Beyond the Point
Claire Gibson
Dedication
To women on every battlefield, in every uniform.
You are not alone.
Epigraph
When the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon, he said, “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.”
“Pardon me, my lord,” Gideon replied, “but if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us?”
Judges 6:12–13
Prologue
November 10, 2006 // Tarin Kot, Afghanistan
Assuming her gear scared him, Hannah Nesmith took off her helmet and sunglasses and placed them on the ground.
“Da sta lapaara day,” she said. This is for you.
The boy couldn’t have been much older than seven. He wore navy blue pants and a threadbare shirt, both at least two sizes too big. Dirty toenails peeked out of his sandals, and his heels threatened to strike the rocky ground. Every student at the school was dressed this way. Nothing fit. Everything was covered in sand. His arms and neck and face were tanned and smooth. Any other day, in any other country, Hannah would have been tempted to reach out and stroke his head. He was just a child.
A U-shaped concrete building stood behind them, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by large rocks the color of the desert. There were no roads. The infrastructure for education had crumbled under Taliban rule, which had turned this area of Afghanistan into a haven for opium production and sharia law. Hannah wondered how far these children had to walk to school, what their parents did all day, and whether or not there was even food at home when they returned at night. In Afghanistan, the average life expectancy was only fifty years. Nearly half of the population was younger than fourteen. And these children were caught in the crossfire.
The battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Markham, sent Hannah’s platoon on humanitarian missions like this specifically because she was a woman. He said her presence would put the children and teachers at ease. But these students would think she was a Transformer robot before they believed she was a female. She wore an ID patch on the bicep of her uniform and an M16 slung over her shoulder. A Kevlar vest flattened her chest, and before she’d taken it off, her helmet had hidden a bun at the nape of her neck. But surely this boy could overlook her dirty-blond hair and blue eyes for the sake of a free, fully inflated soccer ball, Hannah thought. When their convoy had pulled up an hour earlier, the children were using a ball of trash tied together with string.
She gripped the soccer ball in her hands and raised it a few inches higher. The boy took two steps backward, his mouth closed tight, like he was trying to swallow something bitter.
“For you,” she repeated in English, wishing once again that she’d listened to Dani.
Sophomore year at West Point, her closest friend had tried to persuade her to take Arabic instead of Spanish. Of course, Afghan people spoke Pashto, something Hannah hadn’t known until she arrived in March. But she wished she had familiarity with the tones and rhythms of Middle Eastern languages, and would have, had she listened to Dani. But the add-drop period for classes had ended in August—two weeks before the towers came down. The Arabic department at West Point was inundated after that. But the truth was, even if she’d known the future, she probably would have stuck with Spanish. West Point was hard enough without adding another challenge to her schedule. Plus, even if they could speak the same language, the boy wasn’t listening.
Hannah wiped a stream of sweat from her forehead. Heat dragged its fingers up the sleeves of her uniform, down her back, against her neck. It was hard to breathe here. Hard to think. She recalled watching heat waves rise from the ground on her grandfather’s ranch every summer of her childhood, distorting her vision, like transparent oil in the air. But this—one hundred and twenty degrees—was a formidable home-field advantage.
The heat made the days run together. Hannah had arrived in Afghanistan eight months earlier, in March. She’d taken two weeks of rest and recuperation in the summer with Tim, and now was staring down the barrel of seven more months in the Middle East. She closed her eyes and imagined her husband out kayaking on the water.
Husband. That word sounded as foreign in her mouth as any word of Pashto. The time they’d spent together on Jekyll Island during her R & R was a memory Hannah could hold on to until they were together again. She could still feel the grit of sand in his hair, taste the salt of his skin. She’d never seen him so tan.
People constantly asked her how they did it. By “it” she assumed they meant the deployment, the Army, or long-distance marriage. But to Hannah, it was just part of the package. She wouldn’t have wanted to be married to anyone else. So if this was what it took to be Mrs. Timothy Nesmith, then so be it. No part of her felt resentful of the path they’d chosen. Somehow, it felt right for them—even if it was hard. Maybe specifically because it was. Their time apart intensified their time together, making every moment that much more romantic, that much more precious. They were like a magnet and steel: they felt the pull when they were apart, and when they were together, they couldn’t be separated. The sacrifice was part of the sacrament.
She had a canned response ready to dismiss people’s concerns. “We just try not to think about it,” she’d say with a shrug.
But the truth was, she thought about the calendar all of the time. She counted down the days, the months. June 2007 lingered in the future as though it were their wedding date—even though they’d already had one of those. In less than a year, they’d be back together again. It wasn’t that long, really. Not when you compared it to forever. If they could just endure, all would be well in the end. And as the days ticked off of her deployment, moving her closer to home, Hannah had never been more confident that the waiting would be worth it.