Where the devil dances with the dust

The dust never really leaves you. The devils don’t either.

The dust follows you home, thousands of miles from the war, settling into the corners of rooms where you least expect it. Sometimes, I find it in the creases of books I've never opened, or in the pockets of clothes, I bought after returning.

The devils are more insidious than the dust.

They hide in the shadows between heartbeats, in the silence between words. Some take the form of choices made under pressure when right and wrong blur like heat waves on the horizon. Others wear the faces of strangers whose lives intersected with mine in that distant place…brief encounters that left permanent marks.

The worst devils are invisible. They arise when the doubt whispers at 3 AM, when the guilt sits heavy on your chest after waking in a gasp from a dream you can't remember, and fear rises unbidden when a car backfires downtown.

These devils don't threaten your soul like in Sunday sermons; they've already claimed pieces of it, leaving holes that never fill no matter how much time passes or how far you run, or how much therapy you undertake.

I wasn't supposed to be over there. My role was meant to be at a distance: monitoring, analyzing, and supporting from afar. But plans change. Wars have a gravity that pulls everyone closer to their center, regardless of intention.

We had different uniforms, different training, different purposes. But under that relentless sun, those distinctions blurred like mirages on the horizon. In the quiet moments between missions, we were just people far from home, trying to make sense of a place where clarity was as scarce as rain.

The first time I felt the weight of it all was during a sunset that painted the mountains in colors I'd never seen before: purples and reds so vivid they seemed unreal. Beauty shouldn't exist in war zones, I remember thinking. It feels like a betrayal somehow.

"The most beautiful and terrible things exist side by side," Mac said. "That's what breaks people…having to hold both truths at once."

I carried those words with me through everything that followed. Through the good days when children waved from village edges. Through the bad days when we were counted lossed. Through the worst days when I was enveloped with death and didn’t think I’d make it home.

Faith changes shape in places like that. It becomes both more vital and more fragile.

I watched men pray before missions who had never set foot inside a church. I watched others stop praying altogether. Some found faith in each other when they could no longer find it elsewhere. Brotherhood became its own kind of religion.

Fear does strange things to conviction. It strips away pretense until you're forced to confront what you truly believe when everything is at stake. The things I thought I knew for certain became questions I couldn't answer. The lines between right and wrong, once so clear in briefing rooms stateside, wavered like heat rising from sun-baked stones.

There were moments of humanity that cut through everything else. A local man sharing food with us despite knowing it might make him a target later. A medic working through the night to save someone who might have been shooting at us hours earlier. Small acts of mercy in a place that seemed designed to eliminate it.

I remember one night, unable to sleep, I walked out to the edge of our position. The stars were impossibly bright, unmarred by the light pollution of home. I felt simultaneously insignificant and exposed as if the universe could see straight through to every doubt I carried.

A voice beside me said, "Thinking about home?"

I hadn't heard anyone approach. A dangerous lapse in awareness that spoke to my exhaustion. I turned and saw Mac standing there.

"Trying not to," I admitted.

"That's smart," he said. "Home is a dream out here. And dreams can get you killed."

But I dreamed anyway. Of clean sheets and hot showers. Of voices that didn't carry the edge of command or fear. Of decisions that didn't weigh so heavily that they could crush you beneath them.

When I finally came back, I brought the dust with me. It lives in my lungs, memory, and spaces between who I was and who I became. Some nights, I wake up reaching for equipment I haven't touched in years, disoriented by the softness of my bed and the absence of danger.

People have asked me what it was like, and I never know what to tell them.

How do you explain that place where devils and dust swirl together, where faith and fear dance in the shadows? How do you make them understand what it means to lose certainty and find something else—something harder but truer—in its place?

I don't speak of specific missions, names, or places. Those details belong to the classified past, to redacted reports and conversations that never officially happened. But the feeling of it…that belongs to me. The dust in my lungs, the weight of decisions, the brotherhood that transcends explanation.

That feeling is mine alone. The lurch in my stomach when a helicopter passes overhead, the way my hands still instinctively check the equipment that isn't there, the startling clarity that comes in moments of perceived danger.

Mine is the knowledge of how it feels to be simultaneously more alive and closer to death than you ever thought possible. Mine is the memory of quiet conversations under foreign stars, of shared meals and silent understanding, of the strange peace that sometimes descends in the eye of the storm.

I own the conflicted emotions that rise when I see those mountains on television now: recognition and loss, fear and longing. I claim the contradictions: how I never want to go back, yet part of me never left; how I'm grateful to be home while mourning what was left behind; how I hate what happened there but love those who stood beside me through it.

These feelings weren't in the mission briefings. They don't appear in history books or military records. They exist in the space that exists between official narratives and lived experience, in the shadows between what we're told war is and what we discover it to be. They reside in quiet moments when veterans recognize each other across crowded rooms without a word being spoken, in the knowing glance that acknowledges: you've been there too, you've seen it, you understand.

In those silent exchanges lies a truth deeper than any after-action report could capture. The shared weight of having stood where devils dance with dust, where every certainty is tested against the hard edge of reality.

It's the unspoken brotherhood of the tested, a kinship forged in places where words fail and only experience speaks. It's why we sometimes find ourselves drawn to others who carry the same invisible burdens, why a nod in a waiting room can say more than hours of conversation with those who weren't there. We recognize in each other what we've lost and gained: the innocence surrendered and the wisdom earned at too high a price.

And sometimes, on quiet nights when the memories are loud, I step outside under the stars. They're never as bright as they were there, but they remind me of what I learned in that place: that light exists even in the darkest circumstances. That faith, once tested, is either destroyed or transformed into something unbreakable. That fear doesn't make you weak—it makes you human.

That's what I carried home from that nameless place. Not medals or citations or official acknowledgments. Just the dust, the devils, and the hard-won wisdom that comes from standing at the crossroads of heaven and earth, between the devil and the dust.