“Hell, yeah.” Devon jumped off the treadmill and grabbed a twenty-pound weighted vest from the pile of them in the corner. The Murph, a CrossFit workout memorializing a SEAL who’d been killed in action, consisted of pull-ups, sit-ups, pushups and squats bracketed with a one-mile run, all while wearing the vest.
She’d done it many times. To do it on a base in Afghanistan, with actual SEALs... She swallowed the sudden lump in her throat.
The grunts crowded around. “Hey, man. Can we join you, too?”
Flicking them a glance, Grizz scoffed, “Doubt you can keep up.”
“What?” One of the dudes was clearly outraged. “You’re gonna let her.” He stabbed a finger toward Devon.
“Yeah. ’Cause she can keep up.” Grizz said it in the patient tone of someone explaining something to a child.
The hoots were subdued, but clearly derisive. “Yeah, right,” the guy said. “Must be more fun watching her tits bounce than—”
Grizz’s jaw rippled in anger. “I’d suggest you watch your mouth,” he ground out, but Devon held her hand up.
“Don’t waste your breath,” she said before turning to the group. “Pick your best guy. I’ll beat his time.”
A few people backed off with muttered “Fuck no,” but one stepped up with an arrogant smirk. “You’re on.”
They all donned their weighted vests and waited for the digital clock on the wall to reach the next full minute.
“Go!”
There was a running route mapped around the base where two full circuits equaled a mile. The guy who’d challenged Devon surged to the front of the pack, accompanied by the chants of “Go, Moose! Yeah, Moose!” from his buddies.
He was fast. By the time Devon completed her mile, he was already puffing away at the pull-ups. His form was sloppy, face bright red and beaded with sweat, as he hammered them out one by one. Devon elected to do her squats first, slow and steady, aware of the grunts’ glee at their buddy’s superior performance.
His pull-ups done, Moose threw himself into some furious pushups, his desire to impress the SEALs written all over him. About halfway through his set, he started to flag visibly, his whole body trembling at the effort.
“C’mon, Moosey, faster!” his buddies exhorted him.
Devon’s pull-ups were tough, and she was puffing herself at the end of them. To give her upper body a break, she went right into her sit-ups. Nearby Moose was struggling with his. He was muscle-bound but lacked the core strength to power through them. He flopped down on his back and fought his way back up, managing one to Devon’s five. She was already well into her pushups when Moose struggled to his feet, laced his fingers behind his head and started some rapid squats.
“Yeah, Moose, you got this! Gonna beat her!”
Devon’s arms were jelly but she shoved away the pain, determined not only to finish her set, but do it with perfect form—arms fully extended, drop down, elbows at ninety, back up. Over and over.
Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.
The weight vest dragged at her, and sweat dripped from her nose. Next to her Moose seemed to have caught a second wind and finished his squats, then staggered out the door for his final one-mile run, accompanied by the loud cheers of his guys.
Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred!
Pushups in the bag, Devon leapt to her feet and ran after Moose. He’d exhausted himself, and by leaving the squats for last, his legs were toast. Devon passed him easily, aware of his furious shout, his heavy puffs as he fought to catch up.
He never quite managed it, and in the end, Devon beat his time by almost a full minute. Moose threw his weight vest off and stalked out of the gym without a word, although a few of his guys came up for knuckle bumps and murmurs of “Respect,” before trudging after him.
Rhys leaned against a wall nearby, his green eyes warm with admiration. “You knew you’d beat him.”
“Yeah.” Devon shucked her weight vest and picked up a towel to mop her face with. “I always do. The guys who can beat me aren’t the ones threatened by me.”
With a shrug, she headed for the shower, followed by Rhys’s low, husky chuckle.
Over the next several days, she and Rhys joined a few of the recon patrols out into some of the more remote villages. The inhabitants were cautious but mostly welcoming. Bradley would meet with their elders, solemn men with weathered skin, their beards dyed red and kohl around their eyes.
