The Dark Month

WHEN I HOLD MY FIRSTBORN, Patrick, for the first time, embracing him against my chest, my Army-issue brown T-shirt is still damp with sweat and blotched with patches of dried sand from the nineteen-hour trip from Afghanistan to Ohio. My son is six weeks old, buttoned to the neck in a long-sleeve white onesie with a brown giraffe on his chest, and I can smell the stench of breast milk on his breath. His body is warm and fleshy and light—just a little heavier than the 8.79 pounds of an M16A2 rifle fully locked and loaded with a thirty-round magazine of 5.56-millimeter ball ammunition. And as I hold him between my calloused, dried palms and peer into his blue eyes, that same methylene dark as his mother’s, I realize his entire existence is just delicate enough that if I want, I can rip him in two.

I am home for only fifteen days of emergency leave. Patrick has a gastrointestinal problem, some undiagnosed issue with his stomach and throat. Angela and I anxiously await news from a specialist from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital to inform us if he will need a procedure or not. And although my leave is short, I can hold my infant son for only thirty seconds at first. The image of his body snapping like a pencil between my hands comes to me again and again, and vomit rises in my throat.

I give him to Angela.

“I don’t want to hurt him,” I say.

She smiles. She thinks it’s the fears of a new father. It’s not.

I still feel isolated in the center of a desert’s minefield. I’m not yet ready to be home from war.

, seven thousand miles from where my son utters his first sound into this fucked-up world, I am six months into my first combat deployment in Bagram, Afghanistan. As a military police platoon leader in charge of base security operations, I am with my platoon, making rounds to the various checkpoints, just as I do every day. In the watchtower overlooking Entry Control Point (ECP) 1, I make sure the private in the overwatch position is awake. I double-check his weapon, ensuring it is loaded and on “safe,” that it is ready to “rock and roll” at a moment’s notice in case an ambush happens below. I