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I was sitting on my cot in the bunk room when I saw his number appear on my cell. My stomach immediately twisted with fear. Leif never called me.
My fear grew ten times worse when I answered and heard him crying.
“Leif? What happened?”
“Lars…” he choked out. “Your mother…”
I felt like I might vomit.
“Was it the cancer?” I asked frantically.
“No… no, the treatment was going fine… but on the way back from the doctor’s, they got into a car crash. Ingrid was driving, and a man ran a red light… I’m so sorry, Lars, but your mother and Ingrid… they’re dead.”
I wasn’t allowed to go back home for their funerals.
Even under the best conditions, leave might not have been granted – but I also had a black mark on my record for disobeying a direct order. That’s why my commanding officer refused my petition to fly back to bury my mother.
Leif sent me pictures of the funeral. They held it for both my mother and Aunt Ingrid at the same time. They even buried them side by side in the cemetery.
All I know is that a bleak depression swallowed me whole.
For months, I went through the motions like a robot:
Get up. Eat. Train. Go on patrol if that’s what I had to do that day. Do my job. Come back. Shower. Eat. Go to bed. Sleep. Get up and do it all over again.
Strangely enough, it wasn’t their deaths that haunted me. Not really.
The thing that hurt the most…
Was that I never got the chance to say goodbye.
It was only around my sixth month in Afghanistan that the depression lifted, and it felt like I was actually human again.
I still grieved for my mother and my aunt, but the pain wasn’t as sharp. It faded to a low-level hum in the background, enough that I could even forget about it for hours at a time.
In the ninth month, I was almost healed. Or as much as I could be.
That was when I met Rachel.
The United States was the main force at Bagram Air Base. Still, every member of NATO – and every non-NATO European ally – sent soldiers to fight alongside them.
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Poland, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Croatia, Romania…
And the UK, obviously.
England was one of the most powerful members of NATO. They gave us a lot of intel about international terrorists working with the Taliban.
That was how Rachel entered my life.
She was the best thing that ever happened to me.
And… eventually… the most heartbreaking.
PART III
12
Rachel
