The damn sand is starting to annoy me. I’ve been here nine months. Most of the others are out for seven months at a time. But I guess I’m out of luck. One more month, and I get to go back to the States. They’re not making me go to Germany but to Virginia, Marine Base Quantico.

Virginia is far enough away from San Diego, but that actually isn’t on my mind. I’m over Mac. Yes, truly. Once and for all. I’ve deleted her from my brain. Yeah, that’s it.

I call Shane, but he doesn’t pick up. Automatically, my fingers dial Carey’s number.

“Hunter?” he asks as soon as the call goes through.

“Yeah. How’s it going?”

“Fuck, Hunter! How could you go that long ignoring us? Mac had her baby yesterday!”

I hang up, as if my fingers are acting of their own accord.

What did he just say?

Mac had a baby? Mac was pregnant?

The crushing feeling is enormous. Deep inside me, there must have been a glimmer of hope that we would make it one day, Mac and me. But now she has a fucking baby with my dad. Fantastic. Technically speaking, the kid’s my half brother or sister. I should be happy about that, right?

Instead, I feel a profound terror inside me. Dad got my girl pregnant.

Not my girl, I have to remind myself. She never will be now. I’ve lost her forever.

I put my head in my hands and wonder how I managed to ruin my life like this. I gave up FORECON to get far, far away from Mac. And I don’t have Mac because she’s my dad’s girlfriend. I’m not talking to my brother—my best friend—because he’s on Mac’s, not mine. I haven’t spoken to Killian in ages, either, not since Joey died. That life seems so far away I can’t even remember what it’s like.

Over here, everything is surreal. The moon dust covers everything, making everything look the same. There must have been beauty here before, but now things look bleak. We know what we’re fighting for. We’re fighting to make the world a little safer, to make sure our women and children at home are a little safer, and for our brothers who have died in battle, so they didn’t die in vain.

But after nine months, you start to wonder how naive you were to come here. Did I actually think this was a great big round of paintball? An adventure, even? I shake my head at my own stupidity. This is far from a safe, fun game. This is deadly serious. Especially for the Marines taking over the army’s task over here. We’re trained to work in water, not on land. But there’s no water here, as far as the eye can see.

Mac has a baby.

The thought haunts me. I wonder whether she and Dad got married. Is she my step mom now? Even if we’re not blood relatives, our relationship would be taboo now. I mean, it was already impossible before, so…

I don’t know how I could ever have pretended to myself that I was over Mac. After just three seconds of talking to Carey, all the numbness I’d worked so hard to grow over the past months was gone. I’m back inside our last phone conversation—her sobs, her tears, her begging voice saying no. Why didn’t I let her talk?

And then I realize—she would have already been pregnant six months ago. And it makes sense. That was the reason she sobbed on the phone. She didn’t want to tell me she was pregnant. Good thing I didn’t let her talk after all. At least, that way, I was able to feel some inkling of hope over the past six months. But now? Now I know for sure that it’s over. Forever. What am I going to do? What the hell am I going to do?

* * *

Each day here is like every other. Like Groundhog Day. And that’s what we call it. The groundhog days. We go on missions for days at a time in full battle rattle—meaning our full gear—which weighs about fifty pounds. If we get involved in fighting action somewhere, they send us support from the air, or throw down speedballs—bags containing ammunition and drinking water to replenish our reserves.

“Fuck, man, nine months! My hand’s sore,” grumbles Pitbull, the new guy sent here to replace T-Rex. Nobody’s been wounded since that day, which makes things easier for all of us, as we’re not constantly reminded of our own mortality.

There are actually other military branches on this base that rarely have to leave it, but the Marine Infantry—that’s us—is out doing the hard work. Still, none of us would want to change that. We’re all just happy the constant missions don’t allow us time to think. For example, Spider just heard that his girlfriend slept with his brother. After that, he wanted to blow something up. Luckily for him we’re in the middle of a war here, and his wish might actually be granted.

And Jumbo, his grandma died, and it’s eating him up that he can’t be with his family. Fire’s son was born just before our mission started, and he’s mad with longing for him. As for Pitbull? I have no idea. The guy gives me the creeps. He’s got a really disturbing psychotic look to him.

But the rest of us, we don’t want to be inside our heads all day long. We’re happy to be doing something. Otherwise, we’d go crazy.

