Scott found the videotapes in his garage and brought them into the kitchen. We stacked the VHS in a wine box and the little Hi8 tapes in a gray shoebox for a pair of boots that belonged to his wife Tiffany. The wine box was mine. I’d given him the last three bottles—a syrah, a cabernet, and a red blend. Party gifts I meant to give away to others but didn’t for reason I couldn’t remember.

We could have labeled the boxes “before” and “after.” Before the end of childhood and after. When Doug was around and after he was gone.

I folded the flaps of the wine box one over the other until they made a big plus sign and carried the boxes across the brown front lawn to my car. Then we played Uno in the kitchen, gossiping about a friend we don’t see any more but rarely reach out to either. Call it one of those things.

~

I learned how to digitize videotapes after my dad died. He had bins full of them—Super Bowls, old HBO films, an odd double feature of Full Metal Jacket and The Piano, midnight docs on alien conspiracies and mystery tapes with no labels at all; jarring cuts in the middle of Mad About You to an episode of The X-Files, the artifacts of someone who didn’t want to spend money or time buying a new tape. I bought a VCR and all the cables and software and learned the procedures. I figured saving the media would preserve him in some small way and trashing them just seemed wrong in the moment somehow. I don’t know.

I must have digitized three dozen tapes. It took weeks, but it wasn’t all-consuming. Just put a tape in, start the recording on a laptop connected to the player, and let it work in the background. I’m not sure I would have finished it otherwise. I threw out the tapes afterward but kept the double feature. I remembered the tape from the shelves in the den of his California duplex where I lived before I met Scott and Doug. It’s sitting in my closet unwatched.

~

There were five of us: Scott, Billy, me, David, and Doug. I met Doug in English class at the start of my junior year of high school. He had black hair and mild acne. My memory pulls up a wardrobe of grays and browns over standard-issue jeans, but old pictures show him in white t-shirts or in cheap ball caps. Such is memory. He was fit, but by no means a jock. He liked science fiction and computers and comics, but you’d never know it at first glance. He hid his personality behind taciturn walls—emotionless and rigid, projecting a subtle air of disinterest or even mild annoyance. But sometimes the mortar would crumble and a light would emerge from his eyes as his voice warmed into questions about one thing or another—maybe about Star Wars or an old war film he’d recently watched, or into some casual observation about a girl in class he liked punctuated with meek laughter uttered as a hiss through his teeth, his eyes narrowing and cheeks erupting red as if he just told a secret and had become instantly embarrassed by it.

Doug’s dad was a career soldier who always seemed to be elsewhere. He missed his dad and spoke about him with a kind of pride mixed with subtle despair, as if his absence was causing unsaid wrongs to go on being wrong. He had a brother who lived with an uncle in Pennsylvania. There was a story there somewhere, maybe even a scandal—my guess was always shoplifting—but he never elaborated. He talked to me about his mother only once. She had died in Korea when they were little. He lived with his stepmother when I met him, a woman with dirty-blonde hair who smoked cigarettes from a La-Z-Boy in their living room. She had a daughter from a previous marriage. A popular girl. A cheerleader. I had a crush on her briefly, but I knew better.

I met Scott through Doug one Saturday night in October. Doug invited me to a laser-tag place behind the mall. After we blew our money, he phoned Scott from a payphone for a ride home. I remember a lot of begging, lots of “Come on, man,” his trademark sighs whispered into the black phone handset. Scott pulled up about ten minutes later in his ’88 four-banger Mustang complaining about all the rides he was giving out. He had the double-edged fortune of being the only one of us with a car and Doug had apparently blown through a lot of favors. To his credit, Scott had a hard time saying no.

I called shotgun and was surprised no one complained. I never considered the possibility Doug might have wanted the front seat or was at least owed it by virtue of knowing Scott, who I didn’t know at all. It was a decision made subconsciously. Call it a flex of teenage arrogance, or a lack of manners. But Doug never said a word either. He seemed was resigned to it, or even expected it, the manifestation of a lack of confidence, an unwillingness to take up his own space, embarrassed by the notion.

