I was loading my grandfather’s .45 at the civilian bench when a Marine sergeant slapped a hundred-dollar bill on the counter and told me to try not to EMBARRASS myself – and every man on that range laughed like it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.
My name is Jolene, and I’m thirty-four years old.
I’ve been shooting since I was six. My papaw, Earl Riddle, put a Ruger in my hands on a farm in Harlan County before I could ride a bike. By twelve I was outshooting every man at the county fair. By seventeen I had a scholarship offer I couldn’t talk about.
But that’s not the part that matters.
The part that matters is what happened after.
I’d stopped at the range outside Camp Lejeune because I was passing through on my way to a funeral. I hadn’t shot in almost two years. I just needed to feel something familiar.
The sergeant’s name tape said BREWER. He was maybe twenty-eight, broad, loud. His guys were clustered behind him, five or six of them, all grinning.
“Four seconds on the plate rack,” he said. “Bet you can’t clear it.”
I didn’t say anything.
I picked up the .45 and stepped to the line.
That’s when the youngest one – a lance corporal, couldn’t have been older than twenty – looked down at my hands.
His smile disappeared.
The scars run from my knuckles to my wrists on both hands. Burns, mostly. A few surgical lines. You don’t get hands like mine from cooking accidents.
“Sergeant,” the kid said quietly.
Brewer ignored him.
I cleared the plate rack in TWO POINT THREE SECONDS. Eight plates. Every single one.
The range went dead silent.
I set the .45 down. The range officer, an older guy named Tate, had walked over during the shooting. He wasn’t watching me. He was staring at the ID card I’d left on the bench next to my case.
His face changed.
I watched him lean toward Brewer and say something I couldn’t hear. EVERY DROP OF COLOR left Brewer’s face.
“Ma’am,” Tate said to me. “I’m sorry about these boys.”
Brewer tried to hand me the hundred. His hand was shaking.
I didn’t take it.
The lance corporal was still staring at my hands. Then he looked up at me and said, very quietly: “You were at Khost, weren’t you?”
Before I could answer, Tate stepped between us, put his hand flat on the bench, and said: “Son, her file is the reason YOUR UNIT CHANGED ITS ENTIRE EXTRACTION PROTOCOL.”
The lance corporal’s mouth opened, then closed. He looked at Brewer, then back at me, and his voice cracked when he said: “Sergeant Brewer doesn’t know. But my older brother – he told me what you did for his team. He said they never found all of you after the convoy. He said they were TOLD you were dead.”
What Tate Knew
There are things I can’t tell you.
Not because I’m being dramatic about it. Because some of it is still classified, some of it is under a nondisclosure that has my actual signature on it, and some of it I just don’t talk about because the last time I tried to explain it to someone who wasn’t there, they cried and I didn’t, and that felt wrong for both of us.
What I can tell you is that Khost is a province in eastern Afghanistan, right up against the Pakistani border. Mountainous. Cold at night in ways that surprise people who’ve only seen it on a map. And in November of 2013, I was twenty-three years old, and I was not supposed to be there in any official capacity.
That scholarship offer I mentioned. The one I couldn’t talk about at seventeen.
That’s as much as I’ll say about that.
Tate knew because Tate had done two tours with the 75th before blowing out his knee in Kandahar and spending the last twelve years running a range outside Jacksonville. He’d seen the ID card. He’d seen the name. And he’d either been briefed at some point, or he knew someone who had been, because when he looked at me after reading that card, he didn’t look surprised.
He looked the way men look when they’ve heard a story secondhand for years and then the person from the story is suddenly standing in front of them buying a lane fee and asking for ear protection.
Like the world is smaller and stranger than they’d accounted for.
Harlan County to Here
My papaw Earl died in March. That’s why I was driving through Jacksonville. The funeral was in Raleigh, at my aunt Debra’s church, because Earl had moved up there after my grandmother passed and nobody had the heart to argue about it.
Earl Riddle was eighty-one years old. He taught school for thirty years, coached JV basketball for twenty, and never once in his life talked about himself if he could help it. He had a Purple Heart from Korea in a shoebox under his bed. I found it when I was nine. When I asked him about it he said, “That’s for getting shot, Jo. Anybody can get shot. Now let’s go see if the starlings are back.”
He put the Ruger in my hands when I was six because he believed women should know how to handle a firearm. This was Harlan County in 1996. This was not a political position. This was just sense.
By the time I was twelve, I was shooting at a level that made grown men uncomfortable. Not because I was flashy about it. Because I wasn’t. I was quiet and I was consistent and I didn’t miss. Quiet consistency, in a certain kind of man, reads as a provocation.
Earl never cared. He’d just nod and reload and say, “Again.”
I hadn’t shot in almost two years because the last time I’d been to a range was with a man I’d been seeing, and that relationship ended badly, and I’d associated the smell of gunpowder with him for a while. That’s the whole story there. It’s not interesting.
But I was driving to bury my grandfather, and I was three hours early, and I needed something that felt like him. The Harlan County version of him. The man with the Ruger and the patience and the “again.”
