Sir, they're still not eating or drinking anything. Sahar and his men."

I laced up my boots. "Ramadan doesn't end for another week, so don't expect them to."

"And they're still out there every day clearing houses in hundred degree heat."

"Yep."

"They're real troopers."

"Yep."

"What's that?"

She pointed at my chest. I'd taken the locket out of my jacket where it usually sat nestled against my heart alongside my crucifix. I always kissed both before I hit the road. At Abimana's question, I opened the locket and showed her. I guess I felt more at ease sharing this with her because she was a woman. I never shared anything with the men.

The photo inside was of a pale dark-haired girl wearing a headband and starfish earrings. Dad said she'd only gotten her braces off the week before the picture. The locket was filigree silver and adorned with roses, super girly. I'd stolen it from Sarah's jewelry box when I was in fourth grade, when Sarah would have been twenty-six and too old for starfish earrings and Cyndi Lauper.

No one in our family noticed the locket go missing. After Sarah disappeared, our parents didn't touch her room, just walled it off like a tomb. No one ever went in there, except on weekends when Mom would go in to vacuum, just in case Sarah came home.

"You look young to have a daughter," Abimana said.

"She was my sister," I replied.

Civilians would always ask stupid questions in response to that. What do you mean "was"? Abimana had been through too much crap herself, though, and she only nodded. Then she pulled a photo out of her breast pocket. It showed a young woman with very dark skin and very short hair, wearing a blouse and the sort of smile you saw in Maybelline ads. The backdrop was obviously fake, part of someone's school photo.

"The only sister I have left," Abimana said. "She's a pharmacist. I don't have any other family photos."

"What's her name?" I asked.

"Chantal. Hers?"

"Sarah."

"She's very pretty," Abimana said kindly. I don't know if she intentionally used the present tense, but I appreciated it.

"Your sister's pretty, too. Help me help you get home to her, okay?"

Abimana nodded. Within moments, I sounded the call, and we rolled out.

We were within sight of Kabul when an EFP punched a hole in the side of the MRAP two vehicles ahead of us. Abimana gasped from behind the wheel. In the gunner seat above her ear, Rodriguez swiveled in the turret and spat something, and his weapon spat, too. Those of us in back braced ourselves.

"Hold on everybody! Hold on!" Abimana yelled as she punched the gas.

We fishtailed around the burning wreckage. It was obvious there were no survivors. Behind us, something exploded. The shock wave propelled our vehicle forward like twelve pounds of shit through a goose.

I felt my center of gravity shift and knew what was happening a split second before it did. "Rollover!" I roared.

Rodriguez dropped out of the turret just as the MRAP began to flip. We grabbed his limbs and locked him in place, held onto him as empty water bottles flew past our noses, as something else outside exploded.

We crashed to Earth and began to roll, I don't know how many times. The metal encasing us shrieked and moaned. A wild thought flit past my mind and was gone just as quickly: This could be our tomb.

A mountain of dirt vomited up against the windshield. My head bounced off the headrest behind me. Abimana was screaming. Outside, another boom, and the earth trembled like a puppy before a giant.

Our vehicle shrieked, lurched, then shuddered to a stop. Gravity had reversed itself and my neck muscles hurt from the strain. We'd landed on the roof. The whole thing couldn't have lasted three seconds. Thank God for harnesses, or we'd have been tossed like dead weight in a can.

In those first moments after landing, all you heard was heavy breathing and gasps. Then Leonard yelled, "Fuck!"

"Everyone okay?" I yelled. "Check in."

"Okay," Abimana said.

"Okay," Rodriguez said, his voice muffled. We still had him locked in our arms.

"Okay," chimed Leonard and Garcia.

"Two seven's hit," Abimana called into the radio. "Two seven's down." Through the windshield, I saw the rest of our platoon had retreated to a safe distance, turned, and positioned itself to return fire. Shit was about to get real.

"Sir, something's burning," said Garcia. I smelled it, too: acrid and bitter. We were on fire.

"Side door!" I barked. "Everyone out!" The turret had been crushed in our landing on the roof, so I eased open the side door facing away from the road, and we scrambled out. I couldn't see shit with the black smoke in my face. People bumped and jostled each other. Hacking and coughing. Someone snapped at someone else: "Get OFF me!"

From the road, a machine gun rattled and boomed. Two more MRAPs sped past, seeking to join the offensive down the road.

