There's a letter on my bookshelf, the paper yellowed with age and creased from folding and stained with dirt and blood from a day in the Hindu Kush mountains. I didn't think I'd make it out alive when the evening light on the peaks looked like the last beautiful thing I might ever see.
I keep it to remind me where I learned the weight of distance. Not just the miles between here and there, but the years between who I was and who I became in those far mountains.
I went in as an analyst. The recruitment pitch talked about "supporting intelligence operations." Clean language for messy work. Nobody mentioned I'd learn things about myself I never wanted to know, that I'd come home carrying ghosts for the rest of my life.
The mountains were beautiful in their cruelty. Ancient, patient sentinels that had witnessed a thousand wars, a million small tragedies played out in their shadows. They held secrets in their stone faces, fears in their echoing valleys. Those far mountains became part of me, carved into my memory like wind carves rock.
Some days, crouched behind rocks while bullets pinged off stone, I'd catch myself staring at the peaks and wondering what they'd seen before we arrived, what they'd see after we left. They seemed to mock our urgency with their eternal stillness, our noise with their vast silence.
The thin air made everything feel surreal. Colors too bright, sounds too sharp, each breath a conscious effort. We learned to move differently up there, to think differently. The mountains demanded respect…one wrong step, one moment of carelessness, and they'd swallow you whole.
Coming home was supposed to fix everything. American soil under my boots, familiar faces, the promise of normal again. But normal was a country I couldn't find on any map. The mountains followed me home, rising in my dreams, casting shadows across grocery store aisles, turning car backfires into incoming rounds.
Now, some nights I pour bourbon and stare out at the Colorado Rockies. Different stone, gentler slopes, but they whisper the same truths about endurance, about time, about the way some distances can never be crossed again. The liquid catches whatever light is available, amber and warm, holding conversations I have with myself about who I was and who I've become.
I've learned to live with the weight of distance; not just the miles to those far mountains, but the years between then and now. The man who went in is a stranger to the man who came back. Innocence died in those passes, replaced by something harder but perhaps more honest. Knowledge bought with experience and paid for in sleepless nights.
The mountains taught me things I never wanted to know. How to live with fear as a constant companion. How to find beauty in broken places. How to carry weight without being crushed by it. How to read the world through different eyes - always scanning, always aware, always remembering that peace is a temporary condition.
The work was supposed to be safe, distant. Listening to radio chatter, analyzing patterns, staying behind the lines. But there are no lines in mountain warfare, no safe distances when the enemy knows the terrain better than you do. Technology fails in thin air and bitter cold. Electronics freeze. Batteries die. Sometimes all you have is instinct and the weight of the gun you hoped you'd never need.
I remember mornings when the sunrise painted those peaks gold and purple, moments of such startling beauty they made you forget where you were, what you were doing there. Then gunfire would echo through the valleys, and the spell would break. Beauty and terror walking hand in hand through those ancient passes.
The letter yellows a little more each year, but the words remain sharp in memory. Written in a moment of clarity when death felt close, when the mountains seemed ready to claim me. Far away now, but always present. Always holding the stories of what happened in their shadows, what was learned in their silence, what was lost and found in their ancient presence.
Those far mountains marked the end of one life and the beginning of another. The distance between who I was and who I am is not measured in miles, but in understanding...hard-won knowledge about the weight we carry, the choices we make, and the way some journeys change us completely.
The letter reminds me that I survived to write other words, to tell other stories. That the man who thought he was saying goodbye in those mountains lived to frame his fears and carry them forward. Some mornings now, when the light hits the Colorado peaks just right, I see beauty without terror.
The mountains taught me how to survive.
Coming home taught me how to live.
And maybe that's enough; to carry the weight without drowning, to remember without being trapped, to find peace in the space between what was and what might still be.