THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED
A.J. LECOURS
Excerpt taken from ‘Entropy’ in Stay Calm: This is War by AJ Lecours. Make sure to check out the next excerpt in our Winter issue.
It happened on the way to Jaji, a small town with a smaller police precinct way up in the Hindu Kush mountain range of Afghanistan. My squad and I were set to make the four-hour drive from Combat Outpost Herrera to meet up with the Afghan border patrol in order to search out insurgents sneaking in from Pakistan. For this mission, I was in the turret of an MRAP. MRAP is military speak for a big ass truck with a big ass gun strapped to the roof. This particular truck did not have a CROWS, shame. As a gunner, I enjoyed the benefit of putting a size ten ass on a size two sling, half in the truck and half out of the truck. If, for some reason, you are unable to imagine this and are unable to use the internet to look up things you don’t understand, just quit now, it will only get worse.
So, my truck was second in a big line of trucks, trundling up the mountain. Second place in line was the sweet spot. You should be safe from landmines, but close enough that the dust that was kicked up from the massive vehicles wasn’t yet thick enough to choke and blind you.
The trucks were about twelve feet across, the road, and I use that term loosely, was about eleven feet across. This detail played a very important part in the upcoming story.
About three hours in, we were well up the mountain. We hugged the inside wall, driving on the shoulder as the right side dropped off into a small cliff. We slowed down for a particularly narrow part of the road. The first truck makes it through. As our truck drove the pass, it started slipping. Hemingway once wrote that it happened gradually, then suddenly (bankruptcy in his work, truck falling off a cliff in mine). The truck fell in slow motion. I stared out at the perfect azure blue sky, the world tilting in slow motion. My truck was gone, I floated through the air... then a stop, and blackness.
I awoke in a field. The plants were tall enough that I couldn’t see. Where was I? I looked down. I had my pistol. I was wearing my armor. I was in Afghanistan. We were on patrol. Someone was yelling. They were yelling a name. My name. I was here. I yelled. In the plants. What plants? I looked around. This looked familiar. I couldn’t place it. Wait, I could. I had seen this before. Leonardo DiCaprio had been here. In a field of the same plants. That didn’t make sense. Why would Leonardo be in Afghanistan. Wait, that was a movie. What was that movie? The Beach. The one with the marijuana fields. I was in a field of six-foot-high marijuana plants, actual Afghan Kush.
I had died. I was positive. My stoner friends were right, and heaven was a field of six-foot-high Mary Jane. My sergeant continued yelling, I guessed I wasn’t dead. I stumbled toward the voice.
I tripped over a piece of metal. I recognized this metal. It was my metal. More specifically, it was the metal I had put on the truck earlier that day. The .50 caliber machine gun had shorn its pin that held it on the truck and now lay in the dirt at my feet. The barrel, half inch thick on either side, was bent at a thirty-degree angle. I picked up the gun in both hands. It immediately dropped out of my left. I threw it over my shoulder and headed to the truck. The truck was laying on its side at the base of a small cliff.
From where we were, we could see that the edge of the road was dug out. Someone had been making a tunnel into the side. For nefarious purposes, or for a drainage ditch, we would never know.
Other people in the truck faced minor injuries. Spc. East had a box of MREs break a cord and hit him in the arm. A lot of stuff happened. Some recovery. Extra people came out to save us. Yadda yadda. Didn’t matter. Immaterial to the story, or at least to my story. We made it back to the base.