Flames reflected off of the driver's rearview mirror. In the darkness of night the flames were our guiding light. The flames that were consuming us. It was the first time my eyes beheld the horror. Stars without a sky, not light through darkness, but strange stars. Starlight in a darkness and of colors I cannot say. Only moments later did my mind have the chance to recoil. But combat has a way of twisting time and memory.

Sometimes I am still there, and while I was there, there were seconds that I was not there. That's just how it is. And when I am there I remember all of it.

I turned to look at those flames because the vehicle behind me was burning. Something hit the back of my helmet as the glass of the driver's window shattered. A bullet had gone through the mirror, ricocheted off my helmet and blew out the window. It was just one of many bullets flying in every direction. The orchestral percussion of AK47 rifles and the occasional punctuation of an RPG were almost comforting at this point. As long as I was going deaf and flinching: I must still be alive.

Then as suddenly as the ambush had started, it was over. The insurgents had taken minimal casualties. In fact, as the sun started to come up, only one dead insurgent lay in front of our convoy. At a closer look he was not an insurgent. Just some kid.

I threw up onto the road and it was just bile-flavored water.

"You okay Dewain?" Tyreeses asked me.

"Am I okay?" I echoed his question. Did anyone ever say anything anymore or were these just a bunch of words strung together without meaning? I hadn't decided before I went and clambered back into the one operational vehicle. It had just finished pushing the SUV out of our path. Moses had the wreckage off to the side of the road too.

"We are leaving right now. Let's go!" Moses barked. "Come on you dogs, this isn't the Army, it's just us out here!"

I watched as some sand drifted across the road as morning light spilled over desolate hills. We were heading back to ICRA Securities HQ. When we got back, we parked in an ever-decreasing motorpool.

I went into the barracks and undressed at my locker and showered. I hadn't taken a scratch. At least that is how it seemed. I had a severe headache when I woke up and reported to our operation room to tell our company surgeon that I had a migraine. He gave me some water solubles and told me to rest.

As I slept another mission went back out to get the two bodies and two vehicles we had left trying to do another mission. That is always how it went. Every mission went badly and led to the next one.

I then remembered what I had seen in the flames. It came to me in my dreams. It was like a person in a robe, under the night sky. It wore a cowl and under that was the darkness. Not normal darkness, I could see that in the night sky behind this thing. No, the darkness I peered into was absolute, a kind of churning nightmare and the more I looked the deeper I was drawn in. I could see stars in those depths. Not ordinary stars. I could see those in the skies behind it. These were stars made of something unnatural. They were not shiny and light, but of a color I cannot describe. My mind again revolted at the sight. I tried to look away from where I stared into its umbral cowl, but I was transfixed.

Then fear gripped me. I felt a kind of loathing and awfulness that I had never known. I had stood in multiple gunfights with the insurgents and felt a kind of fear and terror that is merely mortal dread. This was something sinister and wicked. The horror that I felt was like a revulsion, like I had to puke and it was my mind that needed to be purged. I awoke sweating and unable to breath for a few seconds.

I was alone in the barracks and at first I did believe I was alone. But then I knew I was not. I looked up and saw nothing in front of me. I looked all around and saw nothing. But something was with me, something sickening and hot. It was breathing its warmth onto me like a fever. My sweat smelled like something that had died and so I walked slowly to the showers.

There I looked into a mirror and I saw those flames. Jeneve and Terrence were in that vehicle and had not come back. Had they died last night? How could I not know for sure?

I was shaking and the flames were real. I reached into them to try and save my friends. I could see them burning and screaming, but I could not hear them. I pulled back my arm and then I began to scream and scream and I fell over. They found me there, with my arm blistered and burned, the mirror cracked and dripping shards. I don't know what happened.

Soon I was in the white room and they had me sedated. The surgeon came to the table and began to bandage my arm.

"How did you not notice these injuries before?" he was asking absently. I didn't respond. He added: "At least they were not bad burns, but you should have gotten them dressed last night."

"Not fresh?" I asked. He frowned. My commander was there and he said:

"Any cuts? He broke a mirror." Moses had his arms crossed. My surgeon shook his head and then I passed out.

Now I couldn't wake up and again I was walking alone across a midnight desert. There, waiting for me was the cowled figure.

"What do you want from me?" I was crying in the dream, helpless to escape the apparition and unable to look away as I was drawn closer and closer to look inside.

It pointed at an atrocity committed by the insurgents that I had avoided too much time with. Now I was forced to witness it in full and horrid detail. When the vision ended I was alone in the morning desert and kneeling. Very little of my recovery time can I recall.

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Then I was back on duty and I accompanied our mission team through Arua. This place is a maze of strange streets and dark alleyways where the sun never cleanses the shadows. To make a right turn, sometimes you have to make a left three times instead. To that difficulty, it is reasonable to doubt a man's ability to walk across the street.

Our translator, Surgy, was buying coffee and moving like he was under fire as he tried to get back to the stopped convoy.

"Forget how to cross the street?" Moses called to him. Apparently he had as he suddenly stopped and got a look like he was somewhere else. His eyes glazed over and he suddenly crushed the paper coffee cup and spilled the hot McCafe' all over his hand.

"Go get him." I was ordered alongside Tyreeses. We went and collected our friend and poured some drinking water over his hand.

