Beyond the Point(73)
She adjusted soon enough. They completed medical simulations and vehicle rollover simulations, and for two consecutive days near the end of their time in Kuwait, her unit practiced counter-IED training, to help them detect and disable roadside bombs. Every time Hannah stepped outside, sand whipped up from the ground, into her ears, eyes, and mouth, as if it were trying to bury her alive. And everyone had the same complaint: it was so hot. In an e-mail to Dani, she’d tried her best to explain how it felt: like someone was blowing a hair dryer in your face. Temperatures stayed in the hundreds and regularly hit 125 by the afternoon. Breath stifled, pores full of dirt, Hannah learned to drink water before she was thirsty, to walk in the shade, and to stay inside between the hours of twelve and three P.M. The climate was as much of an enemy as the Taliban.
By the time her unit reached Forward Operating Base Sharana in southeastern Afghanistan, thirty kilometers from the border of Pakistan, Hannah had marked thick black Xs through seventeen days on her pocket calendar.
She carved out a routine, which Sarah Goodrich, who’d completed her first deployment, had promised would help pass the time. An alarm went off every day at 0530. She ran around the perimeter of the forward operating base, showered, and read a few pages in her Bible. Then she’d make it to the cafeteria for breakfast, before heading to the tactical operations center to meet with her superior officers and discuss tasks for the day.
At times, it was easy to forget she was even in Afghanistan—that is, until she would walk outside, feel the dry heat attack her sinuses, and see dusty mountains in every direction. Afghanistan had a barren beauty that Hannah grew to appreciate and even admire. At night, the sky was so lit up with stars, it looked like a laser-light show and far outperformed the view from her grandfather’s porch. There, she could see constellations. Here, she saw galaxies.
In an area this remote, snail mail was still the most reliable and consistent form of communication. Tim’s handwriting—dark, allcaps—became the thing Hannah most longed to see on the outside of a white envelope. They wrote often, filling the pages with minutiae like what they’d eaten the day before or their most recent workout. But every now and then, Tim would surprise Hannah by sending a poem or a long passage from a book he’d been reading, if he felt it applied to their situation.
She kept his letters in her pillowcase until the stack became too thick. By the time her unit took their first convoy away from FOB Sharana to build an outpost for a crew of NATO troops, the collection was three inches tall. She wrapped the letters with a spare shoestring and locked it in the trunk at the foot of her cot. When they returned a week later, she riffled through them again, laughing at the little drawings he’d put in the margins. The most recent one featured a sketch of Hannah and Tim on opposite sides of the world, arms wrapping around the globe like Stretch Armstrong, reaching across the oceans. He’d never been much of an artist.
It’s only 15 months, she told herself. That’s nothing.
Once at West Point, Hannah’s computer had crashed, destroying a sixteen-page term paper in the process. Tim had shown up at her room with a carafe of coffee and a calculator.
“Look,” he’d said, crunching the numbers of her GPA. “You can literally turn in nothing, and you’ll be okay.” She was crying. The numbers hadn’t convinced her that the world wasn’t ending. He’d put his hands around her face, wiped her tears with his thumbs, and then kissed her softly on the mouth.
“I dare you to believe me.”
After that, Hannah had spent the entire night drinking coffee and listening to Tim tell stories instead of rewriting her paper. It was a risk, and not once during the night had she felt comfortable taking it. But in the end, he’d been right. She’d turned in five pages of nonsense—something she’d written quickly the following morning. And even though she received an F, the world didn’t end. Her GPA only changed by a tenth of a point. She believed he was right about this deployment, too, that spending all this time apart would be worth it in the end. Like one failed paper didn’t impact her GPA, one year apart wouldn’t change the totality of their relationship together.
It was just fifteen months. Basically, a year.
A year is nothing in light of a life.
“HE SAYS A U.S. mortar round landed on his land, killing his prized cow.”
An interpreter spoke quickly in Pashto to a dark-skinned Afghan man, the plaintiff, who spat back something angry and defiant, pointing once again at the photo on the table in front of them.
Three months into her deployment, Hannah had been called into a JAG meeting. The translator, Amjad Ebrahim, was something of a minor celebrity around FOB Sharana. When their unit had first arrived, the translator had collected a few dollars from every officer and showed up the next day with a freshly slain lamb. Skinned, bled, and roasted over a fire, the lamb accompanied an assortment of sauces, spices, tandoori bread, yogurt sauce, chopped mint, preserved lemon, falafel, rice, and steamed greens. It was still the best meal Hannah had ever had—and that included all the meals Wendy Bennett had made at her home at West Point.
Twenty-seven, with a wife and three children at home, Ebrahim had long hair that curled slightly under his ears, dark eyebrows, and a ready smile that defied his circumstances. Every day, he wore a uniform that matched Hannah’s, only his had a patch on the left that read “U.S. Interpreter” where hers said “U.S. Army.”