Kyle Lockwood

As  a young boy I was called by the forest. The trees bowed in the winds, the streams babbled and spoke, I never felt alone. I would have my adventures with friends, imagining myself on historic battlefields fighting for something I knew, but probably didn't fully understand as a 10-11 year old. Nonetheless I knew that I wanted to, I needed to, and one day I would go. By 24 years of age I was doing what I had dreamed of as a boy. My first battlefield was Kabul, Afghanistan, little did we know of its significance. After a month of sporadic and random rocket attacks the city was being overrun. The Embassy I was defending did not last long, we evacuated towards the airport, HKIA. There we held out for a week, before having to leave Afghanistan behind. After our exit people were often shocked when they learned I had gone there, but they did not know of the same place I did. To me Afghanistan was chaotically beautiful, a cruel and hectic nature embodied by its landscape. Its large, jagg...

      How interesting it is, a morning with sunshine contradicting the chill in the air. As if looking up and seeing the warmth somehow warms our own cold bones. While we may be fortunate enough to feel it on our faces, we would have to close our eyes. The warmth shines too bright to stare, leaving us to only feel. The cold though, you can see the cold. You see its vicious bite in the wind, its power knocking at the trees, its chill down your spine, all while staring it in its face. The cold does not waiver, the cold does not break. The cold is timeless, our ancestors felt the same winds which penetrate our jackets. They faced the howling winter seasons which came before us, drudging along until spring.      How similar it is to the sun on a dark night, thinking of spring in the dead of winter.  A light we can see in our minds but not quite reach. We are forced yet again to wait out the darkness, the cold, for a promise of warmth and light. Similarly t...

      The war in Afghanistan was a controversial one from the start. While I was not a part of it when it began, or even at its height. I was a part of its end. I think that many veterans who were apart of its beginning and or height are doing an excellent job of explaining their feelings and opinions on how their war ended, which they certainly should. What I feel like is being overlooked, is how we feel, those of us who were on the ground in its final moments.      For us the war in Afghanistan was something that was on tv during our childhood, we would see stories and veterans come home from it but we didn't really know about it. We knew that there were bad guys there who our soldiers were going after, but that was pretty much the extent of it. For me, I always knew I would be a soldier, it was my only life goal and dream. As I grew up I began to worry that my generation would not have a war, that the war in Afghanistan or Iraq would have ended...