Matt Zeller doesn’t remember the moment when a Taliban rocket-propelled grenade knocked him down. He only recalls seeing a cherry-red motorcycle—a Taliban spotter—approaching his unit and suddenly finding himself lying on the desert floor, watching the sand jump as bullets hit the ground around him. It was the start of a 12-hour firefight.I’m sitting with Zeller at a Starbucks in the suburbs of northern Virginia, outside Washington, D.C. It’s a muggy, summer afternoon and he’s reflecting on April 28, 2008—the day, he says, he could easily have died.