Please see our Publisher’s Note following this month’s Editorial that has important information about a new threat to the survival of all SF/F/H magazines.

Call me Philoctetes. My real name doesn’t matter, and I wouldn’t be allowed to tell you what it is, anyway. Security concerns, you understand.

What you need to know about me is that I was a US Army Green Beret—one of the Quiet Professionals. Usually tasked with working with the locals in counterinsurgency efforts and the like. The stuff that doesn’t—or shouldn’t—make the newspapers.

I spent eight years of my life in Iraq, on and off. That’s where it all began, but it isn’t where it ended. It still hasn’t ended, as far as I’m concerned, and it probably never will. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The day it began was the day they gave me my medical discharge.

Daniels and Ortiz—not their real names—were waiting outside the commander’s office as I emerged, my discharge papers in hand, red and shaking. “It’s not right,” I fumed. “All this for a few headaches and some dizziness?” I could still hold a rifle. Could still walk. I hadn’t been messed up by an IED, hadn’t been shot through the chest by a sniper. No burns scarred my face and body. As far as I was concerned, I was hale and whole.

“Dude, you were knocked the hell out after that rocket exploded over your head last month,” Daniels said. “That was your third concussion this year.”

“And you’ve been acting strange,” Ortiz added. “Like you’re bobbing along like a balloon—when you’re not pissed off, that is.”

I turned to look at them directly. And for a moment—just a moment—instead of Kevlar body armor and fatigues, it looked like they were wearing bronze breastplates over bright-colored tunics. Crested bronze helmets and long wooden spears, tipped again with bronze. Diomedes and Odysseus, I thought, but I had no idea why.

I blinked rapidly, and the image faded away. “Is that what you told them?” I demanded, feeling my fingers crumple the papers I held.

They exchanged a tell-tale glance. “Look, I’m not going to lie to the commander when it’s a question of your health—” Ortiz began.

“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks for fucking nothing. I’m fine.”

Daniels cleared his throat. “TBI,” he replied. “Traumatic brain injury. The Army doesn’t want to mess with it after seeing what it’s done in the NFL. Too many guys become entirely different people after one too many hits to the head.”

At the time, I just scoffed and turned away. But I guess the Army docs predicted pretty well what time would do to me and got ahead of it. At the time, I just felt like I was being disposed of. Betrayed, in a way, too.

The doctors were encouraging, in their way, as they took care of my final physical. I just felt numb, hearing the words, “don’t worry, you’ll get a pension.”

More than thirty percent unfit for duty was enough for a pension—with only ten years in, I didn’t qualify for retirement, so anything I could get was simultaneously, in the bland opinion of those doing the paperwork to muster me out, “better than nothing” and “the best they could do.”

I didn’t want it. Didn’t think I needed it. I was stubborn that way.

I tried living at home in the US for a while with my wife. Trouble is, and I had a hard time accepting it, that the docs were right. I was unfit for duty. I had difficulty sleeping, and when I slept, I woke up exhausted. I had bouts of dizziness and headaches that slowly got worse, instead of better. “You need to see a doctor about the headaches,” my wife opined.

I snapped at her, “Nothing Excedrin won’t take care of. It’s not a big deal.”

After six months of looking, and trying to make ends meet between my pension and her salary as a teacher, I managed to find a job as a management consultant. Most of the companies I dealt with had laughable problems with their production lines, which could be solved by ten minutes talking with their employees, who knew full well where things got bogged down in unnecessary paperwork. But no one wanted to change anything. No one had the will to make the changes I recommended. So why bother hiring me at all?

The headaches got worse. Sometimes, they were so bad that I was reduced to asking my wife to pick me up from work, as if I was a five-year-old with a boo-boo at school. They were depressing. Degrading. But they were something I now needed to live with. Apparently. The doctors I saw shrugged and offered Imitrex, which didn’t work worth a damn.

The visions started to come more frequently. Visions. Hallucinations. They’d sneak up on me when I was lying down in a dark room with a cool rag over my head, berating my body for failing me.

I was sitting on the rocky shore of an island I’d never seen before, screaming in agony because a snake had bitten me in the leg. The men around me all wore bronze armor and carried bronze-tipped spears. I knew that the toxin in my leg was necrotizing. That they needed to wrap a tourniquet above the bite and keep it from spreading, and get me a shot of antivenin. Even so, I might lose the damned leg.

