The rock digs into my back, sharp edges finding every vertebra. I've wedged myself between two boulders on this godforsaken hilltop, and my laptop screen casts a sickly blue glow on hands that won't stop shaking.
Darkness owns everything beyond this outcropping. Complete. Absolute. The kind of black that makes you question if your eyes are even open.
Then the world explodes in strobing light.
Muzzle flashes from below paint the rocks in frantic bursts - white, orange, white again. Each flash freezes the scene like a camera: Mac's face pressed against stone. Donnie's rifle tracking left. My own knuckles, bone-white on the grip of a weapon I still don't know how to use properly.
The sound comes in waves. Sharp cracks bounce off the mountainside, layering on themselves until I can't tell incoming from outgoing. My ears ring and my chest hammers. I taste copper and dust.
Another burst of light. I see Mac's eyes find mine across three feet of darkness. He's mouthing something, but the gunfire swallows his words. The flashes strobe faster now: their guns, our guns, all of it turning night into a hellish disco where the music is bullets and the floor is Afghan rock.
My fingers hover over the keyboard. Training says to process the data. Send the coordinates. Do your job. But another volley tears into the rocks above us, and I watch Donnie's face in the muzzle flash; gritted teeth, focused eyes, every muscle committed to keeping us alive.
I'm typing coordinates while they may be dying to protect me.
The thought hits harder than the sound of bullets striking stone.
I slam the laptop shut. Shove it deep into my pack. My rifle feels foreign in my hands - too heavy, too real. Mac's training echoes through the chaos: "Breathe. Aim. Squeeze. Don't think."
I find a gap between rocks. Darkness swallows everything until the next burst of light shows me movement below. I aim where the muzzle flashes originate. My first shot disappears into nothing…I don't even know if I hit the mountain, let alone a target.
"Short bursts!" Mac's voice cuts through the chaos. "Breathe between!"
I do.
Three rounds. Breathe. Three more. The rifle kicks against my shoulder, each shot a shock through my whole body. I'm not a soldier. I'm a signals analyst playing pretend with a very real weapon in a very real fight.
But my brothers need every rifle working, and mine isn't working sitting next to a laptop.
The rhythm finds me. Fire. Breathe. Fire. Adjust. In the strobing darkness, I can't tell if I'm effective or just making noise. But Donnie shifts left, and Mac adjusts right, and they're moving like I'm actually covering them.
A round sparks off the rock inches from my face. Stone fragments sting my cheek. I duck, breathe, come back up. Find the flash that came at me. Send three rounds toward it.
The firing intensifies. Every flash shows me the same scene from a slightly different angle: rocks, rifles, brothers pressed against stone. But now I'm part of it. Not watching, but fighting.
My magazine runs dry. In the darkness, my hands fumble for a new one. Training takes over; muscle memory from countless practice runs. I reload in blackness, count to three, come back up.
The world is only what the muzzle flashes show me. Everything else is faith; faith in the angle I'm covering, faith in my brothers' positions, faith that the rounds I'm sending downrange mean something.
Hours pass. Or minutes. Time loses meaning when every second might be your last.
My shoulder aches from the recoil. My ears have gone beyond ringing into a dull pressure that feels like swimming underwater. My hands are cramped on the rifle grip. But I keep firing. Keep breathing. Keep trusting that I'm doing something right.
Then - silence. Real silence. The kind that makes your ears ache.
We wait. Breath. Listen. Wait for the next wave.
It doesn't come.
Dawn finds us still pressed against those rocks. Gray light reveals what the muzzle flashes only hinted at: the full scope of our position, the valley below, the trails they used to approach. In daylight, it seems impossible that we survived. The rocks are pockmarked with bullet strikes. Brass casings litter the ground. My brass casings, mixed with theirs.
Mac checks each of us, methodical as always. When he reaches me, he looks at my rifle, then at my face.
He nods slowly. "Good work."
As we move out, I look back at that hilltop. In daylight, it's just rocks. Just another spot on a map. But I know I'll see it forever in those strobing flashes; that space between darkness and light where I stopped being just an analyst and became something else.
We made it through the night. All of us. No injuries beyond bruises and ringing ears, and memories that will strobe through dreams for years to come.
The laptop stayed closed. The rifle stayed hot. And somewhere in the darkness between those muzzle flashes, I learned what I was made of.