“I’ve always been fascinated by maps and cartography. A map tells you where you’ve been, where you are, and where you’re going – in a sense it’s three tenses in one. It’s also an amazing ideogram of information that is very useful and, perhaps most pertinently, also not at all useful.”

— Peter Greenaway, British film director

I held two pieces of paper in my hand. Satellite photos with red pointers in the center. No coordinates, no legend, no scale, no label. Just the brown sand and darker patches of earth. The red pointer on each photo marked the spot.

I slid them into the pocket of a folder and closed it up. I put the folder on top of a stack of papers, the bureaucratic remnants of twenty years in uniform. I gathered the pile under my left arm and walked out of the operations building for the last time.

To the east, over the tired green of the September poplars, you could sense Lake Superior ready to spawn a fog monster, like she does in the fall. Ready to send ghostly tendrils up to threaten the airport runway on the other side of the parking lot to the west.

My red Dodge was like a horse that knows the way to the barn. I was almost a passenger as the truck followed the road out of the gate. Past the F-16 on a stick to zig-zag through town to my house. My whole career in my rearview mirror, from basic training in 1985 to retirement in 2013. After almost three decades, the very last thing I did was make maps of two places in Afghanistan. Those two pieces of paper closed a circuit in my head. A big deep breath and an exhale.

I didn’t just want those maps. I needed them in a way so deep and visceral that I have trouble fully expressing it. I want to know why.

BEFORE

The character of a map changes over time. A map is a planning device beforehand. It’s aspirational, something that helps you imagine. During, it’s a tool that helps you orient yourself. Afterward, it’s a relic. A record. Maybe, if I look at the role maps have had in my life, I canunderstand my need. The metamorphosis of maps from before, during, and after their use might give me an explanation.

My dad was in the US Forest Service, which made me a Forest Service brat. As mobile as a military brat, but with more trees. In each new town, my parents specifically picked houses within walking distance of the library. In Cadillac, Michigan, I rode my Schwinn Varsity ten- speed to the library and looked through the shelves. One book sprawled open, its binding split and surrendered. Massive rectangular pages in a landscape layout. Text on the left page and maps on the right. Maps with three colors. Black lines with red and blue shapes in opposition. The West Point Atlas of American Wars. I was in 8th grade. I drooled over that atlas, page after page.

A map is a way for people to orient themselves. I was always the new kid. Maps made me feel rooted, if only temporarily. They made order out of chaos. Maps gave me the “right answer” the same way that math did. The West Point Atlas said, This is the Battle of the Bulge. This is what happened.

My copy of the West Point Atlas with my grandfather’s letter explaining where he was on this map of the Battle of the Bulge.

Then, dad told us we were moving again. This time to Plymouth, New Hampshire. I barely remembered the state where I was born. We were headed back to the White Mountain National Forest where he started his career. All I knew was the flat Midwest. I looked at my dad’s well-worn Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) White Mountain Guide. Inside the back cover, a manila pocket held several maps of the White Mountains. I imagined my future using those maps. Like the West Point Atlas, they had only three colors. Black for the trails and roads. Blue for water in the ponds and streams. Brown for the contour lines.

During my four years of high school, my dad and I wore out those maps. The AMC manages the Four Thousand Footer Club. It’s a list of people who’ve climbed all 48 peaks over 4000 feet in the White Mountains. My dad and I started “peakbagging” in 1981. The maps were part of a cycle. We planned a hike and imagined the terrain. Then we climbed Hancock or Tom or Madison or Wildcat. We looked from that summit and saw Bond or Willey or Moosilauke or Passaconaway. All the mountains from the maps, laid out like a rolling, green quilt. Then, curiosity drove me to look at the maps again and plan the next hike. My notes tell me I climbed all but ten of those peaks with my dad. We turned brown contour lines into memories.

My dad and I climbed South Hancock in June 1982. We went straight up the fall line through evergreens on a trail the AMC guide calls “unrelievedly steep.” I said something that day that was the culmination of plastic models and math and maps and mountains. I told my dad, “I want to build airplanes.” Then we bagged the peak below tree line. Ironic to choose a career path toward the sky on a peak with no views. I saw airplanes as an extension of summiting a peak. A way to approximate the God’s-eye view of maps.

