by Don Mateer
On the morning of my departure, the air hung thick, as if the world itself woke from a fever dream. The sun loitered just below the horizon, a dull red over a tar-black road and whitewashed buildings. I sat on a splintered bench, staring at a life grown stale.
Back then, in my twenties, life felt like a belt cinched one notch too tight. I’d been born in a town too small where ambition died in strip malls and Sunday sermons. I’d tried the big city for a time, but it turned into a gilded cage where dreams paced behind bars. A nation of rah-rah superlatives peddled women in shabby skirts and men in tight ties and tighter smiles. It was no place for someone who believed the world had to be bigger than this.
So, I’d taken a job that promised escape—or at least motion. Emerald jungles, ochre deserts, shimmering silver seas. Languages I didn’t know. Spices sharper than my tongue could handle. The handshakes of strangers who would become friends. Or so I told myself.
The sun cracked the sky, slicing through the blue-grey mist. Daylight stripped my daydreams bare. Paint curled off the buildings around me, exposing the rotted wood beneath. A wren whistled somewhere above, but the growl of an approaching bus swallowed its fragile song.
The bus rattled up the road and wheezed to a stop in front of me. The driver stepped down, his baby-blue shirt sagged at its seams. Etchings of long days and longer nights carved his face.
“Early bird, huh?” he mumbled through the stale bite of last night’s whiskey. He shuffled to the luggage hold, unlocking it with a creak.
I stood, hefted my bags, and crossed over to him. He took them one by one and tossed them into the hold with a hollow thud. Finished, he propped up a foot on the tire, fished a crumpled cigarette from his pocket, and lit it with a flickering lighter. Leaning in, he drew a deep breath. The tip hissed to life. He exhaled slow. Smoke curled up then unraveled into nothing.
“What you looking for out there?” he asked.
The honesty of his question surprised me. It skipped pleasantries and drilled straight to the marrow.
“Anything,” I said. “Everything.”
He puffed again, studying me. Then he shrugged like he’d seen my kind a thousand times before. “Everybody says they want to see the world. Me? I’ve been everywhere. Driven up and down this country enough to wear grooves in the asphalt. Saved up enough to buy me a big screen TV. Now all I want to do is sit back and watch my shows.” He flicked some ash onto the pavement. “Anyways, you’re welcome to board.”
And just like that, the conversation ended. The driver just stood there, smoke trailing from his lips, squinting at another restless kid too proud of what was given. And I stared back thinking he was the one who’d given up. He’d been handed a map and redrawn the borders until the whole world fit into a TV screen.
He tossed the cigarette stub down, crushed it underfoot, then disappeared around the side of the bus.
I waited. The other passengers arrived. A chaos of honking horns and last-minute hugs. We took care of a few administrative details while the driver loaded our luggage into the belly of the bus.
Then the chaos settled, and our exodus began.
I found a seat in the back of the bus, where the air reeked of faded perfume, spilled coffee, and whispers spoken into the night. Other passengers trickled in and found their places. The driver slammed the luggage hold shut, climbed up the stairs, and slid into his seat. His eyes caught ours in the rearview mirror—a congregation of the restless, the resigned, the half-asleep. And me, my chest tight with anticipation.
“Next stop, Baltimore,” the driver called, and the bus lurched forward.
The highway stretched ahead. A ribbon of asphalt and broken yellow lines. Scenery blurred into a familiar reel I’d seen a thousand times: fast-food kingdoms, billboards shouting their creed—BUY. BELIEVE. REPENT. Megachurches beside golden arches. And then in the distance, the nation’s capital where a white obelisk stood in honor of a man as if he were some meager pharaoh.
Hours passed, and the bus veered off the interstate, pulling into the Baltimore airport pavilion. Planes roared overhead. My heart leaped with them, soaring beyond the horizon where true freedom—true freedom—waited.
The driver hobbled off, cracked open the luggage hold, tossed our bags onto the pavement between oil rainbows and smashed chewing gum.
I stretched my stiff legs, filed off with the others, gathered my things, and went towards the terminal.
