I

1. 

I could see the sound, even if I couldn’t hear it: The rasp and click of a machine-gun bolt sliding into position. The helicopter crew chief was also the door gunner, and he’d just made the weapon ready to fire. Even though I was wearing earplugs, and the pulse of the chopper was thrumping through my skull, I knew the sound the gun was making. I’d heard it hundreds of times. The down-rush of air increased around us, and I felt my stomach lurch with the lift. I forced a smile. There I was, just a middle-aged, middle-class city boy from the American Middle West, dressed in backpacker’s mufti: hiking boots, tan cargo pants, a sweat-wicking blue-collared shirt. No going home now. 

 

2.

Operation Desert Storm started about 30 days after I graduated from journalism school, in the winter of 1990. I hadn’t started looking for a job because I’d been told that I’d be required to pay back the taxpayers for my ROTC scholarship by serving four years of active duty. I didn’t know it then, of course, but there’d been a mix-up with my paperwork. Instead of active-duty, I got a minimum of eight years in the Army Reserve or National Guard. After college graduation and pinning on the gold bar rank of a second lieutenant, I went to Signal Officer Basic Course, Fort Gordon, Georgia. There, I spent six months attending lectures about Army radios and computers. If I had been an enlisted soldier in Iraq, I might’ve returned home sooner. The ground operation in Desert Storm was over in 100 hours. Instead, I graduated from Fort Gordon in September 1991 and started looking for a civilian job. I swore I’d never go back to Iowa, but I ended up settling there. The war was over.

 

3.

In 2010, I was deploying to Afghanistan, assigned as the knowledge management officer of the Iowa Army National Guard’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry “Red Bull” Division (2-34th BCT). The job was one part computer network technician, one part efficiency expert, one part organizational librarian. For two years, my family and I had known about my pending deployment. We had prepared for everything except this: On the final weekend drill before federal mobilization, my unit was loading baggage onto a flatbed semitrailer parked at the armory in Boone. “Everybody throw your duffel bags on the truck! Uh, Brown? Not so fast ...” Uncle Sam had changed his mind. I was not going to Afghanistan. Instead, I was getting retired. 

 

II

1.

I am not a gun person. I do not come from gun people. My father was an active-duty Air Force navigator who had enlisted during the Vietnam War. My mother was a former high school Spanish teacher. We moved every four years or so, with assignments in places like California, Japan, and Florida. Our last assignment was Ohio. When I was in fourth grade, living in Beavercreek, Ohio, my parents inadvertently signed me up for what turned out to be a hunting safety class sponsored by the Jaycees. Many of the kids in my neighborhood were participating, and my parents wanted me to fit in. At the end of the course, the top shooters were eligible to compete on the club’s air-rifle marksmanship team. I loved it—made the team two years in a row. Then, we had to move.

 

2. 

I learned to fire while prone, sitting, kneeling, and standing. I learned to breathe, to hold the breath at a halfway point, and to slowly squeeze the trigger. I learned to treat every weapon as if it were loaded, and to never point a weapon at something you do not intend to shoot. After that, I never played with toy guns the same way. Now, from the deck of my suburban home in Central Iowa, I can occasionally hear the sound of small-arms fire from the nearby National Guard post. It sounds like ripping stitches. I am not a gun person, but there are times I ache to cradle a rifle. It is a phantom pain. To echo the chant from Boot Camp: There are many rifles, and once, one was mine. 

 

3.

Soldiers qualify with a rifle at least once a year. Despite the interchangeability of parts, each weapon is different. And, despite the uniformity of training, each soldier is different. If you are issued a new weapon—one that you’ve never shot before—you must ensure that it is accurate, and customized to you. First, move the front and rear sights to a factory-specified neutral point. This is called “mechanical zero.” Then, fire at a special paper target placed at a twenty-five-meter distance. After firing two groups of three rounds each, begin to adjust your front and rear sights. The adjustments are based on where each shot-group has hit the target, counting the clicks for up/down and left/right. Repeat this process, groups of three rounds at a time, until you have successfully fired five consecutive rounds within the 3-centimeter center of the target’s human silhouette. Maximum number of rounds to “zero” your weapon is 18. The minimum number of rounds is six. Your final settings—the cumulative numbers of clicks up/down and left/right—are called your “battle-sight zero.” 

III

1.

In the second grade, I was temporarily removed from the Talented and Gifted program at Ocean Breeze Elementary in Cocoa Beach, Florida. Students in the program had extra library privileges, but I lingered too long one day looking for books written by C.B. Colby. They were picture books, really. Each page featured a half-page, black-and-white, government-issue photograph, along with about 150 words of caption. My mother urged me to find better and more substantial books to read, but I still gravitated toward Colby titles such as “Leatherneck,” “Our Space Age Army,” and “The Signal Corps Today.” There was even one called “The National Guard.” During my search that day, my teachers somehow lost me in the stacks. The class left the library without me. I was AWOL.

 

2.

