I remember Emily coming back from the family service center at Fort Benning with a purse full of brochures. One was called “The Challenges of Deployment,” written by Dr. Bruce Bell, who warned me in the first sentence that saying goodbye to my wife wasn’t going to be as romantic as I imagined. “The list of opportunities for crushed hopes is a long one,” he wrote. I remember feeling upset that the army would assume romance is the troll of my imagination, not fear.

Then the deployment ceremony came. Emily hung on me after a kiss, her shoulders flexed against the straps of her purple tank top, and the Georgian pine forest behind her bristled in the exacting sun. Saying goodbye was easy. Saying goodbye was romantic. I’m trying to decide if that means Dr. Bell was wrong, or if he successfully managed my expectations after all.

Now I’m on a Boeing C-17 that just refueled in Leipzig, Germany. I’m sitting in containerized seats with 105 troops. We are almost to Afghanistan, and I’m more worried about that goodbye than ever. I’m wondering what happens when I start to envy my own past—I’m already doing it.

I got an email three days ago. Emily attached a picture of herself beneath a statue of Paul Bunyan in Minnesota. She’s there with her family until driving back to Seattle. Snow is everywhere, reaching the tips of Bunyan’s gigantic wooden boots.

Right here, Rossman is talking about the Pashto commands we learned in pre-deployment training.

Wadarega—stop.

Laasuna porta kra—hands up.

Rossman asks me if our accents are too thick. He says he wonders if we’ll just end up pointing our rifles at people who don’t understand what we want.

Rossman and I were battle buddies in basic training. We have already carried casualties out of kill zones. We have been distorted in the eye portals of each other’s gas masks. We have gone without food for days. We have camped in sandy firebreaks. We have agreed that unwashed fatigues and a diet of MREs causes men to smell like paint thinner.

There are no windows on the plane, only fluorescent lights sharpening the grayness of our uniforms. When I imagine looking beyond the cargo hull, I see the western Himalayas. They are so clear I can see the snow-veined peaks, and the worn trails created by slave trade in the 8^th century.  In reality, even if I were seated in the cockpit, I’d only see white clouds thrashing, maybe intermittent glimpses of greenery or boring sea. When I eventually see the Himalayas, I’ll be on the ground, and they’ll be tan blobs in the horizon.

In 2009, when I told Emily I wanted to join the army, we were about to graduate college. She said we should go all out for the cliché: marriage, a dog, a kid. She’s the kind of girl who drinks an entire soda while shopping and pays for the empty bottle at the end. We found a guy on craigslist with a marriage license who performed the ceremony beneath the cherry trees on the university quadrangle. We paid him fifty dollars. His name was Bart and he wore an old fisherman’s vest. When he stumbled over “lawfully wedded” we all laughed and Emily kissed me early.

Before I decided to enlist, choices regarding my future were hard to make. I’d stay up at night thinking. I’d imagine myself in the Peace Corps playing soccer with Cameroonian families. Or going east for some kind of artistic graduate degree. Or staying in Seattle to work at Half Price Books with my brothers. They all sounded like ways to end my life, not begin it. In the morning I’d discover that I brought the milk into the bathroom and left it sitting there on the sink counter all night.

But then I decided to enlist, and even the smallest choices glowed with exacting lights of clarity and purpose. I scored in Category 1 on the military aptitude test. That meant I could write my own ticket to any job. Desk job. Navy. Working in nuclear power plants. But I only wanted to join the infantry. That’s what I had decided. That’s what it would be.

When I told my brother, he quoted Plato, then didn’t talk to me for weeks. “Only the dead see the end of war,” he said. I don’t come from a military family. They had trouble understanding that I wanted to look out of place brandishing an M4 Carbine. I wanted parts of my body to become nearly hairless from starched uniforms. I wanted to stumble through marches with my fists tight and arms straight at my side. I wanted to be at the airport in Seattle with the other recruits on our way to Georgia, fully clad in our fatigues, having taken the wrong skycab to our gate, arguing about missing our flight, me just having talked Litzgow out of snorting hot sauce from Manchu Wok. I wanted an old woman with cauliflower hair to interrupt us, to place a hand on my shoulder and say Thank You to all of us. And I wanted to not be able to say You’re Welcome in that moment because I hadn’t done anything worth thanks yet. And I wanted to feel that soon, I would.

