Deployment came with the expected long hours and drab meals of dry meat and soggy vegetables.

The first day the omelette line ran out of ham is seared in my mind, etched forever along my neural pathways no matter how I try to shake it. It was in the fall, a Thursday, and what followed is a murky haze of culinary disappointments, as that next Sunday, instead of the usual steak and lobster tail, the dining facility (or “DFAC” for those of you uninitiated into the finer points of military abbreviation) only had steak.

And not filets, either. Apparently t-bones were good enough for those risking their lives every day, as they anxiously churned out yet another series of Power Point slides for the commander’s update brief (Or “CUB,” which is completely different from the “BUB,” or battle update brief. It’s completely different because the operations officer said so, and the S3 always knows best.), hoping against hope that the internet would stay up long enough to get any updates sent to brigade.

Then there were the days upon days when there wasn’t enough white bread to keep the line stocked to make a sandwich. Or there was only one kind of ice cream. Or they ran out of chocolate chip cookies and we had to comfort ourselves with…oatmeal. To this day I cannot bring myself to look at an oatmeal cookie without dying a little inside.

What I didn’t expect was the isolation. We relied on unreliable Internet connectivity, less reliable phone service, and twice-weekly mail drops—if weather cooperated and security was sufficient.

Phone service on the FOB was another nightmare that I have only recently been able to remember without rocking myself gently in a futile effort to soothe the savage cellphone loathing beast that within every veteran must lurk. There is something particularly inhumane about an enemy that forces phone companies to shut off cell phone repeaters at night, or risk their destruction. And there is something cowardly about a company that will comply, caring nothing for the fact that I, a Westerner, desperately needed to call home. If I wanted to make regular phone calls from FOB Goode, I had to endure soul-crushing hours sitting on a metal (Yes…metal.) folding chair, waiting my turn for the internet-based phone system to call home to the United States. It still makes me twitch to think about it.

But what I noticed most was corruption winding through every layer of Afghan society, crisscrossed by a growing barricade of U.S. red tape.

And then there was the idealism shattering moment when I realized that Afghans are, by their very nature, a corrupt people who would steal your last dime if they only knew what a dime was worth. The rampant corruption I saw there in Paktya had nothing to do with the massive influx of American aid dollars coupled with school inspections done by helicopter,but had to be a part of their DNA. It’s an entire country that sees no value in things like dogs, bacon, or distilled spirits. What else should I have expected but that they would want to line their pockets as quickly as they could? There’s no excuse for a people in a country wracked by decades of civil war to behave as if survival was their only goal. Instead they should have been looking to the bright, beautiful, American-funded future.

Before I deployed, I organized potlucks and karaoke nights for my friends. Now I just want to be alone.

In my entire life, I have never wanted to organize a potluck or a karaoke night with my friends. Before I read this article, the idea of takeout and a BBQ pork combo plate alone in the privacy of my own home felt like my well-adjusted approach to dealing with the madding crowds that could assail during non-dinner hours.

But reading this, I’ve learned that my own natural tendency toward not wanting to spend more time around people than I have to has nothing whatever to do with my personality, and everything to do with coming to grips with long hours spent building presentations and spreadsheets no one would ever read again. I’m not an introvert: I’m a deeply scarred deployment veteran.

I could probably nap here in this pink upholstered chair, but at night I turn off the TV and am plunged into an unsettling peace—no helicopters, no rumbling armored vehicles, no chatting smokers on break.

I have known the post-deployment silence: the absence of mortar rounds, IEDs, and the overly ambitious EOD techs who never detonated anything before 11:00 at night. Or gunfire. So FOB Goode, with its single helipad, lack of mortar fire, or other tracks from the insurgent playlist had a special kind of terror for me. I’ve stopped dozing off to the soothing strains of Wagner lately, but there are a lot of days when I just miss those Huey blades. I’d attributed that to how many times I’d seen Apocalypse Now, but it turns out, I might have a…disorder. There, I said it. Finally.

“I used to go to church,” I write. But I’m not on good terms with God right now. I think of the young pregnant Afghan woman found dead after a special ops mission. I think of two friends who died when their aircraft crashed not long after I got home. I think of an officer on my team, whose wife was also deployed. Why would God bring them back safely only to desert her during a car accident weeks later?

Accidents are really the deaths that gnaw at you. When you realize you were the last one of a circle of friends to say goodbye before he stepped on that IED pales in comparison to the nights I’ve spent wondering about the arbitrary nature of airplane and vehicle accidents. Sure, I’ve listened to my Afghan colleagues tell me about the time their cousins died during a NATO airstrike, but nothing makes me tear up quite like a motorcycle safety PSA.

What if the things I write and say send a ripple? And what if people get caught in that ripple? What if people die? I never thought of my job as life and death, but what if it is?

Heavy indeed is the head that wears the public affairs officer crown on a United States Air Force facility. The fact that there has yet to be a direct tie between a USAF PAO release and any uptick in violence in either Iraq or Afghanistan is incontrovertible proof that the government is hiding these events from us. That they don’t want us to know the terror unleashed by last week’s release of general officer announcements or updates on the latest squadron picnic. Having seen firsthand how effectively public affairs teams reached out to the Afghan people, I firmly believe that they are hiding the truth from all of us, and it’s high time someone…somewhere…looked into the chaos wrought by stateside PAOs.