I didn’t realize that, in addition to paying for my education and giving me a part-time—and sometimes full-time—job, Uncle Sam would issue me a lifetime of war stories. Instead of “Once upon a time,” war stories start with “And there I was . . . .” War stories are like tales about hunting and fishing. They’re nearly always equal parts you-had-to-be-there, bull-roar-and-embellishment, and this-really-happened. There were plenty of laughs, and just as many times it sucked. Through the Iowa Army National Guard, I received stories of service during tornadoes, blizzards, and floods. There were self-made disasters, too. I lost command of my platoon when I was a second lieutenant, after only a few months of uniformed service and my first-ever written After Action Report. The Army is a learning organization, and it uses such reports to improve its training and operations. Every AAR addresses what was supposed to happen, what did happen, and what changes should be made in order to increase efficiency or effectiveness. I had composed my platoon’s report neatly on a typewriter, which apparently impressed my company commander. He stapled my report—unread and unedited—to his own, unaware of my report’s candor, and sent the package to the battalion commander. And there I was, a couple of weeks later, transferred to the battalion staff for what I came to call “reeducation.”

 

3.

After I got dropped off the brigade deployment list in June 2010, I still had about six months to go before my mandatory, twenty-year retirement. I was put on temporary active-duty orders and sent to Camp Shelby, Mississippi. There, I helped my former unit conduct forty-five days of federal training prior to its shipping out for Afghanistan. Still part of the tribe, I got to see my friends a few more times. They lived in barracks and ate in the chow hall, while I stayed in a hotel and ate in restaurants. I had free time and a rental car. Camp Shelby is near Hattiesburg, home of the University of Southern Mississippi. One sleepless night, a random Internet search revealed this happy coincidence: The library there maintains the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection—and the personal papers of C.B. Colby. In the days to come, over a couple of extended lunch hours, I went AWOL again.

 

IV

1. 

Second-graders take Old Testament God pretty literally, and his “Thou shalt not kill” seemed to be at odds with following my father into military service. Besides, my classmates warned, when you join the Marines, you have to strip down to your underwear in front of nurse—a fact that C.B. Colby’s “Leatherneck” had failed to disclose. According to historical documents once posted on my parents’ refrigerator, I subsequently narrowed my career prospects to “rock scientist” and “space doctor.” Then, in a library book, I found a black-and-white photograph of a soldier looking through a pair of binoculars at a patch of desert. The caption said he was a peacekeeper working for the United Nations. I had discovered a potential loophole to the whole no-killing rule: I could join the military, but I wouldn’t have to kill people.

 

2.

The communications battalion called on a Friday in 2003 and told me to pack my bags. They were mobilizing for Iraq, and they needed every company-grade Signal officer in the state. They called me back on Monday and told me that, over the weekend, the unit had been reconfigured. They now had one too many officers, and I hadn’t made the cut. I was officially the last Signal captain left in the state of Iowa. Were any other Iowa units set to deploy without an assigned communications guy, I was guaranteed to be “voluntold” to go with them. To my surprise, I ended up transferred to a deploying infantry unit—foot soldiers trained to close with, engage, and destroy the enemy, rather than technicians trained to provide clear and consistent digital telephone service. The grunts were in for a surprise of their own, however: Rather than ship out to Iraq, Iowa’s 1st Battalion, 133rd Infantry Regiment (1-133rd Inf.) was mobilized for a six-month rotation to the Sinai Peninsula. A multinational force there monitors the border between Egypt and Israel in order to maintain the peaceful conditions created by the 1979 peace treaty. My inner second-grader was delighted. Instead of United Nations blue berets, we wore orange Stetsons. On our days off, we climbed Mount Sinai. We visited the Sea of Galilee. We saw the pyramids. Blessed, indeed, were the peacekeepers.

 

3.

Despite the occasional easy life in Egypt—or maybe because of it—some of the infantry grunts found themselves going a little nuts. They had joined the Army to be trigger-pullers, and there was a perfectly good war happening a few countries adjacent. Instead, armed only with binoculars, they stood watch in remote desert observation posts for weeks at a time, looking at passing aircraft, trucks, and boats. The mission was to “observe and report.” We were the Neighborhood Watch. See something, say something. It was meant to be boring—“uneventful” was the outcome most desired by diplomats. We were limited to using technologies that dated from the late 1970s, when the peace treaty had been signed. No night-vision goggles. No frequency-hopping digital radios. We did have our rifles, but our on-site emergency ammunition was sealed up in small, red wooden chests. At one squad-sized observation post, out in the middle of the desert, some joker stenciled the words “Pandora’s Box” on the ammo container—open at your own risk. A few years after the mission in Egypt, a memo showed up in our individual personnel files. Technically, we’d been deployed to the same theater of war as the soldiers who were sent to Iraq, but no one would’ve called us veterans of combat. Still, our unit had been retroactively authorized a “Shoulder Sleeve Insignia-Former Wartime Service.” In other words, I got a “combat patch” for peacekeeping duty.

 

V

1.

