Receiving Ashes Before Confronting Afghanistan's Dust It was Ash Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2012; I would be leaving early the next morning. That night, I stepped out into a brisk New York City evening and set off for the 6 train. I needed a break; the packing list from Fort Hood, the mobilization station for my National Guard unit, was starting to blur into the separate one published by my unit, and I was trying to parse the necessities from the "we told you so" items that would be needed only in a dire emergency. The mental work of buying sheets and pillows (a substitution for a three-layer sleeping bag that took up more space than it was worth for a logistics officer like myself) built up; a long walk to the East Harlem Target to buy detergent and sunscreen had the feel of my own personal Gethsemane. I was reaching a point of exhaustion. I would take what I could fit, and my wife would have to mail me the rest once I hit the ground in Kandahar in April. The day had been bright and clear, the weather unseasonably warm; the night cooled the neighborhood off, but not unpleasantly so. I descended underground and paid my fare; I was heading only two stops to 96th Street, but the predictable stop-and-go of the subway, its hiss and whoosh of recycled air and its pleasantly automated voices (ones that know no anticipation) calmed me. The doors opened at 96th, and I climbed back out into the night and headed through the doors of St. Francis de Sales Church. St. Francis greeted me at the door, his hand held up in a sign of grace, his solemn eyes looking beyond me. Mary and Joseph gazed beatifically down the length of the church, parents either cosmically accepting of their son's grim fate, or simply unaware. Dozens of people gathered in the aisles, stumbled over strangers to get to saved seats and scolded children as they contorted every which way to get comfortable. The observant stood side by side with the relapsed (at least for the night). I edged in behind the last pew, comfortably anonymous, and breathed deeply the smell of incense as I watched the priest prepare for the service. Although I was more of a cultural Catholic than an observant one, I knew I was beginning my time in the Wilderness. I had come to characterize my deployment this way: it came at the tail end of a war that few regarded with interest anymore, a war that became more violent as we sought harder to stabilize it. Afghanistan was alive to me, a seething mass of humanity that sought to bleed us where it could not rend us. If I struggled with it, and outlasted it, I thought that I might lose a piece of myself, but that perhaps I would gain something in the process, something that would go deep and hold fast when the winds of life howled. I did not know yet that there would be days of surprising grace, nor that one of those days would come in Kuwait when, my resolve sapped by exhaustion, heat, and anxiety for the war I was headed toward, I would gather courage from following my brother-in-law, a fellow officer in my unit, onto the plane to Kandahar. That the plea for forgiveness in the Our Father would one day be words whispered longingly to the dead and to those still living, to the soldiers we had lost and the ones we still sought desperately to protect. And that the words of the nunc dimittis would take on a deeper urgency as our time grew short, a request to simply go in peace. And, that we would be drawing toward Bethlehem as we shook off the desert and prepared to return to our civilian lives, to confront worlds gone strange to us, where once we knew them well. The service drew to a close after we received our ashes. It was time to return to my bags and their weight. Although I did not know it as I soon would, Kandahar would be ashes and dust - and, from that, rebirth. 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.