But they didn’t hear my words, my pleas—or perhaps they just thought my words were the ravings of a fevered mind. They carried me to a hide tent, where I slowly roasted in the heat of the Aegean sun. In the fires of my own body’s fever as it struggled to fight the poison.

“Antivenin,” I begged, over and over again. “Morphine. Don’t let me die like this.”

I could hear them outside the tent, muttering, “Why won’t he shut up?” and “Gods, the stench of his flesh rotting, I can’t take it anymore.”

And I felt those words as keenly as all the words I imagined being said behind my back in reality. I rarely talked about my problems, because I didn’t want to bore people with them. Never wanted them to wish me to shut up about my woes. Civilians wouldn’t understand, anyway. They shied away from the stench of the military, with a polite “Thank you for your service” mouthed as if it mattered. A propitiation to turn away the evil eye.

When I awoke from the vision, the headache was gone. But the images lingered in my mind. They’d been so real. The pain had been real; the stench, too. The rejection by my companions—that stung as much as the wound.

As much as it had when Daniels and Ortiz went behind my back to report on my health to our commander.

Try talking to a doctor about that, huh? That’s the sort of thing that will earn you a one-way ticket to the psych ward. So I kept my mouth firmly shut about the visions.

“You know, honey,” my wife said one day, clearly picking her words with great care, “You’ve been more irritable since you came home. I’ve been putting it down to the change in circumstance. Adjusting to civilian life is hard. That’s what all the pamphlets say—”

“What do pamphlets know about anything?” I demanded. “I’m fine. I’m a civilian now. Everything is fine.”

“And adjusting to a new handicap is also very stressful—”

I cut her off, anger rising in me. “I’m not disabled. I don’t even have a placard for the car. I’m fine.”

“You don’t have a placard for the car because you won’t apply for one, but you could qualify for one if you did,” she pointed out in a tone of sweet reason.

“I don’t need one. I can walk to wherever I left the car.”

“But you keep forgetting where you parked. You looked for the car for two hours the last time you went to the mall alone. The parking garage had you tied in knots. A trip to the grocery store is almost as bad, and it’s not like you at all—”

If she was looking for an explosion, an explosion is what she got. “God damn it Beth, I’m fine! Will you stop pushing me? I don’t need to see a doctor. I don’t need wheelchair tags. I don’t need any of this.” I exhaled, on the brink of telling her that I didn’t need her nagging me, either, but some shred of self-preservation kept the words from forming on my tongue.

Beth weathered the storm of my ire, though she visibly flinched at my raised voice. I’d used parade-ground volume on her, and I realized almost immediately that I’d been wrong. “I’m sorry,” I gritted out between clenched teeth. “I shouldn’t have yelled.”

“It’s not just irritability,” she pointed out, still somehow keeping her voice calm. “You have mood swings. Like last week, when the garage door broke and you couldn’t get it back on the track—”

“Anyone would have been frustrated about that. I didn’t want to have to pay someone to come out and fix it for us.”

“You were in the garage, screaming and cursing at an inanimate object for a half an hour.”

I hesitated. “That seems pretty normal to me, given the circumstances,” I temporized.

“It might be normal for other people, but it’s not normal for you.” Tears crested in her eyes, finally streaking down her face as she tried to make me understand.

Being told that made me even angrier, but I tried to hold it in, for her sake, retreating into silence rather than take it out on her. But it still found its way out, in little fits and bursts.

I went to counseling for her sake, but I didn’t mention the visions. I took anger management courses for the sake of my marriage and of my job, where the irritability was starting to leak through, too.

Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to make it work. In the counseling sessions, she kept saying, in tears, that, “you aren’t the man I married anymore.”

“Well, no shit. Eight years in Iraq changes you,” I said, while the counselor, a nice lady in her early twenties, held her clipboard and nodded with all the weight of her degree in social work behind her. She didn’t know. She couldn’t know. All she knew was what her textbooks told her, and what was that, compared to eight years of having lived it, day in, day out. “Eight years of wondering if around any given corner, there’s an IED that might take you out. A local that seemed friendly yesterday might be an enemy today.”

“Do you think that perhaps you have PTSD?” the counselor asked, scribbling something in her notes.