My dad’s copy of the AMC guide showing our peakbagging record

I got into the US Air Force Academy to chase an aeronautical engineering degree. Just before basic training in 1985, my great-aunt Boo died. Boo was a social worker and a poet. Her husband was a historian at Bradford College who died decades earlier. The family gathered at her house in Haverhill, Massachusetts. It was a hot day as we piled out of the car. We walked into the dim interior. Narrow paths crossed the rooms between endless stacks of their books, magazines, and newspapers. My parents told me I could take any books I wanted. I sullenly picked through the dusty piles wondering when we could leave. And then I saw them: Both volumes of the West Point Atlas of American Wars. The same maps I pored over in the Cadillac public library. In perfect condition and still encased in a protective sleeve. The whole set felt as heavy as a cinderblock. The broad, black hardcover swung open like a door hinged on undamaged gray cloth bindings. I turned the broad, smooth pages, cool in contrast with the stuffy heat of the room. I walked out with those two volumes like Moses with stone tablets. They sit on my bookshelf today.

After I finished Air Force Undergraduate Pilot Training (UPT) in 1990, I went back to New Hampshire to bag the last five peaks on my list. I have the AMC guide that I used that day. I summited Middle Carter, South Carter, Carter Dome, Wildcat, and Wildcat E in one 14-mile walk in a steady drizzle. No views. That map is still wrinkled from the rain. I don’t remember what airport I flew into or where I stayed. But I remember the hike itself and the map.

After UPT and F-16 school, I went to another specialized course. I learned to fly at night with the cleverly named LANTIRN system (Low Altitude Navigation and Targeting Infrared for Night). A pod looked forward using infra-red sensors and repeated that image in your heads-up display. The second, probably more important, part of the pod was the Terrain Following Radar (TFR). This helped you fly at at low-level. You were a high-speed blind man and the TFR was the white cane, tapping at the ground in front of you. We planned in even more detail for these nighttime low-levels. We built a simplified map of each leg of the route that we called a “stick chart.” The black line of the route was centered in each chart, the direction of travel from the bottom of the page to the top.

Making the stick chart was my favorite part of mission planning. You took the white chart and placed it over the leg location on a topographic map. Then you put both of those on a light table, a broad surface of glass lit from underneath. The contour lines showed up through the map and the chart. I traced the contour lines of the mountain peaks onto the blank white paper. I was like Gollum, muttering “my precious” as I obsessively traced the higher contours of the threatening hills. Not the whole mountain, just the top. Like the summits were islands. A rough shape would’ve been good enough, but I took my time tracing the lines. It makes me happy that contour lines are a through line from my mountainous childhood to aviation.

I recently learned that my AMC maps were hand-drawn. Louis F. Cutter surveyed and drew maps of the Presidential Range of the White Mountains starting in 1885. The AMC used his painstakingly crafted maps in their first guide in 1907 until 1998 when they went digital. I pulled out the maps from my 1987 edition and compared them to the 1917 edition I found online, the first to use the three-color scheme. They looked almost identical, 70 years apart. Finely crafted, but with human imperfections in the lines and lettering. I drew mountains by hand on my LANTIRN stick charts, just like the hand-drawn mountains on my hiking maps. Whether it was for climbing a mountain or for flying around one, I unfolded my maps beforehand and tried to imagine.

The old school hand-drawn maps in my 1987 AMC guide

DURING

Then maps change from day-dreaming devices into practical tools. Since we first used a stick to scratch a map in the dirt, we’ve wanted more detail in our maps. One way is to increase the scale of the map. Comedian Steven Wright had a doozy: “I have a map of the United States… actual size. It says, ‘Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.’ I spent last summer folding it.” Jorge Luis Borges’s story “On Exactitude of Science” depicts a fictional kingdom where maps are enlarged and perfected, but there’s a downside:

…the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless,…

It’s strange to think that a perfect map would be no help. A map so good that it would show your coffee cup on the table. But, if you put the coffee cup in the sink, the accurate map would be instantly obsolete. This is an example of Bonini’s Paradox. When you try to simulate something or make a model of it, the more precise the model is, the less usable it is. You get a map too big to carry that goes out of date immediately.

