We heard the thunder early on. There was no avoiding the storm to follow. Even as the midsummer sun beat down along the Front Range, a surging army of black clouds boiled just north of Colorado Springs, where my son and best golfing buddy, Alex, was stationed with his new bride. It had been seven months since a justice of the peace in Sierra Vista, Ariz., tied their knot and three months since they made it official in Reno in front of God, family and everybody.

As we made the turn on the U.S. Air Force Academy’s exquisite Eisenhower Blue Course, the clouds turned angry. Within minutes came the siren and loudspeaker announcement echoing across the low pine-studded foothills like a direct order from Above.

“Lightning has been detected in the area,” the Voice rumbled. “Please seek shelter immediately.”

Two guys caught us on the 11th hole. They looked like retired Air Force officers, but I can’t be sure. They packed it in when the wind kicked up and the thunder neared. Guess it’s a function of their rank, but they just didn’t have the stomach to take on the lightning head-on. We had no such thoughts of retreat, sticking it out under the cover of shelter off the 14th tee, firing up a cigar and sipping a beer as the showers came and cooled off the landscape. Five holes to go and we weren’t giving up.

A half hour later, we were on our way up the fairway under brightening skies, bullet dodged and bogeys on the horizon.

Half a world away, another much stronger and much different storm raged, as it has for nine years. We could hear that thunder too — Alex more than I, since he was heading right into its teeth a little over a week later. The Springs to New York, New York to Germany, Germany to a Canadian air force base in Kandahar. His first and hopefully only tour. Twelve months minimum, serving in the surge, war without end, amen.

So we played golf while we could, one round at the Blue, another at the Broadmoor’s Mountain Course. Two of the Springs’ best, which, I can only imagine, left a good image in Alex’s mind. Not too many four-star courses in Taliban country, mind you. Lots of holes, though. Physically, politically, strategically. Plenty of holes. Not that I know what the hell I’m talking about, I’m just going off the headlines and public opinion.

Meanwhile Alex, who turned 24 on Aug. 31 — a week and a half after his unit moved north from Kandahar to Herat, which, he texted me, has “beautiful sunsets” — is doing his level best to help fill those holes. He’s an intel specialist sporting a beard so he’ll fit in with the locals, reading reports from the field and, God willing, keeping a low profile. He’s attached to a command rather than a combat unit, which bodes well for our future golf plans.

Alex is on another of what I hope is many “rides of his life,” one that a longtime buddy, who’s in the Marine Corps, says he’ll hold dear forever. How do I know that? Eavesdropping on Facebook, of course.

I recognize that being part of one’s unit is analogous to joining a family. You’re with the same several hundred or at least several dozen fellow soldiers for an extended period of time, in an alien land rife with danger. The default human response to such conditions, repeated through the centuries in every warring culture and ingrained from basic training on down the line, is to grow close to your buddies and stay close, even after the uniform is hung up for good. I’d never drive a wedge (to speak) through the relationships he’s building in Afghanistan at this moment. I just hope and pray that I stay at the top of the golf buddy food chain in Alex’s life, and that we can someday re-create the run we had over the several years heading into the Colorado Springs double-header.

Actually, we were originally slated to do a triple-header starting with a round at Springs Ranch, a public track on the southeast side of town. Mother Nature had other ideas. The skies opened an hour before our late-afternoon tee time, drenching the landscape in windblown bursts that left us sitting in Alex’s newlywed apartment, laughing at the meteorological slapdown we’d been dealt. Lightning lashed our hopes into shrugging acceptance — even we weren’t that crazy — so we made the best of it, waiting for Alex’s bride, Jessica, to arrive from work so we could engage in our second favorite pastime: eating. Nothing fancy, just the Olive Garden a couple miles away, but precious time all the same, serving to not only catch us up on our lives, but to pump up the anticipation level for the two rounds we would get in no matter what.

And we did just that, starting with the classic Eisenhower Blue, which reminded me of so many mountain courses Alex and I had played back home in Nevada and California. On a busy Friday morning — after Alex beat me into the clubhouse and passed me off as a retired officer to score the military rate (don’t tell the CIA), we eased into a front nine that’s all stately coniferous corridors, gentle slopes, old-school shallow bunkering and greens big enough to handle an F-118 landing — in other words, late 1950s Robert Trent Jones Sr. in full force.

