Kyle McNally

I had been in Afghanistan for eight months. After Watan I’d returned to the SOTF, where the timed dragged on and the excitement slumped. When the summer came they sent me back to Helmand, back to Nahr-e Saraj, to a place called Shurakay; just a stone’s throw from my old stomping ground at Watan. Things […]

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous. We were standing in a small circle — the six of us, there in the darkness — going over the patrol one last time. The Afghans would lead us to a compound; we’d arrive at dawn. From there we would monitor a known Taliban hideout. […]

It was my first patrol. It wasn’t anything extraordinary — a presence patrol in the village — but for a lowly combat correspondent, it was something. My allies had helped secure my position on the CONOP; operators who I’d befriended or known prior, and also the MISO techs, who had broken more ground with the […]

The explosion tore me from sleep. I scrambled up from bed and burst outside, assuming an air of indifference as soon as I saw the others. There were five or six of them, all looking over the Hesco barriers at a distant stain of black smoke. Pogues — engineers, corpsmen, attachments like myself, here to […]

We’d been stalled on the tarmac at Leatherneck for almost an hour. They had scrunched us all to the front of the Osprey’s cargo bay where we now sat rocking in our jump seats, our bags between our legs, the rotors pounding turbulently outside. We were drowning in the stench of diesel fuel, stale and […]