Americans are first introduced to Helmand Province from the air. A mass of mountains gives way to sand, patched with green, snaking south along the Helmand River, a roiling brown crease at odds with the fields of poppy and sustenance crops it feeds.
I first met Helmand in November of 2010 from the back of a C-5 Loadmaster, a military cargo plane that's been hauling American troops into Afghanistan since our war there began in 2001. A gaggle of 19- and 20-year-old Marines, myself among them, crowded around a small, circular porthole catching glimpses of the terrain below. The sergeants stayed in their seats. Most were Iraq veterans, and a few had already been to Afghanistan; they'd already crowded around airplane windows, nervously wondering if the sand 10,000 feet below them would soon become their grave. I had been a United States Marine for seven months, my shaved head both tradition and testament to my combat virginity.
I had not learned to hate Afghanistan yet. I was a believer in our mission there: not just defending America from its enemies, but helping the Afghan people take their country back from the Taliban, so they could one day stand alongside America as a free, independent country in a part of the world where authoritarian regimes and terrorist organizations reigned with impunity. The calculus in my young mind was devoutly simple. When a public affairs officer gave us a briefing about encountering journalists on our deployment, he fed us prepared lines about counterinsurgency and supporting Afghan allies. What would we tell a reporter our mission was? Lance Corporal Richmond, who already had an Iraq deployment under his belt, spit out his dip and piped up. "We're here to kill terrorists. Sir."
This April I met Helmand again. It was the first time I'd been there since 2013, and my shaved head and face had given way to an overgrown combover and scraggly beard. Both were intentional, a naïve effort to "blend in" with Helmandis, as I had no machine gun on this trip, nor were there tens of thousands of other Marines alongside me. I flew in with a Stars and Stripes reporter on the once-a-week Kam Air flight into Helmand's capital city of Lashkar Gah.
As the plane began to descend, I braced myself for an emotional impact. I had spent the last five years trying to come back to Helmand. It was a calling I could not fully articulate, not to girlfriends, family members, or editors. The closest explanation I could muster sounded trite and melodramatic: Its sand was in my blood, and my blood was in its sand. I told the Stars and Stripes reporter I traveled with that coming back to Helmand felt somewhat like returning to a childhood home: The walls might not be quite the same size as you remember, the rooms might feel smaller, but the floorboards would still squeak in the same places, and the third stair would still be crooked. So too would a stack of rocks piled next to a road scream that an improvised explosive device might be waiting nearby for a juicy-enough target, and the blaring silence of a quickly abandoned marketplace leave you bracing for an impending attack by bomb or gun.
I was returning to Helmand to report on the frontline of America's longest war, to meet the people who've been trapped between the Taliban and the U.S. government since October of 2001. I needed to see for myself what America had done with 18 years in the Taliban's backyard and what the residents and defenders of Lashkar Gah face today. As Marines, we had been blessed with a privilege Afghan soldiers were not: We got to leave. After nine months of combat, I got to shake their hands for the last time, board a helicopter, and go home to a family that loved me and a country obligated to thank me.