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1
LINCOLN
War is a terrible thing. When I signed up, I just wanted to get away from the shitshow that was my homelife. I didn’t have the money to travel or go to college, and when the Army recruiter started talking about free tuition and bases all over the world, I was sold. I was fresh out of high school when I transferred to basic training.
Basic wasn’t that bad compared to actual combat. At the time, it had seemed like hell. All the things I thought I was good at—fighting, building things and, working out—seemed like they would be a good match to military skills. But I quickly learned I would have to do better. My drill instructor was on us 24/7, demanding perfection. We woke up at three in the morning to go on hikes with fifty pounds of cargo strapped to our backs. We stayed up all night in a foxhole that we exhausted ourselves digging.
I made some good friends. It’s hard not to make friends when you’re all going through the wringer together, but the real trial began when I was deployed. I went to Afghanistan straight from Georgia. Getting off the plane, the only thing they let us do wasfocus on the mission. It was like we had blinders on, but we were seeing all these new things at the same time.
I had never been outside of Tennessee, except for basic, and that didn’t count. That was just an Army base and looked pretty much the same as my hometown. Afghanistan was halfway around the world, and nothing was the same. The land wasn’t green. It had cliffs and cracked earth, deserts, and mountains. It was like being in another world.
The people wore strange clothes and spoke a different language, but they were people, just like my countrymen and me. We would go door to door at these little stone houses to check and see if there were any hidden enemy combatants. People hated us. Old women would beat us with spoons. Young women looked at me like I was about to hurt them, and I couldn’t shake the fear from their eyes.
I was in a Jeep, driving back to the green zone, when an IED exploded our front tire. The driver was killed, and the vehicle ran off the road. There were four passengers, me, this kid from basic plus two other guys. We pulled out our weapons and tried to return fire, but nothing happened. We waited for an hour, radioing our position in for reinforcements. We thought we were in the clear, but when the next Jeep arrived, there was a hail of bullets. They were spraying from the top of a hill and we couldn’t see them. Bastards had waited for hours until there were more of us to kill.
I was the only one who made it out alive. I ditched the two Jeeps on the roadside, cutting down through a valley as the sun dropped behind the hill. I spent the night out in the open, not sleeping, not eating. I had a compass, but my brain wouldn’t focus on how to use it, and I wandered for the better part of a daybefore finding the road again. An American patrol picked me up and brought me back to base.
I had a shower and a meal and went back to work like nothing happened. And that wasn’t the worst I experienced. It was weird after all those war movies I grew up watching. In Afghanistan, you couldn’t tell the difference between the innocent and the guilty, you weren’t supposed to destroy property, and you weren’t supposed to shoot unless you were a hundred percent sure that the enemy was trying to kill you.
Friendly fire, angry old women, and the creaking of the wind paralyzed you so that when you came up on someone who actively wanted your head, you didn’t know what to do. I had eight years of it. When my time was up, I stayed. It wasn’t just that the combat got into my head, but I didn’t know what else to do.
My family and I weren’t on great terms. and I didn’t want to go back home. Other kids had moved to Nashville or Austin. One of the guys I used to hang with dropped me a text every now and then. He had gone to college, graduated, and started working at a bank, all while I was still digging sand out of my boots and jumping at my own shadow.
My choice was taken away from me when my leg was nearly blown off. It was a situation just like a million I had been in before, going door to door looking for the enemy. The patrol I was with consisted of five people, three guys and two women. The women were talking to the Afghan women, trying to calm them down. They were screaming at us in Arabic, clutching their toddlers and spitting like we were devils.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement in the kitchen. I brought my weapon up, but the attack came from the stairwell. Iwasn’t prepared. By the time I swung around, three bullets had buried themselves in my thigh. I didn’t feel the pain then. I was just focused on saving my own life and the lives of my unit.
The Afghan women screamed and ducked into the kitchen. Two of our people followed, making sure they weren’t arming themselves. The kids were bawling, and there was gunfire everywhere. Luckily no one on our team died. We killed one insurgent and arrested another. By the time the smoke cleared, I realized I was bleeding, and I couldn’t put any weight on the leg.
I was transferred to the VA, who announced I was no longer fit for combat. I suffered through months of physical therapy, and when I was finally released, I had to use a cane. Twenty-seven years old and I was walking around like an old man.
“You’re lucky you can walk,” the doctor told me. “They missed the bone, which would have shattered your leg beyond reconstruction.”
I had nowhere else to go, but I was damned if I was going to move back in with my father. I snooped around for a place and found one in town. It was a basement apartment in an old lady’s home. She was retired and renting out half of her home to make money to pay the bills. She taught piano. I didn’t know her exactly, but I had seen her when I was a kid and around the town. She said the place was fully furnished, and she would even throw in a couple homecooked meals if I would eat with her. I guessed her family didn’t want anything to do with her, and that was fine by me. I didn’t want anything to do with my family either, so that matched up.
I didn’t want to ask anybody for help or send up smoke signals that I was back in town. I didn’t have a lot of money either, so I took a Greyhound bus from the VA in Atlanta all the way acrossstate lines. At the bus station in Nashville, I transferred to a local line that took me to the post office in Singer’s Ridge. From there, it was a ten-minute walk to Mrs. Washington’s house.
Even though I was in America, in the same town where I had spent my entire childhood, I kept watching the windows, looking for enemy combatants. I wasn’t armed, and that was making me nervous. There weren’t any women wearing burqas or men wearing robes. It was summer in Tennessee. People were dressed in shorts and T-shirts, and some of the women wore skirts or jumpers.
I eyed each person that I passed with suspicion. I recognized Danny Something from the grocery store and Mary Beth that had been one grade above me in high school. They were walking hand in hand down Main Street, headed somewhere innocent. They stopped to stare as I walked past, leaning on my cane.
Mary Beth seemed about to say something, but I didn’t pause. I wasn’t looking for a warm welcome. I hadn’t chosen to come back. It had just seemed like the only option. I passed the library and the hardware store. The hair salon had a new name, but nothing else had changed.
Turning on Main Street, I navigated the neighborhoods until I reached my destination. I had my rucksack slung over my shoulder and my injured leg was aching. Despite all the physical therapy, I wasn’t used to walking half a mile with a pack on. The leg was getting better. There wasn’t so much pain anymore. It just got tired easily.
I stepped up the stairs to the porch and knocked on the door. A plump old lady answered, her kind face wrinkling up into a smile. I was instantly relieved to see her. She didn’t resemble any of the people I had been in contact with over the past eight years.She wasn’t a soldier, and she wasn’t an Afghan civilian. She was as American as they came, and damned if she didn’t invite me in for some apple pie. She also wasn’t family and didn’t know me well enough to be disappointed.
“I’m so glad you’re here.” She ushered me in. “Would you like some pie, or would you like to see the apartment?”
“Pie sounds nice,” I answered, gratefully sliding into a seat at her kitchen table.
She laid a slice of homemade apple pie in front of me, the kind with sugar crumbles on top, and I dug right in. After eight years of MREs and industrial foods, the dessert was heaven on my lips. It was so sweet and crispy, warm from the oven, and probably baked just for me. There were no good memories of home, but sitting in a strange woman’s kitchen, eating the quintessential American dish, I felt my reservations leak away. Maybe it wouldn’t be all bad. Maybe I could make it through the next couple months and figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
“This is really good,” I told her.
“I can’t imagine you had a lot of apple pie in the service,” she said.
“No, ma’am.”