I snorted. “Everyone I know has PTSD of some form or another. The trick is not letting it dictate your life.” Yes, I jumped at loud noises. Fireworks did me in on New Year’s and the Fourth of July, making me feel like I was hunkered down inside a building while automatic weapons raked the walls outside. Yes, crowds made me sweat. I wanted no part of amusement parks or trade shows, let’s put it that way, all right?

But it didn’t own me. I could manage.

“There’s therapy for that, you know.”

“What, I get to talk about it with someone who’s never served, has never been there, and watch them scribble notes on their clipboard?” The words came out with more surliness than I’d intended.

She made another god-damned note. Right in front of me. Probably something to the effect of my resistance to the notion of therapy.

I wasn’t resistant to the idea of therapy. I was resistant to it being with someone who had no fucking clue what war was really like.

I stuffed it all back inside, and tried not to let it leak out. I kept my tone even at home. At work. I tried for silence, as best I could. God, how I tried.

Beth couldn’t take silence any more than she could take the temper. “It’s like you’re not even here, even when you’re in the same room with me,” she told me plaintively.

“God, Beth, what do you want me to do? I go to therapy with you. I do my best not to lose my shit when you’re around. I channel my frustration into pounding on a heavy bag in the garage. So I’m quieter now. Maybe I just don’t have anything to say.”

Apparently, that was a problem, too. So much so, that within two months, she told me she was moving out to be with some other man, a fellow teacher. Someone who was there with her, in all ways, when I was just an absent presence, a silent monolith in her life that she couldn’t understand or bear to be around anymore. The living corpse of the man she’d once loved.

At least we’d never had any kids. I took that as a blessing, to be honest.

My various employers were sympathetic, at first. As someone with a set of “invisible disabilities,” though, it was hard for them to understand why some days, I simply couldn’t work. I started to forget more than just where I’d left the car. I’d forget that we’d had a meeting on a topic the day before. Oh, once reminded, it would come back, if a little fuzzily—but it made it impossible to work effectively.

My employers couldn’t wrap their heads around that one, and neither could I.

The memory issues scared me worse than the headaches. I felt like I was losing my damned mind. It was one thing to forget where I’d parked the car. It was another to forget two hours of my day. Was it Alzheimer’s? And why was it getting worse, two years out from deployment, instead of better? Why did I wake up aching in every joint now, when I never had before—and why did the pain persist through the day, instead of getting better with exercise as the body warmed up and got more limber? Why did working on the heavy bag to deal with my frustrations leave me winded, when I’d been at pains to keep in decent shape? I couldn’t run, couldn’t do pushups, couldn’t do anything without feeling exhausted.

It took a while for the doctors to circle their wagons around another diagnosis. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, possibly linked to my anthrax vaccinations, possibly not. Not that it made much of a difference; my pension wouldn’t increase for another diagnosis.

All my employers saw was a lazy man, whose life was in shambles, and eventually, their sympathy ebbed and waned, and I lost the job, the same way I’d lost Beth.

One of the few of my buddies who’d stayed in touch recommended, “Hey, why don’t you retire down in Costa Rica? The weather’s warm. The locals are friendly. And the dollar goes a long way. You might not even have to work down there.”

Thing is, I wanted to work. I didn’t know how I’d be able to look at myself in the mirror if I wasn’t working. I’d spent my entire life accountable to no one but my superiors, and now I was dependent on a pension I still couldn’t quite believe I deserved. I had no visible scars. I wasn’t like some poor kid who’d had his face blown off by an IED, unable to go out in public till after all the skin grafts were done. Other people don’t like to smell the poison, the smell of rotting flesh, I thought often. Particularly not civilians. It intrudes on their peaceful lives. Thank you for your service, indeed.

But I had to make a choice. And I was supposed to want peace now. All the counselors talked about it. Finding peace within. As if they knew what was inside me, when they didn’t, couldn’t. But I couldn’t stay in the house. The mortgage equaled the amount my pension brought in each month, leaving no money for food or medicine, and the VA only covered so much. Taxes still needed to be paid, too. A choice was needed.

So I chose Costa Rica, and exile. I sold the house, paying half to Beth as final payment on alimony—laughable, that she wanted alimony, when she was the one with a stable job these days, but the courts are going to do what the courts are going to do. And off I went, with only a footlocker’s worth of belongings, to start a new life.

