Navigating the half dozen outposts between where I had spent the last six months in Iraq and the last checkpoint out of theater took me a day and a half of helo rides and prayers that a dust storm wouldn’t lock me down. One stopped me in Ramadi on the first leg. I laid on the dusty plywood floor for a day with my head on my bag spitting Copenhagen into a taped-up water bottle knowing that if I wandered too far off I’d miss the next bird. The God awful dust stayed put for a few hours. Finally, I broke out to Ali Al Salem. I made the last long leg on a commercial flight from Kuwait to San Diego.

In March, when the rest of the group attached to the Team headed back to California by way of a “decompression” stop in Stuttgart, I got permission to head straight home. My family was in a bad way. And the skipper let me go. I’ve heard that those decompression stops were helpful. It was a chance to let the war out a bit before it was time to assimilate back into “normal” western culture. There were counseling sessions and cognitive tests and some time to let the desert sand wash out of your hair. Like I said, I’ve heard they were good. For one reason or another, I never made it to one. Every second of decompression for me was compression for my wife. And they’d had enough.

When I touched down in San Diego there was no welcome. No signs. No cheering family. No one had any idea where I’d just come from. I wandered out of the war for the last time and into the night air in San Diego dressed like a SOF guy trying not to look like a SOF guy. I tried to jump into a cab. A woman on the curb snapped at me and pointed at the long waiting line behind her.

“Um, there’s a line.” Sigh. Head shake.

I hadn’t noticed.

While I waited, I took a knee on the pavement and got to work on the task of consolidating my gear. Before I left Iraq, I’d stuffed everything I could into my DHB and hopped on a convoy to the next airfield. DHB was short for “Dead Hooker Bag”. They were large black equipment bags that were so big one could fit a dead hooker in it—in theory. Those weren’t my words. That’s just what we called them. And the fact that we threw those words around so plainly tells a bit about the distance I’d just traveled. In Kuwait, the DHB was too heavy to go on the plane. So I had to buy a box from the attendant at the check in counter and put some things in that box, tape it up and check it. Those things that I had to put in that box were my body armor, my ballistic helmet and a pile of other tactical gear I had to wear out of the war zone.

Holster. Magazines. Flashlight. Compass. War.

Kneeling on the smooth polished floor, in the Kuwaiti Airport, alone, piling the war into a box as the fine Jazira desert dust spilled out of it, taping it up and handing it to a smiling Kuwaiti gentleman behind the counter for him to check felt like some sort of ritual. He was the last person I talked to “in theater”.

Later, curbside in San Diego, tired of lugging the Goddamned cardboard box around, I did the ritual in reverse. I broke down the box. I stuffed my gear back in my bag. A hand on my shoulder snapped my head up. A man pointed to a cab waiting at the front of the line.

“Hey, take mine. And welcome home man.” he said.

I jumped in. I don’t remember thanking him. All i could think of was getting rid of that Goddamned box.

The cab dropped me off at my door a little after midnight, less 48 hours or so after I’d left my unit and in Ramadi. It had been about 18 since I left Iraq. My wife left the door unlocked. I came in, laid my bags down at the door and sat down at our kitchen table. She didn’t wait up. Which tells you a bit about the state of things. In the room I’d pictured every day since I’d left, I was alone in silence for the first time in months. There was no dust. And there was carpet. If OIF deployment is life without one thing it’s life without carpet. Just boots on dust on plywood.

Eventually the kids woke up. We were reunited. They were excited. Aidan didn’t really notice I was there.  He didn’t really notice anything. He was diagnosed Autistic when I was gone. That was the mess I’d been sent home to handle.

I tried like hell to be present. But I wasn’t.

One foot in. One foot out.

I ran down the street in the morning to wait in line to register my oldest for kindergarten. It was the first thing my wife had gotten help with in months. The school nurse chastised me for not having his immunization records.

I think I told her to “take it fucking easy”.

Life began again.

It was hard to sleep at first. It was impossible. This deployment, I wasn’t out on patrol every night like I was the last time I went out. I was senior. Too senior to go outside the wire much. I was back on the FOB, staring at targets through “kill TV” every night, strung out on Copenhagen and RipItz and one slide Powerpoint CONOPS. I was safe, relatively. And I didn’t think the transition out this time would be as hard. I still couldn’t get any fucking sleep though. When my family was down for the night, I would walk down to the park next to my house and do box jumps on a picnic table until I couldn’t jump any more, music blaring into my headphones. The band Titus Andronicus had an album that came out the week I got home. It was full of tortured songs about the Civil War. It was perfect.

I knew their front man. He was the younger brother of my roommate at Annapolis. I’d known him since he was a kid. Not the way you know someone by spending time with them. The way you know someone by spending time in the service with someone they know. Annapolis was great for storing your memories in other people. The experience depravation that was life locked inside a fake ship for four years led you to tunnel into the lives of your friends. Their families become your families. Their hometowns became yours. Their memories became your memories. It was perfect training for deployment.

Peej, as his older brother called him, had more practice at the tortured soul thing than I did. I was a rookie. He was a pro. His music showed it. He’d told Rolling Stone in an interview lauding the new album, “When we weren’t on tour or whatever, I got really obsessed with Ken Burns’ documentary on the Civil War. I would stay up and obsessively watch it all night.” I get it. Now I was staying up all night doing box jumps in a park with no shirt on in March, listening to his music. One night, while blasting To Old Friends and New into my ears so loud it hurt, jumping on that stupid concrete picnic table, I slipped and ripped open my shin. It didn’t hurt that badly but the blood was everywhere. I’d just started jumping though. And I knew if I stopped I wouldn’t be able to sleep. So I just kept jumping.

Soon the blood soaked my shoe red. Then a puddle formed on the table. It splashed each time I jumped. Then I noticed that some tissue had shaken loose and was hanging out of the front of my leg.

Somewhere between the last jump, and the hospital getting stitched back up, I realized something.

I wasn’t alright…