“We’re all the same,” Fire says.

“I bet Florida’s never fucked a woman in his life,” chimes in Pitbull.

Florida is the youngest on our team. He has such a baby face we all wonder whether he’s even old enough to be here.

“Leave him alone,” Spider says. It’s normal for us to mess with each other through crude jokes, but Pitbull’s jokes tend to end badly. Florida’s kind of an introverted guy, so it’s definitely better to stop things early.

“Just sayin’.” Pitbull grins. “When I get home, I’ll fuck for an entire week, let me tell you. My balls are blue and ready to burst.”

“Thanks for sharing,” Jumbo mutters.

“He doesn’t have any balls,” Spider throws in.

We laugh before beginning to make our way through the village. A group of children comes toward us, laughing and playing, wanting to touch us. My natural reaction would be to start joking around with them. But over here, you learn not to trust anybody. As soon as you get distracted, you’re giving people room for attack. Especially here, where there’s tons of enemy fighters with IEDs—bombs that show up out of the blue in any shape and size and tend to hurt us pretty badly. Over the last nine months, we’ve found IEDs in Coke cans, old boots—we even found one inside a toy ball. You gotta give it to them—they’re creative motherfuckers when it comes to killing people.

“Hey, my balls are bigger than yours,” Pitbull protests. “They’re so fat your mom had to bring her neighbor so she could suck the other one.” I guess mom jokes will never grow old to guys.

“Fuck, man, your mom is so fat she can’t even kneel down for a blowjob anymore.” That’s Jumbo proving me right.

Suddenly, I realize everybody but us has disappeared from the road. That can’t be good.

“Spider,” I warn him.

“I know, man,” he says, giving us a signal to be vigilant.

Jumbo contacts HQ to get backup from the air. With every step, we scan the ground, the surrounding houses, every grain of dust. Normally, we’d go get cover in one of the houses, but here, any house could be a deadly trap. We need to get out of the village.

I hear a slight buzzing sound. “Spider!” I shout at the same moment Pitbull yells, “Oh, shit!”

My eyes fly in the direction he’s looking, and I spot three men firing a rocket launcher.

“Get down!” I scream, and everybody tries to get cover. But it’s like things are moving in slow motion. With that much gear, you just can’t move fast.

When the rocket goes off, I get hit by the pressure wave and thrown several feet. I hit the ground hard, jump up, and open fire on the T-men. From the other side of the junction, more shots are fired, so at least one of our team is still alive. Before they can launch a second rocket, we’ve killed them.

“Spider!” I call while I turn, keeping an eye on my surroundings. Eyes peeled, I slowly move toward my comrades. I reach Pitbull first. Half of his face is missing. He’s not moving. I don’t want to kneel down and feel his pulse because we don’t know whether the three men were the only ones here. Who fired the shots?

Florida! He comes over to me, gesturing that he’ll give me covering fire. I kneel down beside Pitbull and reach for his pulse. Nothing. Moving on, Florida and I reach Spider, who’s moaning, blood coming from his mouth. Fuck! His stomach’s bleeding, too. It looks bad. Jumbo is unresponsive but breathing. Fire is missing both legs.

And the rest of our teammates are dead.

We hear the helis, and I contact them with Jumbo’s radio. They have to land to take the injured men on board. I’m highly alert, but at the same time, I feel like I’m in a trance. I can’t believe this happened. Who wasn’t careful enough? Who made the fatal mistake? This fucking village should’ve been clear—otherwise we wouldn’t have come here with such a small team.

The Birds come, and more Marines jump out to help us recover the injured and the dead. On board, we start giving people first aid. But for Pitbull and two others, help comes too late.

We still need to keep functioning. We cannot allow ourselves to break down yet. I squeeze Spider’s arm, one of the few places where he isn’t burned or bleeding. What a nightmare. What a goddamn nightmare.

Back at Camp Leatherneck, Spider, Jumbo, and Fire are taken to the CSH, the Combat Surgical Hospital. As soon as they’re stable, they’re flown to Ramstein. I can’t even imagine what it must be like for Fire. To lose both legs… I can’t stand the thought of it. It’s too horrible.

