He spent brief stints in Japan, Germany, and South Korea, and then it happened. Two years into his six-year contract, the events of September 11, 2001, unfolded three hundred miles south of his base. A few months after, his unit was deployed to Afghanistan. Rais’s three-man team scouted a section of Kandahar considered to be the last-known whereabouts of a prominent Al Qaeda bomb-maker. Rais was ordered to call in a strike on a building believed to be their headquarters. He could clearly see that it was full of women, children, and families that had nothing to do with the conflict. Rais
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