Jim Golemafi Narrative

I groaned and rolled over, blinking the stars out of my eyes. My head hurt like crazy and I squinted against the sliver of light glaring through the cracks above me. I slowly tilted my head, trying to figure out where I was. It looked like a small cave or something. The last thing I remembered was diving behind a pile of rocks before a grenade went off and my world exploded. My name is Jim Golemafi and I was an ex-army commander recruited to fight in the Afghanistan war.
As my eyes slowly started to adjust to the dark cave, I carefully scanned each corner, hoping this wasn’t some animal’s hideout, or worse, the Taliban’s. In the very far corner, I could see a shape standing out from the smooth stone walls. My hand fumbled in the dirt, looking for a rock or some sort of weapon that I could defend myself with. When I managed to push myself up and creep over, I discovered a
Papa?”
She tearfully ran a finger across her neck.
It took me about ten minutes to convince her that I wasn’t there to harm her. She said she had been captured and sent to a camp but had managed to slip away last night. We had both stumbled into the cave by dumb luck—or, maybe, fate. I explained to her that if we waited until night, we could sneak back to the base, and maybe she could start fresh in America. She agreed; anything was better than her life here.
We waited until it was dark and then crept out of our sanctuary, sprinting from hiding place to hiding place. By morning, the American base was in sight and I instinctively sped up, not noticing that my counterpart had stopped for a rest. A shot rang out over desert. I spun around, frantically searching for her. Then our eyes locked; the life was quickly draining out of her face as she collapsed to the sandy ground. I heard muffled shouting, felt someone picking me up, and I was then dragged through the gates of the US base. Within a week, my tour ended and I left Afghanistan forever.
“And that, grandson, is why I quit the