“Killer, they want to debrief us,” Florida says quietly. I can’t believe only two people are left unharmed. We were a team of eight. Now it’s just Florida and me. I look at the wounds covering each of our bodies. I guess we weren’t totally unharmed. But they’ve all been treated, and they weren’t bad, considering. Florida has a gash on his forehead, but no signs of a concussion.

We’re picked up by two other men who are supposed to accompany us to the debriefing. When we get there, we salute our superiors and are told to explain what happened. As we’re in the military, it’s more a sprint than a jog. Questions are fired like bullets, and we fire answers back like a reflex.

No, sir, we only noticed a minute before that something was about to happen. Yes, sir, they caught us cold. No, sir, all three of them were eliminated.

“Sergeant Tilman, you saw them first?” a general asks me.

“No, sir, I heard a buzzing sound and told our commander. The same moment Corporal Davis saw them, sir.”

“How do you know?”

“He shouted ‘fuck,’ and we all looked in the direction they were coming from, sir.”

“And what happened next?”

“Sir, we saw that the rocket-powered grenade was going to be fired any second and tried to find cover, sir.”

“Did you find cover?”

“No, sir. When the grenade hit, I was caught by the pressure wave, sir.”

“You were not injured?”

“No, sir.”

“What happened to the others?”

“Sir, I guess they couldn’t find cover fast enough, sir. As soon as I was back up on my feet, specialist Tyson and I fired at the Taliban. He gave me covering fire so I could examine our comrades, sir.”

They’re quiet for a moment, like they’re going through it again to see whether it all fits together.

“Sergeant Tilman. Specialist Tyson. Before you go out again, you are going to see a therapist. Only once he declares you fit will you be assigned another team. Step away.”

We salute and leave the room. Great. I know it helped Carey to talk about things, but I’m not Carey. I bet once I start I won’t be able to stop, and then I’ll end up talking about things I’m not ready to talk about. But the military has learned a lot in its storied past. Some people came back cripples from the Vietnam War, but those who still had limbs were wounded by the terrors they’d seen and suffered with post-traumatic stress syndrome. Studies right after the war showed about fifteen percent of veterans were suffering from PTSD. Studies done twenty-five years after the war showed that four out of five soldiers reported they were suffering symptoms.

Back then, a lot of it remained untreated. Today, about fifty percent of victims still don’t seek help. Especially soldiers, who often feel they have to be tough and strong, shining examples of masculinity. But I guess this is better than being one of the eight thousand soldiers who commit suicide every year.

* * *

“Sit down, Sergeant,” says Major Sawyer, my therapist.

I sit in the armchair. I don’t like the couch. It looks like too many soldiers have confided in him there. Which feels like a bad sign.

“Tell me why you’re here.”

I put both hands on my neck. “We were on a mission in what we thought was a pacified area. My unit was attacked by enemy fighters. Three of our men died, and three were heavily wounded. Only two of us got out unharmed, sir.”

He nods. “You don’t have to be that formal in here. We don’t need to stick to military etiquette. It’s a protected space. Nothing you say in here is going to leave this room.”

Nodding, I release a long breath. I hadn’t realized how tense I’d been.

“How did you feel when your friends were wounded and killed?” Major Sawyer asks carefully.

The situation is freaking me out. Everything inside me rebels against the idea of telling this guy details of my emotional life. It’s nobody’s business what’s going on in my head. Still, at the same time, I know I don’t stand a chance at staying quiet. If I want to go back to active service, I need to cooperate. And I do want to. In spite of everything.

This war is not only about terrorists attacking the United States, it’s also for all our brothers who have already died in battle. We’re avenging them every day.

“Like a loser,” I finally admit.

“Why?”

It’s pretty obvious, but I indulge him. “Because I couldn’t help them. Because I got away unharmed while Fire lost both legs.”

“Were you standing close to the enemy fire?”

I shake my head. “No. Not as close as some others. I think Spider was closest.”

“What happened to Spider?”

I look at the floor. “He was hit in the stomach. There was blood everywhere. So much blood. It was coming from his wound, but also from his mouth and his ears. They operated on him and sewed him back together, but it’s looking bad.” I swallow. The idea that Spider may no longer be with us is abhorrent.

“How do you feel when you think about him? About your friend?”

I run my hand across my face and press my fingers against my temples. “Guilty. He’s a much better person than I am.”

“Why do you think that?”

