Now, as I write these words, fully conscious of my ignorance of all things martial, it might appear that I know what the fuck I’m talking about when I discuss the things that happened. I don’t. I have shot a few weapons in my life. But it was always as a guest of the weapon. Not its master. And I never hit anything that I intended to hit because my eyes would not cooperate.

It was no different now. Emptied of the random platoons that made up the Hashd forces in this ghostly place, the isolated mokebs suddenly found themselves on the perimeter of a battle that should not have happened. In the last few days we had thought this geography finally cleared of the enemy, their last suicides taken down at the threshold of the Eye of the Horse a week before. Maybe there would be pockets here and there—and not so close—that would eventually be flushed. But nothing like this. I wish I could give a minute-by-minute account. But mostly I was just searching for a lens through which I could have a modicum of vision.

I saw him, that familiar stance of the guerrilla with an RPG that I’d last encountered at Khan-T. Here: a dusty roadway with occasional battered buildings on either side. You could have imagined two cowboys suddenly appearing from behind their respective walls to face each other and you would have been forgiven the mindfuck cliché. Because that was exactly what it looked like. I closed my left eye to see better, or see period. There he was in that disheveled hatred of his, several buildings down in the direction that the coffee man or the coffee man’s specter had just hobbled from. Cleric J saw him at the same time and screamed, “Down!” which we all obeyed because he was our mother and our prophet.

That man could have killed every one of us. Instead he chose as his target the emptied mokeb. I don’t know why he did that. But God bless him! Then his backup followed with another round into the smoking mokeb. They must have had information that that was the place they should hit if they wanted to score a major body count.

An instant later, Maysam took one of them down with a clean shot, just as Moalem had done in Khan-T. The ground shook and the fresh rattle of vehicles from the fuel depot gave us hope. We had backup after all. Maysam started gathering the men, and once the two armored engines were on the dust road, we all hung back behind them, scared buzzing flies that we were, and slowly walked toward the destroyed coffee mokeb and the ruined sniper billet.