DANTE DARKSIDE

Story No. 24 — The Color Green

By Elara Voss | Dante Darkside | 22 min read Filed under: The Ones Who Found Themselves In The Wrong Place At The Right Time · Afghanistan, 2009

They Both Came From Towns Where They Could Not Be Themselves.

They Found Each Other In A Desert Ten Thousand Miles Away.

For Eight Months, In A War Zone, They Were Finally Free.

Then The Orders Came. And They Had To Choose What To Take Home.

The story of Corporal Danny Pruitt and Specialist Aaron Cole — and the eight months in Kandahar that were the first honest months of both their lives.

Kandahar Province. Afghanistan. March, 2009.

The desert here is not the desert of postcards.

It is not the rolling orange dunes of calendar photographs or the cinematic emptiness of a landscape designed to look like solitude. It is flat and brown and specific in its details — the particular texture of the soil, the low scrub vegetation that survives in colors so muted they seem to be apologizing for existing, the quality of light at midday that removes all shadow and makes everything appear to be exactly what it is, with nowhere to hide.

That last quality — the light that removes shadow and makes everything exactly what it is — was the thing that Danny Pruitt thought about, years later, when he tried to describe what Kandahar had meant.

“Everything looked true,” he said. “I know that sounds like nothing. But I had been living inside a version of myself that wasn’t true for so long that being somewhere that just — looked true — felt like something.”

“A relief,” I offered.

“More than that,” he said. “Like the first breath after being underwater for a long time. Like I’d forgotten that breathing was supposed to feel like that.”

He was from a small city in Alabama.

Aaron Cole was from a small town in Mississippi.

They had, between them, a map of the American South that was specific in its details — the particular quality of summer heat, the Friday night rhythms of small towns, the churches and the football and the good-neighborliness that was genuine and complete and that contained, for both of them, a specific limitation that the goodness did not cancel out and the neighborliness did not resolve.

They had both spent their entire lives being one version of themselves in public.

They met in Kandahar in March 2009.

In the desert where the light removed all shadow, they tried the other version.

It fit.

Stay with me.

Part I: Danny

Corporal Danny Pruitt was 23 years old when his unit deployed to Kandahar.

He was the second son of a mechanic and a school secretary in a city of approximately forty thousand people where the Baptist church his family attended had been attended by his family for three generations, where his father knew the name of everyone in the congregation, where Danny had grown up inside the specific warmth of a community that knew him and loved him and would have — he believed this, he had tested it in his imagination many times — would have responded to the truth about him with a pain that was not hatred but that would have rearranged everything.

He did not want to rearrange everything.

He had decided this at fourteen and the decision had held.

He enlisted at nineteen. Not to escape — he was precise about this — but because the enlistment was a thing that made sense in his life and in his family and in the specific geography of a small Alabama city where certain paths were legible and others required translation.

The Army was a legible path.

He was good at it. Good at the physical demands, good at the particular discipline of following orders precisely while maintaining the situational awareness that kept people alive, good at the quality that his sergeant identified in his evaluation as “calm under conditions that produce panic in most people.”

The calm, Danny knew, was not a natural quality.

It was a practiced one.

He had been practicing calm over the truth about himself since he was fourteen years old.

By twenty-three, the practice had made him genuinely good at it.

He arrived in Kandahar in March 2009.

He met Aaron Cole on the third day.

Part II: Aaron

Specialist Aaron Cole was 24 years old.

He was from a town in Mississippi so small it did not have a traffic light — a detail he offered early in conversations as both a description and a mild joke at his own origins, the humor being his way of carrying the place with affection and also with the specific clear-eyed assessment of someone who understood exactly what the place was and what it was not.

What it was: a community of approximately three thousand people where his family had farmed the same land for four generations, where the rhythms of the agricultural year organized everyone’s calendar, where the relationships between families had accumulated across those generations into a texture so dense it was almost structural — you could not move through it without touching something that connected to something else.

