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On our first morning, I woke to gunshots. Two staccato pops followed by a hesitant, searching third, the kind of the shot taken with either the utmost care or regret. Not what I had expected, but then, I hadn’t much to go on outside of a watered down cultural brief and my own cursory regional research. I rose from my bunk, waving off my staff sergeant as his eyes halfheartedly offered to leave the warmth of his sleeping bag, and pad barefoot through the abandoned room alongside our barracks, and onto the patio to investigate. It is the first time I had laid eyes on Sakartvelo, the Republic of Georgia, a country roughly the size of West Virginia housing three times the population, in the light of day and it did not disappoint. Eastern greys gave way behind me, bathing Akhaltsikhe in warm pinks as it too awakened. Roosters and dogs raised an impressive din, crows giving impetus to the howls of the latter. As I would later find out, this was partially the cause for my early revival; stray dogs are present throughout the country and, while the Americans never tire of them, the native soldiers are less than amiable to their presence on base. Sitting twenty miles north of the Turkish border, Akhaltsikhe is a small city of about 50,000 and the capital of Samtskhe-Javakheti. This southwestern border state of . As part of the joint NATO forces descending on the small nation as part of Exercise Agile Spirit 2017, our mission was to reaffirm ties with our European allies while impressing upon the Russians the kind of men and material we could mobilize in short order. I expected to accomplish this, and not much more. By the time we left, we, a platoon of Marine tankers from Idaho, groaned to leave. We had drunk wine from aft caps with our Georgian counterparts atop the ramparts of Rabati, a 9th century fortress that withstood siege by Tamerlane before Constantinople fell. We had clamored through the caves and tunnels of Vardzia, an entire city carved into the stone of Erusheti Mtn in the 12th century that served as a base of operations for the great Georgian queen, Tamar. There, on the banks of the Kura River, chasing down the salty heat of khachapuri acharuli- an incredible Georgian bread bowl of cheese, butter, and egg- with Georgian pilsener, we gazed up at the pock-marked cliff face much as the Mongols must have done. Those moments, awash with cheer, the smooth edges of history, and friends new and old, were worth far more than any military objective.