The sound of something snapping close by brought me back to consciousness. It took a few moments for me to regain my senses and figure out what was going on. The first thing I noticed was that it was starting to lighten. I had apparently been out cold the rest of the night in the ravine where I still lay.

Then the pain returned. I was lying on top of my injured left arm and both it and my left shoulder were screaming in pain. I was about to shift to take the pressure off my wounded limb when more sounds grabbed my attention. First another snapping sound, which I was pretty sure was a twig or piece of wood being broken, followed by voices.

"I don't think we will find him," the first voice said.

"Shut up and keep looking. If we do not find him, Qasim will have my head. I will make sure he gets yours along with it!"

I was looking from an almost upside down position, and saw legs followed by bodies stepping over the ravine just meters in front of me. They weren't really paying that much attention, and I couldn't imagine how they did not see me, but they walked on by.

The one in the middle I recognized. It was Moe. There was no way I was going to be able to get them before they got me. I might be able to shoot one of them, but firing an assault rifle with one hand would be difficult in the best of conditions. No, the smart play was to let them get some distance, and try to scoot past them.

I wasn't sure where I was, or where I was headed; but what I did know, was that I needed to get the hell away from that village. They would find me, eventually, if I didn't high tail it. I lay there for a long ten minutes, giving them some time to get some distance. Then I pried myself out of the ravine. Standing, I found my right ankle was also pretty screwed up, and I was having trouble putting weight on it. I pulled the rifle up and switched the selector to 'safe'. Holding the barrel, I used the weapon as best I could, as a makeshift cane. It wasn't much good as a weapon, anyway, as I had lost the bag of ammo while I was twirling down the hill.

I veered to the right as I walked, to put some distance between me and the trio in case they doubled back at some point. Thankfully, I never saw them again. After walking about twenty minutes another ravine showed up, heading perpendicular to the first. I stopped and listened for a few moments, to make sure those guys weren't headed in this direction and in my immediate vicinity. Hearing nothing, I continued down the new ravine.

As I walked, I worked on the problem. I had no food and no water, and I wasn't sure when I would find any. I could wander around, but I had no idea where I was. I could be in Pakistan, for all I knew. The area still looked like what I saw in Afghanistan, but it was a good bet that the area along the border looked the same, whether it was Pakistan, or Afghanistan.

Still, if I was in Afghanistan, there was a chance I might stumble across some friendlies. There were a lot of people living here who didn't like the Taliban, or groups like Al Qaeda. Empty villages like the one I'd been kept in weren't unknown, and the people who were forced out would resent it.

No, my only real hope was finding a village and asking for help. They would either turn me back over to the insurgents … in which case I would be killed … or they would help me. But if I kept wandering around this mountain range, I was a dead man anyway.

Without water, I could have made it three or four days, max, in my best condition. In thin clothing, injured, and in a weakened state; the odds were good that exposure would get me before dehydration set in.

So, I walked. As I walked, my vision blurred and then returned, over and over. Odds were good that I had managed a concussion at some point, also.

I walked for the better part of the day, and rested that night. As I leaned against a rock, I was mildly concerned that if I fell asleep I wouldn't wake up again. At least, that's what they used to always say about people with concussions: don't let them fall asleep. That is actually what I was thinking as I drifted off.

It was mid-morning when I came back awake. The pain in my arm was getting worse, and my throat was so very dry. Even my eyes were feeling dry. I pushed myself vertical, and started walking again. My pace was much slower, now. It felt as though it was all I could do to get one foot in front of the other.

I was about to collapse … when I saw it. A small black funnel of smoke was snaking into the sky. That meant fire, and fire probably meant people.

I made my way around the base of the hill I had been negotiating, and went towards the smoke. After what seemed like an eternity, I came to a small goat path. It looked to be leading towards the finger of smoke, so I followed it, heading up the hill. The rifle wasn't doing me much good on the incline, and I was having more and more trouble holding up my weight.

I dropped the weapon, and used my still functioning right hand and arm to pull on the trees and bushes around the path, slowly pushing my body for every last bit of energy to get up the hill. Finally, I broke out into a flat area that entered a small village. There were women and children moving about, many of whom started yelling as I came into sight.

