Shamali Plain, north of Kabul, Afghanistan john wells tipped his head to the sky, searching for a pair of F-15s circling slowly above in the darkness. Even during the day the American jets were difficult to spot. Now, with the sun hidden behind the mountains, they were all but invisible. Wells could only hope their pilots hadn’t seen him either, for the bombs on their wings could obliterate him and his men in an instant. From the cockpits of those jets, the war looked like a video game, Wells thought. Little gray men ran silently across computer screens an inch at a time until bombs landed with white blasts. The reality on the ground was messier, bones and blood replacing pixels. Wells’s mind slid to a Sunday morning many years before, his dad, a surgeon, the best cutter in western Montana, walking into the kitchen after a night in the operating room, washing his hands compulsively in the sink.

“What happened, Dad?” Wells had said that morning. “Was it bad?”

He was ten, old enough to know that he wasn’t supposed to ask those questions, but curiosity overcame him. Herbert turned off the sink and dried his hands, poured himself a cup of coffee, and fixed Wells with his weary blue eyes. Wells was about to apologize for overstepping his bounds when his father finally spoke, the answer not what Wells expected.

“Everything depends which side of the shotgun you’re on,” Herbert said. And sipped his coffee, as if daring his son to press him further. Wells hadn’t understood then, but he did now. Truer words had never been said. He wondered what his father, two years gone, would think of the man he’d become. He had just started down his path when Herbert had passed on, and if his dad had had any thoughts on the matter he’d kept them to himself.