by Craig Grossi
For the Fourth of July that year, I went down to Hilton Head, South Carolina, where my mom lived with my stepdad, Maurice. They had a beautiful home with a big backyard and a deck overlooking a lagoon. After lunch, a few of us sat out back on the patio having a beer. I was joking around with my brother-in-law Jason and my friend Nathan when suddenly the kids next door started launching firecrackers into the lagoon. My body responded before my mind did. In an instant, I grabbed Nathan, who was sitting next to me, and pulled him down. We hit the deck before I realized what I was doing.
“Wow, man,” Nathan said. My brother-in-law jumped up and came around to our side of the table.
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to come back to my senses. My heart was racing. The firecrackers were still going off; the whoosh sound they made as they flew through the air sounded exactly like RPGs—something I hadn’t heard in months. I got to my feet and helped Nathan up, my palms sweating.
“I don’t know what happened,” I said, trying to smile and brush it off. “I thought the Taliban moved in next door.”
Up until that moment, I thought I was in control of my memories and experiences, not that they had any control over me.
That fall, my fiancée suggested we buy a house. Her friends were all moving to the suburbs and starting families. She wanted that, too, but I desperately wanted to live in the city. I was just twenty-eight years old and had spent the last eight years—nearly all of my twenties—in the marines. I tried to convince her the suburbs could wait. If we bought a place in D.C., I argued, we could live there for a few years, enjoy it, then rent it out later, use it as an investment.
She wouldn’t budge. I found myself far from the city, looking at three-bedroom houses with two-car garages and big lawns that were right at the top of our budget. I remember standing in the foyer of one house, looking around at the slick hardwood floors and empty rooms, and suddenly everything came crashing into focus. I didn’t like what I saw. This wasn’t me. I wasn’t happy—not with the truck or the house or the job or the person I was supposed to be marrying. I thought checking all the boxes would lead me to where I was supposed to be, but standing in the foyer that day, all I wanted to do was run.
Our arrival in the Kisatchie National Forest was unceremonious. The park entrance had no gate, ranger station, or welcome center. Instead, Josh, Fred, and I were greeted by the quiet of the forest. If there had been any breeze whatsoever, the tall longleaf pines might have waved hello. But the afternoon was hot, humid, and still.
After our night at Red’s Lounge in Clarksdale, we’d followed the winding Mississippi River south, down into Louisiana, in hopes of camping in the Kisatchie woods. Kisatchie is a nine-hundred-square-mile swath of central Louisiana, a big green expanse on the map, full of bayous, bogs, prairies, and woods. Safe to say we chose the destination because neither of us had ever heard of it, and no one had recommended it, either.
On the drive down, we’d passed marshes and crossed over narrow muddy deltas until the flat swampland began to give way to stretches of towering pines, making us grateful for shelter from the scorching midafternoon sun.
Inside the park, we spotted a stack of maps in a plastic dispenser hung from a lonely wooden sign. I pulled over and grabbed one, then unfolded the glossy paper across the dash.
“Wow. This place is huge,” Josh said, taking in the enormous gridded network of trails.
Without studying it too much, I shifted the Land Cruiser back into gear.
We drove for a while before spotting a turnoff. A little plaque with a four-wheel-drive sign marked its entrance. Josh and I looked at each other. I raised my eyebrows, then turned the wheel and pulled onto the trail. I hadn’t tested the Land Cruiser’s four-wheel-drive system yet, but I knew my big blue beauty was more than capable. This was exactly the sort of road-less-traveled we were after.
There’s nothing like the feeling of tires treading over dirt. Josh and I grinned from ear to ear as we bounced over the bumpy trail. The truck steadily moved forward, rocking back and forth as she crawled forward over shallow ditches and bumps. The trail was overgrown, and foliage from the forest floor reached across our path like outstretched arms. Fred, jarred from the rocking, stood looking out the window. The view was a blur of green.
I could feel the dirt beneath us soften, and the road began to tilt forward, downhill. As we came around a bend, the Land Cruiser’s bumper pushing through shrubs, the smell of wet earth filtered through the open windows. Ahead, I spotted the source: the road sloped down, right into a fifteen-yard-long stretch of thick, dark Louisiana mud.
