“Hey,” he said, “I’m about to deploy to Afghanistan, but we’ve got this big family event happening in Texas. The week after that family event, he was on a plane to Afghanistan. The mission went bad, and soon the four were scrambling across the brutal Afghan terrain under heavy fire. I’d gotten close to all those guys during the course and had especially come to know Marcus and Axelson really well. As far as we knew, Marcus had died, too.