For every military member there are two particularly dangerous times to be at any duty station. Arrival is pretty obvious. You know the least about where you’re at, whether you’re stateside or in some godforsaken hole halfway around the world, and you know the least about what you’re there to do. Departure is a little less obvious. You’ve been there for months, if not closer to years. You know every nook, every cranny, every hidey-hole. You’ve seen everything, done everything. Sounds like you’d be the safest, but that’s actually what makes it dangerous. You’re used to the patterns so it’s very tempting to just stop looking deeper at everything. You’re eager to leave, so you don’t take one last look around before hopping in the JLTV or you focus a little too much on the road ahead of you instead of what’s up against it. That’s how they get you. It’s common enough to be a trope in books and movies, and not just because lazy writers love tropes.
You’d think, having said all that, that I would’ve been alert. Who ignores their own advice, right? Me, evidently, but I have an excuse. Bad shit generally doesn’t happen stateside. Or at least the particularly bad shit doesn’t, which I guess is where I went wrong. See, I’d been back in the States just long enough to not get twitchy at every pile of leaves or stack of trash along the road when it happened.
The plan was simple. Ten-hour drive from Camp Dawson, West Virginia, back home to St. Louis. Spend the weekend with friends and family celebrating me making it through six months of hell. Load up the truck and the trailer Monday morning with my little sister and we’d both head off down I-64 and end up in West Virginia once again, though this time not far from Huntington.
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A buddy from my last unit had got out of the Army and bought some property out in the middle of nowhere, which is where I’d hand the keys over to my sister, unhook the trailer, and wave as she drove off to MIT for a slightly delayed return to her PhD project. After that, three weeks clearing land, along with camping, fishing, hunting, and whatever the hell else I decided to get up to. Being outdoorsy had made all the “Let’s go stand in the mud and rain while pretending we’re doing something useful” Army training events before I crossed the fence more bearable, but I was really looking forward to being out in the woods without needing to post a sentry.
When the time came, my buddy would drive me out to Fort Bragg. While I looked forward to demonstrating all the training at Dawson wasn’t lost on me, I wasn’t looking forward to stepping foot on Bragg again. Don’t get me wrong, when we got on the road I was happy I wasn’t returning to the Regiment as a washout, I just didn’t know I wasn’t returning at all.
I’m sure most people would expect there to be some dramatic story to how things went awry. I mean, this isn’t just a soldier’s story; everything associated with America’s tier one doorkickers is a rolling Michael Bay advertisement, right? Yeah, no. I was asleep in the passenger seat. I didn’t see shit when it happened. There was a jolt and everything started to spin around. In the single instant I had between snapping awake and darkness taking me, I thought I was in yet another Blackhawk that caught an RPG.
