My name is Corporal Ryan Delgado, 3rd Infantry Division, and I was twenty-two when I first heard the war speak its real language. Not the bullshit they play in recruitment ads (no heroic music, no slow-motion flags). War talks in cracks, pops, and wet thuds. It screams through cracked lips and gurgles through punctured lungs. It never shuts up, even when you’re home. Especially when you’re home.

Ramadi, August 2006. One hundred and eighteen degrees in the shade, and there was no shade. We were clearing a row of shattered two-story houses along Route Michigan, the kind of street where every window could be a muzzle flash and every pile of trash could be two hundred pounds of homemade explosive. My fire team moved in a tight stack: me on point, Ramirez behind me, then Doc Nagel, then Sergeant Hicks bringing drag.

The first burst came from a rooftop three houses down. Not the dramatic Hollywood BRRRRT you see in movies. Real AK-47 fire is sharp, fast, like someone ripping heavy canvas. Crack-crack-crack-crack. The rounds snapped past my helmet so close I felt the pressure wave slap my face. I dove left into a doorway, muzzle up, returning fire on pure instinct. My M4 answered with that flat, authoritative bark (thump-thump-thump-thump), brass casings tinkling onto the concrete like wind chimes made of death.

“Contact front! Rooftop, two o’clock!” Hicks bellowed. His voice cut clean through the chaos because that’s what sergeants do (they become the only clear frequency when everything else is static).

Ramirez was already kneeling, slamming a fresh mag home. Then the world tilted. An RPG came out of a dark alley like a flaming football. It didn’t hit us direct; it hit the wall above our heads. The explosion was a physical thing, a giant invisible fist that punched the air from my lungs and turned the doorway into a blender of brick shards and glass. I tasted blood and dust. My ears rang so hard I couldn’t tell if I was screaming.

When the dust settled, Ramirez was on his back, left leg bent wrong, femur poking through his trousers like a snapped white branch. Arterial blood jetted in perfect arcs, bright red against the tan concrete. Doc Nagel crawled through the rubble, dragging his aid bag, shouting, “Tourney! Tourney! Stay with me, Ramirez!” But the words were mush in my head, muffled by the cotton that had replaced my eardrums.

I low-crawled to them, pressing my knee into Ramirez’s groin to slow the bleed while Doc slapped on a tourniquet. Ramirez’s eyes were huge, pupils blown wide. He kept trying to say something, lips moving in frantic silence. I leaned close. “Mama,” he whispered, over and over. “Mama.” Then his eyes rolled back and the spurting slowed to a lazy pulse. Doc kept pumping his chest anyway, ribs cracking like green wood under his palms.

We dragged him behind a burned-out sedan and kept fighting. The air was thick with the smell of burning plastic and something sweeter (cooked meat). Another burst stitched across the car hood. Ping-ping-ping. Sparks and ricochet whines. Hicks popped up, dumped half a mag into the rooftop, and the AK went quiet. But there were more. Always more.

They came from the side street now, four insurgents in man-jammies and tennis shoes, moving fast, screaming “Allahu Akbar!” like it was supposed to scare us more than the bullets. One had an RPK, the big brother of the AK, and he hosed us down from the hip. I saw Private First Class Kelsey take three rounds center-mass. The impacts lifted him off his feet and slammed him against a wall. He slid down slowly, leaving a red snail trail on the cinder blocks. His mouth opened and closed like a fish drowning in air. A pink bubble formed, popped. Then nothing.

I remember the sound of my own voice, raw and animal, as I rose up and emptied the rest of my magazine into the gunner. The RPK spun away from his hands and he folded in half, knees first, then face-planted into the dirt. The other three scattered like roaches when the light comes on.

We held the corner for what felt like hours but was probably eight minutes. Eight minutes of thunder, of brass raining, of grown men crying for their mothers in languages I didn’t know. When the Bradley rolled up and the 25mm chain gun opened up (that beautiful, hateful jackhammer), the street went eerily quiet except for the ringing, always the ringing.

Later, when the sun baked the blood into black tar, we zipped our brothers into body bags. Kelsey was only nineteen. He still had acne on his cheeks. Ramirez had a two-year-old daughter back in El Paso he’d never met in person, only on grainy Skype calls. Their dog tags clinked together in my fist like cheap wind chimes again.

That night, in the DFAC, nobody spoke above a whisper. The clatter of trays sounded like incoming mortars. Every laugh from the Air Force table felt obscene. I sat alone, picking at powdered eggs, replaying the soundtrack on loop: the wet slap of bullets into flesh, the gurgle of lungs filling with blood, Ramirez whispering “Mama” like a broken record.

Years later, in a quiet apartment in Columbus, Ohio, I still hear it. Fireworks on the Fourth of July. A car backfiring. A slammed door. My wife asks why I flinch at the smallest bang. How do you explain that some sounds are tattooed on the inside of your skull? How do you tell her that every sharp crack is Ramirez bleeding out again, that every scream I hear in my dreams is Kelsey trying to breathe through holes that shouldn’t exist?

War doesn’t end when the shooting stops. It just changes frequency. And some of us (the ones lucky enough to come home) carry the radio forever, tuned to a station that only plays the worst day of our lives, on repeat, in high definition, surround sound.

I keep Ramirez’s dog tag on my keychain. When the nightmares come, I hold it tight until the metal bites my palm. The pain is real. The pain is proof I’m still here. The rest is just noise.

To be continued…