Full Measure

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The camel spiders of Afghanistan were the size of his hand but they couldn’t kill his strong young body. Neither could the little saw-scaled vipers that were almost invisible on the sand and crawled into his bedding at night. The heat of the summer fighting season couldn’t kill him, and not the winter cold that barreled down the mountains, heavy as a freight train, straddling them where they slept or did not sleep, on the ground behind the Hesco blocks or on rooftops or hunkered ten to a room at base. The skinnies couldn’t kill him with bombs hidden in the rocks or buried along the roads, nor with grenades launched from the hills or mortars fired from behind the ridgelines. Not with their AKs or sniper rifles or aged, wired-together long guns left over from other wars in another century. Not with knives or hatchets or sticks. Nothing could kill him, so Patrick Norris did the killing, until they sent him from Sangin back to San Diego in the fall, a free man, twenty-two years old, wounded on the inside only.

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