Boom! The ground shakes violently, and the desert dust fills the air, seeping into my lungs with every choked breath. Martinez dives to the deck as radios hiss and pop, their sounds rattling on the makeshift desk. “Rob, what was that? I can hear it!” Rhonda’s voice comes through the satcom, thin and faraway. Another mortar rips through the comm tent, shredding Martinez where he lay. “Nothing, babe, we’re under mortar fire again.” Bits of Martinez fly through the air. “I gotta go, babe.” I cut the line as the corpsman rushes in. Too late.
I run outside as a handful of mortars pound my makeshift Air Traffic Control tower. Three Conex boxes form the base with a wooden ladder leading to the top. Our “tower” is a wooden box with Plexiglas windows. Inside is Kramer and Sanders. Fresh holes dot the tower, and I’m unfazed. This is just another day in Iskandariya, Iraq — The Triangle of Death. “Are you guys all right?” I yell from the base of the tower. “Kramer is hit!” AJ Sanders yells.
What follows next is equal parts dream state and frantic action. Sanders and I get Kramer down to the deck and start carrying him to the medevac helo. Just then, the Group Commander, Colonel Know-it-all, comes rushing towards us like he’s never been under fire before. This is the first time anyone over the rank of Captain has visited us at our remote outpost in the four months we’ve been in Iraq. That’s probably the cause of today’s extra mortar fire. Oh well, we load Kramer on the chopper. He’s going to be okay. Just a few cuts, bumps, bruises, and plenty of blood. Hell, he’ll get a Purple Heart for this.
The ground shakes again, and I can feel the walls rattle. “Fuck!” I scream.
“Rob, wake up! You’re having a nightmare again,” Rhonda gently coos as she rubs my chest, and I awake.
This is how my day starts in Navarre, Florida. We live right next to Air Force Special Operations Command now, and the sound of the hot range produces all too familiar sounds. Why did I choose to live here in my post-military career? It’s a resort town, sure, but sometimes it hits just a bit too close to home. I jerk to and begrudgingly roll out of bed. I clumsily rub the sleep from my eyes and head to the kitchen.
Audrey comes barreling out of her fortress. “Dad, can you make me breakfast and a sandwich for school?”
“Good morning, sweetie,” I say in the most upbeat manner I can force. She’s already in the bathroom.
Another day. What am I even doing? I ponder as I scrape peanut butter onto both sides of the bread, so the PB&J doesn’t get soggy throughout the day. In the middle goes the strawberry jam. There, just the way she likes it, and I pat the sandwich as if I’ve done something special. Owen already left the house on his way to school. He’s a senior and mostly has everything under control. He’s eighteen and practically already knows everything. Audrey is sixteen and has just started her sophomore year. She’s equal parts sweet, nerdy, adorable, and hell on wheels. I wonder where she got that from? Of course, the sweet and adorable come from her mom.
“Babe, I love you. Gotta go.” Rhonda comes up and gives me a hug. She’s off to work as a Nuclear Medicine Technologist. I’m so proud of her, but I wish she could stay home and hang out with me. I feel like part of me is missing every time she steps out the door. “Bye babe, I love you. Come home soon!” I gently plead, as if her patients can be processed any faster. She really is patient with me.
“Dad, it’s time to go! What about my breakfast?”
I’m such a shitty dad.
I’m back from dropping off my daughter at school, and I load the dishwasher. As I wipe down the counters, my head throbs, and my mind is buzzing. What should I do today, and why can’t I seem to do anything right anymore? Is it the PTSD, my TBI, or am I just a total failure now? My phone dings… It’s a text from Rhonda. A red heart and an “I love you, babe.” I text her back, “kisses.”
I walk barefoot through the kitchen, and I can feel the soft, gritty texture of the Gulf Coast white sand between my toes. It’s only slightly reminiscent of the puke-brown garbage deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan. Even so, a fleeting memory of my life as a Marine invades my mind. I press the power button on my television, and the new images fight to take precedence.