My friendship with Scott had formed on its own terms by New Years and I found myself with him more often. Call it a polarity shift. I rode to school and back with Scott for the rest of high school, always up front. We didn’t always know how Doug got home. We often stopped to pick him up if we saw him walking home. When we parked in front of his house he’d trudge to the front door with a tense mouth and sad eyes, slipping through the front door to prevent his stepmom’s Pomeranian from bolting into the fresh air from the secondhand smoke of their living room. We joked that the dog was begging us, anyone, to set it free. Sometimes Doug laughed; more often he didn’t. Other times he insisted with a flat voice, the walls up strong, that he wanted to walk home alone.

~

The earliest recording on Scott’s VHS tapes is of a birthday party at a Showbiz Pizza Place, a kitschy arcade and pizza parlor. The camcorder timestamp reads July 6, 1989, but who could ever remember how to set those things? Scott looks to be about ten or eleven. He has the cherubic face of a kid who’d fit perfectly in a spinoff to The Goonies.

The next recording was much later. New Year’s Eve 1996. Our first one. Scott always brought out the camera on New Year’s. For him the holiday seemed like a moment in time when some rare magic in the night might shift our world in grand ways and he wanted to capture it as it happened. I suppose I could say I felt the same. I miss that optimism. I find footage of at least a half-dozen New Year’s Eve parties; I’m in most of them. I haven’t seen the footage in over a decade or more but remember that first one well. I recognize the soft living room of Scott’s mothers’ house in the suburbs. That Christmas tree. Those green couches. His parents were divorced by then, his sister off to college. I see myself on the couch—sixteen and skinny, a narrow chin, a thick mop of dark brown hair, a slouching awkwardness and dark eyes. Billy is there too. Round eyeglasses. Braces. A reedy voice that hadn’t quite broken into adulthood yet. A prep school wardrobe that hid his future in the arts. Billy is the friend we gossiped about later, the one we don’t see much of anymore.

Shawn arrives but doesn’t stay long. A class ahead of us, it always felt like Shawn had a foot aimed at a better party elsewhere. I suppose that’s probably true. Scott and I were stunningly tame teenagers. We had no vices. Shawn would get us banned from the local mall for three months after yelling profanity at the employees of the Disney Store as a prank. Bored suburban cops and mall security surrounded us like we were soldiers of some local gang they’d spun themselves into believing was real. We joke about it now. Some years ago, I called mall security to get the Polaroid mugshots they took of us. The call didn’t last long.

JoAnn and Katie appear in the video a little later. Friends of Scott and Billy, though I think Scott had something more in mind with JoAnn—a crush he was too shy or scared to act on. Their hair was almost identical: blonde, straight, and cut to bobs just above their shoulder. This was the mid-90s, the era of “The Rachel.” Katie was the softer of the two, more thoughtful. JoAnn could be blunt and impetuous, as if it was JoAnn’s world and we were all just living in it. Esotropia canted her left eye toward the bridge of her nose. I was always amazed by how little it seemed to matter to her, though I know now that couldn’t possibly have been true. In the video they sit together and watch some concert for one song while No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak” plays on the stereo. Billy mouths the lyrics from a bean bag chair nearby until JoAnn kills the music to listen to the television. No one has the guts to complain. Their friendship with JoAnn wouldn’t last the summer, dying on some petty teenage vine.

And there’s Doug. See the slightly baggy polo shirt. The striped one with the browns and greens locked in my memory. He seems happy at first, almost manic. He arm-wrestles Billy with one hand while eating a Rice Krispie treat with the other. But he drifts into melancholy sometime later, after we had counted down the last seconds of the year; his eyes aimed at the floor as if caught by some old inner criticism made new. Watching him, I remember the mornings at school where he’d stand waiting for the bell dead center in a mob of kids who were strangers to him, his eyes aimed at the floor in the same way. Scott or I would try to coax him to join us, his friends, but he wouldn’t. Eventually, we rolled our eyes and called it Doug being Doug. We stopped trying.

The tape ends. I put in another.

~

I have to admit this: Sometimes we didn’t stop at all if one of us spotted Doug trudging hopelessly toward home after school. “There’s Doug,” one of us might say. But we would tool past anyway and leave the sentiment lingering unsaid, his eyes unacknowledged in the sideview mirror, his depression unbearable.

~

Scott, David and I had dinner at a bougie burger place the night before I picked up his tapes. David wasn’t in the first video, but he would appear in many others. We called him Spock back then, his high school haircut not far from the Star Trek character. He has long hair and a thick beard and about twenty pounds of added muscle now, but we still call him Spock occasionally.