The call went up across the village. The language they were speaking wasn't Arabic or Urdu. I recognized it as Pashto. It was a language I didn't know, but I had heard it, before. Pashto meant I was still in Afghanistan.

A middle aged man with a long beard came out to see what the noise was about, and hurried over when he saw me. He got to me just as my legs gave out, and he caught me.

"Help me," in English, was all I managed to get out through my dry, cracked lips.

Then he blurred out of focus, and I was out.

I have no idea how long I had been unconscious when I came to, but I found myself lying on a flat, hard surface that was bumping along. Each movement caused me to wince in pain from my battered body.

The man from earlier came into my view, his face leaned down into my line of vision. He said something in Pashto and smiled, patting me gently on my good shoulder.

I had no idea what was happening, or where they were taking me. I was in a wagon of some type, staring up at the sky. I couldn't really sit up and look around, as the pain was too great. From time to time someone poured water into my mouth from what seemed like a drinking bladder. Once I remember some type of cooked rice being pushed past my lips. I'm not even sure I was registering it consciously, but I managed to eat it all the same.

I kept slipping in and out, sometimes in a half awake state, and sometimes asleep. It was hard to tell since I was already cold and everything hurt; but I felt like a fever was setting in, and the area around the wound in my left shoulder was starting to hurt worse.

After an unknown amount of time, I heard more commotion. There was a lot of yelling that I couldn't make out, and the man talking next to me was saying something. It seemed weird but I couldn't even register his words. Everything was muted. It was just sounds.

I was starting to slip out when first a gun and then a body came over the side of the wagon, and into my view. The first thing I noticed was the weapon wasn't a Kalashnikov. The second thing I noticed was the digi-pattern design of a United States battle dress uniform.

"Help," was all I could get out, and then I was out again.

6 Months Later

I never did find out what happened to the Afghan man who helped me, but he clearly saved my life! I was in and out for most of it, but he had taken me to a small combat outpost. From there I was air lifted to Bagram for just enough medical help to get me stabilized. Then it was on to Germany.

There were a host of surgeries. I had badly damaged my elbow and shoulder in the escape, and I had also managed to crack my skull. They said there was nothing they could do about the scars on my body however.

I was conscious when I got to Ramstein Air Force Base. When the nurses pulled open the gown I was wearing, the first nurse swore, and looked slightly ill, while the second nurse looked too shocked to say anything.

I knew my wounds and scars were bad, but apparently they were worse than I had realized. Not the injuries from the escape, but the damage done over the years by my captors. I had noticed them, of course, but had never really examined them. I had always spent my free time dreaming of home, and of Claire. Not that I had expected to see either, ever again.

But, once I had time to examine them, it was shocking. Cuts and burns, laid on cuts and burns. My chest, sides and back were road maps of pain. I didn't realize it, but one of my captors had at some point carved the word 'infidel' into the back of my left shoulder blade. The word was partially disguised by the bullet that had ripped through that same shoulder, but you could still tell something had been carved into my skin.

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There was nothing the doctors could really do about that. They said it had happened so slowly, and over so long a time, that the scar tissue was pretty well built up. Any kind of plastic surgery would have had to be so extensive as to be almost as disturbing as the injuries themselves.

So, I got to keep them as a morbid kind of souvenir. My face had generally been left alone. Qasim had given orders that nothing was to be done to me that would affect my ability to work, so they had left my face mostly alone. I did have a nasty scar on one cheek from a particularly savage beating, but that was about it.

After my first surgery, I was declared stable enough to be sent back to the States, where they would do the full reconstruction on my elbow, and repair all the bones that had been broken during my captivity. Without any medical attention at all, some of the bones had healed wrongly, and either limited my mobility or caused me regular pain. I had been wheeled out of the hospital at Ramstein and sent to Walter Reed, the main Army hospital in the US.

At some point between Germany and the US I had picked up a nickname. Military Joe's love handing out nicknames, and they had started calling me Lazarus. I took it in good fun. I didn't really get the full effect of the name until a young JAG Lieutenant came into my hospital room, after my third surgery at Walter Reed.

"What? I went AWOL and I'm now up for a courts martial?" I asked in what I thought was a joking manner, but I only received a frown from the Lieutenant.

