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     I wake up early, usually around 0300, almost every night now. 

     Sometimes it’s from a bad dream, a dream with explosions pounding the walls of my skull, sweat breaking on my skin as I awaken once again with wide eyes and shaking hands. 

     Sometimes it’s from a dream of Rita and our life together.

     Normally, I take a few moments to get my bearings and let the sensations recede. Restless and unable to go back to sleep, I wander outside to watch the stars glittering in the Kuwaiti night. The moon that’s different somehow, familiar yet outlandish. And I feel estranged with the stars of a foreign country.

     I light a cigarette. 

     My favorite time of day, all is quiet, even in the warehouse, most people sleeping. Only the occasional snore or shift of a listless body immersed in a dream of their lives. Of green fields or a lover’s arms.

     And I think of my father. 

     How I used to imagine him in Korea. How he would watch the sun set in the evenings, gazing out the window of the hotel he was bunked in. Hands deep in the pockets of his field jacket, his mind seeing home as the lights of Yeongdeungpo winked out one-by-one. And how marvelous I thought it would be to travel. To feel the charge of adventure, glory, honor. To stare for hours at the rank on a shoulder, to play cards with the boys, and pass a Playboy back and forth. I wanted to be a hero, like Tintin and Captain Haddock. I wanted to be my father. I wanted to connect with him as men, shoulder to shoulder.

     To make him proud.

     I snuff my cigarette out.

     A cough breaks the silence as I reach my bunk again, my laser pen guiding the way. I slide off my boots, slip into my sleeping bag, and pull my poncho down from where I tucked it under the edge of the mattress above me, closing the door to my makeshift sanctuary. The other side hangs limp like its partner—the sky blue bed sheet I stole from Anaconda.

     I’m sealed in. Safe. 

     I have my privacy.

     I’m drowsy, yet I can’t sleep. My eyes close but soon they blink open, and I’m wide awake to the roar of explosions. My bunk’s rattling. My heart’s pounding. My breath seizes up. And my eyes frantically search the darkness for something solid, something for my fear to grasp onto. A moment passes, and I realize there were no bombs or explosions. There was no reason to be afraid. And I can hear the silence of Doha again. I wipe the sweat on my brow and close my eyes, hoping not to dream.

     For a better dream.

     I used to love my dreams. Now I’m afraid of them; afraid I’ll wake to find that being here was just a dream and that I’m back at Camp Anaconda. 

     In that Hell on Earth. 

     I’m afraid if I go to sleep, the mortars will return, relentlessly marching nearer. Every night I go through the same old drill. The trembling, the wide eyes, the curling up in a ball on my side and rocking back and forth in my sweat until the sounds of explosions leave my rattled skull. Until the Hawk I let fly disappears on the horizon. Until the whop, whop, whop of its rotor blades no longer cut through the evening air. Until the guilt in my stomach is only a dull ache. Until I no longer hear the screams of the beheaded.

     There’s something wrong with me. 

     And I’m scared because I don’t know who I am any longer. 

     What’s happening to me? 

     And what is yet to come? 

     A hot, heavy, mid-summer day in New England.

     Stifling and oppressive, like the internet tent in Iraq. 

     At the intersection of the two main roads that wind through and around my hometown, I’m driving past the same Mobil gas station down the street from where I grew up. A small, not quite dilapidated place with a convenience store I’ve been to a hundred times. Across the street, the same school bus parking lot; the same four-way traffic light. And the same left and right turn arrows emblazoned on the same sign.

     A crossroads of eventuality.

     Slowing, I look inside. 

     Through the windows, I see a young woman behind the counter. The cashier. Slumping forward, she’s resting on her elbows as if in prayer, head bowing to the countertop while flipping the pages of a magazine.

     I can’t put my finger on it, but something’s changed. Nothing tactile, merely an impression of ambience. The texture of sensation. 

     A peculiar variant of essential nature. 

     Yearning. Thirsting. 

     So many ghosts; alive and dead at the same time.

     Stepping on the gas, heading toward the levee where we took our walk so many years ago, I hear the gunfire on the perimeter.

     The Hawk’s taking off, the winking, red taillight fading.

     Whop, whop, whop go the rotor blades.

     And the mortars are coming in.

     Bwoom.

     Shock waves of fury.

     “Jack’s dead, Dana.” 

     “What?”

     “He’s dead,” repeats the distant voice.

     Silence.

     “Okay, Libby, I gotta tell ya, that’s some kind of fucked up sense of humor.”

     “I’m not joking, Dana. He’s gone.”

     A pause.

     “I - I don’t understand. Really, what’s happened?”

     “No one seems to know yet, but I do know he did it this past weekend, sometime on Saturday or Sunday.”

     “Did what?”

     “He shot himself.”

     From the other end of the line, those stark three words rebound through the house on the winding road. The house on top of a short hill surrounded by oaks, birch, and hemlock. With the swamp in the back woods. The neatly placed trash and recycle bins by the side of the driveway. And the tall, bushy Rhododendron out front—big, ruffled white blooms with little stalks capped in yellow. The house where I grew up. Where Jack and I spent so much time—sleepovers, birthday parties, cub scout meetings with snipe hunts, movies, and backyard campouts. 

     Where we talked for hours about our imagined dreams.

     Now, the house is dark except for a soft, mosaic glow emanating from one window. A glow stealing its way through the black grass of night. Overseen by the pale gaze from a nearly full moon.

     Icy and prickly. 

     “Jack - shot - himself?”

     “Yeah, he did. I’m so sorry, Dana.”

     “But I just talked to him. How do you know?”

     “Avery told me, and I told her I’d tell you.”

     The phone almost slips from my hand, my mind calculating through a growing fog. “But it’s Tuesday.”

     “Yes.”

     “How come I’m just finding out now?”

     “It took me a little bit to find you.”

     Skepticism feels more rational than truth to me. I’m having a hard time feeling the floor underneath my socks. White? Cotton? 

     Are those toes moving?

     “He didn’t call me,” I murmur, more to myself than Libby.

     “He didn’t call anyone. Well, that’s not exactly true. Avery has been looking through his phone records and he made a whole bunch of calls the week before. But not to anyone he was close to. He didn’t call Avery, their mom—”

     “Joan.”

     “Yes. Nor me. And apparently not you.”

     “Why?”

     “I don’t know. I know he’d been having some problems.”

     “Yeah, I get that, but those things pass.”

     “We know that.”

     Fingers tingling. 

     My heart’s beginning to pound. 

     “Jack’s dead?”

     “Yes.”

     The kitchen is swimming and my eyes are blurring. Darkening. Dizzy, I steady myself by grasping the edge of the sink. A blank stare. No feeling. Then turning, I slump to the floor. Slow. In a daze. My eyes wide open, my back resting against the cabinet, my legs spread open. One hand palm up, resting on the cool, gray-colored, tile floor.

     Helpless and lifeless.

     “Jack’s - dead,” I whisper.