We nursed the first of our customary two or three stogies through the turn as the clouds stacked and the summer breeze freshened. The exquisite, muscular back nine opens up on the edge of high-altitude meadows, then dips back into the forest for its final stanza, moving gradually uphill and angling west, toward the Front Range, as it swallows up real estate in big gulps — two long 4-pars, a 550-yard par 5, 204-yard par 4 and 422-yard finisher. Though we racked up a combined 10-over-par score after the clouds parted, those last few shots went by way too fast, always the case when the game’s best elements — the bring-you-back shots spiced with deep camaraderie and a healthy sense of history — converge into an Experience, a touchstone moment in the long, meandering plot of a traveling golfer’s life.

For that reason, I cherish the thunderstorm that stretched out our Eisenhower Blue round. It was like God up and said, “Not so fast. Time is short — for you, at least. So enjoy, and forget the score.” Not sure if He was down with the cigars and beer, though. I’m gonna tell myself He was, under the circumstances.

The next day dawned just as gorgeous as the last, with the promise of more midday T-storms. Through the good folks in the Broadmoor’s golf department I’d scored a prime tee time on the private guest-only Mountain Course — the newest of the Broadmoor’s three full-length courses, removed from the resort proper and much different in design temperament from the original, famous, parkland-style, championship-tested East and West tracks (the former will host its second U.S. Women’s Open next summer). I started salivating the moment I awoke on the air mattress on Alex and Jess’s living room floor, recalling an opening birdie on the then-freshly redone Nicklaus course when I played it solo a few years earlier.

Not wanting to miss the last round this father and son would play for God knew how long, Jessica rode shotgun with Alex, snapping photos and soaking up the July sun as we both got off to solid starts, driving the green on the short, semi-blind par-4 second hole. Our playing partners, a Connecticut couple staying at the Broadmoor, got the mistaken impression that we were taking time off from the tour; we neglected to mentioned our previous day’s scores, 88 for me and 93 for Alex. We quickly crashed back to Earth, each three-jacking No. 2 for pars then venturing toward bogeyland armed with a fresh supply of cigars and a lighthearted attitude. It was our own little mini-vacation. There we were, in one of the nation’s most underappreciated golf destinations (if you ask me, anyway), with fewer than 18 holes to go and less than 48 hours before Alex reported back for duty at Fort Carson after a month’s leave. He would deploy with the 1st Infantry Division scarcely a week later, but this was no time to dwell on the future. What golfer does when he’s in the throes of the current round to remember? Why even play the game if you’re gonna be distracted by a little ol’ nine-year war?

Right on cue, a couple holes into the back nine, came the clouds, the wind, the rain. The Connecticut couple took up where their Air Force counterparts left off, packing it in. We soldiered on through the bluster, eventually finding shelter next to small copse of trees on the par-3 15th, as lovely a sidehill-hanging one-shotter as Nicklaus has ever devised. Barely 15 minutes later we were on our way, the young Army Specialist and his old man and his new bride, straddling two lives — the last vestiges of youth giving way to flat-out adulthood. The Mountain course’s last three holes play inexorably uphill; the 18th is a wide, treeless stretch hard against a hillside, with bunkers placed at intervals up its left side like sandy mortar scars. It was our final make-believe battlefield before the real deal. Not that we talked about such things as son and daughter-in-law drove me to the airport in Denver. Instead we just soaked in the sweeping Colorado scenery and savored, as best we could, the 36 holes we’d just shared.

Alex’s next tee time would be a doozy. These days his scorecard takes the form of an intel report from the field, provided by fellow players whose bullets pack a little more kick than the dimpled projectiles employed back home. “And we’ve got a golf net set up in my office,” he told me when I finally got a phone call from him in September. “There are a couple of old clubs, including a wood-headed 3-wood. I can hit balls when there’s a lull in the action.”

Alex gets a couple weeks’ leave next spring. I wonder if he’ll carve out time for a round or two with dear old Dad. I’m always game for a golf trip with a hero, son and friend, in that order.