Or so I thought.

• • • •

At first, Costa Rica was okay. I put my uniforms in storage, buried my medals and ribbons in the nightstand, and tried to let the sounds of jungle birds trilling and monkeys hooting lull me to sleep at night.

It didn’t work. Everything was too strange, too new, too alien. The humidity struck me as oppressive, having been stationed in desert environments for so many years. And all my ailments followed me south. The change in climate didn’t help with them at all.

I’d once been fluent in Spanish, thanks to an intensive course at the Presidio, but these days, I could remember more words of Arabic, and the locals would never let me practice with them, insisting on using their excellent English on me instead. Even when I tried, the words blurred in my head. ‘Brain fuzz’ I’d heard it called. It was frustrating, and all I could do was cuss at myself for not being able to think. I tried some Duolingo to jog the memories loose, but found that I couldn’t concentrate on the lessons worth a damn.

And the visions came back while I sat on a white sand shore, trying for some of that fabled inner peace that everyone wanted me to find.

Alone on that craggy island, or almost. The locals avoided me, wounded as I was, tending their flocks of sheep, as if I’d had the plague. But of course, in this world, a man alone, without community, was nothing and no one. An exile might be dangerous—you never knew what they’d done to deserve it, after all. They could be a murderer, a kin-slayer, a blasphemer, anything at all . . . . My clothes wore out, and I used snares and my bow to catch animals for food, then tanned their hides to clothe myself. I walked with a crutch, favoring the leg left lamed by the snake bite. Catching a glimpse of my reflection in a dark pool of water, my beard and hair grown out, clad in skins, I looked like a wild man, not like the warrior I’d been.

I came back to my senses on the beach, feeling the sun beat into me. I’d passed out for hours. I was sunburned and sandy as I headed back home.

The story that the visions told me sometimes seemed too painfully apt, so in my tiny apartment, I shaved carefully. Took a shower. Exerted some basic level of self-care, so that I wouldn’t look as bad as I’d been in the vision—even though the face I’d seen in the dark pool had looked nothing like my own.

Even that exhausted me. I’d once been able to carry a wounded friend out of a firefight over my shoulders, and now, I’d spent too long in the sun, and could barely stand in the shower. I crawled to bed, wondering who the hell I was now. I had no job. No life. No wife. No purpose. No goals. None of my buddies had called or texted lately, and I hadn’t reached out to them, not wanting to burden them with what, to me, still felt like a bad case of malingering.

I was, for all intents and purposes, an exile, like I’d been in the vision. Without community or connection, I was no one at all.

The next morning, I determined that I had to do something, or I’d go insane. It didn’t matter if it was small, so long as it was accomplished. I could manage to make the bed without getting winded, so that was a start. I decided to go to the local library and check out their English language section. Reading I could still do, in fits and starts—my attention span was worthless these days, and the headaches tended to hit hard if I tried to push past more than a half an hour at a time. But if I could do nothing else, I could at least improve my mind.

That’s where I rediscovered Homer and the classics. Where I found the story of Philoctetes and his abandonment on that island. Maybe I’d read some version of the story back in my West Point days, and it had just resurfaced in my mind when I had the hallucinations? It was my working theory, though I couldn’t remember reading the Iliad in school.

I did my best. Changed my diet around. Tried to get exercise, when my body would allow it. Endured days spent flat on my back when it didn’t.

And then they came to see me. Ortiz and Daniels. Odysseus and Diomedes.

When they knocked at my door, I peered through the peephole and couldn’t believe my eyes. My first inclination was to pretend not to be home. My second, darker reaction was to fling the door open and demand, “What the hell are you two doing here?”

“That’s some greeting,” Ortiz said, holding up a six-pack of beer like a peace offering. “Can’t two old friends look you up?”

I wanted to call them both sons of bitches. They’d gone behind my back to report on my health to the commander of our unit. They were the reason I’d been turfed out . . . except my anger died before I could voice the words. They weren’t the reason I’d been turfed. I was.

Still, I had no intention of making it easy on them. I stood there with my arms folded, frowning. “Long way to fly when you could’ve called me first.”

“We were in the neighborhood anyway. Company training exercises.”

