ONE SLOW DAY AFTER CHOW, I googled “Japanese WWII holdouts.” On a Philippine island in 1945, as the war became desperate for the Japanese, Second Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda was ordered to take his three men into the jungle and come out for no one but his commanding officer. He and his men carried out raids and lived in the jungle for decades, all but Onoda eventually dying. He continued doing this for almost thirty years. Then, in 1974, as the Vietnam War was nearing its end eight hundred miles due west across the South China Sea, a Japanese backpacker found him, out there fighting World War II alone. True to his orders, Onoda refused to stand down unless relieved by the officer who had ordered him into the jungle. So the Japanese government actually tracked down the commander, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi, who was now an aging bookseller in Kyushu, and flew him to Lubang Island with an official set of orders relieving Onoda. Though he had effectively murdered a number of Filipinos living on the island, he was pardoned under the reasoning that he thought he was at war. He went home, quickly despaired at the sight of modern Japan, moved to Brazil, and became a cattle farmer. He died in January 2014, as I was packing my bags for Afghanistan.
Onoda’s war had lasted thirty-four years. Mine was less than seven months, but it was long enough to encompass the excitement and uncertainty of two rounds of Afghan elections, and a much-anticipated change of command at ISAF. I was also there during the second un-ending of the Second Iraq War. Sitting in the offices of another unit that mine worked with closely, I watched on the big screen tuned to cable news as the Iraq War went through its third beginning, and thought of the night in college in 2003 when I witnessed its first false ending, with President Bush on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln with a MISSION ACCOMPLISHED sign in the background. A decade later, I sat unsure what to say as the soldiers next to me, most of whom had served in Iraq, too, bitterly realized that their efforts had come to this, the emergence of ISIS. It was as though, in a war without two simple sides, war itself was going to win in the end. “The whole CENTCOM AOR5 is a dumpster fire,” one sighed.
My mind kept rotating around the question of whether there was any way at all to see the end of a war while it was being fought, or if you could only decide long afterward what had actually happened and when.
Accompanying my commander on a visit to Camp Leatherneck, structured like a giant checkerboard in Helmand Province, I saw plot after big square plot of land emptied. Just a few areas were still up and running, the rest taken back down to gravel, like abandoned industrial sites in South Bend, only much tidier because they had been removed with the characteristic thoroughness of the Marines. There, Afghans in the on-base “haji shops,” who had been selling carpets and scarves and pirated DVDs to coalition forces for a decade, were bracing for the disappearance of their livelihoods. In the south, Kandahar had even more shops, arranged on a square boardwalk designed to make you briefly forget that you were on an airbase in a war, noshing in your downtime on pizza or ice cream. But now the boardwalk storefronts were two-thirds empty, like at a dying mall back home.
One instinct would tell you to feel a little wistful, as you would naturally feel when seeing anything built with great effort come to a slow end. Then another instinct would smack you awake, as you sensed the wrongness of feeling sentimental about the end of a war. But this guilt would recede as you noticed that the war, itself, was not the thing that was ending. I’d sit in a meeting about how to posture our unit for the coming retrograde of troops, thinking the war was indeed pretty much over. Then I’d hear a briefing about the escalating count of Afghan National Security Forces killed that week, and wonder if our entire presence wasn’t just a phase in a continuum of warfare that, to Afghans, did not begin when we invaded and would not end when we left.
AND THEN, ONE DAY IN SEPTEMBER, the dust, noise, beauty, and danger of Afghanistan were all in my past. A C-17 lifted me and about a hundred other Americans off Afghan soil for the last time. As our graytail eased up from the Kandahar tarmac, there was no applause, no jubilation from the tired men and women aboard. I tried to work myself into some emotion about it, to savor the moment or something, but it was just a flight.
The next day I sat with Lieutenant Jason McRae, my friend and battle buddy from training, in a surprisingly nice air-conditioned trailer made out to be a coffee shop amid the bleached bonescape that is Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. Some six months earlier, I had walked at his side toward our barracks after the last hugs of the friends-and-family send-off at Camp McCrady. We both kept our eyes forward, but I could feel the restraint on Jason’s part as he avoided looking back at his bewildered two-year-old toddling after us, not comprehending why his father was walking away, crying and confused as his mother scooped him up to carry him in the opposite direction.
Now our war was over; it was time to go home. But time had no real meaning at this stopover base, washed in sunlight and jet lag. We all carried our personal time zone around us. You might be on your way to breakfast at the twenty-four-hour chow hall and pass by a couple airmen on crew rest drinking beer in the morning sun before they go to bed. You might wake up uncontrollably at three in the morning and go to the running track to blow off energy—and find a dozen others working out there. Everyone on our side of the base had some combination of Germany or Iraq or Bagram or America standing twenty-four to forty-eight hours in their past and future. But the Navy had its way of signaling that time still existed, and that our war really was now finished: starting today, Jason reminded me, we no longer drew imminent danger pay.
Thumbing through his iPhone, Jason read a headline aloud: suicide attack in Kabul. Over there, when I heard an explosion, the quickest way to learn what was going on was usually to search #kabul on Twitter or “Kabul attack” on Google, so I did the same now. I learned that it was near the ISAF compound where I’d lived and worked, possibly on the road to the airport. Two Americans dead, no names yet. I quickly emailed the people I considered most likely to have been driving there at that time, and they promptly wrote back to confirm they were alive, and bored. It wasn’t until the next day that they released the identities of the casualties—and their pictures.
Major Donahue had been with me on a trip to deliver clothing and school supplies to an orphanage. It was a volunteer mission, and everyone involved was motivated by a desire to do good but also, at least in my case, aching for more real encounters with regular Afghans even if it meant extra trips outside the wire. When we arrived a contingent of Afghan Boy Scouts came to unload the supplies, and we spent the morning with them, a group of orphans, and the NGO workers at the site. The orphans were like any schoolkids, playful and lively and noisy. I gave them my camera to play with and by the time I had it back it was full of photos. The Afghan Scouts, who were older, polite, and a little reticent, showed us the facility and explained their scouting program. Old enough to observe Ramadan, they quietly refused the candy we had brought before agreeing to pass it out to the little kids. Not having actually spoken to anyone under the age of eighteen in months, for me it was a rare taste of normalcy, the best day of the deployment.
Someone took a photo of me and Donahue standing in a classroom with a group of the kids, relaxed and smiling as one of the scouts uses the wrist of another to show us how to tie some elaborate knot they had learned. Nothing about the photo (other than our uniforms, of course) suggests that it was taken in the context of a war. Now I looked at that same face, squared toward the camera in the serious and dignified look of a standard service portrait, alongside the text of a news story announcing his death. His war and mine had both ended, very differently, just one day apart.