We don’t get together or even talk as much as we used to. I live in New York; David and Scott live outside Atlanta. Even though they live relatively close to each other, they both have careers and wives and so little time, becoming comfortable with the general home-body inertia of their 40s. It’s probably why we don’t talk to Billy much anymore. Or maybe why he doesn’t talk to us.

Whenever Doug arrives in conversation, which he invariably does, we talk about him as if blowing on the embers of a fading campfire. Twenty-five years have passed since we last saw him, and yet we’re still trying to examine the channels of his life, of what we know and remember of it, of what we were incapable of seeing then. Such is the hold he has. But memory is fickle and time is cruel. Sitting at Bob’s Burger Bar, what we remember about of Doug’s life, the fading impressions of a teenage boy’s troubled inner self, has been attritted by the passage of our own stories. We try to apply the wisdom we didn’t have then to memories we barely retain now.

We speculate that—

He suffered from depression but had no means of identifying or treating it compassionately.

He blamed himself for every perceived rejection.

He treated love as if it was a gift purchased through conformity. I tell them that Doug once told me he wanted to be a doctor, then later a lawyer, two fields he expressed no real interest in. “But that’s what people want,” he said bitterly.

He had no space to learn about himself without judgement.

His stepmother treated him like the unwanted spare child and his father wasn’t around enough to provide a balancing force.

He lived in a house where he felt very alone.

Scott tells us he visited a psychic some years back where he showed her a picture of Doug while offering no context. She looked at the photo a moment and seemed troubled by it.

“This person is very angry,” he said she said. “He keeps saying ‘why did he marry that woman.’”

David and I don’t know what else to say.

~

Along with the tapes, Scott gave me a few dusty albums filled with photos of us from our teens to our early twenties, stopping abruptly around 2002 or so. Wondering why we stopped taking photos, we immediately blamed it on the evolution of digital media superseding the physical. But even then, none of us have folders of photos of us on hard drives anywhere. I explained maybe we stopped seeing our lives as novel and worthy of capturing. I also wonder if maybe a jadedness didn’t take hold, but this feels precious.

In the albums, I find a photo of the last time I saw Doug—New Year’s Eve of 1998. Another party. I was in a Marine private first class by then. Doug was an ROTC cadet at North Georgia College. In the picture, I’m carrying him across my shoulders in a fireman’s carry like I might carry a wounded comrade. I apply special meaning to the photo, a final tribute. But I realize later it’s not the last time I had seen Doug. That had happened at a lake trip the following summer; I find evidence of it in Scott’s albums. I can only dig out vague memories of the trip—a humid weekend where I had managed to flee the Marines for a few days. I can’t remember a thing that was said between us, there aren’t enough photos, but I know it’s in there somewhere. Maybe if I only stare at them hard enough.

~

I bought an old Hi8 camcorder to digitize the second box of tapes. Footage of Doug’s final New Year’s Eve, Y2K, was on one of them. I sifted through lots of birthdays and road trips to Florida and Scott’s college girlfriend Sonja. I was in a lot of it, shy and foul-mouthed in equal measure. It was hard to watch myself.

Doug’s appearance in Scott’s videos diminishes over time. I suppose we could judge ourselves for the distancing, but that only works in the context of what comes. We could not predict the future. We could not see inside Doug’s heart, the perceptions he must have felt of being unworthy of acceptance. Where does our responsibility to a friend begin? Where does it end? I think it’s fair to say we were leaving him behind. Maybe he felt he didn’t know how to keep up.

I find the party footage. I wasn’t there; I spent that night drunk on a pier in Naples, Italy. But Doug is there. I watch him drift around the edges in a white t-shirt and holding a blue Solo cup. He doesn’t interact with anyone, nor does he acknowledge it when Scott lingers on him with the camera. There’s a finality to his expression, but it’s one I recognize only after-the-fact, as if I believe he’s already accepted the ugly narrative within him which none of us are capable or brave enough to challenge.

Later, on the green couch in his mothers’ living room, Scott records a year-in-review with David and his girlfriend Alicia. Silly riffing as nineteen- and twenty-year-olds reached for unearned introspection. Doug’s last recorded words are there, but even then he remained unknowable, uninspired, his voice soft and powerless behind the walls. I had to tilt my head to the speaker to hear him.

Scott: What do you have to say?