"You okay?" I asked him, He just shook his head and his eyes watered. I looked away while the man cried. This place makes men humble.

"What do you love?" he asked after awhile.

"I love my cat Willow." I told him.

"If you love anything." Surgy said as if he was about to say more. He didn't, he just sat there quietly and stared out at the sand.

"Well I do hate sand." I started to quote some stupid sci-fi film I had watched a long time ago, but I couldn't recall how it went. Memories felt like lies I was told, or lies that I tell. Maybe both.

That was the last time I saw Surgy until years later when I thought I saw him. It wasn't him though. We all have look-alikes out there. I've always wondered what that meant.

The dreams intensified and soon I was being unprofessionally examined by my boss. My behavior and my lack of sleep made it obvious I was cracking up. I told my boss that I might be crazy. He didn't agree, but listened to me anyway.

My boss is a big guy who looks and sounds like Ving Rhames. He makes you feel very safe and sound when you are alone with him. The first moments of peace I had experienced in a long time. His office was like a sanctuary. I had already cried a few times since I had sat down. The relief and the terror were a tide in me and this was moonrise.

The clock ticked quietly. Pictures of smiling people adorned his office. There were sports trophies for t-ball. Every kid gets one at the end of the season. In a place like this, your kid's t-ball trophy is magically made of real gold. I wondered if everyone felt this way in this office.

"I think that when I got hit I started having problems. I didn't even know I'd burned my arm until the next day."

"At least you don't sound like Surgy or Ericson."

"Ericson, sir?"

"A few weeks ago Ericson and some of the guys on Team Five went out to a village where we had several company sponsored doctors working with Doctors Without Borders. ICRA Securities was doing this on a volunteer basis, you understand? But since company doctors were going, they could have made a formal assignment. They just wanted to take it easy on this one."

"Ebola?" I guessed. For a moment there was silence and he thought about whether or not he should tell me any more and if so, how much. He shook his head.

"It isn't important. My point is that you are not the first of you kids to sit there and tell me you have seen strange things, horrible things even."

"Strange...horrible...Why now, am I seeing this?"

"I don't know, son. This place, it is evil. What we do here, we are not wanted. Those who live here are its prey and they cannot go anywhere. But we have come from faraway lands and we contend with this darkness. It is fighting back, perhaps." he explained. It felt like a sermon. That was right because I was worried I might need an exorcism.

"It shows me the things the insurgents do. Makes me watch." I confessed. I started crying as the screams and sights tried to claw their way up from the nightmares they slept in. Thinking of such false memories summoned them up like real memories. Whose memories were these?

He sighed.

"I know this. I saw it too." he divulged.

"Saw what?"

"The horror in the eyes you see when you look into the mirror."

"I do look into it. I cannot look away." I tried to say. I could see it then and there. It was silencing me. It could somehow obscure my words and make them sound far away and unheard. My boss kept talking. I only heard parts of his story.

Years ago he had encountered the insurgents along with several other ICRA Securities who had gotten killed in that attack. Everything that had happened was going well for their mission until they met their first child soldiers. Boys with guns.

His comrades had hesitated and gotten killed. Only he had returned fire. When it was over he had shot and killed one of them. Apparently the kid looked like his own and he had hesitated. But he had returned fire and survived. It was a harrowing and horrible story. I heard no mention of my visitant.

After he dismissed me I fell into despair. I am ashamed to say that I behaved badly as my mind began to really fall apart. I could no longer discern between dreams and reality. It was always with me, always making me see the awful horrors it relished so much.

I was heading home. ICRA Securities put me on the next cargo plane home. Bundled up warmly I sat for that ride. But whether I was awake or asleep no longer mattered. Without warning the rear ramp began to open. I got out of my seat and walked across the empty space to behold empty night sky above and below and all around.

The stars were dancing to insidious drumbeats that sounded like my own heartbeats. Suddenly they stopped and I could not breath. There it was, floating impossible above the emptiness.

It came slowly from darkest shadow of the night sky. The visitant drained the stars of their colors. Lightly and silently floating in tattered robes my horror was coming closer and closer. I wanted to scream, to run away, but was firmly standing in its path.

The sleeves had no hands and reached emptily outward for me as it came. I could only stare miserably. Tears and trembling told it of my terror with a creeping, screaming, silent nightmare of rejection in my mind as its hooded cowl shown its inner depths.

I stared into that darkness yet again and this time there was no end to it. It was inches away from my face and then it was as if it opened and engulfed me. I was in its darkness. The air was cold on the cargo plane. Colder than anyone can imagine; but inside that thing it was a penetrating cold. It went to my bones, to my very soul and found my dreams, the things I love in this life.

When I got home I could recall nothing more from the rest of the way home. I had landed hours ago. Now I stood having every kind of difficulty unlocking my front door. I lifted my keys from where I kept dropping them and finally succeeded.

I spent that first night getting what felt like the first sleep. Then when I got up I called the animal sitters and said I would be there soon to get Willow. They apologized.

She had suddenly and inexplicably died yesterday.

I realized it had come home with me. Fear crept up my spine. It had killed Willow, what else could it do, this evil I was carrying around with me?

Questions became my enemies. I stopped asking questions. I kept the shades up all the time, plugged in nightlights. It never returned though. I still remember all of it sometimes.

Sometimes, when I look up at night, and the stars are right.