I lean forward, putting my elbows on my knees. “Spider’s the kind of person who’s always there for you. You can fuck up a lot, and he’ll still be there to help you clean up the mess. He’s a great commander. He has a natural air of authority about him you just have to respect without him having to do anything about it.”

“Sounds like a good friend.”

I nod. “Yes, a very good friend. It kills me to know he’s on his way to Germany, and I might never see him again.”

“Have you ever lost a friend before?”

I’m quiet for a moment and think about Joey, and for some reason, that leads to thinking about my other friends, too—Devon, Killian. And Carey. Somehow, I’ve lost him, too.

“Yes.”

“Do you want to talk about that?”

I shrug. “Joey Montana was killed a few months ago. He was one of two friends I knew from boot camp. The other one, Killian, is at Force Recon now. We made it through BUD/S together. But we haven’t really kept in contact.”

“So you feel like you’ve lost him, too?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

“Friends we leave behind or grow apart from are not completely lost to us. We have a chance to get in touch with them again.”

“Even if something happened that makes it…impossible?” The major doesn’t know it, but I’m not talking about Killian anymore.

“Impossible is nothing. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. I know that sounds like an empty phrase, but it’s true.”

“What if I’m the reason they never want to be my friend again?”

“That’s easy. We can change if we want to.”

I nod, but that doesn’t really answer my question. “What if it breaks my heart to be in touch with this person?”

He looks at me for a moment. Behind his round glasses, his small eyes observe me closely as he says, “Why don’t you tell me what’s really on your mind?”

He’s got me. I look at my fingers. And that reminds me of Mac’s fingers, looking so tiny between mine.

“My brother Carey… There’s this girl. This woman, I mean. She’s my dad’s girlfriend. I fell in love with her. In the beginning, I thought it was just a crush, but the more I got to know her the more I fell for her.” I swallow and look at the floor, unable to look at him because I’m so embarrassed. My buddies were killed in war, and all I can think about is Mac and the fucked-up situation we’re in. And here I thought I was over her.

“I thought we had a chance,” I go on, “but…my dad loves her. And she loves my dad. My brother just told me she had a baby. So there’ll never be a chance for us now.” I stop talking for a moment, trying to contain my emotions. “It kills me to know she had a baby with somebody else. And it kills me to know that somebody is my dad. It kills me that she doesn’t want me.” I absentmindedly stare at the design in the wood floor. “And it kills me to know I’ve lost my little brother because of her.”

“Why?”

“He’s still living at home and keeping in touch with her. So I’ve shut him out of my life as much as I can. I don’t want to hear about her, don’t want to know anything about her. I can’t.”

“You don’t have to stop talking to your brother just because you don’t want to talk to her.”

“But what chance do I have? He loves her. Not like me, but like a brother loves his sister. She’s his best friend. She’s part of his life. He’ll talk about her.” Agitated, I run my hand over my short hair.

“So tell him not to.”

“You don’t understand. The last time I talked to him, the first words out of his mouth were about Mac having her baby. I can’t do it. It would drive me crazy. If I call him again, he’ll tell me something else about her. He won’t give me a chance to tell him not to talk about her.”

“Write him an email.”

“But my inbox is full. I don’t want to read what’s in there.”

“Emails from your brother?”

I nod. “And from her.”

“Okay, so create a new account. Write an email to your brother. Ask him not to talk about Mac the next time, not to tell her about your new email account.”

“You think?”

He nods slowly. “It’s clearly torturing you not to be in touch with one of the most important people in your life. I understand that you don’t see another chance to have a good relationship with Mac, but you can have your brother back.”

I need to ask. I hate that I’m such a pussy, but I need to ask. “What about Mac?”

He gives a little shrug. “Some people believe it’s better to keep the people you love in your life even if you cannot get exactly what you want from them.”

“What do you think?”

“That’s not important. What’s important is what you think. Do you believe you can keep Mac in your life if she’s happy with your father?”

I don’t even hesitate. “No.”

“So there’s your answer. As long as nothing about her relationship with your father changes, nothing is going to change about your relationship with her.”

“Even if it did change, it doesn’t mean we’d be together.”

“That’s true. We cannot change others. We can only change ourselves.”

“But how can I forget her?”

“You probably can’t. But you can learn to live with it.”

“How?”

“Take it one day at a time.”