Doug: Ninety-nine was… I learned a lot.

Scott: Such as?

Doug: Stuff. 2000… Just another year.

Scott: Expectations for next year?

Doug: Same… It’ll be just the same, really.

He sits back and crosses his arms, finished. Spock asks him if he’s going to finally get his license this year. Even Spock knew of Doug’s endless need for rides. But Doug doesn’t respond and the scene ends. The walls would allow us nothing more.

~

David learned about it first three weeks later. He was a freshman at Georgia Tech. A high school acquaintance attending North Georgia College with Doug reached out by email to say that Doug was dead. David called Scott right away. Scott tells me later that he broke down on the phone.

David emailed me the news. I was at sea, steaming for Crete from Naples. At first I thought it was a dumb prank, but David wasn’t one for jokes. At least none that crass. I printed the email and called David from a bank of phones just off the mess deck.

David doesn’t remember this conversation, which briefly makes me doubt my own memory, but I know it happened. I remember the obnoxious delay in the call where I’d have to pause to let his responses reach me before asking another question, otherwise the call would fall out of sync and we’d step on each other’s sentences.

After the call, I went to the ship’s smoking area, a long ramp that led from the hangar bay to the lower storage bay. The hangar smelled like grease and exhaust. It was night; the ramp was lit with a dim red light. I sat on the rough black ramp with my knees up and my boots out in front of me and smoked myself hoarse. Eventually, I learned Doug had gotten into some hazy minor trouble with the ROTC cadre, then his grades slipped and the National Guard pulled his scholarship. With no means to pay for college, at least any means known to him, he was staring down the prospect of returning to his stepmother’s house and the embarrassment of failure.

On January 12, a college friend asked him to go skeet shooting. On the way, they stopped at a Wal Mart in town and his friend went inside. Doug remained behind with the shotgun. Rejection and helplessness intersected rotten opportunity.

~

I returned home in March just after my twentieth birthday. I rolled into town after sunset and drove straight to Scott’s house, spinning donuts in the cul-de-sac and honking the horn until he came out. There’s no video of it, but I so wish there was. I was happy to be home.

Scott took me to the cemetery near the interstate. He told me he was angry over not being asked to be a pall bearer. “They got a bunch of strangers to do it; they never even bother to ask us. It should have been us. We were his friends.” He said he found his stepsisters’ tears disgusting. Unfair or not, it was how he felt. He’s still angry. “They treated him like shit,” he said over his burger years later.

I went back to the cemetery one sunny day a few days later. Something propelled me that direction. Call it a need to speak unheard. I touched the grass and spoke to the headstone. Confusion and grief converted into shallow anger and disgust and bravado. I called him a coward. “What the fuck are you doing here?” I asked. I’m not sure I like who I was then, but I’m not sure I was wrong either. It’s something I wrestle with even now. Perhaps it was wrong of me to have berated his choice as an act of cowardice, especially considering the cold brutal calculus he made in that moment in a car outside a Wal Mart in winter rural Georgia. I suppose in the moment I figured the cowardice lived in not facing himself directly. I suppose that despite all the rides he bummed, he couldn’t ask for the ride that mattered, the one that offered a way out. Going through Scott’s tapes, though, I’m scared there’s a scene where he asked for it between the lines. I hope I never find it. I’m scared of what it might mean if he had and we were just too cowardly to answer.

~

I finished transferring the tapes about a week after the New Year’s 2025. The tapes run from late 1996 to about 2005 or 2006, maybe a little after, but not by much. I see a lot of bad cuts, the places where Scott had replaced one moment with another, too cheap or broke or just too rushed to buy a new tape. I see an old girlfriend, a lot of dark bars. Before I went through them, I joked that I’d probably find most of it cringy. I wasn’t wrong. I do. Some of it, anyway. Mainly I see myself now in contrast to who I was then. I want to tell myself to be different, but I’m not sure in what way. I’m hard on myself. I want to hide from the flaws I see in the gaps of my clumsy late teens and early twenties. I haven’t watched them since.

I put all the tapes into the wine box and mailed them back. I shared a link to a cloud folder with the files with Scott and David. Scott told me he got them; David didn’t respond, but I wasn’t surprised. He isn’t much for nostalgia, and I’m still not sure anyone wants to see how young we were. I don’t have an email for Billy. I asked Scott, but he didn’t have one either. I thought about finding an email for Doug’s stepmother or stepsister and sending them some of the videos, the ones that matter. I’ve thought about it, but I haven’t done it. I won’t.

