Free Range International

Editors note:  This is the third entry of the Dalton Thomas Comes Home story.

I drove into town the next morning to pick up supplies for the horses and my dog, Tor Spay (which means “black dog” in Pashtu), who was due to arrive within the next 24 hours.  But first I hit Starbucks, aka “Fivebucks,” so that I could check my email.  I paused at the entrance because I was confronted with the image of every single person in the place staring into a computer or smart phone, which really creeps me out.  Seems to me every zombie movie worth a damn portrays them with glazed over eyes, oblivious to everything around them.  When life starts imitating zombie flicks, it should give us all pause.  Anyway, I cracked on, got my $5 cup of coffee, and set up at a little table in the corner with my back to the wall so I could keep an eye on the smart phone zombies just in case they got bored with their devices and turned their hungry attention to me.

I had an email in my inbox from Yahya Afridi, saying my dog should be delivered that day, Inshallah.  Tor Spay was my best friend and sometimes only companion when I was working out in East Butt Fuck Afghanistan.  That dog had my back like none other.  I knew I had to find a way to bring him home with me after he almost chewed the nuts off a local Afghan that made the mistake of throwing a rock at me just outside the FOB.

So, in high spirits, I spent the morning shopping and the afternoon mucking out the horse stalls.  A freakishly large snow storm was apparently heading our way and by late afternoon as I headed back to town to pick up some odds and ends, big, thick, wet flakes had started piling up in my yard.  I was elated to see a large dog crate sitting on my back porch when I returned.  But my elation quickly turned to concern, as I didn’t hear Tor Spay’s distinctive welcoming bark as I approached the crate.  Peering in, I could see that there was indeed a black dog inside, but the hulking beast left snoring on my front porch certainly wasn’t my Tor Spay.

I figured there had been some mistake.  They must have gotten the dog crates mixed up at the airport or something.  But there was no paperwork attached to the crate, no stamps or markings of any kind, which I thought strange.  The dog inside stirred, woke up, and gave a bit of a whine, so I opened the door, and out stepped the biggest Kuchi fighting dog I have ever seen.  In Afghanistan, the dogs that accompany the nomadic Kuchi people are legendary for their size and strength, making them much sought after as fighting dogs.  I could tell this one had been a fighting dog because his ears had been cut off, tail bobbed, and he had scars all over his muzzle and head.  The Afghans cut the ears and tails off fighting dogs so that the other dogs can’t use those appendages as leverage during a fight.  He must have seen a lot of time in the rings, as he was the oldest, ugliest, most beat up dog I’ve ever seen.  Have you ever seen a dog without ears?  It ain’t a pretty site.  Despite their fierce reputations, Kuchi dogs can be sweet and docile and this one seemed quite friendly, as I scratched him where his ears used to be.  I gave him some water and noted that he was missing a few incisors and his upper left canine.  Both his lower canine teeth seemed to be made out of cheap, dull steel.

At this point though, I was confused and starting to get pissed off.  As I watched the Kuchi dog devour several bowls of food and lap up about a gallon of water, his arrival was seeming less and less like a mistake the longer I thought about it.  There couldn’t be a lot of people in the state of Washington importing washed up Afghan fighting dogs.  I started to have the sneaking suspicion that Yahya had fucked the whole thing up and sent me the wrong dog.

After finishing his food and water, the Kuchi dog trotted past me into the house and proceeded to take a huge crap on the Afghan rug I had just unpacked.  He walked nonchalantly past me back to the porch, sat down, and started howling.

I could not believe it; I looked at the mess on my rug, out the window at the howling Kuchi dog, back at the carpet and did what any sane man would do, I popped open a beer.  Then I cleaned up the rug and got my burner out to give Yahya his “what the fuck?” phone call.

I cut straight to the chase, skipping the usual Afghan formalities of asking, “How’s your family? “How’s your health, yadda yadda.”

“Yahya, what the hell have you done with my Tor Spay?”

Given the time difference, I must have woken him up, as he sounded groggy and confused at first.  But I didn’t care, I needed to get this straightened out.

“Oh, Dalton, yes, hello my friend.  You got the dog today, yes?”

“I got a dog not my dog.  Where the fuck is Tor Spay, Yahya?”

“Dalton, Dalton my friend, I…I couldn’t send you Tor Spay.”

“Yahya,” I spluttered, “what do you mean?  You told me everything was good to go with the dog last week!  What is this fucking dog you sent me?”

