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 had gotten “sporty” with the summer thaw — I saw combat my very first day back in the valley.

That set the tone for the month to come. Like Watan, I had moved into Shurakay with the engineers, watched them build the place from the ground up. Our VSP was attacked regularly. Us pogues who’d been assigned to towers had mastered a sort of fireman’s drill; leaping out of bed, throwing on our kits, grabbing our weapons, rushing to the towers to repel the Taliban. By the time I left the place, one of our Afghan partners had been killed, and five Americans had been wounded.

Needless to say, I’d gotten my fill. So when the news came that I was moving to Zombalay — an outpost just down the road from Shurakay — for the very last month of my deployment, I wasn’t as enthused as I might have been as a fresh-faced boot. My end-of-deployment paranoia was at its height; all I wanted to do was get home.

The MISO team from Watan had also migrated to Zombalay, having seen it as a sort of Promised Land for pogues. “They even take the cook out on patrols,” they’d told me back at Watan, where getting on a CONOP was about as easy as winning the Medal of Honor. Zombalay (or “Zombieland”) was run by Green Berets, and this particular team was supposedly “laid back” when it came to support elements. If you wanted combat, they’d give it to you, provided you weren’t a liability. My combat camera predecessor had apparently been a liability. I would have to rebuild a bridge.

At the first team meeting I introduced myself, stated my purpose, promised them that nothing would go back to the SOTF without their oversight — a promise I made and upheld with every other team I’d worked with. I gave my usual spiel: “I’d like to get on some patrols,” I said, expecting nothing of this with less than a month to ingratiate myself. I was shocked when one of the soldiers immediately jotted me down on his list, one for an upcoming patrol. I looked at the MISO techs. The Promised Land, indeed.

Two days later our patrol was snaking out the gate, bound for an ALP checkpoint beyond the white space. Two ATVs at the rear carried food; rice, lamb, bread. We were going to celebrate Ramadan with the Afghan policemen, a perfect “happy snap” moment for Public Affairs.

Dusty village streets bore us onto an ocean of poppy fields, a creek twisting its way to the horizon, with twisted willows bobbing along its path, the poppy blazing like a million shards of colored glass.

The sky was stained a soft purple when we reached the checkpoint, a dry mud compound like all others in Afghanistan. The sun had just begun to melt into the horizon.