We rolled to a stop and I hopped out to look for a twig. Making my way along the edge of the mud pit, I leaned out over it and stuck a long stick down as far as it’d go. When I pulled it out, the watermark looked about two feet deep. I held it up so Josh could see.
“I think we can make it,” I said, walking back to the truck. Fred had jumped into the driver’s seat and put his head out the window, watching me. Josh hung out the other side. He shrugged.
“We probably can,” he said, “but where are we going to make it to, exactly?”
We consulted the park map, but our trail wasn’t on it. Wherever we were, we were alone in the thick of the woods, with no cell phone service and no plan.
I hopped back in the driver’s seat and nudged Fred out of the way.
“Your call, man,” Josh said.
Fred stuck his head out the window behind me. I could see the reflection of his goofy smile in the side-view mirror.
“Let’s do it,” I said. I shifted the old LC into four-wheel drive and eased us forward. If we went slowly enough, I hoped we’d have enough torque to get through the slop.
The front wheels went in first, and we tipped forward as the nose of the truck pushed into the watery mud. The Cruiser righted herself and pulled her rear tires in. As the back wheels rolled into the mud, though, I felt the entire weight of the truck sink. The tires slipped, and we lost traction. I pressed my right foot harder onto the gas, but that just sent mud flying up from all four tires. Only five feet into our mud pit and we were stuck. I glanced at Josh, who looked at me as if to say I’d better have a plan.
For a moment, we just sat there. I felt a cool prick of anxiety start at the back of my neck and flush through my body. Then I gripped the small shifter on my right and pulled it straight back into the lowest gear we had.
I returned my foot to the gas and slowly pressed down. Beneath us, I felt the power shift through the Land Cruiser, and she lurched forward. Josh sat up in his seat and pounded the outside of the passenger side door. Fred stood from the backseat with his head between us, trying to get a view of the action.
“Come on, baby! Keep rollin’!” Josh shouted, and she did. The mud sloshed along the bottom of the doors and we slowly glided forward. When we crawled out of the pit on the other side, we headed uphill again, victorious.
Thankfully, the overgrown trail dumped us onto a well-maintained fire road, and, after another mile, we came to a campground. It’d been nearly ten hours in the car, and we were finished pushing our luck. We drove into the campground and had our pick of a site; no one else was around. I parked the Cruiser between two enormous pine trees and we got out.
It was a relief to stand and stretch. Fred leapt out behind us onto the piney forest floor and got to work examining the area. The humidity hadn’t eased up at all, and mosquitoes immediately descended onto our bare arms and legs. Josh and I set out to look for kindling and logs to burn. The sooner we got a fire going, the quicker we could stave off the bugs.
We found a narrow trail into the woods. The dense canopy obscured much of what was left of the daylight, but still, it was hot, and I wiped the sweat from my forehead. Back in the truck, our cooler was packed with meat, veggies, and beer. Josh had brought a cast-iron skillet, perfect for using over an open flame.
A soft layer of pine needles lined the flat, compressed earth of the trail. I walked along, picking up a few sticks and twi
gs. Then, I caught sight of a small, innocuous thing: a small stack of rocks just ahead, right in my path. A lightning bolt of thought flickered in my mind: Don’t step there.
I’d noticed rock stacks like this before, on hikes with Fred in Virginia. Hikers or campers would make a little pile of stones, one balanced on top of the other, small sculptures that served little purpose other than to mark a trail and pass the time. Cairns, they’re called. For anyone who had patrolled in Afghanistan, however, the rocks served a completely different purpose. The Taliban often stacked rocks as a way of signaling to one another and to villagers the location of IEDs. We had been trained to spot such formations and to be cautious of them.
