She leaned over-a quick kiss-and said, “Toss the key through the mailbox; don’t forget, okay?”

I said I wouldn’t and she was gone in a flash of pink. A minute later I heard the sound of her old beater starting up, and off she rattled.

Gloria is a nurse at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in the north end of Washington, D.C., where I’m being treated, and she was a soldier too, once, and is now a civilian employee. She is the child of Mexican immigrants and a big striver, which I am definitely not. I am what they call a lifer; I will probably be in the military my whole life. When your average troop says this, it means twenty-and-out or thirty-and-out, retire on the pension, maybe get another job, and have a pretty nice life-what with the benefits and all-but I will probably get killed, considering what I do, so I will really be in the army my whole life.

I fell asleep and awoke at dawn like a good soldier. Then I took a lot longer than a ninety-second shower and helped myself to some of Gloria’s coffee and cereal. The milk was bad, so I ate the cereal dry, washed down with the coffee, which was some store brand I never heard of. Gloria doesn’t spend freely. She has a plan, which she explained to me on our first date. She was working two shifts a day, seven days a week, and going to school on top of that, so she could become a nurse-anesthetist, and really rake in the money, and she thought that in ten years of doing this she would have enough to finance medical school. She also explained, on the same first date, that she wasn’t after a regular boyfriend, she just wanted someone nice who was out of town a lot and wouldn’t try to control or otherwise fuck up her life, which, as I say, she had all planned out.

I was planned too, so that was cool. How I hooked up with her was I go for physical therapy three times a week at Walter and a while ago, on one of those days, Brenda Crabbe, my PT, had handed me a piece of paper with a phone number on it and said that Gloria Espinosa wanted to meet me. I asked her who she was and why me, and she said, “Half the doctors in this place been trying to get into that girl’s pants for a year and she won’t have anything to do with them. This is your lucky day, Sergeant.” She had no idea why, she said; she said, “It can’t be your face.”

So I called the number and we arranged for a date and I got cleaned up and drove my rental to her house, which was in Riggs Park, a section of D.C. I had not been in before. Hamilton Street, where she lived, was rows of two-story brick buildings that someone built for people who needed a roof and could pay but who didn’t have much of a choice. Her building had a sagging metal awning in front and a pile of plastic lawn furniture under it, designed so that the people who lived there would have a place to sit when the Washington summers made it impossible to stay inside. That was before AC and TV; the furniture looked like nobody had used it in a while.

She opened the door and she was beautiful: the cheekbones, those plush lips, and a curved nose with all kinds of character. She was smaller than me, which was nice, because I am not a large man, and she had a neat figure-eight kind of body, which appealed to my Middle Eastern tastes, that and the hair. And she gave me a beer, a National Bohemian, as a matter of fact, and I thought she was being funny, because Natty Bo is the beer soldiers in the Washington area drink by the case to get drunk, because it’s really, really cheap.

So we had a beer each and talked, or she talked mainly, and she gave me the plan; she had to be careful about dating because she absolutely could not get involved, not seriously involved, with anyone. It was a little like being interviewed. She was looking intensely at me, to see if I was maybe concealing a guy who would give a shit, and I told her that was fine with me; I just wanted someone to go to a movie with and I didn’t want to get involved either.

She said, “You’re career-oriented too?”

I said, “In a manner of speaking. I’ll probably get killed, and I don’t think it’s fair to saddle a family with that.”

Her eyes got wide when I said this and she asked me what I did in the army and I was going to use the lame one-I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you-but she was not the kind of woman to be put off with that so I said what I was allowed to, which was some bullshit about long-range scouting.

“That’s why you’re working with Brenda. You got hurt in Iraq.”

“No, Afghanistan,” I said, our first lie. I’d known the woman for twenty minutes, so this was something of a personal best.

I’m in an organization called the Tactical Intelligence Support Detachment, which is its name just now. It’s had a lot of names, but what it’s been doing for the last twenty years or so is going into various places and gathering military intelligence, mostly what they call comint, which is eavesdropping on telecommunications but also just looking around and getting the feel of a place that the army might want to go into. Running agents too. The unit has three kinds of troops in general: knob turners who get the signals or whatever, spooks who gather the humint from live local types, and shooters, people who make sure the others don’t get caught doing it. Sometimes-rarely-the shooters are ordered to commit some other form of necessary violence. I’m a shooter. The army is officially not supposed to do stuff like this. It’s covert operation, which is supposed to be the domain of the CIA. But the CIA doesn’t belong to the military, it does not salute and say hoo-ah when the army wants something from it, so the army decided it wanted its own little CIA, which is us.

Obviously, we’ve been busy since this whole terrorism thing started, although not as busy as we could’ve been. One thing a general hates is risk. The way they got all those stars is by not taking a risk and not ever getting a bad grade on their report cards, so when they get up there in the Pentagon the last thing they want is a bunch of cowboys in disguises slipping into some supposedly friendly country and listening to guys plotting bombings or, even worse, taking the guys out, as they say, extrajudicially. What if someone got caught: scandal, questions in Congress and the media? So half our missions get scratched, but the one I got hurt on didn’t.

As it happens, I’m fluent in Dari and Pashto and Urdu, languages spoken in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan, which was where this abortion actually went down. The target was a guy named Hamid al-Libiya, a comrade of Mr. bin Laden, who was tracked via comint from his dwelling place in Waziristan to Riyadh in Saudi, where he apparently picked up some funds from our wonderful allies there and went back to Waziristan. I guess al-Q has learned by now that they can’t just send messages via sat phones because we’re all over that, and they don’t have broadband cable yet in Waziristan, so in order for the bad guys to keep their operations together they have to travel from time to time. They can’t seem to stop using cell phones, though, so that’s how we triangulated in on Mr. al-Libiya, who was in a place called Baggan, which was all Taliban all the time.

I was with two other guys, and we were posing as militants, armed to the teeth and so forth; we had beards and we smelled right and we blended right in; we had our own house and everything. After a day or so, we observed the arrival of several tinted-glass SUVs during the day, and from our house the knob turners are picking up intercepts of the subject’s cell phone, and they learn he’s meeting with a couple of senior Taliban commanders. So we got set to run in there that night and snatch the bunch of them.

We ran into a little problem, which is really part of a big problem. Okay, the army hates Special Ops, but it’s like the bad girl on the block; they know she’s bad but they can’t keep their hands off her. So instead of being a self-contained operation there’s levels of sign-off on every mission, which tends to compromise our security and slow things down; also, when we actually get clearance to go in, everyone in the area wants to be involved in this real exciting stuff and get part of the credit, if any. For this thing, they gave us a reinforced platoon of Special Forces guys, under a Captain Lepinski, who were supposed to hover in the area and provide backup and extraction in case we got into trouble.