Embedded

Dave Covington stood outside the barracks, his cigarette trembling in the thick Afghan night air. Smoke coiled upward, dissolving into the fog. The shed loomed across the compound, dark and silent, a black hole that swallowed any sense of morality that might have survived this place.

He hated Afghanistan. Not just the dry heat or the smell of diesel and rot, but the way it stripped him bare, forcing him to face parts of himself he didn’t want to know existed. His eyes lingered on the shed where the “interrogation” had taken place.

You’re a journalist, not a soldier, he reminded himself. You don’t intervene. You observe.

He felt the weight of it—his camera bag in the barracks, the notebook filled with fragments of stories that he no longer recognized as his own. Jim Armistan had sent him here with promises of greatness.

“Keep your head down,” Jim had said. “Let the soldiers do their thing. You’re there to tell the truth, not to get involved. Pulitzer, kid. Pulitzer.”