Alexander’s army left behind new cities and legends of blue-eyed progeny. The British left behind their garrisons and the Durand Line. And when we arrived, we found what the Soviets had left behind and put it to our use. We lived on their bases and used their runways and drove on the roads they’d built. We observed evidence of the Soviets’ defeat — the rusted tanks and trucks and picked-apart planes — and shook our heads in awful wonder at the fate of our former enemy.

Now we wonder whether another foreign army will one day commandeer our old bases and similarly shake their heads at all the things we left behind. If that ever happens, and it most likely will, then those other soldiers will surely find the words “Keavy Metal” scribbled in a few odd places across Afghanistan. That’s the nickname that Keavy Rake left behind. On walls, in bathrooms, on desks and doors and chairs and Hesco barriers. Every place she visited in Afghanistan, the Air Force officer used a Sharpie marker to tag her presence, no matter how impermanent it had been. Deep down, she knew America would leave one day. And when she imagined the Taliban, her enemies, taking over all the places she’d been, Rake wanted them to know she’d been there first.

“It was a flex on them — like, ‘I was here mothafuckas,’” she says later. “Afghanistan was ours while we were on the ground and in the air. We owned that space. I wanted people to know that. Right, wrong, or indifferent.”