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Prologue

Afghanistan, November 2011

Ten minutes It was only supposed to take ten minutes to reach our ride home

Perkins drove I rode in the vehicle coedly mine-resistant vehicle bounced down the dusty road If you could dignify the narrow strip of packed sand as such The sas

Corporal Perkins spat out an oath behind a keffiyeh tied across his nose and mouth My face was also half-encased with cloth The idea was to keep fro on the cloud of sand and dust that swirled around us But the grit ed to work its way behind our makeshift filters My face itched with the stuff Under the desert sun, I squinted behind the dark Eyepro strapped tight to lare and kept the dust fro me

Perkins’ oath ed up by the roar of the vehicle and the howling wind

“Copy that,” I shouted, although he could no better hear ripped s

Perkins, a red-haired, freckle-faced 20-year-old, said so tomy head The muffled response was, “Erica, are … okay?”

Perkins was one of the good guys He saw and acknowledged that women were a military asset Women have aided combat troops for years—unofficially, of course—as far back as the American Revolution Back in ’04 or ’05, the Marines led the way for women to beconed hly select group of woround troops and intel-gathering duties The types of jobs men couldn’t perform because of cultural niceties

“Erica?” Perkins’ voice pierced hts like a knife

He’d been asking afterat the tail end of a convoy My concentration still suffered, even after spending weeks in a hospital I tried to conjure a response, but the wind seeht out of my head “I’m fine,” I yelled

I checked o

Perkins was hell-bent on returning to his ho-ass state full of fields, ss Me, I could think of no other place to go except the DC suburbs, where I had lived all 20 years of my life With the exception of the last thich I’d spent in Afghanistan

Perkins had an advantage over o hoht I was insane to join the Marines Maybe they were right, but their alternative was for e and marry well Not my idea of a life plan