Inside the airport, amongst the muffled moans and clicking keys, heels tapped against linoleum. I dragged my luggage to the ticket counter. The woman behind it handed me my boarding pass with a practiced smile and chipped strawberry-red nails.
Standing under the departure board, I scanned names of cities I’d only read in books: PARIS. BANGKOK. MARRAKECH. My imagination outpaced me, as it did back then. London’s cobblestone streets, Cancun’s beaches, Amsterdam’s canals.
Then my eyes settled on my destination. IRELAND. The first step into whatever waited beyond.
And with a smile, I walked towards my gate.
Hours later, I pressed my forehead to the airplane window. Beneath polished wings, the Atlantic Ocean swelled—grey and restless, flecked with white-capped waves that rolled to infinity.
When we landed, I drifted through the terminal in a daze. Beyond walls of glass, the green Irish countryside sprawled. A kind of green I’d never seen back home. Hills stretched to the edge of the sky, glistening with the remnants of fresh rain. It looked less like reality and more like a fleeting watercolor I’d dreamed up once and forgotten.
I found a quiet corner with a panoramic view and let my imagination wander. A small stone cottage. A writer’s desk by a foggy window. Words flowing faster than I could catch them, capturing a life far from those billboards that had promised so much and delivered so little.
The crackle of the loudspeaker pulled me back to the present. Time to board.
The other passengers shuffled toward the gate. I stood, collected my things, and joined the line. Each step took me farther from the life I’d left behind and closer to the unknown.
The second layover was in Italy.
I found myself on an open-air terrace for smokers, though I didn’t smoke. The Carnic Alps rose before me, towering like stone sentinels crowned with clouds and dusted with snow. Alpenglow brushed pink and gold over the mountains.
A man wandered up beside me. I recognized him instantly. He’d been on my flight. His most distinctive feature, a crimson birthmark splashed across his bald head. He lit a cigarette, cheap by the smell of it. Its acrid scent cut the clean, crisp air. The smoke arched upwards, marring an otherwise pristine scene.
I wanted him to move along, but he lingered, staring out at the horizon. The ash grew long on the tip of his cigarette.
“Jesus, that’s beautiful,” he said, his baritone voice rolling in a slow wave. “Going to come back here in six months. Take a two-week break.”
He flicked the ash, and it scattered over the terrace railing.
“Venice first. Then a bike ride up the Dolomites. Might stop at the Asiago War Memorial. See what’s left of the Great War up there. They called it the White War here, you know. Fighting in the snow, dying in the cold on some godforsaken mountain. Gets in the imagination, don’t it? Brutal way to live. Worse way to die. Fighting for meaning you’ll never find.”
He dropped the cigarette and grounded it out. “But you don’t have to worry about that, do you?” He laughed, low and mirthless, as if he knew something I didn’t. Then he walked away, leaving only the bitter scent of smoke and judgment in the chilly air.
A sort of tension grew in my chest. I wanted to scrub his words from memory, but they clung there. The image of soldiers climbing up those peaks. Starving, freezing, dying. Bodies buried by snow drifts. I tried to twist it into something heroic. A medal on my chest, the weight of honor heavy but welcome. But the picture refused to change.
The loudspeaker crackled. Time to board again.
After hours in the sky, the plane touched down in Kyrgyzstan.
A sanguine sunrise greeted my sleep-starved eyes, casting fiery hues across the tallest mountains I’d ever seen. I stepped off that plane into the thin air. Exhaustion mingled with unease.
That morning, I wandered a chainlink fence topped with snarls of razor wire clattering in the wind. Beyond it stood a city of mahogany and alabaster apartment blocks. Soviet relics. Scars from a dead empire that refused to disappear.
The rain began as a whisper, then grew louder. The streets transformed into rivers of mud. Seeking shelter, I stumbled into a wooden building.
Inside, sagging bookshelves smelled of dust and damp paper. I pulled a book at random and settled at a rickety table. I opened it. The spine cracked. The epic of Manas greeted me. A hero’s story etched in Kyrgyz lore. The preface described how his story still lived today, recited by firelight beneath skies crowded with stars. If the story was true, Manas had defeated the peoples to the south and forced an alliance long ago.