Rocks weren’t the only thing the Taliban used to mark IEDs. Trash was common, too. A wrapper. A soda can. Anything shiny or out of place that we might instinctively grab or kick. Before my mission in Sangin, a unit of marines took up post in an abandoned compound near the Green Zone. The corpsman caught sight of a box of tampons lying in the dirt. Maybe out of boredom, or amusement, or just to clear it away, he kicked it. It was attached to an IED and blew him up. He lived, but the blast took three of his limbs. That’s what gave rise to our “pattern of life” rule. After that, we only ever took compounds where people were living, and even still, the EOD guys would sweep for IEDs before we moved in. Even in places that were inhabited, sometimes we’d still find IEDs that remained.
The feeling of living like that—in what was essentially a minefield—didn’t leave you when you got home. After I first came back from my deployment, I’d catch myself avoiding pieces of trash or rocks as I walked down the sidewalk or through a park. The sound of a garbage truck lumbering down the street and suddenly hitting a pothole, or a plane flying low overhead, sometimes made me duck, too. And driving around in D.C., I instinctively watched pedestrians on either side of the road. Instead of my mind registering that some guy was simply out for his morning jog, it’d ask: What time is it? Why is he out jogging? Have I seen him before?
On the trail in Kisatchie, a jolt of adrenaline washed through me like a wave, then passed. In an instant, I registered that I was home now, that a rock was just a rock again, that it had been stripped of its danger now. I took a breath, looked up, and there was Fred, gleefully bounding through the brush off to our right. I watched him hop over a log and sniff along the bottom of a tree trunk. He lifted his chin up, twitching his wet nose and scanning the horizon. When his eyes landed on Josh and the bundle of sticks he was carrying, he trotted toward him and, with a quick leap, snatched a twig from under his arm.
“Hey!” Josh said, playfully, then pretended to chase Fred, who held the long, thin stick between his teeth, letting Josh come just close enough before dashing away.
Back at camp, Josh and I started the fire while Fred gnawed contentedly on his stolen twig, propping it up between his front paws while he reduced it to a slobbery nub. Stunningly, the cooler had managed to keep our food and drinks cold in the back of the truck all day, and it wasn’t long before we were sipping beer and flipping steaks. When the sun went down, the heat stayed, but the bugs were gone and our bellies were full.
That night in my tent, I tossed and turned. Fred splayed out in one corner while I lay across my sleeping mat, waking up every hour to wipe the sweat from my forehead and reposition. Sometime around 3:00 A.M., I awoke to shuffling and crackling sounds outside the tent. I propped myself up on an elbow and looked over at Fred, who was already awake, twitching his nose in the air. I leaned toward the flap of the tent, slowly pulling the zipper down. Outside was a whole pack of wild hogs roaming through the campsite, including an enormous one right outside our tent. They were hulking creatures, snorting and honking over the ground, looking for food. Fred, now fully alert, started growling. “Easy, buddy,” I said, and he came over and curled up next to me. The noisy intruders moved on, and we managed a few more hours of sleep.
The next morning, Josh and I decided to get back on the road. We’d thought we’d spend a few days camping in Kisatchie, but one restless night in the heat was enough. Even though we were in search of the challenge and uncertainty of being off the grid—the feeling of the day-to-day grind and immediacy of life in Afghanistan—the bayou had put us in our place. It was a contradiction: we wanted to be back in Afghanistan, but then again, we didn’t. Maybe it would always be that way.
After our night in Kisatchie, the bungalow we’d rented in Austin sounded pretty good. We drove out of the park, dark red mud flinging off the Land Cruiser’s tires as we merged onto the paved highway leading us out. In Austin, we spent a weekend sleeping on real beds, eating from food trucks, and relaxing on the banks of Barton Creek. Refreshed, we struck out on the road again, heading northwest toward our first big destination of the trip: the Grand Canyon. Neither of us had seen it before, and we were excited. We planned to spend a night with a friend of Josh’s in Santa Fe before pushing onward into Arizona. The driving days would be long: over ten hours to New Mexico and at least six more to the canyon. But we were hitting our stride. We’d been on the road now for almost two weeks, and we were falling into a rhythm. I stubbornly insisted on doing most of the driving, leaving Josh in charge of the music and Fred in charge of sleeping. We branched out from Johnny Cash and listened to my favorites—Huey Lewis and the News, Sturgill Simpson, and eighties hits from my favorite movies, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Back to the Future—along with Josh’s favorites, Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Driving across central Texas, the temperature spiked to nearly one hundred degrees again, and the Land Cruiser rose and fell over narrow roads that cut through the sloping plains. The open expanse was endless, interrupted every so often by skeletal oil pumps that sat slumped toward the earth. On the horizon, rock formations reached into the sky and hung in the distance like planets. It felt like we were in a Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoon.
