Essay: During My Three Tours in Afghanistan, I Become An Old Man
Author You watch sporadic drops of rain blotch the sidewalk outside your office on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska, and think of watching for the first time as rain fell into the dust of Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, nearly nineteen years ago, in 2002. How it cratered into what the Afghan linguists half jokingly told you was the result of decades of artillery having pounded the soil into fine powder. How the raindrops disappeared into the parched stuff. How you could drive through the inches of it that seemed to cover the whole of the Shomali Plains, only for it to wash back over t...