Not that long ago, someplace far away where American soldiers and sailors were deployed, there were two brothers. One was good at building bombs and the other was different. And the one that built the bombs used the one that was different to put those bombs in places and on things that killed people. The one that built the bombs did it because he believed he was fighting for one side in a war. And the other one did it because his brother told him to. He didn’t really understand why. He just knew what he was supposed to do.

First bombs…then play. First bombs…then eat.

One day they were both captured. First was the young man with the far off stare and the odd walk that fidgeted with his hands. He flapped his ears sometimes with his fingers. He giggled with delight when he saw people he liked and he couldn’t resist watching his favorite cartoon over and over again on the beat up television in his family’s home. He wasn’t hard to find. He wasn’t hiding. But he was confused and scared when they took him away. He didn’t understand. He just wanted his brother. And his TV.

The one who built the bombs was a little harder to find but he was captured a few hours later. Lives were saved in the community. It was a good thing that was done.

I’m not exactly sure that’s how it went down. Once, a long time ago there actually were two brothers planting roadside bombs in some far away place. And they were captured by my team. I’d forgotten about it for a long time. It was an unremarkable mission. Pretty easy, actually. I filed it away somewhere in the back of my head when I redeployed with a thousand other memories of far off places and semi-dramatic events. It wasn’t that memorable. Certainly not traumatic. It sat in a heap of things sort of like it.

One of the things that helped me calm myself in the weeks after I got back was to run. It’s a habit I’ve kept up. Long, slow runs through the southern California hills lubricate the synapsis. Endorphins remove the self conscious barriers of connection. I often find myself cycling through the long slideshow of my past. It’s a meditative experience many have. One day, a year or so after I’d taken off the uniform for good, on a particularly beautiful and challenging run a thought popped into my head from a distant corner of my conscience. It was about the two brothers and a random thing one of the locals had told one my collectors. I read it in a report.

“One of them isn’t right. Like a child.”

And then I remembered the picture of him. When you work a target deck like I did you spend a lot of time with whatever picture you have of whoever you’re hunting. They sort of burn into your brain. And I remember his even now as I write this. He looked a little off. Like he wasn’t all there. At the time, I found it unremarkable. We heard lots of things about lots of people when we did that work. Most of them weren’t true. But we knew with certainty that those two were trying to hurt people. So they had to be stopped. And we stopped them.

My life as a hunter in the desert and the one I have lived every day since crashed into each other as I climbed higher into the mountains, running harder and harder, my lungs burning, the music in my earbuds blaring. A thought that I wish I never had came to me. It was the memory of that picture and the look on that man’s face. And then I realized that it was the look my autistic and cognitively impaired son has in most pictures we’ve taken of him. My son who had been diagnosed on that deployment, after that mission. And then the hidden guilt of countless missions and operations, the times when in another environment the human part of my brain might have been more engaged, took over. I filled in the blanks with a guilty imagination. A story formed, and I could only see my son in that situation. I couldn’t shake it. And for a long time it’s something I thought about, even though I really didn’t want to. And it hurt.

First bombs…then play. He must have been so scared.