Her hair tucked under a scarf, Devon sat with the women and children. They were curious about her life in America, and spoke frankly about their own lives—the lack of education, the arranged and forced marriages. One woman’s thirteen-year-old daughter had recently been given to a man in another village in order to settle a dispute. She was to be his second wife.
“The first wife abuses her terribly,” the woman said, her sorrow etched on her face. “Makes her sleep in the kitchen, only gives her the leftover scraps of food.”
Devon’s heart ached, but there wasn’t anything she could do.
“American women get to choose their own husbands?” a young girl asked wonderingly.
“Yes. We marry for love.”
The women scoffed at the notion.
Rhys offered medical care to any villager who needed it. He didn’t talk to the women, but he was allowed to see the children. Devon loved watching him interact with them, his gentleness, the funny faces he’d make that elicited shy giggles, his quiet expertise.
“You’re good with kids,” she said later, when it was just the two of them sprawled in his hooch with cups of weak coffee he’d made on his hot plate. “You want any of your own?”
“No way.”
He sounded so vehement that Devon glanced over at him. “Really?”
“Considering the lack of fatherly role models I’ve had in my life, the last thing I need is to be one myself.” His voice wasn’t bitter, just matter-of-fact. “I enjoy kids, and yeah, I think I’m good with them. I just don’t want any of my own. How about you?”
“Same, actually. I don’t have much of a desire to be tied down like that.” Devon leaned back against the wall and stretched out her legs. The chairs he had were rickety and uncomfortable, so they’d made quite the cozy conversation pit on a patch of floor with a handmade Afghan rug Rhys had bought in one of the villages. She fingered the elaborate, colorful weave, knowing that the women and girls who’d made it had toiled for hours in a hot and dusty room.
“What do you want to do after the Army?” he asked.
“Travel. Do something with my degree. Go to graduate school.”
Rhys finished his coffee and set his cup aside. “What’s your degree in?”
“Social work.” Drawing one knee up, Devon draped her wrist over it. “I’d originally wanted to go right to flight school, but I promised my dad I’d get that backup degree first.”
“The Army flight program doesn’t require a degree?”
“Nope. No officer’s commission, either. It’s called ‘high school to flight school’ for a reason. Hearing about the CST program derailed everything. In a good way, but...”
Despite the word officer in her title, warrant officers weren’t commissioned; they were enlisted with a specific specialty.
“What about you? Shane said something about PA school?”
“Yep. I want to go into emergency medicine. When I was at 18-D, the spec ops medic course, we did rotations in inner-city emergency rooms, rode on ambulances, did hands-on trauma care. It was amazing.”
Devon was curious. “What sets PJs apart from regular corpsmen and medics, then?”
With a chuckle, Rhys lay down on his side and propped his head in his hand. “A lot of PJs hate being called ‘medics,’ but it’s never bothered me. It’s the simplest term to use, but it’s only a small part of what I’m trained to do. Our specialty is personnel recovery—downed pilots. We insert behind enemy lines, locate and authenticate, provide lifesaving care and then fight our way back out if necessary.”
“Shit. H
ave you ever had to do any of that?”
“No.” A shadow crossed his face. “At the rescue squadron, most of what we did was pick up the pieces of our guys and innocent civilians who’d run afoul of an IED.”
There was a thread of...something...in his voice that made Devon put her hand on his forearm. The next words burst out of him in a torrent of sound.
“Once some infantry guys were on patrol and a dude stepped on an IED. It—” Rhys closed his eyes. “It blew him up into some trees. He was hanging there by his pack. Dead.”
Devon rubbed her thumb over the corded muscles and just listened.
“The tree was too high for anyone to climb, too dangerous. So they called us. I was winched down from a helo and I cut him free.”
Such simple words to encapsulate what must have been a horrific experience, both for Rhys and the man’s friends on the ground, who’d had to watch the lifeless body of someone they loved spiral back to earth like a carelessly dropped rag doll.
There wasn’t anything Devon could say, nothing that would lessen the impact of what he’d gone through, so she just kept stroking his arm, letting him know she was there.
After a moment, Rhys’s ragged breathing steadied and he opened his eyes. “I’ve never told anyone that before.”
