by John Renehan
“So whattaya think, L.T.?” said Hill, sweeping their surroundings with his smoke hand.
Black looked out at the dark panorama beyond the rock slab.
“Not to be a downer,” he said, looking at the little fire, “but you guys don’t think it’s a little bit crazy to be lighting that thing up here on the mountaintop?”
“That’s the beauty, sir,” said Hill through a breeze of smoke.
“What’s the beauty?”
Hill gestured out into the night.
“You look out over there, sir,” he said. “We’re covered on three sides. The only people that can see this fire is someone that’s wayyyyyyy—”
He pointed across the chasm toward the other mountains, whose top halves were visible.
“—the heck over there.”
“Okay.”
“Only a supersniper could make the shot from that mountain, sir.”
He took a drag.
“And Afghani dudes with a rifle generally ain’t super,” he said, exhaling to the nods of the sniper team guys.
Black squinted at the far slopes.
“It ain’t like they don’t know we’re here anyway,” Hill went on. “This fire pit must drive ’em crazy, wanting to kill us every night but not being able to get us. Kinda cool, right?”
“Right.”
The two guard tower soldiers from Vega eyed the blackness uneasily.
“And if they did actually make that shot one day,” Hill continued, kissing a narrow cone of smoke across the gulf. “Well, shit, that’s just sporting, right? I mean, they almost deserve the kill if they can make that shot.”
He grinned his cigarette-stained grin and drew another cloud into his lungs.
“Makes you feel alive up here, sir!”
Bosch spoke up for the first time.
“That’s fucked up,” he said sullenly.
Hill leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs out in front of him, crossed at the ankles, gazing out at the void.
“Well this,” he said quietly, “is where you come to do fucked-up shit.”
He looked at Bosch with piercing eyes.
“Right, Bosch?”
Bosch said nothing. The first soldier shook his head.
“You’re crazy, Hill.”
“Pfft!” Hill scoffed. “Crazy. What’s crazy? We’re livin’ up here like the Swiss Family Robinson on top of a mountain in the middle of no-freakin’-where. That’s crazy.”
He took a drag and exhaled slowly.
“This place ain’t even real,” he muttered through the haze.
He lingered in his smoky thoughts before turning to Black with his wide-gapped smile.
“You ever wondered what’s crazy and what’s real, sir?”
Black turned and looked him in the eye.
“Yeah,” he answered flatly. “I have.”
For a moment Hill seemed taken aback. He shook it off and squinted at Black, nodding his head mock-knowingly.
“So,” he said brightly, “whatcha doin’ way up here, sir?”
Black glanced at Brydon, who looked at the ground.
“Just got some business with Sergeant Merrick.”
The kid nodded conspiratorially.
“Mmmmm, I gotcha, I gotcha, sir. Hooah. Officer business.”
He raised his cigarette in a toast.
“Well, welcome to our humble abode.”
Black raised his own and dipped his head.
He was content to listen to the soldiers smoke and joke, but no one besides Hill seemed able to relax with him there. The taciturn Bosch said little, as usual, and kept eyeballing Black. His friend from the guard shack stared off into the night awkwardly. Brydon examined the stone slab and seemed to wish to be invisible. The snipers for their part had never met Black before. Soldiers as a rule don’t loosen up around officers they don’t know.
“How did Traynor die?” he said to no one in particular, but looking straight at Brydon.
The medic looked up, surprised, catching Black’s eye briefly before looking away again.
“Aw, sir,” said one of the snipers. “You sure you wanna know that one?”
“Hit me.”
The sniper shook his head, took a long pull on his smoke, and told it.
“It was when they first took this ground,” he said, gesturing at the rock around them. “All this glorious little tidbit of shitty land here that we’re sitting on.”
“Okay.”
Vega, he explained, was still brand-new at that point. No one had gone much past there, and the platoon came under frequent attack whenever it tried to. Word came down from headquarters that they needed to find high ground to lay in an O.P. between Vega and Darreh Sin.
“They needed a squad,” the sniper said. “A volunteer squad, to move fast and light and identify a location. Then air assets would come and secure it.”
“Traynor’s squad.”
“You got it, sir.”
The sniper looked around at his buddies.
“That was a tight nine guys,” he said, shaking his head. “Knew each other’s girls and hung out all the time off-duty and all that shit. Kinda weird, honestly.”
Somebody chuckled.
“Not, like, gay weird,” the sniper continued, “but anyway, you know how it goes with squads. Sooner or later everything kinda breaks down all onesie-twosie, just each dude with his coupla buddies. Not those dudes. They were like nine freaking brothers.
“So Traynor’s the junior guy. E-two private, got to the unit, like, three weeks before they deployed, and here he is trying to hold his own with dudes that are practically like family.”
They scouted the ridges and passes for a day before they found the site. It was perfect. They made camp for the night.
They hadn’t seen a soul up there. But someone had seen them. Someone was ready. As soon as day broke, they were attacked, by a significantly larger force.
“They never even knew who it was,” the sniper said. “Taliban, or what? Never knew how they had got seen or how the enemy laid so much heat on ’em so quick.”