I took company to mean the old unit, which surprised me. I hedged for a moment, then flung up a hand and said, “You’d better come inside.”

Inside, Ortiz cracked open a beer, offering me one. I held up a hand, shaking my head no. “Can’t drink these days. Bad for the system.” What I meant was, interacts badly with my medications, but I didn’t want to say that.

They sat in my little living room, where the windows were open to the sound of jungle birds and the green of the trees, sweating in the wet heat of Costa Rica.

“It’s been a long time,” Ortiz said, and, strangely, I started to hallucinate even as he spoke. He became Odysseus, the crafty one, saying, “We never meant to leave you alone for ten years, old friend.”

“It’s been three years,” I said out loud, as much to contradict the vision as to respond to Ortiz. “Not forever, I guess.” Though it felt like an eternity. “What brings you to my humble abode, eh?”

“You, mostly,” Daniels admitted, while, overlain over him, Diomedes nodded sternly, saying, There’s been a prophecy. Only with you and your arrows on our side will Troy fall.

“Me?” I asked blankly. “Why?”

“We’ve got a lot of young, green men coming into the company,” Ortiz replied, shrugging. “And something of a brain drain as the officers with the experience to train them have retired or been killed in action.”

It took me a moment to remember that Iraq was over, but there was another war still going on. “Afghanistan.”

“Troy must fall,” Odysseus told me, leaning forward persuasively. As if the man who’d abandoned me on this rocky island could say anything that would induce me to return to fight at his side. “We’ve been fighting there for ten years, and the men are starting to fall apart. There’s talk of desertion. Of giving up and sailing home, in spite of all our oaths of brotherhood.”

“Yes, Afghanistan. Surprised you were never rotated there, to be honest.” That was Daniels talking. “I went in right after the Horse Soldiers did, when it still looked like we could work with the locals to help them defend themselves from the Taliban. To train them. Get them to work together, tribe by tribe, faction by faction. Before it all became . . . a machine.”

That’s the way the Quiet Professionals work. Behind the scenes. With the locals. Precision strikes. Not mass bombing campaigns. I closed my eyes, trying not to see two men in bronze armor sitting in my living room. “You know I was forced out on disability,” I said, my voice toneless. “You had your hands in it. I haven’t worked in the last year. I’m not . . . I’m not fit for duty.”

It hurt to say. Again, I’d spent every day of the past ten years of my life ready to be thrown into combat. Ready to be a weapon in someone else’s hands, part of an elite unit, a band of brothers. To have to admit to not being what I’d once been . . . yeah. It hurt. And again it made me confront the yawning abyss in my soul that demanded: so, what are you now, if you’re not a soldier, not a husband, not a leader?

They exchanged glances. “We’re not asking you to come back into the Army. We couldn’t—the medical discharge is final. But neither of us is exactly in, anymore, either,” Ortiz said.

“We both mustered out and took military contractor jobs about six months after they turfed you.” Daniels shrugged.

“You mean mercenaries?”

“No, I mean military contractors. The food’s better. The pay’s better. Everyone’s a professional, not a bunch of dumb kids who joined up because it beat living on food stamps.” Ortiz looked me straight in the eye. “It’s a way to serve your country without being bought and sold. Your loyalty gets rewarded.”

Odysseus nodded. “You swore oaths with us, bonds of brotherhood and loyalty to the just cause of Menelaus. While you have suffered, those oaths have not been kept. Is it not your duty to come with us back to Troy?”

The vision snapped free. I wiped my forehead, wishing for that beer, but knew better. “And why should I saddle up and ride with you again? You helped force me out to begin with. And as I keep saying, I’m not all right.”

“Well, we wouldn’t want you on the front line. We’d want you back in a desk position,” Daniels offered. “Mostly logistics and training. There’s no one else who could do the job as well as you could. And honestly, I can’t see you living here like this for the rest of your life. You’ll go stir-crazy without anything to do.”

“Brain drain? Green kids?” I prompted. My memory was working okay today, and I wanted to prove it, if only to myself.

“It’s true, even in private security companies. We’re getting a lot of people who’ve been RIF’d out as less experienced anyway. And we need officers.”

“What all do you do?”

“Embassy security. Escort duty for foreign troops. Police training. All the things we would’ve been doing anyway, but with better pay and benefits. There’s a VA-affiliated center down here in Costa Rica, but wouldn’t it be nice to be able to go home and have double coverage in the States?”