I won’t.

I don’t know your name, but we tried to kill each other once.

Do you remember it? It happened on November 5, 2005, on the second day of our big weeklong offensive in Husaybah, Iraq—a dense square of markets, mosques, and homes tucked into the corner where the Euphrates River meets the Syrian border. Nearly 2,000 U.S. Marines, me among them, had stormed into Husaybah before sunrise the previous morning. We had attacked across the trash-hewn desert west of town with our eyes coated with the green electric glow of our night vision goggles. We quickly smashed into the first row of homes and shoved our rifle barrels into the faces of the sleepy men who opened the doors and blew apart the locked doors of homes that had been abandoned. Children startled awake by our voices and our boots shrieked against their mothers in terror. I remember that.

Husaybah had been a violent place for us then. Plenty of our Marines had died there before we came, and our leaders wanted Husaybah mollified once and for all, and so we searched through your homes, sifted through your cupboards and closets, through your unmentionable things with the anger of a raw nerve. We looked for anything that tied the houses and people living inside them to Al Qaeda-in-Iraq forces, or ‘AQI’—just another letter set in the endless greasy sop of military acronyms.

On my second afternoon in Husaybah I stood on a roof and gazed out over the geometric madness of buildings that surrounded me. It was cloudy. Parts of the city crackled with rifle fire. You appeared around a corner of a wall that defined the small compound of a house the same way chain link fences surround our yards. I liked the walled compounds for their dominance and privacy—like fortresses. Gray metal fences are just ugly and noisy. Walls can last forever. You appeared from behind it wearing a dirty gray sweat shirt and pants, like the track suits worn by fat New Jersey mobsters. You already had the launcher on your shoulder. It was made out of white PVC pipe with a cheap wooden handgrip and a battery switch bound with electrical tape. We always laughed at them whenever we captured one. Compared to our shoulder-mounted anti-tank rockets, our wire-guided missiles, and our heat seekers, your homemade bazookas were shoddy and infantile, completely weightless against our intractable technology and sophistication. But we knew they could kill, and if we had found you before you fired it, or just simply found you carrying it, building it, handing it to someone else, or even burying it in your cousin’s backyard in a rage of benevolent rebellion against all war, we would have blown your body to pieces with high explosives that have been tested and refined and improved since the First World War. We would have scattered your atoms in a wide plume with a professional calculus learned and taught and relearned in the way of tradesmen, which is what the American military was and still is today: a profession of arms, trained to execute the final thousand meters of American foreign policy, which in this case was to kill you. We’re good at it. American troops train for battle like athletes and our officers study war like scholars. To us you are dilettantes, a junior varsity team. Many still feel this way.

Yet given all this you pivoted around a corner in a dirty sweat suit and aimed your homemade rocket launcher at my friends and me. As I sit here now I think about the resolve it must have taken to do that, to build this cheap weapon and aim it with the hope and faith against the best weapons in the world created by some of the richest nations in history. Surely you must’ve felt it when you wheeled around corner. Yet it didn’t seem to matter to you, did it? Was it God or money or hatred or maybe just boredom? You are an Arab man. An Iraqi man. A Sunni man, no doubt. Faith has driven plenty to violence. But so have debt, hunger, oppression, and just blind hatred. Did you shoot at me for those things? Can I blame you? There are many Americans, more Americans than I’m comfortable with, who stock their homes with firearms and talk as if an invasion is a real possibility, be it from some outsider or from their own government. But there is little chance of invasion for us. I am from a country that will likely wither and die by its own self-destruction.

But that wasn’t a luxury for you, was it? We were in your country uninvited. You turned from behind a corner to see a real invader. What did we look like to you? I imagine we looked like armored toadstools perched on your roofs with our black weapons held at our chests. I saw you. I saw your eyes. They were wide and filled with terror. Did our sight scare you? Your face was haggard, your hair and beard short and ragged. You looked like you were in your late twenties, perhaps older. It’s hard to say. I only saw you for a few seconds, but looking back and remembering . . . Yes, I’m certain you were maybe twenty-eight, thirty at the latest. You were older than me. I was twenty-five then. Thoughtful, but brash. I could almost hear you chanting your battle cry—Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar—over and over and over again, begging your God for victory or maybe just to spare your life, your breaths short and fast as you quickly aimed and fired. Were your palms wet? When the circuit closed on your launcher your body was surrounded with a wispy cloud. I heard the rocket motor fire. A Marine near me yelled “RPG!”