The situation rapidly became untenable. Nine guys, barely dug in, with only the weapons they could carry up to the heights of the mountains. There was no chance. Too many attackers with too many heavy weapons and rockets, pushing in around and below them. Multiple guys were wounded immediately.
Under heavy fire, the squad managed to climb higher and drag the wounded up to the ridgeline. They called for air support to keep them alive and MEDEVAC—medical evacuation—helicopters for the wounded.
Attackers pressed them from below, now from both sides of the mountain, lobbing rockets and grenades up onto the ridge and resisting all efforts by the Americans to drive them back.
Most of the squad at this point were either incapacitated or already dead. The attacking force, whoever it was, could taste it coming. The complete overrun and annihilation of an American position. That didn’t happen every day.
An attack helicopter arrived and did what it could. It was hard to pick out the attackers in the wooded slopes, and the chopper itself kept coming under fire from the trees. The pilot had to keep pulling back. What he did see, he reported later.
He saw a cluster of Americans on the ridgeline. Only one really was moving. But the one guy was racing back and forth frenetically across the mountaintop, from one edge of the ridge to the other. He moved like a madman, sending grenades and machine-gun fire down into the treeline, keeping up as much flash and noise as he could to convince the attackers that there was still a fighting force up there.
“Traynor,” said Black.
“You know it, sir.”
The MEDEVAC bird arrived. Its pilot was a madman too.
“Dude had the balls to descend,” the sniper said, pointing back over
his shoulder. “Fucker came down over the summit and flew right down the ridgeline at about twenty-five damn feet. He was so low nobody could get an angle to fire up at him.”
Traynor didn’t get on the helicopter.
The MEDEVAC pilot didn’t know what the other pilot had seen, which was that there was only one person left fighting on the mountaintop. Otherwise his crew would have made Traynor get on. The pilot only knew that the place was hot and they had critical wounded to get out.
Traynor helped the crew drag three wounded on board and watched it go.
Later, after it was all over, the MEDEVAC crew reported that they had asked Traynor how many guys were left on the mountain with him. Standing there in the rotor wash, he just shouted, “We’re good,” and ran back to the fight.
But the other pilot, the one flying the attack helicopter, could see only one American moving on the mountaintop after the MEDEVAC bird left. Everyone else with him was dead.
Traynor kept racing around the mountaintop, keeping up the fireworks display, raiding his buddies’ bodies for ammunition and grenades.
“How’d it end?” Black asked.
“The Apache finally had to bail,” the sniper said, “but Sergeant Caine saw what happened next.”
“Caine?”
“Yeah. He was coming with the Q.R.F. from Vega.”
Quick reaction force. The rescue squad.
“Everyone was broke off from hustling the whole way up the mountain from Vega,” he said, thumbing the black air behind him. “Except Sergeant Caine. You know how he is in the mountains. Freaking machine.”
Black thought back to the harrowing climb back from Darreh Sin, with Caine seemingly not even winded, haranguing everyone to speed up.
“He climbs ahead of the rest of the Q.R.F., and he’s coming down the ridgeline over the summit up there.”
He shook his head.
“Thirty seconds too late. Saw the rocket land right under Traynor’s freaking feet.”
“Oh.”
“Vaporized his ass,” the sniper said glumly. “Sergeant Caine couldn’t even find some damn chunks of him to stick in his coffin.”
Everyone was silent. The guard tower soldiers from Vega had been rapt.
“Best part,” the sniper told them, “none of those dudes Traynor put on the MEDEVAC bird even made it.”
He examined his cigarette, which had nearly died while he’d been telling the story. He sucked it back to life and shook his head.
“Losing Traynor was rough on Sergeant Caine, man. He liked the kid. Kinda took him under his wing.”
“If everybody else on the mountain was dead,” the first soldier asked, “why didn’t Traynor get on the MEDEVAC?”
“Yeah, he coulda been on that bird and outta there,” the sniper answered. “He knew he was probably fucked. But he wasn’t gonna leave his buddies’ bodies to get fucked up and desecrated and shit, and he wasn’t gonna take a space on a MEDEVAC from a dude that was still alive, no matter how hurtin’ and critical the guy might-a been.”
“Damn.”
“Damn right. Hardly knew those dudes for two weeks before they deployed, but he laid it down without blinkin’.”
The sniper eyed Black.
“That, sir, is loyalty,” he said. “Your boys is your boys, even if you just met ’em.”
He took a theatrical drag as the other sniper nodded his approval.
“Y’all got that on the officer side of the house?”
Black gave him a look that, to his surprise, made the kid shut his trap. No one else said anything.
Black’s mind wandered, out among the mountain spaces. Hill’s voice brought him back.
“Lucky Traynor,” Hill said quietly.
“What?” asked the first soldier.
“Taliban, or whoever the fuck, done him a favor.”
Everyone looked at him like he was nuts.
Hill stubbed his smoke out and got a fresh one. He put out his feet and leaned back in his camp chair, surveying his audience. Making them wait for it.
“Saw a thing on the news, a few years back,” he said. “Sixtieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, right? They’re talking about this dude who was the only survivor of one of the ships that got sunk there.”
He lit up.