As I look down at my laptop, I struggle to formulate a cogent and coherent thought. I need to write something profound and elegant. Something honest, where I bare my soul. I need to be open kimono. But all I feel are walls around my inner thoughts, and nothing but putrid trash appears on screen. The cursor blinks in the same spot for what feels like an eternity.
The doorbell rings just steps from my empty office, and I instinctively go deathly silent. I can’t bear the thought of human interaction right now. Funny, because that’s what I really crave inside. After what feels like an eternity, the interloper vanishes. Crises averted. But why do I feel so empty and alone?
I look over to the kitchen and see steam rising in the air. The dishwasher is just finishing its drying cycle. As I stumble into the kitchen, the fridge starts humming a soft pulsating static, and I’m instantly transported to Afghanistan.
My chest tightens as the static grows louder, morphing into the ghostly wail of a radio call that isn’t there. My knees weaken, and for a moment I’m back in Afghanistan with the desert heat pressing my skin, sweat dripping into my eyes as I scan the sky for incoming fire. The hum of the fridge fades, but the dread lingers. I grip the counter to steady myself, breathing in short, shallow gasps. The kitchen comes back into focus — the tile floor, the faint smell of detergent, the half-empty coffee cup beside the sink. Everything is ordinary, safe, but my body refuses to believe it. I feel like a trespasser in my own home, caught between two worlds that will never let me fully belong to either.
“Sir, we have a flight inbound. It’s a Huey carrying two of our Cobra guys that were hit. The aircraft was destroyed and they are badly injured. One of them is the XO and the other is a Lieutenant,” my Staff Sergeant informs me. “Call flight ops and get the C-130 ready for transport.” I grab my Sergeant, who is jumping to his feet, and we rush outside towards the Huey as it lands.
Their screams didn’t sound human anymore, more like some guttural tearing of the soul that clawed at the air and rattled my ribs. The blades of the Huey chopped overhead, drowning out thought, but nothing could drown out that sound or the sight of their bodies coming off the bird. Skin looked like candle wax left too close to the flame, hanging in the folds, slick and blackened in places where the fire had eaten deepest. My hands stuck to them as we carried them, as if their bodies were trying to pull me down into their hell with them. The weight wasn’t just muscle and bone — it was the unbearable heaviness of knowing these were men I’d laughed with, saluted, trusted. Now they were unrecognizable, their bodies reduced to a battlefield warning written in flesh and fire. The stink of it wrapped itself around me, a smoke I couldn’t outrun, not then, not years later. It wasn’t just the smell of burning — it was the smell of a man’s life that would never be the same again.
The XO is badly burned, and his face bears a resemblance to a scene from Batman. Not funny. The Lt. is even worse. He is burned from head to toe, and his flight suit has melded with his skin. The smell is haunting. I grab his severed foot and hold it next to his body as we move him to the transport vehicle. The XO isn’t much better. I can still smell them in my dreams and sometimes even during the day. I can’t think of another smell that is quite as bad. Still, sometimes the smell of burnt toast triggers a particularly unpleasant memory.
Just then, the alarm goes off on my phone. It’s time to pick up Audrey. I hop in my jeep and head off to her school.
“Hey Audrey! How was your day sweetheart?” I cheerfully inquire.
“Fine.”
“Okay, anything exciting happen?”
“Oh my word, there is drama in band!”
What follows next is a disjointed and confusing story about a girl she calls “daddy”, fellow classmates who are in some gender bending poly relationships, and a story arc that hits upon and presses through every norm that I can imagine, and others that I hadn’t even thought of before.
I listen, trying to track the plot, but her words tumble out like puzzle pieces from different boxes. She is animated, arms gesturing, eyes wide, throwing names and nicknames around like confetti. I nod at the correct times, drop in the occasional “wow” or “seriously?”, and wonder if I’m more of a translator than a parent in this moment. It’s like she’s inviting me into a world that operates by a set of rules only teenagers instinctively understand. It’s a soap opera stitched together from TikTok tropes, whispered hallway gossip, and the high-stakes theatrics of adolescence.
