The Deer and the Ramen
One day a box showed up with my name on it.
It had come all the way from home, wrapped in layers of tape and handwriting I knew by heart. My mom’s.
Inside—instant ramen, rice, seaweed, and more Korean and Japanese food than anyone in my tent knew what to do with. She probably thought I was starving. She was right, just not in the way she imagined.
I remember the smell when I opened it—soy, sesame, the faint ghost of home. The desert air couldn’t hide it. For a minute, the tent didn’t feel like a tent. It felt like a kitchen.
Everyone gathered around, pretending not to stare. I offered some ramen. They looked at it like it was gold. Deep-woods Irvin drifted over immediately. Born in Indiana, raised somewhere beyond the tree line, spiritually aligned with deer, dirt, and diesel. The same man who once picked up a dead deer off the ground at Fort Hood—bare hands, no hesitation—and tossed it into the back of his truck like he was rescuing a friend. I had stared at him with the widest eyes, because that was the most “Irvin” thing you can witness and still not fully process. So, when he saw my care package, his eyes widened in the exact same way mine had widened at the deer. He leaned in, squinting at the contents as if inspecting ammunition from a foreign country. “What is this?” he asked, half amused, half excited.
I offered him some. Seaweed crisps, I think. Something green and delicate that crushed between your fingers. He took it like it was a science experiment. Held it up to the light. Squinted again. Looked at me like he wanted confirmation that humans actually eat it. Then he took a bite. Something in his brain must have snapped open because he didn’t even hesitate after that. He devoured it. Ate through the seaweed, the rice crisp. He looked like a man who had just discovered an entire new category of food he didn’t know existed.
One guy asked how to eat the ramen dry; another just chewed it like chips. Nobody cared—it was food from somewhere that wasn’t here.
Brando would’ve said something like,
“See, even war knows when to step aside for a good meal.”
And maybe he’d be right. For a few minutes, no one talked about convoys, or checkpoints, or who made it back last night. We just sat there, slurping noodles, laughing about nothing.
Then the power went out, the fan stopped spinning, and the desert came rushing back in.
But the smell lingered a little longer. And for a moment, in that desert, with mortars somewhere in the distance and dust everywhere else, it felt like the world was bigger than the one we were trapped in.