A van sat stalled on the road. I recognized it at once: a civilian contractor, foreign by the look of the vehicle. The Afghan vehicles always looked beat up. The road was a public thoroughfare, so we were always passing civvies - Afghan and foreign - going about their business on deliveries. Right now, though, the guy was caught in the middle of a gunfight.

"Corporal," I said to Rodriguez. He nodded, scuttled to the far end of our overturned MRAP, and unloaded a round into the air. As he began firing, I charged out from the other side of the MRAP, heading straight for the van. I trusted the rest of my squad to follow.

While Rodriguez distracted the Taliban, I bounded up to the van and yanked open the door. My gut was right: an American cowered in the driver's seat. Mid-forties, looked like, with a mustache and a Detroit Tigers baseball cap, probably had a wife and three kids to support back home in the Midwest. As soon as I yanked open the door, he recoiled like a shotgun and threw his hands in the air.

"Don't kill me!" he whined.

"Get in back!" I yelled.

He hesitated ... then the window next to his head shattered. The Taliban had finally spotted us.

"MOVE YOUR ASS!" I screamed, hauling him out of the bucket seat by the scruff of his shirt and tossing him in back. I squished myself behind the wheel as my squad thundered up the metal steps and followed the driver.

"Where's Rodriguez and Abimana?" I demanded as Garcia brought up the rear. Further up the road, I heard thunder as our platoon returned fire. Out of the corner of my eye, in the field, wherever the Taliban were hiding, something blossomed white and hot. A direct hit.

Garcia looked behind him, unsure. "She was right behind me!"

Bullets riddled the back of the van. I couldn't think straight. As if I moved through a dream, I slowly became aware Leonard was screaming, "Get down! Get down!"

Out of nowhere, Abimana appeared at the door with Rodriguez over her shoulder. She was a small woman, maybe 140 pounds, and she had Rodriguez and his equipment slung over her back like it was nothing. Leonard and Garcia pushed past me to pull Rodriguez off of her and drag her inside the stairwell. As soon as they were in, I punched the gas. We took off, tires squealing.

The van was an old stick. The highway here was straight and flat, so I opened her up.

"What if there's IEDs, sir?" Garcia yelled. I was clocking over a hundred by then.

"Then we're dead whether we go fast or slow!" I yelled back.

At that moment, an RPG soared right over the hood of the van. A near miss. I heard the scream, saw the vapor trail: probably an OG-7V warhead that would punch through metal and fragment on impact, fired by an RPG-7V2. It was a favorite weapon of the armored vehicle hunter/killer teams dispatched by the mujahideen.

Terrified, I flinched, and the entire van swerved. The warhead detonated somewhere in the field to our right. Another whoosh - another one passed over our roof. Leonard screamed at everyone in back to hold on to something.

The other MRAPs were looming large now, and the Taliban's fire had calmed down. They'd already scored a direct hit on one of our squads, whose vehicle still lay smoking behind us. I didn't want to think about that yet.

"Rodriguez is shot," Abimana said. I risked a side glance. She was right - he'd been hit in the thigh and was bleeding fast. Rodriguez clutched himself and groaned. He was pale.

"Breathe, man, you're gonna be okay," Garcia lied. "It's just a flesh wound."

"Do they know it's us?" Abimana asked as we approached our comrades.

"I don't know," I said coldly. If our own didn't recognize us, there was a good chance we'd be blown off the road again. An unarmored civilian van wouldn't survive that.

I waved my arm out the window and began to slow down. One of the MRAPs trained its weapon on us. I stuck my head out the window, let them see my Army-issue helmet. "Don't fire!" I screamed. "We've got wounded!"

A colonel and a medic jumped into the van with us to inspect Rodriguez. The medic was a nervous guy with a twitch, and he looked grim. "We need to get him to the ER." His face said, Your soldier's a dead man. I wasn't giving up on Rodriguez without a fight.

"Closest facility?"

"Camp Eggers, about two miles," said the colonel. "I'll get you an escort."

We were blocks from the U.S. Embassy when a car bomb went off. That's how things rolled in Kabul. The bomb sheared off the side of a building and buried the street in rubble. We didn't see it happen, but we felt the explosion from half a mile away. It sounded like the end of the world.

The MRAP in front of us took a detour down a side street, and I jerked the wheel to follow. Meanwhile, in back, Leonard and Garcia were trying to calm down the contractor, Mitch, who wouldn't stop mumbling about retirement and his kids.