***

Surely you remember the Persian Gulf War. How could you not? I was ten years old. My stepdad was in the U.S. Air Force then. He was sent to the Emirates to fix the American fighter jets we deployed after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I was in fifth grade then. As I turned and walked up a broad snowy path between a set of houses on my way home from school a cold afternoon in January, I noticed my friend Chris trudging through the deep snow toward me.

“Come on, dude. Something’s going on,” he said. “I think it’s started!”

We waded through the snow and plopped cross-legged in front of the television in his living room. We watched titillated as the special news reports showed grainy night-vision video of your anti-aircraft tracers arching toward our fighter jets high above your capital city. Whenever the screen erupted with the white flash of an exploding bomb we cheered because we knew we had killed some of you. There was nothing gory about it. We didn’t see your blood or your body parts. It was clinical and precise. Even later, when we began to see the fuzzy bomb camera footage aired on the nightly news as 1,000 pound bombs crashed into bridges and factories and aircraft revetments, we saw the thermal signatures of your people—maybe your soldiers, maybe not, but all unlucky unlike us—become engulfed in the smoke and fire of our long-learned ability to destroy the human body.

Soon your whole army fell apart in front of us. When our tanks and armored vehicles crossed the border, you surrendered to us by the thousands, trudging across the desert half-dazed with your hands above your heads, flapping coalition leaflets imploring you to surrender. When you did fight us, it was almost cartoonish. Stories came back to us from the desert, or “The Sandbox” as we called it, of the shells from our main battle tanks punching through two and three of your tanks with a single shot and of bulldozers burying your troops alive right in their trenches. Just over 1,000 of our troops were killed or wounded fighting your country. To die as an American in the Persian Gulf War quickly became the unlucky punchline of a sad joke. We were so good at killing you that within four days of launching the ground offensive we annihilated an estimated 20,000 of you like we annihilate anthills in our backyards or roaches in our cupboards.

Our whole country felt as if we had returned to the heady day’s right after World War II, when America basked in the destruction of two of the ugliest regimes in the history of the planet. We used your body to eradicate the ghosts of our mindless destruction in Vietnam. We felt as if we had returned to glory, that a curse had been broken. Our money had killed the Soviet Union. Our bombs had killed your fellow Iraqis. Our army was confirmed best in the world. We were Americans, natives from the “city upon the hill,” citizens of God’s Country. We sang Lee Greenwood songs at school recitals. Your destruction was our absolution. We felt invincible.

Americans rarely seem to make the connection, but the two wars—the one our fathers fought in and the war where you and I finally meet—are really all part of one big war, at least in a spiritual sense. Our victory over the forces of your dictator gave us carte blanche to press our moralistic notion of empire upon your people through the use of our bolstered military confidence. Because of your indomitable dictator, coupled with a strain of American Exceptionalism, we despised you all collectively. After your generals surrendered at Safwan in March of 1991 we restricted your airspace and suffocated you with the boot heel of economic sanctions. We dangled food before your face in exchange for your precious oil. Sometimes Saddam Hussein took it. Other times he did not.

The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 had nothing to do with your dictator, and certainly not your country, but I can’t help but think that many of your citizens saw the smoke and ash of the fallen World Trade Center, the cavity drilled into the side of the Pentagon, and the detritus of Flight 93 scattered across a field in Pennsylvania and realized with a quiet dread that your country, as proxy for your dictator, would inevitably be called to stand tall and answer for crimes real or imagined. If you didn’t, the subsequent rumblings and fist poundings from our punditry would have certainly signaled our brutal intentions. Americans wanted blood for the death of our citizens, and in many ways it was a completely justifiable desire. Our people were killed because of religious extremism, by Bronze Age clerics and zealots who failed to understand the concept of free will, and who harbored just as much sanctimonious moral superiority as the Western governments they claimed to loathe and sought to punish. You had nothing to do with it, but we came and made our demands anyway, and then we dropped more bombs.