What it was not: a place where Aaron Cole could be Aaron Cole.

He had known this since he was twelve.

He had managed it since he was twelve — the specific management of a person who loves their home and cannot fully live in it, who understands the cost of truth and has decided, for reasons that are simultaneously practical and heartbreaking, to defer it.

He enlisted at twenty.

His father’s brother had served. His father had not been able to — a farm injury at eighteen — but had raised Aaron on the specific regard for military service that runs through certain American communities like a structural element, load-bearing, not decorative.

Aaron had that regard genuinely.

He also had — he was honest about this — the understanding that the Army was a distance.

Not an escape. A distance.

From the town in Mississippi. From the management. From the version of himself that the town required.

He had not known, enlisting, what the distance would provide.

He found out in Kandahar.

On the third day, a corporal from Alabama sat down across from him at the meal table and said: “You’re from Mississippi.”

Not a question.

“How’d you know?” Aaron said.

“The way you said ‘sir’ to the sergeant,” Danny said. “There’s a Mississippi ‘sir’ and an Alabama ‘sir’ and they’re not the same.”

Aaron looked at him.

“That’s the most specific thing anyone has said to me in three days,” he said.

“I pay attention,” Danny said.

“To what?”

“To what’s actually there,” Danny said. “Instead of what’s supposed to be there.”

Aaron was quiet for a moment.

“Me too,” he said.

They ate the rest of the meal in the comfortable silence of two people who have just recognized something in each other and are taking their time with the recognition.

Part III: The Eight Months

What the eight months in Kandahar were — what they actually were, beneath the operational reality, beneath the work and the danger and the specific texture of a deployment that was neither the worst nor the easiest either of them would experience —

was the first time.

The first time, for both of them, that the version of themselves they had been managing since adolescence was not the version they had to perform.

This did not happen suddenly.

It happened the way true things happen between careful people — slowly, in the specific increments of trust that are built through shared danger and shared boredom and shared observation of the world.

They talked.

They talked about Alabama and Mississippi — the specific textures of their specific places, the particular qualities of communities they both loved and both understood completely, including the part that understood them back incompletely.

“He described his church,” Danny told me, “and I knew exactly what he meant. Not the building. The feeling of it. The specific way that being loved by a community and being fully known by a community are not the same thing. He described it and I thought: he knows. He knows exactly what I mean.”

“Did you say that?”

“Not that night,” Danny said. “We talked around it for three weeks. We were both — we were both precise people. We didn’t rush the precision.”

The precision arrived on a night in April.

They were on watch — the specific quality of watch in Kandahar, the long attentive hours of a night shift where the attention is real and sustained and the conversation that happens around it has a particular quality of honesty that the daylight hours sometimes don’t.

Aaron said something.

Not a declaration. Not a revelation. A sentence that was precisely calibrated to be receivable — to communicate what it communicated without requiring a response if the response was not available.

Danny received it.

He responded.

The response was also calibrated.

They sat with it.

“And then?” I asked Danny.

“And then,” he said, “we were honest.”

He said it simply.

The way you describe something that changed everything and that was, at the same time, the most ordinary thing.

“We were honest,” he said. “For the first time. Both of us. In our whole lives.”

Part IV: The Color Green

The title of this story comes from a conversation that Danny described to me — a conversation that happened in May 2009, on an afternoon when their unit had a rare pocket of stillness, when the operational tempo had slowed to something that allowed for the kind of conversation that the tempo usually prevented.

They were sitting outside their housing unit.

Aaron was looking at the low scrub vegetation that grew at the perimeter — the plants that survived in the Kandahar soil in colors so muted they seemed to be apologizing for existing.

“What color would you say that is?” Aaron said.

Danny looked.

“Green,” he said. “Kind of. Grayish green.”

“At home,” Aaron said, “green means something specific. The fields in July. The specific green of Mississippi in summer that you can’t find anywhere else.”

“Alabama too,” Danny said. “Different green but — you know it. You grow up knowing it.”