Dinner is over, and Rhonda and I cuddle up next to each other on the couch. We put on an action movie and settle in for the make-believe. The film flashes bright across the screen, and the story unfolds. Between the quick cut gunfire scenes and the tawdry prose, my mind slips in and out of the present and the past. Rhonda scoots in closer and flicks her hair toward my face, indicating an unspoken command that assertively whispers, “stroke my hair.” I do so, and my thoughts wander. The on-screen fight scenes trigger a memory.
My chest tightens, and I’m back in Kalsu, Iraq. The night air smells like burnt sand and diesel. I’m walking toward the tower, boots kicking up sand particles that sparkle in the sky, when the whistling drop cuts through the hum. Then impact.
The blast is a hammer. A mortar lands so close that the worlds collide. I’m airborne before I realize I’ve left the ground. Concrete swallows me, the T-barrier is brutal, cold, and unforgiving, and then nothing. Darkness swallows light. Consciousness scatters. That’s how my skull cracked in this life of static, headaches, and pieces of memory glued together with a blur. My TBI — traumatic brain injury.
On the couch, my head rings like it did that day. The movie fades in and out, explosions on screen tangled with the real ones still booming in my mind. My wife shifts beside me and notices that I go quiet for too many minutes. “You okay? What are you thinking about?” she asks, gentle, curious.
“Nothing.” My voice comes out flat, clipped. I don’t know how to tell her about the mortar, the barrier, the ringing silence — all mixed together with burnt flesh, a severed foot, and Kramer as well. I don’t know how to tell her that every boom pulls me backward. I don’t want to. Not tonight. I just want to chill out and relax.
I lean against her instead. Just her warmth, her heartbeat steady under my cheek. I want the safety of her arms, the ordinary comfort of being next to her. No words. No mortars. Just the rise and fall of her breath.
The screen flickers with gunfire and shadows, but I softly close my eyes. For the first time all day, I’m not in Iraq or Afghanistan, not in Navarre, not even anywhere in between. I’m just here. With her. And for a fleeting moment, I feel the peace I’ve been longing for.
“Hey, babe, let’s go to bed and spoon,” I whisper, and she perks up as though she’s been dying for the chance to rest after the long day she’s had on her feet. We hurry under the sheets as I set the temperature to arctic conditions.
The sheets are cold, the fan hums low, and I sink. The bed disappears, and the walls fade until I’m drifting through space and fractured time. One minute I’m spooned against Rhonda, safe, the next I’m standing in the tower at Kalsu with a radio pressed to my ear, dust choking the air. The mortar lands again and again, each blast rewinding like a broken film reel.
Martinez dives, explodes, reforms. Kramer bleeds, shouts, and laughs. The XO’s face melts like candle wax, then hardens into my son’s teenage grin. My daughter calls me “Dad” in a sing-song voice, and suddenly she’s screaming with skin like charcoal, her maroon band flag catching fire in her hand. I try to run, but my boots are glued to sand that turns to tile, kitchen tile, detergent burning my nostrils, the fridge humming like artillery static.
The Huey hovers overhead inside my living room, blades chopping down pictures off the wall. The smell of burnt toast and charred flesh mixes with peanut butter and strawberry jam, smeared thick across bread that drips red like a wound. My phone buzzes in my hand, the screen flashing Rhonda’s heart emoji, but when I look again, it’s a severed foot, pale, grinning at me.
I can’t breathe. I run through corridors that keep folding back into themselves, Navarre streetlights flickering into Iraqi searchlights. My mind rattles, my skull vibrates. The barrier is always waiting. The T-wall leaps forward, slamming me back down, back out, back under.
Everything collides. Past, present, family, war. It’s all one continuous battle where no one survives, but somehow I’m still here.
Boom. The ground shakes. Dust fills my lungs. Rhonda’s voice cracks through the static, faint, stretched across a decade.
“Rob, wake up! You’re having a nightmare again.”
And just like that, my day begins.
Did yesterday even happen? Damn, I despise living in the in-between. I hate echo hours.