The vehicles we rode in on were driving away now as we stood there watching them. They rounded the corner at the entrance and sped off. Only the upper portions of their antenna were visible, gliding along the tops of the perimeter barriers, just beyond the razor wire.

"Let's go ground our gear," I said.

"Let's go," he replied.

We walked toward a cluster of metal buildings, the largest of which houses the battalion aid station in a makeshift wooden house within it. "The Planetarium," as I call it, is an enormous sheet-metal building, much like an airplane hangar. Within it, the aid station is just one of the many wooden shanties that line its interior walls. The metal ceiling forms an arch shape above and, at its highest point, is roughly 50 or 60 feet high. It is pocked with thousands of holes from bullets, mortars and shrapnel. During the daytime, the sunlight pierces the dim space through all of these holes creating an odd parody of the night sky. A few holes, where the actual mortars and rockets have entered, lay agape, allowing the light to merge with the dust into wide ethereal beams of light shooting down toward the dirty concrete floor below where we mere mortals dwell, trivial.

In the aid station, we took off our IBAs and our kevlars (body armor and helmets) and placed them under a stretcher with our assault packs. We walked off and headed to the TOC (tactical operations center). It was there that we discovered we would not be staying for several days as we had planned. Rather, we would be leaving at some point in the night. Knowing our time here was limited, we headed out to see as many soldiers as we could.

We stopped at the chaplain's tent first. Outside the tent, several soldiers worked on some sort of electrical problem involving a power outage. When I opened the door to the makeshift chapel, the light shone in from the opening into the dark space with its crude wooden benches and cross made with two-by-fours at the far end of the tent. Chaplain Thomas was alone. He had been sitting there in the dark at the end of one of the benches. He was leaning forward and holding his face in his hands. He looked up at us wearily, his eyes adjusting from the dark.

"Hey!" he said, surprised to see us, but lacking the energy he seemed to exude the last time I had seen him.

"Hey, Chaplain Thomas!" I said, smiling widely as I walked in, leaving the door of the tent ajar to let light in. "Is that okay?" I asked, gesturing to the plywood door of the tent.

"Oh, yeah, that's fine," he was smiling with visible effort now and welcomed us in to talk but did not stand. We shook hands, and he gestured for us to sit down on the benches across from him.

"So, how have you been, man?" I asked.

He shook his head and smiled, holding his eyes on mine, almost nervously. After a short pause, he said, "All right. All right, man."

Chaplain Thomas and I were of similar age and same rank, and when our team first arrived in Mahmudiyah, he immediately established a relationship with us. Initially, it appeared solely for the benefit of the soldiers via mutual referral. However, very early on, he became our friend and it became clear to us that we were his outlet for his thoughts and frustrations. When he was moved away from us to this other patrol base in November, we worried about him and wondered who he would confide in then.

During our first month in-country, Chaplain Thomas conducted one memorial per week and dreaded the prospect of a continued trend. Each time, he would share with us the pressure, stress and sadness of this process as he experienced it. And he would always be relieved when a memorial was over. Many had been killed since; many he knew very well.

"Have you been okay, chaplain?" I asked again.

"I'll be honest, man. It's been rough," he replied, and nodded, thinning his lips as he looked at me.

"A lot of shit has happened since the last time I saw you," I said.

He raised an eyebrow and tilted his head into a nod without speaking, then turned his gaze to the floor of the chapel tent as if remembering.

Capt. Chase was not speaking, maybe because he had only just met Chaplain Thomas in his last week prior to moving away. I decided to let the silence linger in the air to draw the chaplain out, leaving things in his court.

"I think of all the soldiers in the battalion, I was closest to Sgt. Eaton," he said suddenly, but quietly. He was still staring at a nondescript point on the floor as he spoke, but once finished, he lifted his gaze toward me again. He nodded as if agreeing with his own statement. I nodded back.

"That was the hardest memorial I ever had to do," he added, shaking his head, then he returned his gaze to the floor.

"I can imagine," I said, weakly.

He looked up at me and raised a hand toward his face, stroking down over his mouth to the shadow on his chin, then gazed away toward the light coming in through the doorway of the tent. He paused for a moment, motionless, staring outside. His hand had stalled at his cheek.

"They kept him alive almost a half an hour, you know." His voice resonated soberly and when he paused briefly, Capt. Chase and I exchanged a quick glance. The chaplain did not turn back toward us. "Both his legs were blown off." He took in a breath. "There was just nothing for the tourniquet to go onto." His voice seemed to fade a little as he spoke those words. "He died on the bird."

None of us spoke for a moment, and the chaplain's gaze out into the light did not waver, even slightly, his pale blue eyes reflecting the light and the sadness.

Abruptly, he turned back toward us and said, "Wanna see some pictures?" He was visibly brighter suddenly.

"Sure," Capt. Chase and I said together, surprised by the sudden shift.

He stood up rather quickly and disappeared into an area within the tent that had been partitioned with plywood -- his apparent sleeping quarters. He returned promptly holding a laptop open, looking at the screen as he walked down the aisle between the benches and finally he sat in his previous spot, having never looked up from the screen.

"Here we go," he said, perhaps to himself, as he stared at the screen, and then began gliding his finger around to move the mouse and find the pictures.

"Here it is," he added, and turned the laptop toward us as it rested on his lap.

He began to show us several pictures of Sgt. Eaton.

"That's him right there," Chaplain Thomas said, pointing to Sgt. Eaton's image. It was a picture of 10 or 12 soldiers in front of a palace in the international zone. He clicked to another one of Sgt. Eaton by himself, smiling. The next one was of Sgt. Eaton and the chaplain together with rows of tents behind them. Their eyes were wide and bright. It was a different time.

"Oh, this one is my favorite, check this one out," he said, and tapped the mouse pad. When the picture appeared, he turned the laptop more squarely toward us.

The photo was worth the proverbial thousand words. Sgt. Eaton wasn't in it. In fact, there were no people in it at all. Instead, it was a picture of Sgt. Eaton's body armor -- his IBA. It was laid on the hood of a Humvee. It dominated the foreground, and his name and rank were clearly legible in the frame. The windshield of the vehicle formed the backdrop, and the sunlight was hitting it just slightly through what were apparently shadows overhead. In the low-center of the windshield was a picture of Jesus someone had set on the dash, just behind the glass. It glowed strangely just beyond Sgt. Eaton's name in a beam of light that had snuck past the shadows.

The chaplain just smiled at us and nodded, his eyes wide and bright.