“Here it’s a different green,” Aaron said. “A surviving green. Like it didn’t have the right conditions but it showed up anyway.”

He looked at the plants for a moment.

“I think I understand that green better than the other one,” he said.

Danny looked at him.

“Me too,” he said.

It was not a conversation about plants.

They both knew it was not a conversation about plants.

It was a conversation about what it means to grow in conditions that are not designed for you and to show up anyway in whatever color is available and to find that the color, though it is not the color anyone expected, is a real color.

Is green.

Is actually, in its own way, beautiful.

Part V: What The Army Was

The United States military in 2009 operated under Don’t Ask Don’t Tell — the policy that had been in place since 1994 and that permitted gay and lesbian service members to serve provided they did not disclose their sexual orientation and provided no one asked.

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

The policy’s name was also its complete description.

It institutionalized — gave official governmental form to — the management that Danny and Aaron had both been practicing since adolescence. The management of a version of yourself. The performance of a different one.

The Army had not given them something new.

The Army had simply formalized what their towns had already required.

“We used to talk about that,” Aaron told me. “The irony of it. That we had come ten thousand miles to a war zone and the war zone was the first place we’d been honest and the institution we were honest inside of was the one with the official policy that said: don’t be.”

“How did you hold that?”

“Carefully,” he said. “The same way you hold anything that doesn’t fit the container it’s in. You’re careful. You’re aware of the edges.”

“Were you afraid?”

“Of the policy?”

“Of everything,” I said.

He thought for a long time.

“I was afraid of losing it,” he said. “Not the policy — of losing what we had. The specific thing. The honesty. The — the surviving green, if you want to use Danny’s language.”

“The being known.”

“The being known,” he confirmed. “I had never been known. Not fully. And I was afraid that when the deployment ended and we went back — back to Alabama and Mississippi and the management and the performed version — I was afraid the knowing would go with it.”

“Did it?”

He was quiet for a long time.

Part VI: The Coming Back

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was repealed in September 2011.

Danny and Aaron had both been back in the United States for two years by then.

The eight months in Kandahar had ended in November 2009 with the rotation of their unit back to their respective home bases — Danny to Fort Rucker in Alabama, Aaron to Fort Benning in Georgia.

They had driven to Fort Benning together, in Danny’s truck, from Kandahar to the processing facility to a drive that took eleven hours and that they filled with — Danny described it to me as “everything we needed to say before we had to stop saying it.”

“What did you need to say?”

“What it had meant,” he said. “What those eight months had been. We needed to — we needed to name it. So that it was named. So that it existed somewhere as a named thing and not just as something that happened.”

“Did you name it?”

“We tried,” he said. “The names we had didn’t quite fit. We kept — we kept almost getting there and then the word would be wrong somehow. Too small. Or too general.”

“Did you find one?”

He smiled.

“Aaron said: call it Kandahar. The whole thing. Just call it Kandahar.”

“And?”

“And that fit,” Danny said. “It was the only word that had the right size.”

They parted at Fort Benning.

They went to their respective home bases.

They went back to Alabama and Mississippi respectively in their first leave periods.

They went back to the management.

Danny told me about going back to the church in Alabama — the three-generation church, his father greeting people at the door, the specific warmth of a community that knew him and loved him and would have rearranged if they had known.

“And?”

“And I sat in the pew,” he said. “And I thought: I know what Kandahar is now. I know what the real version is. And I am sitting here in this pew and I am — I am both things at once and I don’t know what to do with that.”

“What did you do?”

“I sang the hymn,” he said. “Because the hymn was beautiful. Because the church was real. Because my father was at the door and he was real too.”

“And Kandahar?”

“Kandahar was real too,” he said. “That’s what I was sitting with. All of it being real simultaneously.”

Part VII: After

The repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in September 2011 changed something.

Not everything.

Not the towns, not the churches, not the specific geography of communities whose love is genuine and whose knowledge is incomplete.

But something.

