On an otherwise typical, sun-parched afternoon at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Marez in Mosul, Iraq, four days before Christmas 2004, someone walked unnoticed into the chow hall and blew himself up near the sandwich bar. The blast ripped a hole through the roof forty feet overhead and tore apart fifteen US soldiers and seven civilian contractors—along with the bomber.

No one knows for sure how he gained access to the chow hall or how he delivered his lethal payload, but among the soldiers, shock has mixed with standard-issue paranoia to produce a host of conspiracy theories. Some credit the attack to a faceless mess worker with jihadi sympathies, perhaps a Tamil Tiger in hiding. He could have planted the bomb in the cabinets below the sandwich bar, and then used a remote detonator. He could have saved his own skin. Another theory attributes the explosion to a surface-to-ground missile launched with precision target-acquisition equipment from somewhere along the jagged line of beige rooftops deep in the heart of Mosul. After all, the complete layout of the base, including the location of the chow hall complex and its GPS coordinates—slightly skewed per US military security requests—was freely available to local mujahideen via Google Earth.

The official story, however, blames Ahmed Said Ahmed al-Ghamdi, a twenty-year-old medical student, who had grown up in Sudan, where his father was a Saudi diplomat. He could have entered the base through one of the many holes in the miles-long, barely protected perimeter, then sneaked into the chow hall with a stolen Iraqi Civil Defense Corps uniform and ID card. He would have been surprised, perhaps even worried, by how easy it was. Then he would have sized up the scene before him (soldiers and Iraqis dining together in clusters throughout the football field–size cafeteria), planted his feet in the spot with the densest mass of people, and closed his eyes. He would have detonated a suicide vest laden with several pounds of C‑4 or Composition B and pounds more of ball bearings, and he would have vanished instantly into a fine red mist.

I was in the middle of checking my e‑mail at a FOB internet facility, thirty miles south of Mosul, when the lines suddenly went dead. Ten months into my tour, I was waiting out redeployment at a boring oasis called Q‑West. While Third Platoon spent their days running around the city with infantry units from the spanking new Stryker Brigades, most of Charlie Company—including my platoon—was stuck biding time at “Key West”—as it was euphemistically known. “Commo blackout,” the administrator announced from the doorway. That’s when I knew: someone in my brigade had been killed—they always suspend communication for a couple of days to give the Mortuary Affairs people enough time to notify the families before sympathetic e‑mails start rolling in.

When I got back to the company area, the squad leaders were herding everyone down to the Tactical Operations Center. It was there the CO told us that two of our friends, two of our “battle buddies,” Specialists Nicholas Mason and David Ruhren, were dead. Others were badly injured, no telling how many yet; he’d let us know. The CO had tears in his eyes. Somehow he’d managed to make it this far into our tour without a major casualty, and then, as we were preparing to turn our gear and our mission over to our replacements, the worst occurred. He didn’t offer a speech or any consolation. There wasn’t anything to say. Ruhren and Mason didn’t die gloriously. They weren’t holding their positions to the end or rushing in under fire to pull out wounded comrades. They were making sandwiches. Nick Mason, his friends remember, was piling the salami high and stuffing his pockets. And, as he turned for the door, you can bet he was smiling.

We had arrived together months earlier, stepping off the C-130 into the chilly March air of the Tigris basin, greeted by Mosul’s sulfuric stench. We were the 276th Engineering Battalion, tasked with minesweeping, convoy escort, and security fence construction. It was late at night, and we’d been flying for hours, but the captain—or colonel, who could tell in the darkness?—had us line up in a company formation even though he knew one mortar could knock out half of the unit.

Things were different then.

It was the tail end of year one. Humvees had only jury-rigged armor, if they had any at all. We wore beige-and-brown desert camouflage uniforms with conspicuously green body armor. We spent our first days scavenging scrap metal, taking advantage of the odd-job welders and professional metalworkers in the unit to outfit our scrappy array of “guntrucks”—embarrassing, Vietnam-vintage five-ton dump trucks retrofitted with machine-gun mounts and painted olive drab.

In the beginning it was all good fun: volleyball, weight lifting, webcams, video games, and thousands-deep DVD libraries. In the mornings, we ate eggs made-to-order, fresh bacon and sausage, cereal, juice, and fresh fruit, all served by a swarm of Sri Lankans and Filipinos whose smiles were like so many Polynesian leis. Friday night, we gorged on steaks, crab legs, and near-beer.

Then, about a week after we arrived, a hail of orange and red tracers streaked back and forth across the black sky. The West Virginia National Guard unit we were replacing had come in with the invasion, but this was the first firefight they’d seen. During their yearlong tour, they hadn’t taken a single casualty and had never so much as laid eyes on an IED. They’d grown accustomed to cool, quiet nights interrupted only by the low hum of generators and the crunch of gravel underfoot.

Things would change during year two. I would change, too.

Before leaving the States, I had made out a will designating my mother as sole recipient of my $250,000 Army life insurance policy. Should my mother have died, the premium was to be divided between my two sisters—except for the $15,000 that I set aside for my girlfriend, Joanna, my childhood sweetheart, whom I came very close to marrying in the predeployment hysteria. I wanted her to have a nice vacation to forget about me if I got killed. I was twenty-three years old. It was hard not to get caught up in the romance of it all.

But we didn’t board a troop train and kiss our wives and girlfriends goodbye through the windows as the engine pulled away. Our departure was less emotional, more sterile. We boarded a charter bus for the two-mile ride from Fort Dix to McGuire Air Force Base. We loaded our gear onto pallets and boarded a cargo flight to Morón, Spain. We flew from Spain to Kuwait, where we spent two weeks baking in the desert, then from Kuwait to Mosul. I don’t identify a whole lot with the young man who made that triple-legged flight in March 2004. But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to distance myself from the man I became over the twelve months that followed. It wasn’t sudden or dramatic; somehow the slow, plodding tread of the war just marched deep inside of me to a place that I do not know how to reach on my own.

The rhythm of it calls me back, all through the day, every day. And I wonder if I’ll ever be able to leave it behind. Everything pales next to Iraq. Where else will I ever feel again that strange mix of dire, mortal seriousness and boyish innocence? Where else will I pit scorpions against geckos in miniature cage matches? Where else will I pull a tarp over a pile of corpses scavenged by dogs in the night? Three and a half years later, I’m still trying to sort it all out—still trying to figure out how the hell I wound up scanning the plains of Saladin’s Nineveh; watching over confused, frightened, and understandably pissed-off detainees; staring down the barrel of my rifle at children. In twelve months, I never fired a shot. Most days I’m happy about that, others I feel like I got ripped off, left with a severe case of combat blue-balls. I have to remind myself that I am here, among the living, the lucky—and to be thankful for that. But I feel a twinge of regret, like I’m a fraud for calling myself a veteran without ever having been deep in the shit; and I harbor a strange nostalgia for those days, as if my life had more meaning when it was ever more tentatively mine.

I have wondered since leaving the National Guard in July 2007, at the end of my six-year contract, if the other guys from my unit are as consumed by their memories and frustrations as I am, if they, too, feel something less than fully alive in the civilian world we now inhabit. I have wondered, more than anything else, how the small handful of troops from Charlie Company who saw the worst of it in the chow hall that day have fared since our return.

If I could somehow gather their stories, pull together the common threads, maybe I could start to understand my own story.