He sounded hurt by my harsh tone.

“Dalton, please don’t worry, my friend, you got a very good dog.  I couldn’t send you Tor Spay so you got Tor Spay’s plar; a very famous champion.”

Yahya went on to explain that he had sent Tor Spay’s plar (father) to see if he could actually make it through customs, because my dog was a “special dog” and he didn’t want to risk sending him without first knowing if he could get a dog into America without it getting confiscated.  This was complete bullshit, as Yahya and I had discussed in detail the process for getting a dog sent from Pakistan to the U.S., and I had paid him $5,000.00 to cover all the costs of immunizations, quarantining, etc.  So, I asked him when my dog would arrive and was told it would cost another $5,000.00 for that to happen.  I told Yahya he was either going to send me Tor Spay, or I’d be on a plane to Pakistan next week to rescue my dog and knee cap him.  Threatening to kill him would be culturally tone deaf, as hill Pashtun are not afraid of dying, but they are terrified of being crippled.  He laughed and said there was no way I could get a visa.  I countered with a threat to put him on the JPEL and he laughed again saying the CIA could no longer fly drones into Pakistan, and besides how would I put him on any list when I didn’t even work for the government?

He thought I was joking about knee capping him.  I wasn’t.  Because I love that dog more than anything, otherwise I would not have spent $5,000.00 to have him shipped over.  Yayha assured me that he was still my good and best friend and that he could send Tor Spay back, if I gave him the freight money, but it would still be a difficult task because Tor Spay was now in the Miranshaw dog ludus.

I asked if a ludus was what I thought it was and yes, of course it was.  All Yahya’s uncles had seen Spartacus and with gladiators on the brain, they decided to turn their dog fighting operations into a professional dog ludus.  Yahya said that now they even brand the dogs that completed training with their own special logo.  He was about to receive another string of foul language and meaningless threats for branding my dog when my cell died.

The snow really started coming down at that point and the Kuchi dog was still howling away.  As I stepped onto the deck in an attempt to get him to shut up and come inside, the Kuchi dog stopped howling long enough for me to hear howling somewhere off in the distance.  It sounded like wolves calling back and I, having spent countless hours watching Nat Geo  (it was that or fucking cricket) on TV in Afghanistan, was well aware of how dangerous large packs of carnivores can be.  You spend a year watching lions and tigers and bears tearing the ass out of cape buffalo or baby elephants and then tell me you wouldn’t be a little freaked out by the sound of a pack of wolves.  Then the power died before I could charge my phone and I thought to myself, how could this day get worse?

I walked down to the barn to check on my two feral horses.  Earlier they had indicated they would tolerate me as long as I didn’t try to brush them down.  Now they seemed super skittish, clearly they wanted to get out of the barn and they kept looking at me like I was stupid for hanging around.  I made sure all the other exterior stall doors were lashed tight against the storm.  As I stepped out of the barn, I saw the Kuchi dog jet past me.  Horrified, I watched him clear the fence like a show horse, shooting out into the rapidly darkening pasture without breaking stride.  Why in God’s name did I ever let him out of the crate?  I don’t have a lot of close neighbors, but I shuddered to think of what that Kuchi dog could do to livestock, other dogs, or God forbid, a child.

But before I had much time to contemplate the potential lawsuits I might be facing, I heard frantic yelping and the Kuchi dog once again cleared the fence, heading straight back towards me.  Following close on his heels was a big fucking wolf.  With both animals bearing down on me, I had barely enough time to react.  I reached into my back pocket for my spare tire and threw it at the wolf as hard as I could when he was maybe 5 feet away.  It exploded off his forehead in a spray of crappy lite beer, and with a yelp he did a hasty 180 and galloped off to the southeast, disappearing into the snowstorm.  But I heard howling in the distance and figured I’d better get inside quick before the whole pack showed up.

Kuchi dog and I headed inside; I locked the door, looked outside at the driving snow and caught my breath.  Despite having just gone head to head with an alpha predator, I smiled.  I had been home the better part of a week stumbling about in a self-induced funk trying to figure out what to do next with my life.  Now I knew what I had to do, at least in the short term: it looked like me and Kuchi dog just might have to to do battle with a wolf pack, who may have been drawn to my farm by my two smelly feral horses.  The pack probably wouldn’t be too happy that I had nailed one of their members in the head with a beer can.