She knew why. Who back home would understand? They’d be horrified, and fascinated, to hear a story like this, but in the end it would affect them not at all, which was why so many combat vets were adrift when they returned home.
“There wasn’t anything you could do for him at that point,” she said softly. “You know that, right? All you could do was help him get home to his family.”
And at great personal risk to himself, too. Winching down into the trees from a hovering helicopter was no joke. Any deviation in altitude could’ve meant Rhys’s injury or death. That pilot was a hero, too.
“Yes. That’s exactly what I tell myself.” Rhys’s voice was husky with remembered emotion. “When I’m wandering the aisles of my local Safeway at three in the morning.”
“Ah.” She quirked her lips. “Good old Safeway. The site of many a battle with mental demons.”
“What’re yours?”
Her gaze didn’t waver from his. “You know what they are. And no, I don’t feel the need to talk about the details anymore. It’s something that happened to me, and it wasn’t my fault. It was theirs.”
“So what makes you wander the Safeway?” Rhys’s voice was whisper soft.
“Because I trusted them, okay?” she snapped. “I would have taken a bullet for any one of those men. And they threw my trust away like garbage.”
Turning his palm up, Rhys gripped her fingers. It was his turn to listen as the words rushed out of her with the force of a tsunami.
“I came back here to rewrite that part of my story, you know? It’s my narrative, not theirs. I wanted to learn to trust again; believe in myself again. Prove to everyone around me that I’m not a victim.”
“No way. You’re not a victim.”
“Damn right I’m not.” She gave him a mighty shove in her enthusiasm and he collapsed down on his back, dragging her with him. Propping her elbow on his chest, she gazed down into his face, smiling.
He grinned back at her. “I gotta say, you’re really beautiful when you’re all fired up.”
“Yeah?” Devon stroked his jaw, the roughness of his beard tickling her fingertips. “Only when I’m fired up?”
“Nah. You’re beautiful all the time, but there’s something extra gorgeous about the way your eyes flash...” Rhys gave an exaggerated shiver.
Chuckling, she lightly flicked his nose. “You’re silly.”
“But I give good hugs.”
He opened his arms, and without hesitation, Devon curled up against his side and put her head on his shoulder. “Oh, yeah, you do.”
His embrace was perfect—tight enough to be comforting, but not so restrictive that she felt threatened in any way. They drifted in silence, the only sound the slight clink of Rhys’s dog tags as Devon lifted and dropped them back against his chest.
Finally he sighed. “It’d just be temporary, huh?”
Sudden tears rushed to Devon’s eyes and clogged her throat. “Yeah,” she managed. “But it wouldn’t be casual.”
She felt him bury his lips in her hair, his voice so soft as to be almost inaudible, “Sweet, beautiful girl. I—”
Before he could complete that thought, there came a pounding on the door and Matt burst through it, still wearing all his tactical gear, weapon slung from his shoulder. “Doc, we need you!”
They both sat up in alarm. “What is it?”
Matt told them about a young boy in the neighboring village. “Stepped on an old Soviet land mine a few weeks ago, blew off part of his right foot. They left it untreated, and now it’s so infected, Doc. The kid is in a lot of pain, and the smell...” He gagged.
“Let’s go.” Rhys jumped to his feet, Devon right behind him.
“They told Sayed they didn’t want to be seen asking the Americans for help.” Matt’s words stopped them both in their tracks. “They fear reprisals.”
Sayed was a member of the Afghan National Army who acted as their platoon’s interpreter. He’d said at the outset he was afraid for his own family’s safety, and he hadn’t been home in years so as not to lead anyone watching him to them.
They all looked at each other helplessly, until Devon suggested, “We could do a hard entry, as if we’re searching them or something. Make it look like we forced them.”
A gleam entered the men’s eyes. “I like it,” Rhys said slowly. “That might work.”
“Lemme get Hov and Maddox.” Trotting out the door, Matt soon returned with Shane and Aaron. The five of them huddled around a map of the village, and after a few minutes of intense discussion decided on their course of action.
