I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them

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WINTRIC ELLIS, NEWLY ARRIVED, pushes his size 8 boot into the spongy ground and feels the subtle give of the earth run through the ball of his foot, up his leg, and settle in his camouflaged hip. Green grass in Afghanistan, he thinks, water somewhere. He smells damp soil and grass, unexpected but familiar—Little League center field, Kristen in a California meadow—and attempts to make this thick-bladed greenery stick alongside the everywhere, suck-you-dry desert he had imagined.

“Eyes open, everyone,” Big Dax says.

Although Wintric knows today is a low-risk humanitarian mission, the words slide him back into his default, visceral nervousness: Bombs, somewhere, everywhere. Already he has been told that roadside means nothing in this country. Big Dax and Torres have shared stories with him — everything from far-afield livestock to massive diesel trucks igniting the barely buried hell, not to mention the bombs strapped to men, women, children, dogs. Bombs the size of tennis balls, soccer balls, tackling dummies. Under the rising sun Wintric replays the refrain repeated among his platoon for each of his eight days in country: Don’t go looking for a fair fight.

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