Kuchi dog was clearly raring for a fight, pawing and scratching at the sliding glass door.  The power had come back on, so I went down to my basement to take inventory of our weapons in case the wolves came back.  My old lady had cleaned me out in the divorce, so my arsenal consisted only of a rusty garden rake, my old Marine Corps E-tool, and a heavy-duty staple gun, which I shunted aside, as it would be worthless on animals with a thick coat. I grabbed the E-tool and headed back upstairs.  I checked my cell phone, discovering that it was now partially charged, but I had no bars.  The storm was probably screwing with my reception, which was never great to begin with out at my place.  Then the power went out again.

And that’s when the pack showed up.  I heard one of them slam into the back patio doors before being answered with vicious snarling and barking from Kuchi dog, who was now going nuts trying to get out of the house.  Kuchi dog smelled a fight and even at his advanced age, the instinct to fight back hadn’t left him.  The snow was coming down hard, the sun had set, and the power was out, so it was pitch black inside the house and out.  I managed to find my wind-up flashlight and gave it a couple of cranks before casting its beam out through the patio doors.  I could barely make out what appeared to be a half dozen black shapes pacing back and forth in front of my porch.

I was on my own, with no reliable form of communication, no power, and possibly trapped at the farm; if the storm went on for long enough, it would be days before somebody with a chain saw could cut me out of the driveway.  To top it all off, I was now being stalked by a hungry pack of wolves.  With the odds stacked against me, what I needed was what the military calls a force enabler to even the playing field.  Traditional force enablers come in the form of sniper teams or D7 bulldozers, but I needed to get creative.  Kuchi dog was still going ape shit at the door as I popped another beer and sat down at the kitchen counter to think.  And then it hit me, I had force enablers, in the form of about 30 2mg Xanax tablets, at least two ounces of state-issued primo weed, and a whole bunch of ground beef that I had picked up at the grocery store that day.

Few things can energize a man more than coming up with a cunning scheme.  I got out the meat, went down to the basement for a dozen of those large plastic feed pails the old lady never got around to recycling, and recovered the Xanax and dope.  I rolled up all 30 pills inside balls of hamburger, cut down the pails with my trusty Emerson CQ7 folder, put my high-speed speed E-tool in the corner and climbed into my brand new sleeping bag to wait the storm out.  If the wolves were still there in the morning, I had a plan.

I immediately feel into a deep and dreamless sleep.  The Kuchi dog woke me up before dawn.  The snow had stopped and it was quiet as a grave outside.  But then I heard it, the long, eerie wolf call I’d been dreading.  The pack was still outside somewhere, but at least they were no longer on my front porch.

The dog and I swung into action.  I cautiously opened the door and let Kuchi dog go scout the yard for me before carrying the feed buckets, and bait down to the barn.  We both went back for the Bud lite and my E tool.  I set the feed buckets in pairs around the three sides of the barn that were fenced in.  One bucket had the laced meatballs and the other was full of bud lite with reefer from the state dope clinic thrown in for good measure.  After tying up the Kuchi dog, I checked the area with binos from up in the hayloft.  I couldn’t see any wolves, so I trudged up to the house to get my new gas grill, hauled that inside the barn, fired it up and started cooking a giant rib eye steak for Kuchi dog and I.  If those damn wolves were still around, the smell would hopefully bring them right into my chemical ambush.

The dog made short work of his steak and was lying out of the floor of the hayloft, gumming the steak bone with what was left of his teeth, when I heard the wolves.  I spotted them trotting towards us from down wind.  As they drew closer, the Kuchi dog started barking savagely and straining at his tether.  I counted four wolves and they were all big, healthy-looking specimens.  I remembered once reading a Russian detective novel Wolves Eat Dogs and glanced over at the Kuchi dog just in time to see him disappear down the hayloft steps, trailing a frayed rope behind him.  I grabbed my E-tool and followed.

The horses were now making a ruckus as the wolves closed in and went right for the bait.  The alpha male hogged the food and beer closest to the southern side and the other three spread out and started in on the others around the barn.  I figured Kuchi dog and I would just sit there and wait till the wolves either buggered off after their feed or passed out from the tainted meat.  But I’d forgotten that you can’t keep a good fighting dog down, and Kuchi dog had other plans for those wolves.  He jumped over one of the empty stall doors, hit the outer door latch with his right paw, and having broken free of the barn, went after the lead wolf like a rocket.

