The Weight We Carry

The chair sits empty at my kitchen table, third seat from the left, slightly pulled out like someone just stepped away for a moment and promised to return. It's been twenty-something years since Mac took that blast meant for me…twenty-plus years of carrying his sacrifice like stones in my pockets.

Morning light filters through the windows, casting long shadows across the floor. I trace the grain patterns with my eyes, finding faces and mountains in the whorls. The coffee's gone cold again. I keep forgetting to drink it while it's hot, lost in the spaces between memories.

In these quiet hours, I sometimes think I hear his laugh echoing off the walls. Deep and genuine, the kind that made everyone around him smile, even in the worst situations. "Check your six," he'd say, that slow drawl carrying equal parts amusement and deadly seriousness. Not just in the country, but everywhere. At the mess. In the barracks. Even at that dive bar where we'd try to pretend we were somewhere else, anywhere else, just for a few hours.

I wasn't a soldier. Just an analyst with a laptop and a gun, I barely knew how to use. But those mountains didn't care who I was. They watched impassively as I crouched behind rocks, gathering intel while bullets pinged off stone.

Mac saw something in me, something worth protecting. Worth dying for, as it turned out.

"You're carrying too much weight, kid," he told me once, watching me check and recheck my gear before a mission. "Ain't all yours to carry."

It took me years to understand what he meant. Years of therapy, of nightmares, of pushing away everyone who tried to get close. Years of quiet remembrances, trying to make sense of why I lived and he died.

The Colorado Rockies outside my window are different from the Hindu Kush – gentler, more forgiving. But as I hike their trails, my mind inevitably wanders back to those other peaks, where beauty and danger danced together in the thin air, where each footstep could mean survival or doom.

I carry ghosts in my pockets like spare change. Their weight shifts with each step, a constant reminder of debts I can never repay. Jimmy. Scotty. And Mac. Always Mac, whose life paid for mine in a transaction I never agreed to and never wanted.

They tell me I survived for a reason. Bullshit. There is no reason why I'm here and they're not, just the random chaos of metal and flesh and time. No grand design, no fate, no purpose. Just the luck of standing three feet to the left when death came calling.

Sometimes I catch myself talking to them. In the shower. On mountain trails. In the grocery store, when something reminds me of a story Mac would have appreciated or a joke Scotty would have made. The woman who hands me my change at the coffee shop gives me a look when I mutter "Thanks, brother" to empty air.

At night, I trace the map of scars, both visible and hidden. Each one is a story I'm still learning how to tell. Each one is a bridge between who I was and who I had to become. The ravens tattooed across my back: Hugin and Munin, Thought and Memory…they watch over it all, silent witnesses to a transformation I never asked for.

The mountains taught me things I never wanted to learn. How to live with fear as a constant companion, how to find strength when all hope seems lost, how to carry the weight of memories that refuse to fade. They showed me both the worst and best of humanity, played out against their ancient slopes.

I don't want your pity or your prayers. I want the world to remember what it costs to send the young to die in distant lands, what it means to come back carrying pieces of the dead in your soul. I want the empty chair at my table to speak, to tell their stories when my voice fails, to hold space for all they could have been.

Some days, I feel like an archaeologist of my past, carefully brushing away layers of time to understand what lies beneath. Each memory I uncover asks its own questions: Why did I survive? What was it all for? Who would I be if Afghanistan hadn't rewritten my story?

The answers don't come easily. They're like water in cupped hands; the tighter I try to hold them, the more they slip away. But maybe that's the point. Perhaps understanding isn't about grasping, but about letting go.

There's a strange geography to the mind after trauma. Valleys carved by grief. Mountains built from resilience. Desert stretches of emptiness where memories refuse to grow. I've spent years mapping these territories, learning their contours, understanding their seasons.

Now, as I stand at my window watching the sun set behind the Rockies, I realize these mountains will always be part of me. They're carved into my psyche as surely as wind and water carve the rock. I can't escape them, but maybe I don't need to. Perhaps they're a reminder of who I was, who I am, and who I'm still becoming; shaped by forces beyond my control, yet still standing.

Till Valhalla, brother.

Not a promise or a prayer, but a truth written in blood and memory. I'll keep your memory alive through all the days and years ahead of me, through all the seasons still to come, until it's finally my turn to join you in that great hall where no warrior stands alone.