A wave of nostalgia and self-pity washed over me and I started to take my phone out to erase those photographs.

Moalem shook me. “What are you doing?”

I saw my confusion mirrored in his face. I want to delete the darlings of this war. I want to save them from the unforgiving hands of our enemy. Moalem pushed me across the room, telling me to shoot in short bursts.

“We have to let them know someone’s here and they’re not coming to an empty building.”

He ran to the other side and proceeded to do the same. It was a poker game and each side bluffed miserably. I started to shoot from my position, squandering shots so quickly that I muddled through two magazines. The little figures were still out there. But we’d slowed their progress. Moalem took turns shouting into his wireless while continuing to take aim. Why had this traveler brought Marcel Proust with him to the war? I clicked in my next-to-last magazine and started talking to myself. Moalem looked irritated with me.

“Because he thought that here, right here, he’d finally have time to read the whole damn book!” I screamed.

“What?” Moalem shouted back under the measured snap-snap of his firing.

I wished that I had at least read all the highlighted parts of the book. But I’d left that task for when I thought I’d have more leisure time. Maybe when I next went back to Tehran for a break.

Moalem now thought he saw the BMP rear its head from behind a different building. Another set of shouts into the walkie-talkie. More guns pounding the space between us.

“They are scissoring us!” Moalem yelled. It was an expression I’d heard men say countless times, and there was something satisfying about the notion of getting scissored. It had a certain finality to it. We were about to get totally cut off from our rear.

I had no more ammunition.

And so I daydreamed:

It’s another one of those holy evenings in Tehran, a south side working-class neighborhood where a childhood friend stirs enormous pots of food to give to the poor. His relative, a no-nonsense Quds commando—arguably the most-feared commando unit, besides the Israelis, in the Middle East—asks me politely not to take pictures of him, then tells me about the last time he was scissored. He recounts it with a straight face while his two little girls hover at his knees. Between the realization that every last man in his unit is dead and that he has run out of ammo (as I have now), and the three weeks he spent in a coma in a Moscow hospital bed, there is an entire arc of a life. This man does not live because he’s highly trained—if you’re out of ammo you’re out of ammo. He lives because he’s lucky and the rest of his unit that night wasn’t. Yet he still would not know what PTSD was if you sat him in a classroom and tried hammering it into him. It doesn’t enter his world. It is as if he’s taken an anti-PTSD vaccine that makes him impervious. We both know that soon he’ll be returning to the Syrian nightmare, but we don’t talk about it. PTSD is not an option he was ever offered; it does not apply to the calculus of his life. Getting scissored for him is just another thing.