"No, Sergeant," she said, ignoring the sarcastic tone of my jibe. "In the attack on your convoy, many of the bodies were in … pieces … I have been told, and were unidentifiable. There was also a lot of post-mortem damage done to the bodies, following the attack. The report on the scene says it was impossible to tell how many of our soldiers were actually there, and we were forced to use the logs from Camp Blessing as to who was at the scene. You were declared dead."

"So you're here to bring me back to life, LT?"

"Apparently so. This has happened before so we do have a procedure to do this. We just have to fill out the paperwork. After that you will get your back pay and go through the process to be medically discharged from the service."

"And just like that, I'm out."

"I'm sorry, Sergeant, but your doctors were quite clear. While your injuries do not present long term disability, it has been decided that, based on what has happened to you, you won't be able to go operational again. Your AR 40-66 came back with a suggestion that you should be severed from the service. Command has agreed to offer you a medical discharge, instead of a separation under AR 635-200."

An AR 40-66 was a mental evaluation. Given what had happened to me, they had ordered one up after my second surgery, and a head doc had shown up and asked me a boat load of questions. An AR 635-200 was the new version of a section eight discharge, which meant getting kicked out because you were loony toons. It would be hard to get a job in civilian life with that around my neck, so the Army was throwing me a bone with the medical discharge for my wounds.

Either way, I was out of the Army.

She wasn't kidding about the paperwork. Besides the military paperwork to change my status back to alive, there was the other paperwork. When I got out of the Army, I would need things like a driver’s license and a Social Security number, all of which had been shut down when I was declared dead. I would want to vote again in the future, most likely. Apparently you can't do that if you're dead, either, in spite of the stories claiming otherwise.

There was an upside to all the paperwork. The Army owed me three years of back pay. Since I'd been alive the whole time, that meant I was technically still on active service. So, I would be leaving the military with a nice check to carry me over 'till I figured out what I wanted to do with my life.

Which brought me to the most troubling part of the paperwork. Claire had been listed as my beneficiary for my military life insurance, since I'd had no other family by the time we were engaged. It had paid out to her already. Since I was alive, no one was sure what to do about that. The most obvious thing was to ask for the money back, but the JAG officer said she wasn't sure if there was a set procedure to deal with that. I didn't really have an opinion either way. The Army would figure out what it was going to do, and that would be that.

The other troubling part, was that I hadn't been able to get a hold of Claire. Through my three years of captivity, more than anything else, she was the thing that kept me going. My thoughts of her drove me to do what I had to do, to stay alive. I had always felt that, if there was even a one percent chance I could make it out alive, it was worth trying for it.

Since waking up, the one thing I had tried above all else, was to get in touch with Claire. I needed to let her know I was alive. I had called her old number, but there was no answer. I then reached out to an old buddy who was at Fort Bragg to go by her old place. He found out she had moved at some point. The people living there now had no idea who she was, so that was a dead end.

I had called her parents' old number, but it had changed at some point. Claire and I had never had very many friends in common, and I wasn't sure how to get a hold of anyone who would know where she was now.

I tried to contact the UNC alumni association, since I had learned she had managed to finish her Doctorate while I was away. But they didn't seem to think my reasons were good enough to hand out member information. I sent a letter to her parents’ house, and never heard anything back. I put ads in newspapers in Miami, where her parents lived, and in Chapel Hill, on the off chance someone she knew at school would tell her about it. But nothing.

Some of the guys I had known from my time at the Special Warfare Center or that I had spent time on other teams with stopped by to see me. Sadly, the guys I had grown closest to were all gone, dead in the ambush that had stolen so much of my life. It was nice to see a few friendly faces, but more than anything I wanted to get out of the hospital and go searching for Claire.

Thankfully, the day finally came. I had finished my rehab and healed up enough from my surgeries that I was sent home. A SOF officer had shown up on the day I was to get out, along with a JAG lawyer. The lawyer was there to get my discharge finished and make sure I was now fully alive. Annoying, but necessary I guess.

The officer had some kind words to say before I was discharged, and presented me with a purple heart and a bronze star for my actions in the convoy attack. I wasn't sure I really qualified for that. The only account of that attack was a video from a drone that had shown up near the end of the battle, and my own after action report.

