LETTER FROM A FRIEND IN AFGHANISTAN
By Jay de Leon

One morning, as I sleepily scanned my usual deluge of daily email, one jumped at me because of the title and the address of the sender. The title was “Long Lost Friend in Afghanistan” and the address was “@us.army.mil.”

I perked up a little bit. And of course, curiosity got the better of me and I had to open this email first, and find out who the sender was.

I teach martial arts as a passion or a hobby, which translates to, I do have paying students but the cash outflow of this particular enterprise exceeds the income trickling in. By a wide margin. I have been teaching now since 1987, and must have instructed a few hundred students by now. But I digress.

I immediately recognized the sender of the email. His name was Mark Anthony, and he was a student about a couple of schools ago, in the early 1990’s in San Jose, California. As a reservist, he had recently been shipped out to Afghanistan as part of the U.S. war on terror.

On the surface, it was probably not a big leap from what he was doing in San Jose, California, to whatever it was he was doing in Afghanistan. In San Jose, he worked as an armed courier for one of the biggest computer chip manufacturers in Silicon Valley. It was not unusual then for criminal elements to try to pilfer or hijack shipments of computer chips, since just a few boxes of those precious high-tech components were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

As far as I can remember, Mark Anthony was a single, happy-go-lucky guy then. He enjoyed his job, but he enjoyed even more the hard workouts at my martial arts school. The training was realistic, the sparring could be brutal but all this fostered confidence in one’s ability to handle potentially dangerous and life-threatening situations. It also engendered a lot of camaraderie and even friendship between training partners.

Reading his email now fifteen years later, I was glad to see that Mark Anthony still considered me a friend after all the lumps and bruises he sustained at my hands (and feet). In fact, part of his email read, “History is never to be forgotten…The skills that I had learned from you long ago have never gone away, and have only gotten better.”

A wee bit dramatic, that last comment almost reminds me of that saying about the battles of Britain being won in the playing fields of Eton. But that is not the direction of this dissertation.

I also found out Mark Anthony was now married, leaving a wife and a blended family behind in Reno, Nevada. He was of course looking forward to ending his tour of duty safely, and returning home to his family. He mentioned he would love to attend one of my many martial arts seminars late next year, possibly with several alumni of the San Jose gladiator school.

In our email communication, I typed out a hearty acquiescence to future plans. In private, I just said a quiet prayer that a soldier would come home safely to a waiting family in Reno, Nevada, and to a band of brothers who in another life and time shared his warrior ways.