I was a Marine by then. In late March of 2003 I watched our “Shock and Awe” air campaign smash Baghdad into rubble on CNN. I watched fire and high explosives rubble the skyscrapers of your capital with clarity of a dumb Michael Bay action flick. None of that grainy bomb camera footage that marked the opening moves in 1991. This was the modern era of the mass media spectacle. The scene felt like a cheap gratuitous facsimile of the first time, like a movie sequel that tried cover up a cheap plot with high-powered special effects.

Our leaders paraded themselves on television like conquering warlords before our troops had even crossed the border from Kuwait, counting the gold their hordes hadn’t even pillaged yet. We never discussed your plight or what you may have wanted for your own futures. You were never even considered. We just shrugged it off. We told the world we were coming to rescue you from the clutches of an evil dictator and that we would be greeted as liberators. It was only by sheer luck that the results of our hubris briefly matched your exuberate expressions of freedom when your fellow Iraqis beat on the statue of Saddam in Firdos Square with fists and the dusty soles of their shoes. But that exuberance didn’t last, did it? That same dumb hubris prompted a U.S. State Department toad named Paul Bremer to fire your entire defense industry, a move which put hundreds of thousands of trained Iraqi security personnel—men who wanted to rebuild your country, perhaps even you—right out of work and single-handedly created an insurgency (up to and including ISIS) that locked us into a quagmire for the rest of the decade. A hubris that killed and wounded so many of us and exacted a still-untold cost on you. It was the same hubris that put you and me at odds with each other.

***

And so here we are, back to the moment you closed the circuit on your homemade rocket launcher and tried to kill me. I might say you were brainwashed by psychopaths who arrived in the chaos of our occupation and who used the intellectual shackles of religion to make you a willing participant in my death. There is also the hard possibility these same psychopaths dangled a few hundred American dollars before your impoverished eyes, or maybe just pressed the hot blade of threats against the lives of your family in order to accomplish their bidding, which in this case was to kill Americans with a rocket propelled grenade.

Before I could seek cover behind the wall that surrounded the roof, your rocket exploded with a sharp crack against a building nearby. My veins were flooded with adrenaline and terror. My eyes had widened and my mouth drooped slightly. The sound reverberated across the madness of Husaybah for a number of seconds before it blended into the chatter of distant firefights. My joints felt stiff. I breathed slowly and began to unravel a knot of fear in my gut.

None of the others said much of anything. I suspect we were all ingesting just how lucky we had been. Had you raised the tube a few more inches your rocket might have carved a path right to the wall that surrounded the roof we commandeered, right to where we stood, and exploded with the same flash, spraying hot slivers of metal that might have pierced our bodies and punched frothy little holes into our livers and lungs. The sudden overpressure under our Kevlar helmets might have burst our eardrums and detuned our synapses. You might have killed us. But you were nervous and afraid, so you didn’t.

You appeared again a few seconds later. I saw you in a gap between two buildings as you ran. I knew immediately it was you who had fired the rocket because you looked back over your shoulder at us with wide eyes and a face that seemed to me as if grayed by terror. The emotions that arose in me in a millisecond I can only really describe as a crossbreed of disgust and atavistic rage, backed by the same glaze of self-righteousness that put us in your country to begin with. I was a member of the most skilled military on the face of the planet with the largest reach of any dominion since the British Empire. You were a terrorist from a broken nation. I raised my rifle.

Though it happened too fast to do so then, as I brought my rifle to my shoulder I could trace a trajectory of wanton caveman stupidity from your body to my barrel, through my rifle, and into my shoulder and beyond, all as a dark timeline of American foreign policy misadventures and the stone-crushing hubris of empire that created them. I could trace a hard red line back to the elected officials—thereby including many of us—who had read just enough glorified history to think America was somehow anointed with the right to interfere and manipulate the fates of other nations, as if your wishes, hopes, and aspirations for the future of your country seemed to be of little worth if they didn’t match our own. I can’t help but believe that to be true. We found nothing in your country. No weapons of mass destruction. No nuclear program. No terrorists but for those we ultimately brought with us, in part because of opportunistic religious thuggery, but also because of our ham-fisted American bombasticism.