But the Army does love handing out its ribbons.

Then I was out the door. I had three years of salary saved up. True it was an Army salary, which is about the same as the salary a well-paid grocery clerk gets, but I had been on Hazard pay at the time, and it was decided to keep me at that pay rate through my time in the hands of Qasim. It would be enough to let me live half way decently for a year and a half, maybe two, or poorly for a full three years. But it also meant I had enough money to begin my search.

Since I had already learned she was no longer in Chapel Hill, at least not at any of the addresses I had, there was only one line I could follow. Their phone number may have changed, but I still had the address to her parents' house in Miami. I booked a plane ticket as soon as I was discharged, and headed to go and find her. Luggage was easy. Most of the stuff from my barracks had been shipped to Claire while she was still in North Carolina, and she had apparently cleaned out the house I was renting at Fort Bragg of any of my stuff as well.

For all she and the Army knew at the time, I was dead. They'd had to do something with my stuff, and she was the logical choice. Since I couldn't get a hold of her, that meant I had no idea where anything was, that I had owned before that day on the convoy. I had picked up some pants and shirts, along with a new duffel bag and toiletries at the PX near Walter Reed … and, I had a gun. For now it was in pieces, and packed up in my duffel. I had known I was going to Florida, though, so I had used the uncomfortable feelings my situation seemed to generate with everyone, to have the lady JAG lawyer get me a concealed carry permit for Florida.

Since I was military … or, I guess, ex-military, now… I didn't have to take the safety course. It was just a matter of filling out paperwork. She was able to get everything taken care of, before I was even released from the hospital. I used the same tactic to get a guy I kind of knew, who was stationed in Washington, to purchase me a gun. It was all legal and on the up and up, I just wanted the option to be armed when I got to Florida.

Not that I expected anything to happen, or was worried; it's just that having been at the mercy of others for so long, I didn't want that to happen again. I thought of it as a safety blanket, albeit a hard and metallic one.

I was all set to travel. My duffel bag would have to suffice as luggage, until I figured out where I would be living and what I wanted to do. All that had to wait, though, 'till I found Claire.

I wasn't able to sleep on the plane. I hadn't been around this many people in one place, especially a tight and confined place like an airplane, in a long time. It made me uneasy. Thankfully the people in my row were equally unsocial, so I was left to my own devices.

Stepping off the plane, my body noticed the change from the mild summer temperature of Maryland, to the damned, muggy heat that was south Florida. I hadn't driven in a long time, so I opted for a taxi. I gave him the address, and looked out the window as we rode.

There was one thing I wanted to do. It was like an itch I needed to scratch. I asked the cabbie to pull over at a gas station, and wait for me. Grabbing my duffel bag, I headed to the restroom, where I dug out the pieces and assembled my sidearm. Then I loaded it. I had also had my Army buddy pick up a belt-waist holster, which I used to hold my gun at the small of my back. My t-shirt was long enough that it covered the weapon enough to work. Not that I was worried, since I was licensed to carry it.

I felt much more complete once I was adequately armed. It gave me a sense of being in charge of my own destiny, which I still really needed. Maybe the shrinks were right to push me out of the Army. Looking at it objectively, I clearly had some issues lurking below the surface.

I returned to the cab and slid back into the vehicle. The cabby gave me a weird look, probably wondering what I had been doing, but then he just shrugged, clicked the meter off of 'wait', and got us back on the road.

It was weird seeing all the people going about, just living their lives. My brain had just adjusted from living in captivity, to being poked and prodded for months in a hospital. Now I was having to adjust again. From my point of view, it wasn't hard to identify with the way Vietnam soldiers felt, coming back from so long overseas. It was social whiplash.

All those thoughts pushed out of my head as we pulled up to the address. I was trying not to get excited, since I had no proof that she still lived here, but that wasn't really working. I paid the cabby, grabbed my duffel, and headed up the walkway.

I didn't notice any cars in the driveway, but they had a garage so the cars could be in there. I rang the doorbell and waited. I was starting to think no one was home when the door in front of me opened, to the very last thing I had expected.

Standing in front of me was Claire.

And she was about eight months pregnant.