This is the writer's voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Treasman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of the writer's voice, we'll hear Will Mackin read his story, The Lost Troop,

from the November 27th, 2017 issue of the magazine.

Mackin, who retired from the Navy in 2014, will publish his first story collection,

bring out the dog in March.

Now here's Will Mackin.

The Lost Troop.

We had a dry spell in Logar.

It was December, and the weather was dog shit,

so a degree of slowness was expected.

But this went beyond slowness.

It was like peace had broken out and nobody told us.

Nights we'd meet in the ops hut for the mission brief.

We'd tune the flat screens to the drones over Ghazni, Oregon, and coast,

only to find all three orbiting within the same cloud.

We'd listen to static on the UHF. We'd stare at phones that never

rang. We could have left it all behind, walked off the outpost into the desert, never to be seen again.

We could have created the legend of the lost troop. Instead, we chose someplace where we imagined the enemy might be hiding,

a compound on the banks of the Helmand River, a break shop in downtown Marja, a cave high

in the Hindu Kush Mountains, and we ventured out there hoping for a fight. I thought of the Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima, who when their island fell to the Americans

didn't know that it had fallen, who not long after, didn't hear that A-bombs had destroyed

...