One of my best friends, Maddie, snapped this photo of me and my one-year-old daughter in the middle of trying to get pictures for our Christmas card. I had scooped her up and kissed the back of her head before making yet another attempt to put the bow back on. Every time I fixed it and stepped out of the frame, she pulled it right back off. Getting a picture of that child was a job fit for the Crocodile Hunter.
It’s the only picture I have of the two of us from that day.
That was December 1st.
It’s weird how much I remember about that day and night. In so many ways, there was nothing out of the ordinary about it, yet my memories of what came afterward aren’t nearly as clear.
After we wrapped up taking pictures, Maddie and I went to one of our favorite Mexican restaurants. Jeff called while we were waiting on our food. When he realized we were at dinner, he casually told me he’d let me go and call back shortly. I had no reason to think anything was going on—and at that point, there wasn’t.
After I got home, I turned on White Christmas and waited for Maddie to send me the edited photos so I could order our Christmas cards. I finished the movie, ordered the cards, but still hadn’t heard from Jeff.
By the time I went to bed, I was starting to worry. I’d learned that when I didn’t hear from Jeff when I expected to, there was usually a reason. Sometimes the phones simply went down. Other times, it meant someone had been wounded or killed.
I thought back to our last call. Jeff had been completely calm and said he’d call me back, so I told myself it wasn’t him. I convinced myself he wasn’t out on a mission and that whatever was going on had nothing to do with him. I probably wouldn’t know anything until morning.
There are certain things I still feel guilty about even though I know there’s no reason to, and one of them is getting off that call at the restaurant. As if staying on the phone just a little longer could have somehow changed what happened. It couldn’t have, but nearly 14 years later, there’s still a part of me that wonders if something I did differently on my side of the world could have changed what happened on his.
I was texting back and forth with Jeff’s cousin Kendra before I fell asleep. The last thing I sent her was, “I’m worried.”
Less than an hour later, sometime after midnight, I woke up to a call from a strange number.
Still half asleep, I fumbled around in the dark to answer. There was static, a delay, and then through it I heard a broken and delirious, “Hey.”
It was Jeff.
I could tell he was hurt, but because of OPSEC, Jeff didn’t know what he could say and I didn’t know what I could ask. Even in a moment like that, it was so ingrained in both of us that it affected how much either of us said on that call.
Well, that and the drugs Jeff was on.
The call couldn’t have lasted more than a minute. What I know I got from it was that he’d hurt his arm, he was going to be moved to a hospital, and he’d call me again as soon as he could.
To this day, it gets me how simple that call sounded. How “hurting his arm” could be something that would still be affecting our lives nearly 14 years later.
That was it.
As soon as we hung up, I stared at the strange number on my phone for a moment, wondering if that had really happened or if I was dreaming. Then I called Maddie while grabbing my iPad and searching for any news out of Afghanistan.
I had always given myself one rule during deployments in an attempt to keep my sanity: don’t watch or read the news.
So naturally, that was the first thing I did.
It didn’t take much explanation before Maddie was in her car headed toward my house. She made it in record time.
While I was on the phone with her, I found a news article that had just been posted. I recognized the location immediately: Jalalabad, Afghanistan. It reported an attack involving suicide bombers and gunmen in the same place Jeff was.
When Maddie got to my house, I started frantically cleaning just to keep myself busy. We stood around the kitchen trying to figure out what we were supposed to do.
There was no chance I was going back to sleep.
So Maddie stayed, and we stayed up for the rest of the night.
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