The map-territory relation is an example of this paradox. Alfred Korzybski wrote this in Science and Sanity, published in 1933: “A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” The best example of this is the map of the London Underground. In 1933, Henry Beck created the Way Finder for that subway system. The simple colored lines don’t show precise geography. But if you want to know the next stop or where to transfer to a different train, it’s very useful. More helpful because it’s simple.

Cartographers can’t depict everything. Peter Turchi, author of the book Maps of the Imagination, put it this way in an interview. “People think about inclusion all the time but it’s a little less common for people to think about omission,” says Turchi. “What you want to convey to any reader or user is often defined by what you leave out.” You won’t see mountains on a subway map.

I made LANTIRN stick charts, route maps, and maps of the target area throughout my life as a pilot. I went on three deployments to Iraq and one to Afghanistan. I flew Close Air Support (CAS) on every single sortie. CAS means you work in close proximity to ground troops. This demands careful coordination so that friendly troops are not put in danger by your actions in the air. You talk on the radio to a Joint Terminal Air Controller (JTAC; “jay-tack”) on the ground and give his troops the support they need. We typically did non-lethal tasks, but we had weapons, just in case. We spent our time in the briefing studying the maps where we planned to work.

When friendly forces took effective fire from the enemy, we called it Troops In Contact (TIC). A TIC was the highest priority, superseding any of the planned missions we had. We left the planned mission, got grid coordinates, a radio callsign for a JTAC. Then my wingman and I raced across Afghanistan toward the location with the help of GPS. On the way to the fight, I shoved the pre-planned maps for the other superseded missions under my leg. We showed up overhead the TIC for the ultimate pick-up game. You built situational awareness as quickly as you could to help the troops on the ground. The TIC never happened on a piece of dirt that we already studied. We started from scratch every single time. It was like waking up from a coma in the huddle at the Superbowl: “What down is it? Are we winning?”

Sometimes we went from one TIC to another, bouncing around the country like a ping- pong ball. You might get a chance to choke down a Red Bull and an energy bar. Piss into a piddle-pack on the way back from the tanker. Then we’d be off to another TIC. I climbed out of the cockpit four, sometimes six, hours later, hollow from repeated doses of adrenaline. I saw the unused maps from the lower priority missions all wrinkled and sweaty on the ejection seat. I thought, Oh yeah. Forgot about you.

Let’s say you’re at a truck stop and there’s a big map on the wall next to the fridge full of energy drinks. You’ll see the human desire: Where am I? There’ll be a big, greasy mark on the map from all the fingers that point and touch. You’ll know where you are. Rushing over the mountains of Afghanistan to a TIC, I wanted a grease spot or a big red arrow in the sky pointing to a valley saying, “You are here.” I never had the tool of a map when it mattered most.

One day, I arrived at a TIC and the JTAC passed the coordinates of the enemy position to me over the radio. He calmly used a standard format called a “9-line.” Nine pieces of information that helped me figure out where the enemy was. The JTAC was on a ridge and his unit was taking fire. I could hear gunfire and shouting in the background. He described where he was on a ridge, a beige east-west spine. They were on the western tip. Around a hundred meters to their west, enemy troops were firing at them from a creek bed in the valley. I made a dry run to make sure I was pointed in the right place and not at friendlies. Then the JTAC cleared me to use my 20mm cannon. I made three passes and used all 500 rounds of my ammunition. The friendlies were able to safely withdraw. I don’t know if I hit anybody that day.

I didn’t have time during that fight to draw a map so I could understand my place in the world. I wasn’t able to depict friendlies here, enemies there. The world was the map, the valley itself. My eyeballs were the pen that drew the contours, the rivers, the ridge line. Maybe, on the day I retired, I made my two maps to complete unfinished business. To make the maps that I was too busy to draw at the time. Two maps for the two lives I took in two other valleys.