The Kuchi dog, in his haste to get at the wolf had failed to give my chemical ambush a chance to work and the big wolf seemed to have all his senses when Kuchi dog attacked.  But there was no turning back now and the battle was on, my good Kuchi dog versus the evil wolf.  Despite being slightly smaller than the wolf, it looked like the old Kuchi dog was kicking the wolf’s ass but what do I know about dogfights? All I could see was a lot of flying fur and flashes of teeth.  Although Kuchi dog was holding his own, I knew the rest of the pack would soon join the fight, so I prepared to do what I could to help him out.  I locked the E tool into the 90-degree configuration and raised the shovel over my head.  I charged the wolf and threw all my 225 lbs into a downward swing that I was sure would decapitate that damn wolf.   In the split second before the shovel hit the wolf, I heard that little fucking devil voice in my head say, “hey, isn’t that shovel broken?” But it was too late.  The broken locking mechanism had failed in mid- swing; the flat of the shovel hit the wolf right on top of his thick wool-covered skull.  It bounced off the wolf and hit me square between the eyes.  I went out like a light.

Dalton Thomas posts the second  of I’m still not sure how many posts about coming home.

I didn’t sleep well on my third night home.  I gave up trying around 0500, made coffee and sat outside to watch the sunrise.  Just after 0800 the county sheriffs prowler climbed up the long gravel driveway and parked behind my rental.   The sheriff got out, about 6’3”, around my age, a little on the husky side, thinning blond hair, big friendly smile.  I liked him immediately.

“I’m from the government and here to help …you got another cup of coffee up there”?

“Sure, come on up “ I stuck my hand out and introduced myself.

“Ron Jackson, county sheriff, damn glad to meet you. Seen any zombies?

“Nope”

“How about psycho combat vets you seen any of them”?

“Not yet Sheriff, grab a seat and I’ll get us some coffee”.

We sat down on the back porch taking in the spectacular view of Mount Rainer.

“So Dalton, are you aware that physicians are obligated to contact local law enforcement if they think their patients are a threat to themselves or those around them?”

“Nope, but I’ll take your word for it Sheriff”.

“Yesterday I get an email followed by a phone call from the doctor you saw and he tells me that a guy, who has been Afghanistan for 8 years, and been blown up over 15 times, came to see him for sleeping pills.”

“I haven’t been blown up over 15 times Sheriff, I’ve never been blown up”.

“I can see that Dalton, I’m trying to tell a story here”  He gave me a sidelong glance like I was irritating him, I smiled, it was like talking to an old friend.

“So I asked the doctor if he thought you were dangerous, and he sez ‘how can he not be? Over 15 IED’s, eight years of Afghanistan, it is, in my professional opinion, impossible for him not to be severely damaged’.  I asked if he detected anything that would give him the impression you were a ticking time bomb near the end of his fuse, and he said you seemed normal. But then added that you can’t be normal, but seem normal, and that’s abnormal, so he used the most aggressive state treatment protocol on you and contacted me as required.”

“Is that really the law Sheriff”?

“Not really Dalton, the doctor wanted to put you into the system as a potential severe PTSD or TBI candidate.  If you committed a crime then his notes could be factored into the prosecution, at least that is the intent of a ‘policy’ recently approved by the state.  But a random doctors diagnosis has no standing in court and I have no obligation to pay any attention to him.  What he doesn’t understand, and what I’ve been explaining to the state attorneys office for years now, is the consequences of a report like that coming up in a background check for a job interview of a returned vet who has no real issues is a huge law suite.   We’ve had zero problems with the few returning vets we have around here but you’re now the third report I’ve received from the same doctor.  If I paid attention to the dumb ass we would have records on computer files and computers files migrate, right?”

“I guess”

“Take my word for it Dalton, if you email a file it has migrated”.

“Am I in some sort of database now”?

“Oh hell no, I’d  never put a report like that on our computers, I shred  them.  Sheriff is an elected office in this county and I’m not about to expose the taxpayers to litigation we could never win.  They’d vote me out of office and I’d have to get a real job; who wants to do that at our age?  The doctor can kiss my ass, I’m the Sheriff around here and have an obligation to protect the public purse, and mine too for that matter cause I’m loaded.”

“No kidding, how did you get loaded”?

“The wife, raises horses and now heads the family ranch, the property has been in her family for generations. Most wives of law enforcement officers are concerned their husbands will get hurt on the job, mine is afraid I’ll get sued.”

“Don’t you receive some sort of immunity when acting in your official capacity as sheriff?”