I risked a glance at my side. Abimana held Rodriguez's hand, which was slick and red. Her other hand was pinching his femoral artery, which hung out of his thigh like loose spaghetti. Outside: sirens, screams, gunshots. The stench of fear and C-4, heavy in my throat.

So this is how it ends. Maybe we'd share a grave. Nah, Rodriguez snores. I'd kill him. You think crazy things when you're about to die. But because I can't ever be serious, I smiled and said, "How're you doing, asshole?"

Rodriguez cracked a shaky grin. "I need a vacation."

"Yeah? Where you gonna go on vacation, huh? Vegas?"

"Well, I used to like the desert-"

"Sir." Abimana spoke softly, but the alarm in her voice was like a gunshot. It got my attention immediately. People were running through the street, panicked. Far away but not far enough: more explosions. It sounded like fireworks, but much bigger. The earth shook. And shook. And shook again.

Then fire exploded off of the MRAP in front of us. Someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail. The MRAP took off, and I floored it to keep up.

Behind us, more weapon fire.

"Don't stop," Abimana whispered.

"I know," I whispered back.

That must be another thing about dying. You hit this space where you're totally calm and stop responding to outside stimuli. You can't even yell. My brain said that I had to drive, so my body just kept driving.

When we got to the next intersection, smoke and rubble blocked our path. The MRAP screeched to a halt. The turret pivoted and roared at gunmen on a neighboring roof.

There was nowhere to go. We were trapped.

"Sir!" Abimana yelled. I saw the snipers at the same time she did. They clustered on another roof, aiming a grenade launcher right at us.

I screamed at everyone to get out. Leonard and Garcia reacted first, grabbing Mitch by the shirt and scrambling out the back. Abimana fell down the metal stairs, which by then were slick with Rodriguez's blood. I scooped him up in my arms and bolted after her, and she scurried through the dirt on hands and knees for an alleyway. I was right behind her.

The van exploded. If you've never witnessed an explosion, let me set the scene for you. The flames won't reach you first. What really gets you is the noise and the shockwave. The concussion alone will blow you off your feet. If you're lucky, you're far enough away to avoid the fireball. The explosion will disperse everything in its radius, which is a nice way of saying if the initial explosion doesn't kill you, the shrapnel might.

This is what happened when the van exploded. For a second (which felt like a thousand years), I couldn't hear shit, just ringing in my left ear.

Then the white noise receded, and the world around me expanded with shocking speed: car alarms, and the roar of fire eating everything in its path.

And screams. Horrible screams, the kind that meant death.

My chest hurt. Was it raining? My face was wet. Water? No. Blood. Not mine.

Rapid movement to my right. Abimana. She was back on her feet, stumbling against the alley wall. We were coughing and choking from the dust. I felt Rodriguez tremble against my chest as he coughed, and this insane surge of gratitude welled up in my throat. If he could cough, he was still alive.

We stared out at the street from our hiding place. People were screaming, scattering, wailing. I didn't see Leonard or Garcia anywhere. Total pandemonium. From our vantage point, I couldn't see the MRAP, but I heard it firing as another grenade went off from the rooftops.

"The Embassy's back that way," Abimana said, her voice roughened by smoke and tears.

"I'm not ... Toby ..." Rodriguez was slurring like he did during our last leave when we tried to outdo each other on shooters. I won (or lost, depending on your point of view). Both of us woke up with hangovers that would have felled King Kong.

"Shut up," I told him. Don't you fucking die on me! I shifted him to get a better grip and wondered how long you could survive before bleeding out. "Abimana, lead the way."

Abimana had a good sense of direction and led us back to the original bombing. It was worse than I expected. There'd been a market here, but now everything was buried or on fire.

"They don't even care they're killing their own people." Abimana's voice shook.

"Private!" I snapped. We didn't have time for this. She jumped, and we ducked across the street into another alley. I'd been through Kabul numerous times in my tours. It's a big city, but Camp Eggers and its hospital weren't too far from the U.S. embassy. I'd never made the journey on foot, though. We fled through backyards, mud puddles, frightened crowds of civilians carrying their own dead and wounded.

That's when I saw it: a scrap of white, fluttering like a dove. I backpedaled and almost dropped Rodriguez as I stared down the dark gullet of a forgotten side street. The ringing in my left ear was loud now, like the roar of an approaching train. In another world, far away, muted explosions. Blood on my face and in my mouth and up my nose.

