United States Marine Corps

The United States Marine Corps appears in Jessica Mastriani’s account as a military force working to locate and detain men trained at terrorist camps in Afghanistan, and as the organization alongside which she put her unusual ability to find missing people to wartime use. The book gives little institutional detail about the Corps itself; its significance emerges instead through the searches Jessica helped direct, the human outcomes she witnessed, and the lasting cost of that work.

Wartime Search Operations

For Jessica, the war was not a distant sequence of reports about Marines killed or suspected terrorists found in Afghan caves. She says she was there, directing personnel toward the caves where the people they needed to find might be. At first she tried to identify locations from home and later from Washington, but the people sent to investigate sometimes returned saying no one was there. Jessica maintained that the leads were correct: the failure, as she understood it, was not in her ability but in the searchers’ inability to find the people she had located.

She eventually asked to be sent to the field so she could show them. Her account establishes that she worked with United States Marine Corps personnel, but does not specify her formal status or describe the Corps’ wider command structure. In a later effort to protect Hannah, Jessica invokes her year working with Marines whose job was to track down and detain men trained at terrorist death camps. That comparison reveals how she understood her own wartime experience: it had placed her alongside personnel carrying out a dangerous mission, and it shaped how she judged threats after returning home.

The People the Searches Found

Jessica says she found everyone she located, but the outcomes varied sharply. Some people became publicly known through news coverage; others remained secret. Some were too deeply hidden in the mountains for the searchers to reach. Others were kept under observation while the authorities waited. Some were dead. The account does not present finding someone as equivalent to rescuing them: location could lead to action, surveillance, an inaccessible destination, or confirmation of death.

That range of results complicates the apparent certainty of Jessica’s claim that her power was never wrong. Her ability could identify people, but it could not guarantee access to them or determine what would happen next. The Marines’ search-and-detention mission and Jessica’s capacity to find people therefore intersected without making every discovery a successful recovery.

Jessica’s Role and Its Limits

Jessica’s participation was driven by the immediate need to find people during wartime. When personnel returned from a location without finding anyone, she trusted her ability and pressed to go there herself rather than accept their conclusion. She describes the work as direct involvement in a war that other Americans might encounter only through television reports. Her perspective makes the search operation personal: the people in the caves were not distant figures in a broadcast but the subjects of locations she had identified and operations she had helped guide.

The narrative does not provide a roster of Marines, name a particular unit, or detail specific missions beyond tracking and detaining men trained at terrorist camps. Its account of the Corps remains focused on this relationship with Jessica: personnel needed actionable locations, while her dream-based ability supplied leads that ordinary searches had sometimes failed to confirm.

Aftermath of the Deployment

After the wartime work, Jessica began having nightmares and could no longer sleep. Because her ability depended on dreaming, the loss of sleep also meant she could no longer find people. The condition was identified as posttraumatic stress syndrome, or PTSS. Attempts to help her included drugs, therapy, and a week beside a pool in Dubai, but none restored her sleep; she was ultimately sent home in the hope that familiar surroundings might help.

Returning home did not restore the life that had preceded the war. Rob later described the pressure she had endured and the things she had seen as beyond what anyone her age, or any age, should have experienced, and told her she had come back broken. Jessica herself recognized that she had returned different, and that the change reached beyond the loss of her ability. The Corps is thus associated not only with the wartime search effort in which she served alongside its personnel, but also with the experience whose consequences followed her into civilian life.