“Are you a lawyer Dalton? You’re kinda screwing up my  story here. Tell me your story now because I forgot where I was”

I laughed out loud; and headed back to the kitchen for more coffee.  The Sheriff called after to me.

“Your horses look like shit.”

“I think they’re feral, they won’t let me near them”.

“They won’t what?  Won’t let you near them?  Where the hell you grow up New York City?”

“On military bases in the south mostly”.

“And they didn’t teach you how to take care of horses”.

“Why would they”?

“I don’t know, I always thought the army had horses.”

“I was in the Marines, so was my Dad.”

I walked back outside with two fresh cups of coffee; “Know what I was thinking about when you pulled up”?

“Tell me”

“The smell; it was reminding me of Afghanistan.”

“What smell”?

“The smell of cut hay and mown grass”

The sheriff just looked at me expectantly so I plunged in.

“I was working out of Jalalabad years ago as a regional supervisor for a Brit security company, and to be honest,  had very little to do.  I asked The Skipper if I could go on some calls with him.  The Skipper was a retired navy senior chief, an EOD tech by training, and the regional EOD mentor. He was able to go anywhere in the Eastern provinces because all the locals knew him and his team.  He had started his program back before the military started working off big box FOB’s and well before the Taliban started coming back.  I can hear him now talking to somebody at the Taj bar;  ‘all the local people know I move the boom, no questions asked, 24/7 so they let me go anywhere I’m called.  I know I have girlfriends on two continents and I’m a 50 year old fat man who needs for an unending supply of cash money so this job is a match made in heaven, the Taliban are going to provide me employment for life.’

“One morning we were poking along because The Skipper drove slow, really slow, I learned later that he went to church daily and was even more superstitious then a normal EOD guy, the slow driving was part of his ritual to keep bad luck at bay.”

“It was a beautiful fall day, crisp and clear, blue skies, when suddenly his lead truck stops, we pull up next to it and open the doors to this overpowering smell of cut grass and shredded leaves.  The Afghans are out looking up and down the road, The Skipper looks over and says “IED”.

“What do you mean IED? It smells like somebody is mowing grass or hay.”

“Exactly, and somewhere near here are a bunch of trees with all their leaves blown off, close the door let’s drive down the road some and scope this out”.

“The road doglegged to the right crossing a large culvert that channeled a fair sized stream, now mostly dry, under a paved asphalt road.  The road was covered in a several inch carpet or leaves but there was no sign of a blast.  We get out of the trucks looking around, trying to figure out what had happened, a patrol from the Afghan army (ANA) pulls up with a bunch of villagers in the back of their pick ups.   They tell us there is a bomb in the culvert.  The Afghan team leader asks what had just blown up and an elder points downstream and said ‘the man who put the bomb in the culvert, we don’t know him’.”

“The Skipper gets out one those fish eye mirrors you used for searching under vehicles and a large piece of angle iron with 90 degree bend at the end and  a surefire flashlight taped to it and gives it to his senior EOD tech.  The culvert is about four feet below the road and the stream bed five feet below that.  The EOD tech lays on his belly holds the mirror in front of the culvert while one of the other EOD men took charge of the light.   They spot the IED immediately – The Skipper and I look and see it too; pressure cooker on vehicle jack stand jammed up against the top of the culvert pipe with a blasting cap taped into the lid and wire running out of the pipe heading downstream.”

“The Skipper calls back to the FOB and describes what he found. The army tells him to stay on scene and wait for the route clearance package to come recover the IED.  The Skipper acknowledges but we both knew waiting for the army was a non starter.  They would take at least 8 hours to roll out and there was no way the ANA would keep a road closed that long.  There was a new Brigade rotation at the FOB and new command groups thought they actually had a say in what was happening outside the wire.

“We tape four bricks of C4 together, The Skipper wraps them in det cord, primes it, attaches about six feet of shot tube and hands it off to his head EOD tech.  The EOD team and some of the ANP troops tape the charge to a piece of cardboard and then tape the cardboard to a five gallon water jug they had some local kids take down the creek and top off.”

“The Afghans tie 550 cord to the water jug handle and lower it to the front of the culvert pipe, one of the local EOD techs is in the culvert making sure the charge is lined up correctly, He gives a thumbs up and scrambles up the bank, the head EOD guy looks a The Skipper who nods and puts on a set of high end hearing protectors.  I fish a old dirty pair of foam ear plugs out of my pocket, we’re sitting on deck chairs the Skipper carries around with him for just such an occasion.  The EOD guy looks over one more time to make sure the shot is lined up, takes a step back and shoots the charge.