They looked at me, and I looked down at myself. I felt like a bum, slumped, and disheveled beside their neat-cropped hair and perfect postures. I’d been like them once. I’d been one of them once. The temptation, the desire to return, to be what—who—I’d always been, loomed large inside my heart.

“I’m not the man I used to be,” I hedged, knowing that they couldn’t know the half of it. The quarter of it. Or they wouldn’t be offering. “But if you’ll have me, I’ll go.”

• • • •

I wish I could say that having a purpose again eliminated all the symptoms. But sometimes, when a snake bites you, you stay bitten forever. I plunged myself into the work as best I could, focusing on what I could do instead of what I couldn’t. That seemed to be the most realistic thing I could do. And some days were good enough, and symptom-free enough, that I could pretend to be me, at least for a while.

Everyone around me understood when I was short-tempered or tired or just needed to swear into an empty office for a while. So many other people were in the same boat. It felt good, being embraced by my brothers and sisters in arms again. I wasn’t cut off anymore, alone on my island.

And yet . . . and yet. It wasn’t the same. I’d been in Iraq, of course, but Afghanistan was a different kettle of fish entirely. Here, loyalties could change overnight. This tribe had bad relations with that tribe going back five hundred years, so they wouldn’t work together. Or would agree to, for a day, a week, and then they’d change sides again. The complexity of the factions was staggering, and damned near impossible for someone not born in the region to keep track of, day to day.

Uzbek, Arab, and Pakistani militants flooded into the region, driven out of Pakistan by the government there, swelling the ranks of the Taliban. But NATO had withdrawn its forces, and over time more and more US forces withdrew, too, being replaced by private security companies, like the one to which I now belonged.

Suicide attacks ticked up. I began to eye any car parked along a street as an explosion waiting to happen. I wasn’t one of those tasked with clearing out the Green Zone; I didn’t carry a rifle anymore. I was one of those that our soldiers protected when I left the company compound.

I hated it. I wasn’t a dignitary, but I was a training and logistics officer. I had more information tucked in my head—on days when I could remember it clearly—than was safe for the enemy to get hold of. So I endured the dignitary treatment as best I could, chafing for the days when I would have been one of those outside the armored Humvee, clearing the lanes.

Peace treaties were signed, war-lords like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the head of Hezb-i-Islami, were recognized as new members of the Afghan government, and acknowledged by the UN . . . only to see more of the country fall into the hands of insurgents not a month later. Everything we did seemed to be built on sand that crumbled as soon as it was settled into place.

Kunduz was taken. Kunduz was lost. Kunduz was retaken.

I watched it all through a veil of exhaustion and pain medications. China, of all governments, attempted to negotiate with the Taliban, and failed. That was early 2016, if I remember correctly. Then the parliament in Kabul was bombed and attacked with assault rifles as peace talks once again floundered to a halt.

The Taliban began to fight its own splinter factions, and for a moment or two, I experienced the heady hope that they might collapse in on themselves in an orgy of violence as they fought back pro-ISIL forces within their own ranks.

They didn’t. Instead, they formed ties with the Haqqani Network to reinforce the supremacy of Mullah Akhtar Mansoor within the Taliban.

On and on it dragged, year after year, until a peace treaty was finally signed between the US government and the Taliban, with an agreement to withdraw troops by a given date.

Kabul fell. Troy burned.

Twenty years of my life, my mind and body broken in the service of others, and for what? What was it all for? Is anything different today, than before the city fell?

The visions, the hallucinations, have no answers. Homer has no answers for me in the Iliad, either. Only the Odyssey might hold some key, some code, some message for the weary soldier. The journey before Odysseus after he returned home to Ithaca was a long one. He was commanded to leave his home once more, to travel south until he found a place so far from the sea that people there wouldn’t recognize an oar, but call it a winnowing fan. There, he was supposed to build a temple to Poseidon to win the god’s forgiveness, and a peaceful final journey home.

Where in this great world of ours, so much larger than the one known by the ancient Greeks, is there a place where no one would recognize a rifle for what it is? What is my final journey, but one to a home that no longer exists except in memory, to try to find a self who also no longer exists?

Or perhaps never existed at all: a man of peace.