Chapter 17: The Long Way Home

Spring–Summer 2011

Getting out was not a single moment but a long unspooling of them, and the family learned in those weeks that freedom came wrapped in paperwork and waiting and the particular exhaustion of being moved by hands larger than your own.

From the firebase they were flown to Bagram — the great roaring American city-on-a-plain that the women could not have imagined and could not stop staring at. So many aircraft. So much electric light burning the night back to noon. Yasmin held Omar’s sleeve and would not let go. Dina pronounced it all very loud and very wasteful and stayed very close to him as she said it. Only Nadia took it in with her bottomless calm, as though she’d always expected the world to be large and was merely having it confirmed.

At Bagram the machinery turned around them, and at Bagram, for the first time, Omar learned that he could not stay with them through what came next — and had to go and explain it to four women who had only just gotten him back.

Because the truth, once the planners laid it out, was simple and unbendable: he and the women were not going home by the same road. He was a United States soldier, recovered after six months, with a shattered-and-healed leg that needed a real workup and a medical board to process him out, and intelligence people who weren’t finished with him, and a whole repatriation machine that ran on military tracks. He’d be flown to Germany — to the big military hospital at Landstuhl, where every wounded man from that war passed through — and then on to a military hospital in the States, and somewhere in all of it a board would sit and decide, formally, what everyone already knew: that his soldiering days were done.

The women were Afghan nationals entering on humanitarian grounds. They would go an entirely different way — staged through a third country, screened, vetted, biometriced, medically cleared, their parole adjudicated by people who had never worn the uniform. A civilian road, a slower one, run by the State Department and the resettlement people and the veterans’ group back home who’d taken up their cause.

The two roads diverged at Bagram. There was no version where they didn’t.

He told them in a quiet room, all four together, the way he’d learned to tell them hard things.

“Listen to me, because this part matters and I need you to hold onto it. I have to go one way and you four go another, for a while. They’re flying me to a hospital in Germany to work on this leg, then to a hospital back in the States, and there’s a board that has to sign the papers that let me out of the Army. That’s my road, and I can’t change it.” He looked from face to face. “Your road goes through a safe country first, where they’ll see to your papers and your health, and then it brings you to America. To Cedar Rapids. But here is the thing you have to understand — you will get there before I do. My leg and my board are going to keep me longer than your papers keep you. So you’re going to land in my country without me standing there. And I need you not to be afraid of that, because you will not be alone for one single minute.”