"Thank you for rescuing me,"

he says, kneeling next to my table in the middle of that dive of a bar, Sutter Station. I smile and say the pleasure is mine since all I really want to do – ever since we met – is drink whisky, pull him in. I’m lost in this when he tilts his head and turns inside to say, “I’m fucked up; you really should leave.” And, for the first time, I see him – three years at the very front of Afghanistan – buried down there, all the way inside.