The Foreign Service Journal, October 2015

30 OCTOBER 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL already well into her second overseas assignment. We talked briefly on the tarmac as we waited for our heli- copter against the early morning sun, the sky a perfect blue. This was Anne’s first trip to Kandahar, and we were meeting for the first time. She mentioned that during a recent vacation, she had cycled across Jordan. I also chatted with my translator, Nasemi, who was supporting a large extended family stretch- ing from New York to New Zealand. His own parents had only recently migrated to New Jersey. Within hours both Anne and Nasemi were dead. Two other civilian State Department employees—Abbasi, an Afghan- American working in the embassy public affairs section in Kabul, and Kelly Hunt, who headed our public affairs section in Kandahar—were injured, Kelly critically. Three soldiers walking beside us were also killed that day: Staff Sergeant Christopher Ward, a Floridian who led the protective detail; Sergeant Delfin Santos, the youngest of 17 children, born in the Philippines and raised in California; and Corporal Wilbel Robles-Santa, who grew up in Puerto Rico and left a wife and two young children behind. All three were born in 1988. I fell to the ground and rolled into a shallow ditch when I heard the first of two explosions. The engine block landed not far from where I had been standing. As I prepared to die, I wondered what my family would be told. Later, I held Anne’s hand and then Kelly’s hand, first as they were taken on stretch- ers to the nearest first aid station, and then as they were taken to a helicopter for the short flight to Forward Operating Base Apache for further treatment. I returned to Kandahar alone in the early afternoon, picked up by the same helicopter that had dropped the five of us off earlier in the day. “Is that it?” the crew chief asked, looking first at me and then at his flight manifest with its longer list of names. “Are you the only one?” Not a day goes by when I don’t relive what happened on that cloudless morning, recalling every moment as it unfolded, reliving endlessly what might have been.