“When it was repealed,” Aaron told me, “I called Danny. We hadn’t talked in — we’d talked, but not — not like in Kandahar. We’d been careful again.”

“What did you say when you called?”

“I said: it’s legal now.”

“What did he say?”

“He laughed,” Aaron said. “And then he said: it was always real.”

“What did you say?”

“I said: I know. I just wanted to call.”

He paused.

“And then we talked for three hours. Like Kandahar. Like the watch. Like the honest version.”

They live in different cities now.

Danny is in Atlanta — the specific migration of a person who has found a place that is Southern enough to feel like home and large enough to contain all the versions.

Aaron is in Memphis.

They see each other three or four times a year.

They have, in the years since the repeal and the years since their own subsequent processes of telling their families — processes that were, as Danny had imagined, not hatred but rearranging, and that required time and patience and the specific grace that real love requires when it is learning a new shape —

they have built lives that are, as Aaron puts it, “full size.”

Not the managed size.

The full size.

“Does it still feel like Kandahar?” I asked Danny. “That specific quality of honesty?”

He thought for a long time.

“Kandahar was the first place,” he said. “There’s something about the first place. You can’t replicate it exactly. It was the desert and the light and the specific conditions of being ten thousand miles from everything that required us to be something else.”

“Do you miss it?”

“I miss what it was,” he said. “The first time. The first breath. You can’t keep taking the first breath.”

“What do you have instead?”

He looked out the window at Atlanta.

“The breathing,” he said. “Just — the breathing. Normal breathing. Every day.”

He paused.

“After Kandahar I understood that normal breathing was not nothing,” he said. “It was everything.”

Coda: The Green

In 2019, Danny went back to Kandahar.

Not operationally. As part of a veteran support program — a visit, a few days, the specific journey that some veterans make back to the places that shaped them to see what the places look like when the shaping is complete.

He stood at the perimeter of the base where he and Aaron had sat in May 2009.

The scrub vegetation was still there.

The same muted color. The same apologetic presence. The same surviving green.

He took a photograph.

He sent it to Aaron.

Aaron texted back: still the best green.

Danny looked at the photograph for a long time.

Then he looked at the actual plants.

The light was doing what Kandahar light does — removing all shadow, making everything exactly what it is, giving nothing anywhere to hide.

The plants were green.

Not the green of Alabama in July.

Not the green of Mississippi fields.

The green of something that grew in the wrong conditions and showed up anyway.

The green of something that did not have the right soil or the right water or the right everything and grew regardless.

He stood there for a while.

Then he sent Aaron one more text.

We were the right green all along.

Aaron replied three minutes later.

I know.

I knew in Kandahar.

I just needed the rest of the world to catch up.

Dante Darkside spent two days with Danny Pruitt in Atlanta and spoke with Aaron Cole by phone from Memphis. Both reviewed this account.

Both asked for the same thing:

“Tell them the towns are still the towns. Tell them we still go back. Tell them our families got there eventually. Tell them it took time and it was worth the time.”

The towns are still the towns.

The families got there.

It took time.

It was worth the time.

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was repealed on September 20th, 2011.

Approximately 13,000 service members had been discharged under the policy between 1994 and 2011.

Their names are not in any single place.

They served anyway.

In the wrong conditions.

In the surviving green.

Still green.

Still there.

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“‘We were the right green all along.’ Danny texted that from Kandahar in 2019. I have been sitting with it since.” — Reader, Atlanta “The surviving green. Something that grew in the wrong conditions and showed up anyway. That is all of us.” — Reader, London “‘Normal breathing. After Kandahar I understood that normal breathing was not nothing. It was everything.’ Yes.” — Reader, New York NY “I am a veteran. I served under DADT. I read this three times. Thank you for the right green.” — Reader, Nashville TN “Aaron said: I just needed the rest of the world to catch up. The rest of the world is still catching up. Keep going.” — Reader, Mississippi “Story 24. Still the best series anywhere. Not once less than everything. Not once.” — Reader, Berlin