For many years after 9/11, the United States, in many ways, became Captain Ahab from Moby Dick, chasing the White Whale of our national security through the “War on Terror” to all corners of the world. Like Ahab, we’re a nation with a wounded soul. A whole subset of our population refuses to allow itself to heal. Many of our people gnash their teeth with blood-thirsty indignation and rage, shaking their fists at lands they’ve never seen or even understand. Every anniversary of 9/11, we beat against our sores with old reels of doom and loss. Civic leaders, campaigning politicians, and even sitting statespersons routinely trumpet the call to arms with the fear of your hordes running through our streets with zealotry in your heart and a bomb strapped to your chest. They bang their gavels and shovel money and citizenry into the black maw of war to kill you, hoping that one more body—more than 200,000 civilian casualties in Iraq, so far—will pack that festering wound and finally bring peace. They do this in spite of the understanding that coming into your country was just a few short semantics away from being an outright war crime. But every time we lash out with drones, precision bombers, and surveillance measures the thin vindication that follows clouds a realization that every single bomb we drop, every bullet we fire, and every person we kill in the name of security only chips away at our overall safety. We will simply never be able to kill enough to bring about peace. But we’ll certainly try.

***

And so, with my rifle in my shoulder, I fired three shots.

My bullets struck out with the same thick vitriol that left my mouth when I saw you running away. I don’t remember what I said, but it was undoubtedly profane. My eyes were wide and white with controlled, but crystalline rage. The brass shell casings jingled against the concrete roof and settled. I clicked the rifle safety and let it rest against my body armor. I lit a cigarette. All that bile settled inside me and my heart rate slowed. The rage and indignation was suddenly replaced by a hollow sense of futility.

What am I doing on this roof with a rifle trying to kill you? I wondered. The thought left as quickly as it came; there was no sense in asking. But the hollowness remained and later grew, fueled with similar experiences. For many years after there was a small part of me that grew angry when I thought about you trying to kill me with a rocket propelled grenade. RPG’s are serious business, and you tried to kill me and my friends with one. Over the next few years I would think about you with the same self-righteousness that carried us to your country. Slowly, though, after I put away my rifle and left the service, the self-righteousness morphed into emotionlessness, then finally retrospection.

Regardless of my feelings, I’ve always wondered if you are still alive, and I have to recognize the odds are not in your favor. If we did not kill you before we left Iraq in 2011, then perhaps you died in Syria. Or maybe you were forced into ISIS—the monster that filled the vacuum once we finally left—and the threadbare Iraqi military cut you down, or perhaps we finished what we started and bombed you with our own airpower in our campaigning. Maybe you were killed by Kurds, or by pro-Syrian forces, or Syrian rebels, or perhaps by Russians. Or maybe you’re still out there, lost to the blinding winds of the Forever War, trapped by the flippant whimsy of our commitments.

I’ll understand if you don’t wish to hear any of this. Many things I write here are for you; some of them are for me. I cannot expect either of us to forgive the other for our intentions, nor can we reasonably ask for it. We intended to kill each other for reasons that were both out of our control.

Sometimes I daydream that perhaps the same futility that flooded me after I shot at you also filled your veins, and that you fled the war. I like to think you have a family, maybe a business, and you’re living in peace somewhere. Sometimes I wonder if there is ever a chance when you and I might walk through Husaybah and marvel at the stupidity of our insignificant little battlefield. I wonder if one day I will be able to talk with you, to explain to you how the world I lived in brought me to the world you lived in to destroy your life and finish ruining the lives of those who might have loved you. I want to explain to you what it looked like to see you in your town as I stood on its rooftops with the weight of an empire pressing me toward you. I want to show you the world we lived in when I came with my friends to kill you and others in the name of security for my people. We call it freedom and liberty, but what we really mean is security. I want to show you all the neuroses that fueled the tanks we sent rumbling across your streets and sent high explosives blasting into your home and the homes of thousands of others, neuroses that loaded the bombs onto our jets and dropped them from the clouds and turned to rubble the bones of so many of those you may have known. I want to show you how afraid of the world we had become and in many ways still are today. I want to show you the worth of all the tin gold trying to kill you has earned me, has earned us all. Unfortunately, that will have to wait; I’m still trying to tally its value.

But all these thoughts are nonsense and so I cashier them, yet I know they’ll return at bored moments while I am driving to work on a cloudy Tuesday morning. They’ll show up when I’m jogging, reading a book that I’ve grown bored with, or walking home from a bad date. But no matter how often I think of these things, whenever I think about those three bullets I shot at you and the fear and rage and blinding national stupidity that fueled them I’m always glad about one thing:

I’m glad I missed.