AT THE CENTER OF DWYER was a towering spike, a kind of makeshift Nelson’s Column. Nailed to it were dozens of arrows, pointing every
which way, each arrow painted with the name of a place some soldier at Dwyer called home.
Sydney Australia 7223 miles Glasgow 3654 miles
Bridgwater Somerset 3610 miles
That first morning, walking past the spike, I had a thought. Maybe I should write my own home up there.
Clarence House 3456 miles
That’d get a laugh.
But no. Just as none of us was eager to draw the Taliban’s attention, I was eager not to draw the attention of my fellow squaddies. My main goal was to blend in.
One of the arrows pointed towards “The Cannons,” two enormous 105-mm guns at the back of the non-working shower block. Nearly every day, several times a day, Dwyer fired off those big guns, lobbed massive shells in a smoky parabola towards Taliban positions. The noise made your blood stop, fried your brains. (One day the guns were fired at least a hundred times.) For the rest of my life, I knew, I’d be hearing some vestige of that sound; it would echo forever in some part of my being. I would also never forget, when the guns finally stopped, that immense silence.