AFTER

I live in Duluth, Minnesota. July is supposedly the only month when it’s never snowed. We leave the winter gear in reach. Each member of my family has a plastic bin filled with stuff like hats, gloves, mittens, and head lamps. Recently, I was rooting around in my bin for a hat and found two maps. One was a poster-sized topo map of the Presidential Range of the White Mountains. The last time I climbed a Four Thousand Footer was 30 years ago. The other map was the Wind River Range in Wyoming. I climbed Fremont Peak there 24 years ago. For some reason, those maps are in my hat bin right now. The maps went from planning charts to useful tools to relics.

I wrote this story 6 years ago. This is a picture of those two maps in my hat bin today in 2026. Wind River Mountain Range and White Mountains. Go figure.

A giant map of Alaska hangs on the wall behind our laundry room. A memento of my three-year Air Force assignment there. I found more maps jammed behind Alaska. Yet another White Mountain National Forest map. Topo maps of the Uinta Mountains where I climbed King’s Peak in Utah just a month before 9/11. A laminated area map of the Great Salt Lake Desert that I used while at Hill Air Force Base. I admit it. I’m a map hoarder. I’m like a squirrel storing so many nuts that I lose track of where they are.

Maybe the two maps I made the day I retired are just more of the same life-long compulsion. Maybe I hoard maps as topographical proof of life. If it’s not on a map, did it happen? James Salter was a fighter pilot in the Korean War. He said something about writing that seems true for maps:

Call it a delusion if you like, but within me was an insistence that whatever we did, the things that were said, the dawns, the cities, the lives, all of it had to be drawn together, made into pages, or it was in danger of not existing, of never having been. There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.

Many of the books on my shelves are about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I read to build context for my combat experiences. Several combat veterans mention maps in their stories. In the story “Soldier’s Home,” Ernest Hemingway describes a WWI veteran named Krebs and his return to civilian life after the war. Krebs wants to know how his experience fits into the big picture:

He sat there on the porch reading a book on the war. It was a history and he was reading about all the engagements he had been in. It was the most interesting reading he had ever done. He wished there were more maps. He looked forward with a good feeling to reading all the really good histories when they would come out with good detail maps. Now he was really learning about the war. He had been a good soldier. That made a difference.

Kevin Powers writes about maps and the passage of time in his novel The Yellow Birds.

He highlights some of the map-territory issue with a map of Iraq:

That map, like every other, would soon be out of date, if it was not already. What it had been indexed to was only an idea of a place, an abstraction formed from memories too brief and passing to account for the small effects of time: wind scouring and lifting the dust of the plains of Nineveh in immeasurable increments, the tuck of a river farther into its bend, hour by hour, year by year; the map would become less and less a picture of a fact and more a poor translation of memory in two dimensions.

In notes at the end of the book, Powers talked about his motivations for writing it. He said he was trying to illuminate “the cartography of one man’s consciousness.”

Benjamin Busch writes about maps in a story called “Into the Land of Dogs.” The character in this short story is the only survivor of a helicopter crew that crashes in Afghanistan. The description of maps in the air versus maps on the ground makes my spinal cord ring like a tuning fork:

He was learning just how different maps and land were, his simple acceptance of symbols wearing away as he travelled. He had lost trust in depiction. No, that wasn’t it. Representation. There had been such certainty in the air, all the hills, forests, dunes, and towns clearly identified and named.

Both Powers and Busch portray maps as untrustworthy because of the passage of time and changing perspectives. They’re right. For example, I thought I was done with the Four Thousand Footers. Not so fast. I reviewed the hike when I crossed Wildcat E in the rain, the last peak on my list. In 1998, when the AMC maps went digital, they found that Wildcat D was the taller summit and kicked Wildcat E off the list. The 1987 list and maps I own are obsolete. The hiking project I started with my dad in 1981 isn’t complete. On the bright side, I have a reason to go back to New Hampshire’s high country for one more hike.