So I stopped.
Two Point Three Seconds
The plate rack at that range had eight plates. Standard setup. Steel, about the size of a dinner plate each, on a hinged frame, spaced maybe eight inches apart.
Four seconds is a solid time for a cold shooter with an unfamiliar handgun on a rack they’ve never seen before. Four seconds would have been respectable. Four seconds and I’d have taken Brewer’s hundred dollars and been back in my car before anyone said another word.
Two point three seconds is a different conversation.
I didn’t go in trying to prove anything. I want to be clear about that. I went in because the plates were there and the gun was in my hand and something in my body just remembered what to do. The way you remember how to swim. The way your hands know a keyboard. Eleven years of a very particular kind of training doesn’t leave you. It just goes quiet.
My hands don’t shake on a trigger. They never have. The scars don’t help the grip, technically. The skin is tight across the knuckles on my right hand in a way that should affect my release. My occupational therapist in Bethesda told me I’d probably never shoot competitively again.
She wasn’t wrong, exactly. I’m not competing.
The last plate hit the frame at two point three. I know because Tate had a timer running. He told me later he’d clicked it on out of habit when I stepped to the line, the same way he clicked it for every shooter. He said he looked down at the number and then looked up at me and then looked back down at the number.
The range had gone quiet in the specific way ranges go quiet when something has happened that nobody has a word for yet.
Brewer’s guys weren’t grinning anymore. Two of them had taken a step back without seeming to notice they’d done it.
The Lance Corporal
His name was Garrett Foss. I found that out later.
He was twenty years old, from Macon, Georgia, nine months into his first enlistment, and he had an older brother named Dale who’d done three tours with a Ranger battalion and come home to run a hardware store and never talk about any of it.
Garrett had grown up hearing almost nothing about what Dale did over there. That’s how it usually works. The ones who saw the worst of it talk the least. Dale Foss apparently told his family almost nothing for years.
But at some point, in some context I’ll never fully know, Dale had told Garrett one story. Just one. About a convoy outside Khost in November 2013. About what happened when it went wrong. About a woman whose name Dale either didn’t know or wouldn’t say, who’d done something that Dale described, according to Garrett, as “the reason any of us got out.”
Garrett had been carrying that story for years. He’d never expected to be standing six feet from it on a Tuesday afternoon in Jacksonville, North Carolina.
When he said “you were at Khost, weren’t you” – his voice was completely flat. He wasn’t asking to make conversation. He was asking because my hands had told him something and he needed to know if he was right.
I looked at him for a second.
Then Tate stepped in and said what he said about the extraction protocol, and Garrett’s mouth did that thing where it opens and then closes because the brain hasn’t caught up yet.
The protocol change is real. I know it happened because I was told it happened, years later, by someone in a position to know. I had no part in designing the new protocol. I just provided the data, you could say. In the way that things going very wrong in a specific way provides data.
What I Said
Brewer was still standing there with the hundred-dollar bill.
He wasn’t loud anymore. He wasn’t anything. He had the look of a man who has just understood that he made a joke in a room where the joke landed on the wrong person, and there’s no version of the next thirty seconds that goes well for him.
I picked up the .45. Checked the chamber, dropped the magazine, set it back in the case.
Garrett said: “Ma’am. I’m sorry. I don’t – I don’t know if you want to hear this.”
I told him I didn’t mind.
He said: “Dale said – he said they told the families some of you didn’t make it. He said they held a memorial. He said he went, and he stood there, and he didn’t believe it, but they told him to believe it, so he – ” Garrett stopped. Cleared his throat. “He said he lit a candle for you. For the woman whose name he didn’t know. He said he still thinks about it.”
I stood there for a moment.
The range was still quiet. Even the other civilians down the far end had stopped shooting, though I don’t think they knew why.
I thought about Earl, and his Purple Heart in the shoebox, and the way he’d say “that’s for getting shot, Jo.” I thought about a church in Raleigh where in three hours I was going to sit in a pew and look at a casket and try to remember to breathe.
I thought about a November in Khost that I’m not going to describe to you.
Then I picked up my case and my ID card and my ear protection.
I looked at Garrett Foss.
“Tell your brother,” I said, “that the candle was appreciated.”
I walked past Brewer without looking at him. The hundred-dollar bill was still in his hand.
Tate held the door.
Outside, the air smelled like pine and diesel and the particular nothing smell of a highway town in March. My car was parked at the far end of the lot, Earl’s .45 case in my hand, three hours to Raleigh.
I sat in the driver’s seat for a minute before I started the engine.
Then I drove to bury my grandfather.
—
If this one hit you somewhere quiet, pass it along to someone who’d get it.
For more tales of unexpected twists and turns, check out what happened when My Husband’s Secret Phone Had Nothing to Do With Another Woman, or the strange encounter in My Dead Commander Showed Up at the NTSB Hearing and Said I Had to Disappear, and don’t miss the drama when My Captain Just Accused the One Person Who Was Trying to Save Her.
