After White Flags

A new short story about the quiet cost of trying to help.

Today, on Veterans Day, Military Review published my short story “After White Flags,” which the journal also nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Read it here → Military Review

I have been working on this piece, on and off, for nearly four years.

I began writing it as Afghanistan was falling, returning again and again to a question that still unsettles me: when we call something helping, what are we really trying to satisfy?

After White Flags began as a story about intervention but became something more private, about the impulse to step into someone else’s life and the quiet costs that follow.

Jack, a soldier preparing to deploy to Afghanistan, agrees to help save his friend Steve’s failing marriage. He becomes the go-between, the mediator, telling himself he is only helping by passing messages. But with every call and every favor, he is making choices that bind him to the very thing he thinks he is fixing.

The story moves between a bar in the present, where Jack and Steve meet again as Kabul falls on the TV, and the past, which slowly reveals what Jack’s help has cost. Beneath it all runs a question many veterans still wrestle with: what if doing nothing had been the wiser, truer form of help?

After White Flags lives in the uneasy space between intention and outcome, where the urge to make things right carries its own quiet weight.

I am grateful to Military Review for publishing it today. Veterans Day should not only be about celebration; it should be about honesty. This story refuses easy redemption because that is often the truth. We do not always get the clean answers we want.

If you have followed my work, you know I keep circling questions of moral injury and complicity. After White Flags stays with that discomfort, tracing the fine line between service and interference, duty and desire.

If it unsettles you, good. These are the questions worth asking, especially today.

Read the story in Military Review → link

I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Special thanks to Sarah Maples and David Ervin at Military Review for their insight and vision in helping this story become what it needed to be.
And to Eugenia Kim and Derek Webster, who read through early drafts and helped me find what I was really trying to say. Thank you.