Devon shivered in excitement. It’d be a fine line to walk between the appearance of American aggression and allowing the family to save face, so they had to proceed carefully.
“Okay, get jocked up,” Rhys ordered them. “We roll in fifteen.”
On a medical mission, and as the guy with the most combat experience, it was understood Rhys would take tactical lead; Devon couldn’t help but be impressed at how the other three had checked their SEAL egos at the door in their willingness to help.
Her heart in her throat, she flew to her hooch to grab her Kevlar. She snatched up her weapon and quickly checked it over. Since arriving in country, she’d kept it meticulously clean and sighted in, so it was just a matter of making sure her magazine was full and she had extra ammo.
Then she jogged out to meet the guys, who were already gathered in front of Rhys’s hooch. Bradley was there, too. “This is going on the books as a humanitarian mission,” he was saying. “You’ll be following MEDROE, Halloran.”
Medical Rules of Engagement, which said that an injury not the fault of the United States wasn’t eligible for advanced care. In other words, Rhys wouldn’t be able to call for a medical evacuation of the child. The U.S. wouldn’t risk a helicopter and flight crew to assist in something that wasn’t their fault.
It was understandable, but it still sucked. They all nodded.
“I’ll be monitoring from the TOC,” Bradley went on. “Good luck, guys.” Fist bumps all around, and then Bradley jogged toward the tactical operations center, where he’d be listening to their comms, ready to send help if they ran into trouble.
Matt and Rhys took point, Devon in the middle, Shane and Aaron bringing up the rear. They moved swiftly and silently through the sleeping village, the darkness of the Afghan night almost tangible. Through her night-vision goggles, Devon could see an occasional cat slink through the shadows and tensed, wondering if the ever-present packs of feral dogs would betray their presence.
But all was quiet, and as they neared the target house, the stench of rotting flesh filled the air. Bile rushed into Devon’s throat, and she gulped it down, horrified by the ext
ent of the little boy’s infection.
The team arrayed themselves next to the front door, and at Rhys’s signal, Matt raised his booted foot and kicked it in. They swarmed into the tiny mud house, following their noses to the family’s sleeping room.
Swiftly, silently, they overwhelmed and flex-cuffed everyone but the child. Devon warned them in Pashto to keep quiet. “We’re here to help.”
Wide-eyed, the family nodded as Rhys knelt next to the little boy. His left foot was wrapped in some filthy, bloodstained cloths, and when he eased them away, Devon gasped. The toes were completely gone, and what remained of his foot was a mass of blackened goo.
Rhys hissed through his teeth. “Fuck. Devon, translate as I go.” He pointed at Aaron. “Help me hold him down. This is gonna hurt.”
Trying not to puke, Devon relayed in shaky Pashto what Rhys was doing as he gloved up and first irrigated the boy’s wounds with Betadine before grimly going to work to scrub out all the dead flesh.
The boy’s screams were heartbreaking, even muffled as they were behind Aaron’s hand. By the time Rhys sat back and wiped his sweaty forehead with his sleeve, everyone in the room was green around the gills.
“Almost done,” he murmured.
Trembling with relief, Devon knelt next to the boy and brushed his damp hair off his forehead. “You’ve been so brave. It’ll feel better soon.”
Rhys irrigated the wound again and packed it with blood-absorbing gauze, then wrapped the whole thing up in a clean, white bandage. As a final indignity, he rolled the boy onto his side and plunged a needle into his butt cheek.
“A horse dose of antibiotics,” he said. “Devon, tell them to keep the bandages as clean as possible. We’ll be back in a few days, op tempo permitting.”
Devon translated as best she could, some of the medical terms escaping her in Pashto, but she was able to get the gist across. A woman nodded vigorously as she listened carefully to the instructions.
“We’re going to leave you like this,” Devon said gently, referring to their flex-cuffs. “That way no one will think you asked for help.”
The woman nodded again. “My sister comes by every morning to weave with me.” For the first time, Devon noticed the loom set up in one corner of the room. Making rugs must be how the family supported themselves. “She’ll set us free.”
Keeping a Warrior Page 18