I left that building. My head full of visions. Manas had his adventure. Would I have mine?
Evening fell, bringing with it smoky smells. Wind cut through the fabric of my shirt. The sun dwindled into an orange smear, consumed by the horizon. A sliver of moon climbed into the sky. Venus burned bright for a moment before clouds rolled in and smothered it.
Reality weighed down on me like humid air before a storm. The illusion I held for the past two days cracked. The fantasy of sightseeing, composing poetry, snapping pictures, falling in love—it all dissolved into raw reality.
The weight on my shoulder wasn’t a camera.
It was a rifle.
The vest hugging my chest wasn’t for style.
It was filled with ceramic plates.
The boots on my feet were the tan, heavy kind worn by soldiers.
My adventure wasn’t a journey of discovery.
It was war.
And my next stop was Afghanistan.
I was joining my unit, three weeks into their deployment. A fresh face no one knew.
Under the haze of polished streetlights, I fell into a slow-moving river of tan, green, and grey uniforms and trudged to the tarmac.
Ahead, military planes crouched on the runway. Their rear ramps yawned like the jaws of leviathans ready to swallow us whole. The hum of their propellers filled the night. Two by two, we shuffled into those cavernous maws.
At the top of the ramp, two loadmasters in olive drab flight suits stood. They spat brown tobacco juice into plastic bottles. “Bathrooms busted,” one of them said, his voice clipped and mechanical as the machine that surrounded us. “Piss in a bottle if you gotta go.”
I crammed into a seat somewhere in the middle of the cargo hold. Knees jammed to my chest. Rifle wedged awkwardly between them. The shoulders of strangers pressed into mine on either side. The air filled with bad breath, stale sweat, and the chemical tang of grease on metal.
The ramp groaned shut. The engine roared, its feral scream vibrating through the plane. The machine clawed skyward. Metal contracted and strained.
My jaw tightened. My fingers curled around the stock of my rifle.
I tried to summon those heroic visions of myself again. Me, the epic hero. Me, finding the truth of the world written in blood and sacrifice. But the harder I reached for it, the more it slipped away.
You’ll be fine. This was your choice. Your path. Heroes are forged in fire, aren’t they? If you miss this war, you’ll miss some fundamental truth. A lesson revealed through suffering. Besides, you trained for this. Those long days under a hot sun and those cold nights with a rifle by your side. They attacked us. We are fighting for the oppressed. The enemy is evil and regressive. A blight on the free world.
I thought of the words of a military priest standing in his chapel, his camouflage uniform draped with a purple stole. “Ruin will not fall upon the virtuous,” he had said. “Pray to God for salvation. And He will answer.”
But it all felt hollow as a spent shell casing.
I glanced around the cabin, searching the faces of other soldiers for a flicker of reassurance, a mirror of my fears. Their faces were blank. Just exhaustion and boredom. The only answer came from the lavatory door, flapping loose on a broken hinge, mocking me for my musings.
Time dripped by. Three hours. Maybe four. My ears popped with the pressure change. My stomach flipped. The plane shuddered. Wheels screeched on asphalt. The plane slowed and stopped. The rear ramp whined open. Dry heat poured in. A blast of petrol fumes and traces of smoke.
“Everyone out,” one of the loadmasters shouted.
I rose with the others, neck stiff, muscles twitching from tension coiled too long. My rifle felt heavier than I remembered. I followed the line towards the open ramp.
Outside, there was no fanfare, no banner, no drumbeats to mark our arrival. Only floodlights so bright they stripped the stars from the sky. Dust swirled about the artificial glow. Dull golden ash.
“Form two lines,” someone barked through the metallic scratch of a megaphone.
Our boots fell into rhythm. We marched towards the hulking silhouettes of low buildings. Drawing closer, shapes sharpened into mud brick walls. We passed through a rusting metal door into a hallway lit by flickering fluorescent lights. Bullet holes peppered the walls. The hallway spat us out into a wide room. Rows of metal chairs lined up like pews facing a stage on the far end. Above the stage, a crooked PA system hung on the wall beneath a jagged hole in the ceiling.