In need of gas, we pulled into a big Mobil station, sun scorched and faded, in a run-down refinery town. Behind the low building, trailer homes were lined up in the sun and a few shoeless kids ran around kicking a half-deflated soccer ball. A couple of mean-looking stray dogs paced back and forth, panting in the heat. I decided to leave Fred in the truck. Inside, I picked up a huge bag of beef jerky for five bucks, and with a full tank of gas, we continued on to Santa Fe and, from there, to the Grand Canyon.
Unlike Kisatchie, which was empty, the Grand Canyon was an ordeal. The road leading to the entrance was thick with RVs, campers, minivans, and tourists with hats and hiking boots. When we pulled up to the ranger’s gate, in the middle of the afternoon, a young woman with dark hair and a smile kindly delivered some sobering news: all campsites in the park were booked up for weeks. Instead, she pointed us in the direction we came from, toward overflow campsites outside the park. We drove a few minutes to the campsite and decided to relax there for the rest of the afternoon instead of struggling through the tourists and the heat. We’d be the first ones at the gate the next morning to snap some pictures, then be on our way.
We found a tucked-away spot with a big picnic table and fire ring—just the right amount of luxury. Josh and I made a small fire and cracked open a few PBRs. Fred stretched out across the dirt, and we stared into the flames together.
Josh and I had picked up fresh steak and veggies from a nearby market; hungry for dinner, we cooked them up over the fire. I fetched Fred’s bowl out of the truck, and after filling it with kibble, added a few nice pieces of steak for him, too. When I set the bowl down in front of him, though, he hesitated. Instead of eating, he nudged his nose into the earth and pushed dirt and pine needles into the bowl, covering his food. It gave me chills to see it. I thought of his little pile of scraps under the bushes by the burn pit in Afghanistan, the place where he went to hide any food that he found around the compound. When we were camping like this—exposed, out in the open—I wondered if it brought Fred back to Sangin.
Often, the two of us were affected by the same triggers�
��big crowds and loud noises, like fireworks or a car backfiring. One time, back home in D.C., Fred and I were walking to the local farmers’ market when a truck came barreling down the street. It felt like the sidewalk beneath us was vibrating. Fred got spooked and pulled on the leash, trying to get away. I bent down and scooped him up, carrying him in my arms the last block to the market. “It’s okay, buddy,” I said. Another time, the smoke detector went off in the middle of the night in our apartment. Fred, who had been sleeping on the floor somewhere, leapt into bed. Even after I got up and replaced the batteries and got the loud, incessant chirping to stop, Fred lay next to me shaking. It was the way he reacted to fireworks, too. I pulled the rattled dog close to me and held him until we both fell back to sleep.
In the campground, I watched as Fred buried his food instead of enjoying it, his survival instincts kicking in yet again. I knew he was hungry but that he would ignore his hunger if he didn’t feel that it was safe to eat. The only thing I could do was sit with him. I grabbed the bowl and pulled out some of the pine needles and chunks of dirt. I sat down next to him, took a sip of my beer, and looked out into the distance. I waited like that, without looking down, until I heard him crunching on bits of kibble. He worked through most of his meal like that, with me sitting there silently, letting him know he was safe. In moments like that, we took turns reminding each other that we were no longer in a combat zone—that we were going to be okay.
The sky turned yellow and orange, then a deep royal blue, then dark. We spent the rest of the night looking into the fire, all in agreement that a properly burning fire was better than cable. Overhead, stars began to blink through the inky night. Turning my face up in admiration, I caught a few shooting across the sky, brilliant dashes of glittering white light.