“Wasn’t one of the bigger ships, right? Didn’t have a whole lot of guys on it, but he was the only one that made it out.”
“Okay,” said the soldier.
“Dude was thirty at the time. Been in the Navy a little bit. News story was about how he went out to Hawaii on the anniversary, for the first time ever since the war. You know, old codger tour group with the blue hats and shit.”
“Right.”
“So he goes out to Hawaii with his wife and some of his kids and the other blue hats and all their wives and all their kids, and they all have a nice little trip, right?”
“Right.”
“You know, breakfast in the hotel, ride on their tour buses and totter around on the docks and stuff, looking down in the water and payin’ their respects to their old buddies thinkin’ ’bout when they were all kids with no wrinkles or nothin’, like we all sittin’ right up here on this cliff. Nice happy little trip, everyone sheds a tear, do your hugs and get on home.”
He paused for a good drag on his cigarette.
“So when the old dude gets back to his hotel, he tells his wife and his kids that when he dies he wants his ashes brought back there to Pearl, and he says put ’em in the water.”
“Okay.”
“And, you know, his wife is kinda hurt, right? ’Cause she was thinkin’ all eternity in the family plot back in Bumfuck, Nowhere, right? Like, side by side forever in the kinda shithole where I live back home.”
He chuckled.
“But his kids see it in his eyes, and she sees it, and everyone sees they can’t make him change his mind. So they say, ‘Hey, you’re the boss a’ you,’ and they all hug on it or whatever, and they all think he’s a little crazy, but hey, he survived Pearl Harbor, so he gets to be crazy, right?”
He blew out a long one.
“Died that night,” he said flatly. “Didn’t make it back to Bumfuck or nowhere else. Didn’t get on the plane. Went to sleep in his hotel bed after the Love-You-All dinner they had that night at the Holiday Inn or wherever, and woke up dead.”
“Damn.”
“So I’m watchin’ the news about this, and everyone in the news story that’s hearin’ about it from the Bumfuck folks is getting all teary and saying, Oh, that’s so sweet, he stayed alive to make it back and honor his friends before he died, and all that shit. But that’s bullshit.”
The first soldier looked at him quizzically.
“He didn’t live no happy life,” said Hill, taking a drag. “He lived a cursed life.”
“Whatta you mean?”
Hill turned to the soldier.
“He didn’t die in the ship with his buddies like he was supposed-a.”
He inhaled and blew out a long jet.
“So he was damned to walk the Earth for sixty years with his buddies haunting his life the whole time. May-a looked like he lived a happy life, but that just made it worse. The more he got in life—kids, a wife, whatever—that was just one more thing he had to chew on that his buddies never got.”
“Oh.”
“He didn’t go back there to pay his respects and honor his buddies, man. He went back there to ask ’em, ‘Is sixty goddamn years enough?’”
The guard soldier was watching him like a kid at a campfire.
“And they said, ‘We’re cool now, bud.’”
He surveyed the group.
“They set him free.”
No one said anything. He went on, with mischief in his voice.
“But his buddies ain’t even that cool
after all. Everybody in the news story is all charm-y and saying, Oh, he wants his ashes to be with his buddies, how nice, but they got that one wrong too.”
“Whatta you mean?”
“His buddies ain’t even there in the water,” Hill said, shaking his head. “Coupla the big ships are there—Arizona, right?—but the littler ships, they ain’t at the bottom of Pearl Harbor no more. They all got pulled up and scrapped after the attack.”
He chuckled darkly.
“His buddies ain’t lyin’ in the bottom of the sea. But that’s where he’s gonna lie. That’s the fuckin’ deal they made.”
A breeze bent the little fire.
“He ain’t never gonna leave there. His wife even said it too. After she got back home the little Bumfuck newspaper did a story and came to her house and made her tell the whole story, right? And when she got to the ashes part they asked her, ‘How did you feel about the ashes?’”
“Yeah?”
“And she just looked the reporter in the eye and said, ‘In some ways I don’t think Gerald ever left Pearl Harbor.’ And she’d probably been sayin’ that to herself her whole life, but it took that whole time for her to realize how true it was. Blew her life on a man who was damned and didn’t even figure it out till practically the end.”
He blew a cloud of smoke at everyone and let them chew on that.
“What happened to her?” Black asked.
“Funny you ask, L.T.,” Hill said, with a wicked little grin. “She was a little younger than he was, right? Turns out her old high school sweetheart was still doddering around Bumfuck too. Married him six months later and called it a day.”
He laughed out loud.
“God damn,” said the first soldier, hollow-voiced.
Everyone stared at the stone slab, defeated.
“That,” said one of the snipers, “is the worst fucking happy ending I’ve ever heard.”
“Yep,” said Hill, still amused. “Probably thought about that dude every week her whole life but still stuck by ol’ Gerald. Then Gerald says, ‘Thank yee very much for the grand life together, but I’ll be sleepin’ with the fishes if you don’t mind.’”
Everyone lapsed into silence again. Hill eyeballed Black.
“You got a girl, there, sir?” he asked. “There someone back home waitin’ around loyally on ol’ Lieutenant Black?”