“You know you won a free round-trip ticket to Afghanistan?” a perpetually busy chief master sergeant asked me one warm winter evening. We were at the gym at Robins Air Force Base in Houston County, Ga., after a day spent serving on a panel of public affairs chiefs.
“You’re kidding,” I said. Weights clanked behind us. “I saw my name on a deployment list, but there was a question mark beside it.” All afternoon, my hopes had hung on that question mark.
“No question sir. You made the list. You’re going to ISAF headquarters in Kabul,” he said, referring to the United States-led international force in Afghanistan. He beamed like he was handing me a winning lotto ticket. It was January 2013. I was scheduled to deploy in 15 months.
To him, deployment amounted to the opportunity of a lifetime. At that moment, it seemed to me like some surreal theft. I’d miss another New England summer, every birthday in my immediate family and my 33rd wedding anniversary. As a 30-year Air Force Reserve veteran, I’d spent months away from home, but never deployed to a war zone. So I was a decade overdue. But while the Air Force Reserve asks for volunteers to go overseas, I had assumed they don’t involuntarily deploy 53-year-old grandfathers.
They do.
When I called my wife, Debby, that evening to tell her the news, she said, “Aren’t you a little old for that?”
I felt old. I took a walk around the gorgeous Georgia base, grateful to be away from the frigid New England winter, feeling alternately numb and angry to be “non-vol’d.” The crepe myrtles bloomed and the sun warmed my arms as the notion crept up my spine: I’m going to Afghanistan.
In the evening, after opening the Gideon Bible to the 23rd Psalm and glancing at the familiar words – “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want …” – I slept in fits until about 3 a.m., then not at all. In the dark, short, violent movies kept looping in my head. Somebody would burn another Quran and 40,000 protesters – 1 percent of Kabul’s population – would storm the gate. An Afghan would come to work and start shooting, like what happened when a colleague was killed at Kabul International Airport. Looping, like bad songs that won’t stop.
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