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Luke
Sometimes, when we were high into the hills where the roads stopped, I’d jog ahead, my feet digging into the ground because of the fifty extra pounds of ammo on my back. It was mostly scrub and rocks, but when you’re rolling through the landscape long enough, you start to notice the difference between light brown and dark brown and red brown, between opium and cotton, the difference between 100 and 105 degrees. Out of the city we’d hit tobacco or sugar beet or poppy fields. We’d pass donkeys or camels on the road, or other vehicles whose horns played a little song each time they sounded. Depending on who was driving or who was riding, we’d pause at prayer time. Our interpreter Malik would get out and face east as he bowed his head on the road.
It’s hard to run when you’ve got to gear up practically everywhere you go, but I found ways. I started to get up before the heat hit to run around the makeshift track at the FOB that some hardcore marathoners had worn into the earth. A few of them did something called shadow runs, where they timed themselves running the same number of miles as a race back in the States. They got T-shirts and water stations and everything.
I preferred to run alone. Most of our days were hard and long, too hot or too cold, hours and hours waiting on the decisions of our superiors. Alone, running, was the only time when I had control. I could run for as long as I wanted. I could escape into my running dreams.
I imagined I had returned home to Texas, running at the high school track in Buda. I listed jobs in my head that I could do, as unrealistic as I wanted. Firefighter. Gym teacher. Radio DJ. I composed letters to my brother and his wife and my nephew, which I tried to remember as I wrote them later in my Moleskine and mailed them off. I wrote letters to Cassie in my mind and then got nervous when I went to write them down. But I’d send one soon.
When I’d return to our room, Frankie would be Skyping with Elena, or in the community room playing video games with Rooster, or we’d have a briefing before a mission, and he’d have brought me some toast and a warm, dusty bottle of water if I didn’t have time to eat before we had to go.
Sometimes we annoyed the shit out of one another. Sometimes Rooster snored and we had to throw pillows at him. Sometimes Frankie had to yell at me to get my laundry done because there wasn’t enough ventilation to handle the smell of sweaty clothes.
But we did everything together. We got the same food poisoning, we hit the floor at the same time if there was an explosion close by, we went to the Hindu barber together in Lashkar Gah, watching the muted Bollywood videos while we got a shave.
It was like having brothers. Friends. It was like having a life.