In 2009, Prince Harry implored his army bosses to return him to the front lines. A British newspaper reported shortly thereafter that Harry’s head finally appeared to be screwed on straight.

“Left, face!”

Our plane lands at the airfield in Bagram. There is no sound except jet engines, so I can’t speak to Rossman. Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines from around the world are thronged in tents and containerized buildings. We sleep in wooden shacks called “B” huts.

I’m half awake, thinking of Emily’s black shirt— the one that’s transparent in the back so you can see the two dimples above her perfect ass. The shirt is real, but I scare myself by realizing that such a pang of lust creates imaginary context: me behind her, walking down a street in a neighborhood that doesn’t exist.

A procession of things in fours. Four squads to a platoon. Four years of experience needed to lead a platoon. Four forms of Military. Four stages of training before deployment. Four days since I’ve seen Emily, each one distilling memories into dreams.

When Emily and I moved into an apartment off base in Fort Benning, she started feverishly documenting her life. She started a blog for all the things she drew and baked. She bought a new camera phone. Haircuts. New furniture. Anything that could be was categorized and thrown on the Internet. When the baby comes she’ll post the circumference of its head on Facebook. Of course the things that try to fill in the gaps of experience won’t, but what I worry about is whether or not they’ll end up making reality even more foreign, even more not there.

The military is mostly a present-tense operation, like how the training force blasted mosque prayer music whenever we simulated raids. They turned it on in the middle of the night, at times waiting for us in dark corners wearing hijabs. I can’t stop thinking that some day, years later, I might be running up the stairs in a library and swing a hard corner into a woman in Afghani garb. What about my training then?

In the morning we set out in a convoy of Strykers to Al-Qualat. Bagram ripples and shrinks behind us. We pass several caravans of nomadic tribes that look like something out of biblical times. Loaded donkeys, walking women and riding children. Following some distance behind are men and boys, herding sheep.

Then there are big busses called “jingle trucks” that are decorated with shiny objects that glimmer through the tan grime of desert. Sometimes they are topped with bags of grain, farm supplies, and, at times, small cars that must have been lifted on top with a crane or forklift.

The opinions I have of the future are determined by the things people tell me about it. I will clamber off the back of a truck in pursuit of the Taliban with Afghani soldiers. The Afghani soldiers will be wearing flip-flops, speedo eye goggles, and New York Yankees t-shirts. We will repair a damaged fender on the truck using mud to weld the fiberglass together. We will call an air strike on a secret base camp surrounded by emerald grass—a geological freak accident. We’ll sleep on worn mats in smoky huts.

I haven’t talked to Emily in four days. I imagine her driving back to Seattle on a Wyoming highway, pregnant, our German shepherd in the front seat, whining out the window.

In my wallet there’s a laminated photograph of Emily kissing me on graduation day. I’m holding my rifle in one hand, and embracing her with my other. My short-rimmed military cap is askew. Her skin is darker than I’ve ever seen it—she’s a quarter Native American, but the Seattle winters tended to pale that fraction away.

Now I can’t remember whether that kiss occurred before or after graduation. Then I admit I never knew which kiss it actually is—there are too many.

When I look close enough, I can see pixels indicating that there’s a space between our lips, and so it’s not clear whether in that moment I’m pulling her towards me, or putting her back down, her once kicked up leg lowering back onto the asphalt someplace in Georgia I’ll never see again.

I’m thinking of all the events in my life that once happened for the first time, and how currently they are happening for the first time again, and that later they will be happening again, and then again. I want to know how they will look.