The Foreign Service Journal, October 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2015 31 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. I wish a dust storm had blown up out of nowhere, causing all flights to be canceled. I wish the outcome had been different. I wish I had been killed instead. But I somehow did survive, alone among the living. The next day I attended the ramp ceremony for my col- leagues, accompanying their remains on the long journey home. We started with five flag-draped aluminum boxes in Kandahar and added four more in Bagram, bringing the American death toll for that day to nine. The song played at the Bagram ceremony was “Abide with Me” rather than “Amazing Grace.” There was yet another ramp ceremony when we landed in Frankfurt, a chaplain entering into the belly of the military aircraft and offering a prayer. Prior to our arrival at Dover, the control tower responded to our request for landing by announcing to all the airplanes swirling above Chesapeake Bay that dark morning: “Cleared for landing: American heroes coming home.” Three days later, I returned to Kandahar for the remaining 20 weeks of my tour. But I have never quite left Afghanistan behind, and probably never will. w At odd moments random memories from that year return unprompted: the rush of hot air through an open Black Hawk door; the winter fires from encampments below; the taste of cardamom tea in a musty government office in Kandahar; the smell of roses in the small garden outside; the dust kicked up by a Special Forces platoon returning in off-road vehicles at dusk to Tarin Kot; the gentle rustle of the wind blowing through a stand of pine trees on a lonely hill in Zabul; the bril- liant night sky above Alexander’s Castle in Qalat. Always I recall the awful finality of that single bugler playing “Day Is Done” to conclude yet another memorial service, for yet another young American soldier dying far away from home. It is impossible to ever forget those few forlorn notes, echo- ing hauntingly across the Horn of Panjwai, off a brown and desolate mountaintop above a remote and now-abandoned military outpost, somewhere in southern Afghanistan. n