My vision contracted like I was in a tunnel. And in the middle of that tunnel, standing quietly in that empty side street, was a girl.

She wore a starched white blouse and denim jeans, the kind you saw in the old Levis' commercials with Brooke Shields. She even looked like Brooke a little, except her long hair was black and her face ... her face was white like a ghost. I mean it. She looked like she'd been carved out of bone.

I recognized her, of course. I'd memorized that face when I was four, when I first noticed the old school portrait hanging in the upstairs hall of my parents' house. It was Sarah.

"Toby." She whispered it, but I heard her as clearly as if she'd screamed in my good ear.

I said nothing, just stared. I'm sure my eyes were popping out of my skull.

"Toby!" She sounded angry now, like she wanted to shake me.

"No," I croaked. I'd been hit harder than I thought in the blast. I was cracking up. Had to be.

Sarah turned on her heel and fled down the street. I screamed like a man possessed and bolted after her. Then I felt a hand on my arm, pulling me back.

It was Abimana. "Sir! What are you doing?" She flinched as I whirled on her. I'm sure I looked insane.

"Did you see her?" I hissed.

"Sir-"

"Did you?"

"Sir, when I came back for you, there was no one there."

"You-" I bit my lip, shaking with fury or madness or ... I'm not sure. The world was falling down around me. I turned back to the little side street and kept walking.

"Sir!" Abimana said.

"We're going this way," I said, with an edge that dared Abimana to defy me. She didn't.

At the end of that street, I saw another flash of white. Sarah again, two hundred feet away. I immediately gave chase. I'd regained enough of my wits by then not to scream, but I still scrambled after her like a child on some crazed run with the Pied Piper.

It went on like that for ... well, it felt like forever, ducking and weaving through side streets while war raged in Kabul. I didn't know where we were going, where we'd find Camp Eggers. I just kept following Sarah. She never vanished. I'd turn a corner and stare, frantic, sure I'd lost her, only to see that white blouse again and that dark hair. She was always far away but not too far - down the street, vanishing around a corner, a ghost on a mission.

Abimana huffed behind me, struggling to keep up. My arms burned. I'd forgotten I was holding Rodriguez.

Then, after what felt like a year, we turned a final corner and were suddenly standing in front of an army checkpoint. Camp Eggers. We'd made it. The soldiers on duty whirled on us, startled, and raised their weapons. They stopped when they saw our uniforms, and I guess our faces. We must have been a sorry sight.

"Sergeant Williams, 455th," I gasped. Why was my body shaking? I couldn't feel my fingers. Must have been the running. "We were attacked ... outside ... outside the city ..."

People running from all over. Medics. Guys in uniform. Someone in a truck. Pulling Rodriguez from me. Rodriguez wasn't protesting, and it occurred to me I hadn't heard him crack a joke for a while. And then I saw why, because Rodriguez had gone blue.

Someone put a blanket around Abimana, who gasped for air like a drowning woman. Guess the shock of the day's catching up with her. I felt light headed, and the ringing in my ear had gotten worse. My head felt heavy. I was going down. I was down. The pavement felt strange against my back, but it was nice to not stand anymore.

The world felt far away, along with the voices clustered above me like chattering birds.

"Sergeant!"

The pain in my chest had been steadily growing into a brush fire. The sun was setting and the stars were coming out. Mom would be making dinner soon.

"He's been shot! We need a medic!"

"It's okay," I slurred. "It doesn't ... even hurt anymore ..."

Through the sea of legs clustered around me, I saw Sarah. She sat on the pavement, head cocked, watching me with tears in her eyes, and I started to scream.

When I was a kid, my family liked to go to Cape Cod. The bay's protected from the ocean, so the waves there are soft and mild. You can float on your back without getting tossed. It's very peaceful.

Floating now, just like at Cape Cod. I was being lifted. Light flashed in my eyes. Pretty stars.

Hold him! One, two, three, lift!

Trauma one. Trauma one, code blue.

I need to get home. I'm not supposed to be here. Sarah! Where is she? SARAH!

Single gunshot wound, left fifth intercostal space, no exit. What's his pulse?

Pulse ox, 80 and dropping.

Sergeant, a bullet collapsed your lung. We're putting in a tube to re-expand it.

SARAHHHH!

He's bradying down.

Okay, tube him now.

Sergeant, are you Catholic? Do you want a priest?

Falling again. Falling far away.