Anasazi Exile. Eric G. Swedin

to AA for three years, back when he had gone to a chapter that met every night in the multi-use room of a Presbyterian church in Salt Lake; he didn’t need to go any more; he had whipped it.

      Pride turned his feet around. A stone bench in the shade of a tree provided a place for him to slump, his face slack and his eyes focused in a thousand-yard stare.

      Sometimes a man can force himself to forget, and other times he can never not remember, regardless of how hard he tries. Through an act of pure will, Harry had forgotten the name of the village in Afghanistan, but he remembered everything else. The village was near the Paki border, high in the mountains, and the Pashtuns in the village openly sympathized with the Taliban. Harry found it amusing, in a cynical and ironic way, that the villagers considered the Americans their mortal enemies, yet felt safe enough to not hide their Mullah Omar and Taliban posters.

      Harry’s team rode into the village on two Hummers and a six-ton truck, carrying twelve American special operators and six troops from the Afghan army. The team leader, a National Guard captain from Tennessee, found the tribal elders and went into the standard negotiating spiel, drinking sweet tea, offering money for information, and proposing to bring in heavy equipment to grade the road that snaked down from the village to the nearest large town. The captain also bluntly told the elders that they would search the mosque.

      Harry took half of the guys to the mosque, where they removed their shoes as a sign of respect, and went through the building, arms at ready, covering each other. They were a scruffy-looking bunch, with unkempt beards, uniforms and combat webbing modified with personal touches, like the baseball cap that Harry wore and the Puerto Rican flag he had sewn onto his shoulder.

      They found the weapons cache that intelligence had predicted: two 12.7mm antiaircraft guns with nine boxes of ammunition, and six hand-held rocket launchers with thirty projectiles. There were also seven boxes of dynamite and a box of detonators, just the recipe for making IEDs. The Americans and their allies hated IEDs, those improvised dealers of mayhem that blew off legs and arms if they didn’t kill you. The real treasure, though, was a bottle of vodka with a Russian label. Did the liquor date back to the Russian occupation or had it been smuggled in more recently? Harry didn’t care. Their base camp didn’t even have beer and they hadn’t been to Bagram Air Base for two months, where at least a man could sip some smuggled suds. During a moment when other eyes were distracted, the bottle went into his backpack.

      The captain ordered the weapons cache carried outside the village and blown up. Everyone, even the women in their burqas, came out to watch. Harry wrapped blasting cord around the boxes of dynamite as the rest of the men stacked the other weapons nearby. They found cover behind a nearby rise and made sure the villagers were far enough away. When he twisted the igniter, Harry made a big enough boom to alert half the country that another weapons cache was no more. Because it was so late, the captain decided to bed down rather than risk a night ambush, and the tribal elders agreed that the mosque could be used.

      The stars came out and Harry slipped out of the mosque to watch them. His fascination with the sky was a well-known quirk and no one questioned this. Of course he went fully armed: M4 assault rifle on a strap, 9mm Beretta in a holster, trench knife on belt, three fragmentation grenades, two flash-bang grenades, and a red smoke grenade. He found a small ridge near the village and hunkered down, pulling his jacket tight around him. Even in summer, the nights were cold. That was what made the stars so extraordinary, cold mountain air and no pollution. This was how people used to see the sky—as a great swath of white, the Milky Way, and thousands of distant stellar fires—before they learned to disturb the night sky with fires, lamps, and electricity.

      Harry looked at the stars, but brought out of his pack the real reason that he wanted solitude. The vodka burned his throat and he felt the pleasant buzz that came over him like a familiar friend. After two drinks, it occurred to him that the Taliban could have filled the bottle with poison and left it for the next dumb American who came along. You could put a lot of different types of nasty stuff in vodka and no drinker would notice a difference in the taste. Harry felt a jolt at the thought, but already his mind was muddled and he consoled himself with the knowledge that liquor was not uncommon among the Arab fighters that flocked from the Gulf States to fight with the Taliban. It was as if being a warrior for God exempted them from the restrictions of the Koran.

      He swallowed more vodka. Then came another boom, not as big as the one he had made earlier that day. So shit-faced that he could barely walk, Harry stumbled back down to the village, tripping over rocks and shrubs. The bottle slipped from his fumbling fingers and spilled its eighty proof alcohol into Afghan soil.

      A bomb buried under the mosque had been set off by someone in the village. The villagers stood around, stony faced, not rushing to get their personal weapons, but not doing anything to put out the fire either. Harry found two other men of his team who had been on patrol and were still alive.

      The three of them drove away in a Hummer, Harry’s head pounding with a hangover, wondering why he was alive. He had been saved by his alcoholic addiction, but if he had not been so obsessed with getting a drink, would he have noticed something to tip him off that the mosque was a trap? Would he have overheard a villager say something? Or noticed some clue, like fresh mortar or a depression in the floor, where the bomb had been located?

      A man can never know the answers to such questions.

      Harry decided to not return to the village later that day, when the Rangers rolled in, recovered the bodies of the dead, drove the villagers from their homes, and used a pound of C4 on each house. They left only rubble behind. It wouldn’t turn the villagers into allies, but it made the soldiers feel better.

      With a loud sigh, almost melodramatic if anyone had been watching, Harry wiped at his eyes and looked out at Farmington, New Mexico. He had only bought one more bottle of liquor after that. A bottle of vodka in North Carolina. At Fort Bragg, there was a grove of trees east of the grassy parade ground where tradition demanded that each fallen Special Forces soldier have a tree planted in his honor, next to a plaque with the soldier’s name and unit on it. The never-ending War on Terror was turning the grove into a forest.

      Harry walked through the trees, leaves rustling in the breeze, and poured a bit of the vodka before each tree. Just a little, since he was not sure if too much alcohol would harm the saplings. Fallen friends, one last toast, never to drink again. He vowed to never let down a friend again.