I never set foot in Afghanistan except inside the wire at Kandahar Air Base. But I saw almost all of it from the air. At the time, I couldn’t name the places I saw. I did a “show of force” over a city once, flying 500 knots over the buildings at 500 feet above the ground. To deter anyone who wanted to threaten a US convoy that was hauling ass back to its compound. I tore across that urban sprawl and thought, Wow. Big town.

Sometimes, I drink beer and zoom into the maps on Google, almost like drunk texting. I try to make sense of where I was, where I might’ve been. One night, I scrolled the computer mouse across big striated cliffs next to a river as it spilled out next to that big town. It took me years, but I finally thought, Huh, so that was Jalalabad.

I showed up over some coordinates and talked to a dude on the radio. I looked out the window at an anonymous scene with mountains by some river. I looked at the brown. The black and blue. Made my own contour lines. Friendlies here, enemies there. My mental map.

Now, like Krebs. I want detailed maps after it’s all over. Sometimes, I think I made my two maps to fill in a gap. Like Krebs, I want maps to help me really learn about the war.

#

The day after Michael Herr died in 2016, Esquire republished his August 1968 piece “Hell Sucks.” I felt a surge when I read this line: “When the battle for Hué was all over, they entered it into the records, gauged its terrible cost and battlegrammed it, so that it took on the dry, tactical stamp of the West Point Atlas of American Wars.” When he mentioned my atlas, it was like he completed a circle between my combat deployments and my 8th grade self. In both the magazine article and his book Dispatches, Herr opens with a passage about a map:

There is a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in Saigon, and some nights, coming back late to the city, I’ll lie out on my bed and look at it, too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off. The map is a marvel, especially absorbing because it is not real.

Later, in the magazine piece, Herr describes how an unnamed officer stops by for a cocktail and is also drawn to the map. The following passage about the map of Vietnam doesn’t appear in the book:

The General is drawn to it too, and whenever he stops by for a drink he’ll regard it silently, undoubtedly noting inaccuracies which the maps available to him have corrected. The waters that wash around my Indochine are a placid, Disney blue, unlike the intense, metallic blues of the General’s maps. But all of that aside, we both agree to the obsolescence of my map, to the final unreality of it.

Salter and Hemingway wrote about how we desire stories and maps. How we want the stories to create reality and the maps to give us meaning. But writers from Vietnam and later tell us that maps will fail us. Busch wrote about “losing trust in depiction.” Powers said a map was a “poor translation.” Herr wants you to agree on the “final unreality” of a war map. Turchi says it best in his book: “The first lie of a map—also the first lie of fiction—is that it is the truth.” If simplicity gives a map utility, than my two minimalist maps are the most useful lies ever told.

The map—before, during, and after the event—lives between our ears. What Powers called the “cartography of one man’s consciousness.” I thought that if I brought my two maps into being, I could somehow get answers. All my life, maps helped me up mountains on foot and around mountains in airplanes. Maybe my two maps could help me now. But Turchi says that my mapmaking has probably been in vain: “We compile mental maps that are wildly skewed, a mental atlas so large and complex that we can never fully convey it to anyone else. Then we live in the world those maps create.”

Surrealist René Magritte painted a work called “The Treachery of Images,” a depiction of a pipe for smoking tobacco. Under that image he painted this phrase in French: “This is not a pipe.” The statement is true. It’s not a pipe. It’s the image of a pipe. The red pointer on my first map is just an image. It isn’t the man hiding in the rocks waiting for my two bombs to impact. The red pointer on my second map is not the second man disappearing while his motorcycle cartwheels away from the explosion. The two maps are not the two men.

I don’t put much faith in those pieces of paper anymore. Which is good, because I can’t find them. We moved into a different house. My papers are in boxes that went from one attic to the other. I’ve looked. Those two maps were the last thing I made in uniform and they’re missing.

Even without them, I still see the snowy peaks of the Hindu Kush stretching off to the horizon north of Jalalabad. The nameless folds of the earth there preserved in the folds of my brain. My memories conspire with the terrain itself to become a map. One that is perfect, filled with meaning, and imaginary.

Looking at a modern AMC map in 2023 before going to do Shmo’s Big Stupid that year.

***

This story was first published in Consequence (Vol. 13), Fall 2021.