Onstage, a teenager paced back and forth with too much energy. His Air Force uniform hung loose on his wiry frame. A patchwork of jagged moss-green stripes and teal blotches. He gripped a microphone in one hand, the cord snaking across the stage behind him.
“Please sit down,” he said, his voice twanging with an exaggerated Southern drawl.
I dropped into one of the metal chairs.
“Welcome to Afghanistan,” the teenager announced, his enthusiasm somewhere between a used car salesman and an actor in a bad high school play. “Kandahar airfield to be specific. We call this building. the Taliban Last Stand, or TLS for short.”
He paused, scanned the crowd for any flicker of reaction. Blank faces stared back.
“Yes,” he said, pushing on, puffing up his chest. “This is where the Taliban took their last stand. Right here, in this very room. The enemy wouldn’t lay down their arms until the brave pilots of my United States Air Force bombed this building and forced the evil Taliban cowards to surrender.” He straightened his shoulders back like he’d personally delivered the victory. “Yes, right here is where we won the war in Afghanistan. Now we’re just cleaning up.”
Again, he searched for applause or cheers, but all he got was the faint shuffle of boots and a couple of coughs.
I leaned back in my chair. Tried to picture the scene—the shouts, the gunfire, the explosion ripping through walls. But all I imagined was myself tangled in the wreckage. A shadow amongst shadows. A nameless casualty.
The PA system crackled to life.
“Rocket Attack. Rocket Attack. Rocket Attack,” a clipped robotic voice said in a faint British accent.
The teenager dropped on the stage. His microphone clattered on the floor. Feedback squealed through the air.
“Get down,” he shouted, his earlier bravado gone. “Stay down. Cover your heads.”
I slid off my chair and pressed my face to the gritty floor. Around me, others did the same. Flies bit my neck.
I waited for the explosion.
But it never came.
After a moment, the teenager pushed himself up and brushed dirt from his sleeves. “Get to the bunkers,” he said. “Wait for All Clear.”
I got to my feet. A current of bodies swept me towards the doors and into the night.
Outside, the air hit my face, hot with the stink of an open sewer. Rows of cement bunkers, topped with green sandbags, squatted in a gravel lot. Narrow slats marked their entrances.
I ducked into one, settled cross-legged against the wall, and rested my rifle on my lap. Inside, the air was cooler but stagnant. Faceless shadows drifted past. Boots bumped by hips.
“What if a rocket hits the bunker?” someone asked.
“Tell me again how the Taliban surrendered,” someone else shouted.
Grunts and a few low chuckles answered.
I let my hand drift to the floor. My fingers brushed across the surface. Gravel scraped my skin, then aluminum shards, then something slick and sticky. Then a squirming mass writhed up my knuckles. I yanked my hand back, shaking off whatever it was.
My eyes adjusted to the dim light. The ground shifted into a graveyard of refuse. Rotted apple cores, crumpled candy wrappers, broken glass, faded condoms. Ants swarmed the trash, carving away scraps and hauling them into hidden tunnels.
I watched them work. Their lines unbroken. Tiny scavengers burdened with pitiful treasures.
Maybe that’s all I was. Another rummager, searching for scraps of meaning I could carry home. Stories of heroism. Fragments of glory. Something to tell those men in their tight ties and women in their shabby skirts when they asked me what I’d done with my life. Something to tell myself.
I reached down, pressed my fingernail on an ant. Its shell splintered. The line of its brethren buckled, scattered, reformed. They marched on, as if nothing had happened.
Somewhere outside, another rocket sliced through the air. A soundless arc of metal and fire. Its explosion bloomed far away, too distant to matter.
But compressed inside that bunker, the world shrank until it fit in the palm of my hand. Just gravel, glass, and ants.
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Don Mateer is a veteran of Afghanistan. He now lives in Oregon. His previous work was published in Line of Advance Literary Journal. He is currently working on a novel.
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