Nearly every day in journalism school, I wore a khaki correspondent’s jacket from Banana Republic. During the Gulf War, my heroes were CNN’s Peter Arnett and CBS’s Bob Simon—guys who had made their reputations in Vietnam and were still on the job in Iraq. I daydreamed of following in their sandy boot steps and wearing a baby blue flak vest—a magazine article I’d clipped said reporters should avoid looking like soldiers. After Fort Gordon, however, I went back to Iowa and never left. My first job was at a weekly newspaper in Osceola, the seat of Clarke County, pop. 4,164. Later, in the state capital of Des Moines, I edited “how-to” magazines for the company that has published Better Homes and Gardens since 1922. Most of my military career consisted of one weekend a month, two weeks a year, plus disasters and deployments. Occasionally, I’d pull a few months of active-duty as a “lessons-learned integrator,” producing After Action Reports for the Iowa Army National Guard. In the Army, a “lesson” is an insight gained through experience. A “lesson learned” is an insight gained through experience that results in a change in individual or organizational behavior. A lesson learned is not considered “integrated” until it is shared with others.

 

2.

There was a problem regarding my mandatory retirement date. For months, the brigade personnel section had assured me I would still be required to deploy to Afghanistan, even though my twenty years would be up halfway through the deployment. “Nobody retires halfway through a mission,” I was told. “Although we might bake you a cake.” At each level of military rank, you’re required to successfully complete weeks or even months of training. I had mismanaged my Army career, however, and hadn’t kept up with my military schooling. I had been a captain for too long. The Army uses an “up-or-out” promotion system. If you don’t make the next rank within a certain time period, you’re out of the Army. I’d go to Afghanistan, and, one year later, as soon as my boots hit the tarmac back in Iowa, it’d be “Thank you for your service. Have a nice day.”

 

3.

Artist and author Carroll Burleigh “Kip” Colby published his first book in 1951, at the age of forty-seven. By the end of his career, he had had written more than eight-five titles about the military, history, science, and the outdoors, and sold more than three million books. He was a Boston art school graduate, an aviation magazine editor, and an officer in the U.S. Air Force Auxiliary—the Civil Air Patrol. He earned a “war correspondent” shoulder patch for duty that apparently wasn’t too dangerous, covering Air Force operations in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, for Popular Science Monthly. At the peak of his popularity, to auditoriums packed with schoolchildren, he’d play audio recordings of mountain lions and demonstrate how to fire a flintlock. At one such event, he told the kids: “I don’t know how a guy could write about guns unless he shoots them.”

 

VI

1.

It was like stepping on a landmine. It was December 2009, and I was still in uniform. The staff was sitting at a horseshoe-shaped conference table in the war room in Boone, Iowa, brainstorming names to fill remaining positions in the brigade headquarters. There are approximately 10,000 people in the Iowa National Guard, and we were taking nearly one-third of them. Reading down his list of open jobs, the colonel wondered aloud what a “battle command knowledge officer” was. I’d answered without thinking, having just researched the topic for a weekday lessons-learned job. The colonel knew me from Egypt. If there had been a landmine, I would have heard a click. Instead, there was a three-second pause and then a smile from the colonel. I instantly knew where I was headed. That evening, I told my wife I’d inadvertently volunteered for Afghanistan.

 

2.

In the largest deployment of its citizen-soldiers since World War II, the Iowa National Guard moved more than 3,000 people halfway around the world. The mission was to “clear, hold, and build”: Clear their assigned areas of bad guys; hold the ground to prevent further insurgency; and help the Afghan government build infrastructure, services, commerce, and rule of law. As a soldier and as a citizen, I wanted to believe in that mission. I didn’t want it to be a waste of life or time—whether for me, my friends, or my nation. I started writing a journal. If nothing else, I wanted to be able to tell my kids what had been so gosh-darn important that I had to be gone for so much of their young lives. Later, after I learned didn’t have to go as a soldier, I bought my own bulletproof body armor, and spent $68 and all of my wife’s airline miles to go to Afghanistan. I stenciled “Press” on my Kevlar helmet, and put in a request to embed with my old unit as civilian media. I’ll admit that I was more a war tourist than a combat correspondent—more C.B. Colby than Edward R. Murrow—but I wanted to get downrange. I wanted to see things for myself. I wanted to see how the story might end.

 

3.

I didn’t go to Afghanistan to see the elephant or to hear shots fired in anger. I went because my buddies went, because I wanted to share in their stories and bring them back. I also went because there simply had been too many coincidences along the way to ignore. There were the sudden reappearances of childhood dreams and heroes, the arbitrary magic of botched paperwork, and a reconnection to the yogic serenity of the shooting range. And there I was ... A middle-aged, middle-class, city boy from Iowa, now stuck between ground and sky, smack dab in the middle of historical events, and in the company of friends. Things had gotten very Zen. I had chosen a middle path. I had found myself at war; I was not in conflict. Buffeted in the air, I focused on my breath. I was centered. Zeroed. And on target.