I don't know if it worked yet, and I won't for a little while, but I think I might finally have a little piece of the mountains to fuck right off to.
When I reflect on the path that brought me here, the ultimate frustration is in the contrast between how small the thing is that I want, and how large are the things I have done. I want a little piece of land where I can live quietly and sustainably and with self direction. Today, in America, if you do not inherit such a thing or have half a million dollars in a couple of pillowcases, this is a preposterous dream.
I once sat across from a guy who stacked his political adversaries into steel drums and buried them in the desert, and had the burying done quietly, secretly, in the dead of night, so that their families would know nothing except that they were gone and without the dignity of a halaal funeral.
I once jumped in a little Daewoo van with a bunch of secret police and they had a jolly afternoon cruising around the city doing an ops test for a piece of hardware that was, at the time, blacker than midnight and cost about what a nice airplane did. The running joke was, if you think you're about to be captured, kill as many Taliban as you can but save two bullets - one for the machine, and one for yourself.
I once stood on a mountaintop all alone and watched the sun rise through wind-gnarled trees, and breathed frosted breath over instant coffee and a valley that had killed kings. I ate my breakfast out of a plastic bag and took my morning shit while I watched the little ants below herd goats in flocks of Theseus that were a thousand years old.
I once was the target in a training exercise for our local partners. They were the third generation of the program I had trained the original trainers for, and I wanted to see how they measured up, and by extension, how the program was doing when nobody thought I was around. It was a test by proxy for the development of the cadre I had nurtured from nothing, a master's chance to see the journeyman's honest work. It was their next-to-last training mission, and by then it was routine for them. Indeed, they no longer needed supervision, and were expected to execute without the guiding hand or watchful eye of an advisor. And when their process led them to their target, instead of one of the local advisors, or one of their own, they found a stranger who, instead of politely being arrested and walked to the assault vehicle, thrashed and screamed and cursed them terribly in their secret home tongue. To my utter delight, I watched the confusion be replaced with a fire in their eyes that rose to a killing glow and then I watched them compose themselves. They zip tied me and the largest of them, an enormous specimen, simply picked me up and carried me off like a sack of potatoes. As I berated their lineage, their nation, and their manhood, the brute whose back I was on set me down on the dirt as gently as I would allow, put his hand over my mouth, and told me shut your mouth. And I bit him, and told him he was Karzai's dog. And he sighed patiently, and put on a rappelling glove, and slammed his hand back over my mouth for the two kilometer walk back to the vehicle.
When I go to the grocery store, to others I am at best some kind of eccentric hill person and at worst some kind of petty criminal. When I go to the grocery store, in my head, I might as well be rolling hot in Spin Buldak. When I go to the grocery store, I can barely remember what I went in for, because I'm absolutely terrified of who I used to be, and who threatens to rise like a killing glow when the pressure in my own head swells until the steamwhistle lets one off.
Sometimes I am petrified that people will learn who I am and what I've done. Sometimes, I am petrified that nobody will ever know.
When yet some new middleman appears from the grass, demanding another portion of my meager war chest; when some checkbox in an absurd process becomes a week long ordeal of whinging and hand-wringing by self important bureaucrats; when the seller's agent fingers his grotesque gold jewelry as he gives some other half-answer; when it doesn't matter how hard it was to bootstrap the smallest possibility only to have it subject to the whims and inattention of a score of strangers - I may cry, or rage, but I must convince myself it is a small price to pay to not give one goddamn for the rest of my life what anybody else knows or doesn't.