The C4 goes off with a giant WHOOMP; it’s a slow burning explosive so it doesn’t evaporate the water, it pushes it down the pipe at around 26,550 feet per second, the kinetic energy takes out the IED and the water renders the explosive components instantly safe.  A giant gush of water erupts out of the downstream end, arcs over the creek bed for about 200 feet and slamming into the trees like a wave. The water explodes up into the sky, slowly dissipating in a rainbow of colors that hung suspended in the air for a good 45 seconds.”

“There were hundreds of people from local villages and the stalled traffic watching us and they erupted in cheering and laughing and shouting.  Kids were dancing around in excitement; local men coming up to take pictures with the ANA troops and the EOD team.  The Skipper looks over with a big wide smile and says to me “can you believe we get paid to do this shit Dalton”?

The Sheriff was laughing out loud, he looked at me; ‘No shit?  You were never in a firefight or got blown up or any of that?”

“Never, our job was to avoid drama, the way we were set up inside the local communities made doing that a no brainer.  I saw all kinds of IED’s go off but mostly because The Skipper let me tag along with him. The Taj guesthouse, where I was lived in Jbad, had a bar and pool; my two best buddies, who worked in the reconstruction biz, were living there too.  On Thursday nights there would be 40 or 50 internationals hanging at the bar, famous journalists, American and French SF teams, German NGO chicks, dozens of American NGO workers, grad students from Boston…  We had a full house staff, a great cook and my company had the guard contract and we were the best in the country. I loved being in Afghanistan and now I smell cut hay and think back to all cool shit we did and realize I’ll never be so alive or free again.”

“Now the Sheriff was roaring with laughter; ‘never be so alive and free again? Jesus Dalton you’re suffering from male menopause, you can go down to the Cougar Clinic and get some testostirone shots, fix you right up.  Never so alive again….that sounds gay dude.”

“Maybe I didn’t put that quite right.”

“I’m kidding Dalton I think I know what you mean….You could just drive around anywhere you pleased in Afghanistan”?

“We could drive most anywhere we wanted for years, but the South got bad in 07; the East started to go pear shaped in 09; we adapted as the security situation tanked by wearing local clothes, never speaking English outside the compound, driving in old beat up cars, but our freedom of movement steadily contracted and at some point each of us realized we weren’t really good, we were really lucky.  I got called back to Kabul at the end of 2010; the Ghost Team expanded for one final round of direct implementation so my two best buddies headed south to support that. The Skipper pulled out in 2010 too and by the end of 2011 all the outside the wire crews had called it a war and gone home.”

“I stopped giving my expat PSD teams ammo because we were reduced to operating inside a 2-mile box of downtown Kabul where armed internationals were unwelcomed and not needed.  We no longer controlled our destiny in Kabul or anywhere else in the country and you had to accept that fact if you were going to stay in the game.  I would have explained all this to the doctor yesterday but he was being such an asshole I didn’t feel like it”.

The Sheriff was looking over at me smiling like I was a long lost friend.  I was smiling too,  talking to him had been refreshing. He stood to leave.

“I’ll bring the wife by this weekend to look at your horses and I drink Bud light, so don’t be a social retard and not have any around when we show up. I can’t wait to tell her one of our neighbors spent years in Afghanistan cleaning storm culverts with C4 charges…who the hell would believe that”?  He paused on the steps and looked back.

“What did the doctor give you”?

“Xanax and a dope chit”.

“Xanax? Did you take any”?

“No, I hate being told what to do there is not a chance in hell I’ll take that crap now, I don’t care how tired I am.”

“Don’t try it – that shit is addicting, I can’t believe that asshole gave it to you, should be a law against that. How did you spend 20 years in the Corps if you don’t like being told what to do”?

“I was an officer”

“Probably a dick too, but you seem to have turned out OK.  Dalton, I’m going to enjoy having you around.”

It was a great start to my new life as a normal American.  It was hard to believe that in 72 hours I would be fighting rendition.

Last night I was coming back from the Lebanese Restaurant located in the Wazar Akbar Khan section of Kabul.  Back in the day it had a full bar and open patio with large crowds of expat customers, but not these days.  Now you have to walk through a long blast proof hallway through a series [...]

This is the first of what I hope is many posts from my friend Dalton Thomas.  He wanted me to stress that he is practicing his creative writing skills and his story is a fictional account of coming home after being gone a long long time.
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