A Change in the Afghan Fighting Season, Borne on the Raindrops Rain in the Afghan desert left us dumbstruck, eyes on heaven. We have been here since April, and it has rained twice. A thunderous downpour left mud and yawning pools of brown water upon our arrival; tires and feet churned the ground, and earth stuck to our boots with tenacity, denying any effort to scrape it off. After that, the sun returned and the water evaporated, and we were left once more with a fine brown powder that covered our teeth, clothes and weapons. We baked through the summer into September, until, as the weather cooled, clouds rolled in from a distance late one afternoon, cloaking the mountains in mist and filling us with anticipation of a late summer storm. That evening, Eric, one of my fellow officers, rapped on my door, then impatiently opened it: "It's raining!" I stepped out and marveled with him at the night sky, stars and moon for once obscured. Water popped against the worn fabric of our uniforms, hit our skin with a flat sound, trickled down from the catwalk above our heads. The dust on the great, towering blast walls that surround our living quarters began to run. Soldiers emerged from their rooms and flinched as drops startled them, then held hands out in disbelief, as young children might with snowflakes. Although we did not know it yet, the rain signified the slow ending of the Afghan fighting season. It had begun with our muddy reception. A midnight rocket barrage welcomed us the day after the downpour; we huddled under cover as the mud dried and caked on our boots, listening to sirens and the distant thud of impacting rounds, the merciless roar of jet engines and the belch of air cannons. With the heat came the war. The sweet smell of burned electrical equipment lingered in the early morning heat on the June day we dragged a battered gun truck, the result of a nighttime ambush, through our motor pool. The next time, it was not us but the engineers in front of us, and our soldiers recovered their wreck in the cool midnight air, perhaps both grateful and guilty. The days cooked and rounds cracked as we gradually marked our progress; as the summer wore on, we pushed emergency shipments to a base breached by fighters in Afghan uniforms, who killed and burned until they were cut down. A sergeant from one of our sister battalions came to us, and gave us a box to send to his wife at the base, her name and rank printed on it in permanent marker: "I can't reach her, but I know she's O.K.; she'll know when you guys come in." The box left and came back, and the sergeant picked it up from our office, his face drawn, his shoulders tight with anxiety. Ramadan came early, and the fighters bedded down. Our soldiers continued to push through the eerie landscape of an unfinished war - culverts tampered with, yet without bombs; abandoned motorcycles and sagging cars, suspicious, recorded, and ultimately disregarded; garbage in trees mimicking explosives designed to shred people with ball bearings. The fighters returned as Ramadan ended, and Camp Bastion exploded with a fury that seared the desert air. Be on guard, we were told; if it can happen there, it can happen anywhere. The air cooled and we waited, but the air-sucking thump of a car bomb breaching the gate never came. People smoked and talked through the thud and siren of rocket attacks as they became infrequent. Gunners on convoys bundled up against the bite in the Afghan air, and we exhaled collectively as enemy action fell by fits and starts, a deadly staccato that began to drop off. We had come through heat and fire on the day we saw the clouds rushing toward us on a cool wind. That night, the rain was brief but its sweet smell lingered on the dense air until it was overtaken by the cloying odor of wet dust. Now we knew that the clouds would come gray and heavy as the fall grew cold and winter overtook it, and that the floods would barrel through Kandahar Airfield as the war once again grew quiet. With water would come some measure of peace. John Bilby is a New Jersey National Guard soldier currently deployed to Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan, as a battalion transportation officer. He was born and raised in Belmar, N.J., and is a resident of New York City, where he is enrolled in a teacher preparation program at the City University of New York. He has been in the National Guard for six years and is scheduled to redeploy stateside in January 2013.