by Melinda Minx
He smiles. I expect him to be angry, or hurt, but he seems genuinely happy for me.
“What about you?” I ask. “You want to stay in Tuckett Bay.”
He shrugs. “I try to conquer just one objective at a time. My career will sort itself out later.”
I move to stand up, and he reaches a hand out for me. I grab hold of his strong hand, and he lifts me up effortlessly. I don’t let go of his hand.
“And what’s your current objective…what is your rank?”
“Huh?” he asks.
“Your rank, in the Special Forces.”
“Captain.”
“Captain Steel,” I say. “What is your current objective?”
He grins. “Is that revenge for me calling your Dr. Sinclaire?”
“Your objective, sir?”
“To have dinner with you on Saturday night,” he says. “Doctor.”
I shake my head. “I don’t believe you. You must have planned further ahead than that.”
He lets go of my hand and shrugs. “Well, I have to get back on the boat. There’s a lot of fish left to catch.”
“You think you already caught me?” I ask, as he turns his back to me.
He looks over his shoulder and lets out a long sigh. “Sophie, I’m so tired of fishing metaphors.”
14
Mason
“Come on, man,” Samuel says. “I told you all about that hot college chick I fucked!”
Samuel drank a lot at lunch. Now he won’t shut up.
I throw the last fish onto the ice and glare up at him. “Sophie isn’t some college chick.”
“That’s why we wanna know so bad,” Samuel says.
“I was with her in high school, all right,” I say. “That enough for you?’
“So, you like, did it, in high school?” Samuel says. “Man, she must have been one hot piece of ass back—”
I grab him and shove him into the edge of the boat. I push him until he’s tipping out over the water, and I hold him there. One more good shove and he’d go down into the freezing water.
“Shit!” Marv yells over. “Mason, come on, man!”
“Don’t fucking talk about her like that,” I say. I lift him up until his feet are off the deck. His eyes widen.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry!” he wails. “Just let me go.”
I pull him by his collar back into the boat, and I throw him down onto the deck. “Mind your own fucking business,” I grunt.
I go back to work, and I know that none of those assholes are going to ask me about Sophie again.
I did realize something talking to Sophie. I realized that I have no real idea what I’m doing here. Aside from getting her back, I have no overall strategy. No plan for my life. In the Special Forces, it was as simple as doing what I was ordered to do. They basically told me where to sleep, where to shit, when to wake up. Fifteen years of that, and now, suddenly, the whole wide world is totally open to me. I can do anything I want; millions of choices are all laid out in front of me.
And the only thing I’m sure of is that I want Sophie? And then what? A girl—a woman—like Sophie isn’t going to want to hang around in Tuckett Bay forever, married to a fisherman.
I’ve got enough money, but it’s not about money. It’s about doing something with my life. Sophie will make me happy, I know that, but if I want to make her happy, I’ve gotta carve out a real life for myself.
15
Mason
2003, Iraq
“Big Steel, Little Steel,” Sanchez shouts.
Eric and I pop up and stand at attention. Eric is scowling. He hates being called “Little Steel.”
The victory celebrations from a few months back have died down, as all of us on the ground realized that we were going to be here for a long time. The guys planting bombs on the road and shooting at us apparently didn’t get the message that we’d already won.
“You two are on the team.”
Eric smiles wide and looks at me. I stay tight-lipped.
The team. We’ve been holding rifles in our hands since we landed, but the initial invasion was mostly completed by the more experienced soldiers. Neither of us has fired a shot. Sanchez’s team is stepping out of the relative safety of Baghdad to flush out insurgents. It’s our first time where Eric and I will really be in a small squad with a real risk of combat.
“We leave in an hour,” Sanchez says.
Once he’s out of earshot, Eric grins. “I’ll show them that I’m more than Little Steel.”
“Look,” I say, pulling him in by the collar. “Forget your ego for a minute. We gotta watch each other’s backs and get out of this alive.”
“Easy for you to say, Big Steel.”
He shoves me off him.
I know not to push him now. I’ll let him cool down rather than pressing the issue. The harder I ride him now, the more likely he is to get even more reckless. Fucking Eric.
I read Sophie’s last letter again, knowing it might be the last. I’ve already wrote her back, but I consider penning another letter. I’ve got an hour.
I hit my bunk in the barracks and grab a pen and paper. I stare at the blank sheet, and my mind wanders.
I start writing, not really thinking about what or why I’m writing. I scrawl as fast as I can, losing track of the time. When I’m done, I read the letter over.
“Shit,” I whisper. “I can’t send this to her unless I die.”
That’s what this is, I realize. It’s a letter to put in my pocket, and to tell everyone to send it to her if I die. I hold the letter in my hands. They’re shaking. I haven’t felt this afraid since I enlisted.
I tear the letter in half, fold it over, and tear again. When it’s nothing but shredded paper on the floor, my hands are calm. Steady. I’m not afraid.
I’m not going to fucking die. I’m going to fight. I’m going to survive. I won’t give her a letter from a dead man, I’ll come back to her alive.
The Humvee rolls across the road. The road is completely blown apart in places from the initial invasion. We’re all quiet and nervous as we ride. IEDs are nearly impossible to spot until they’ve blown up, and they can make short work of a fully armored Humvee. There’s no armor on the bottom.
Riding around in Humvees has been one of the most dangerous things we’ve done since going to war, but that’s about to change. Baghdad is small on the horizon behind us now, and we’re heading south along the Tigris River. Human civilization began here, but it sure doesn’t feel like it now.
As we approach a small town south of Baghdad, the driver pulls off the road and rolls down into the desert. We stop next to some brush, behind which there is another Humvee and a tent.
We step out and meet up with another squad. They are covered in sand and sweat, and they all have a crazed look in their eyes, like they just learned what war really is.
“We were stationed in town,” one of the soldiers said. “And a suicide bomber blew up in the market. All hell broke loose.”
“You didn’t hit ‘em back?” Eric asks.
I elbow him.
The solder gets up in Eric’s face. “Hit who back? He’d blown himself up! He’d blown a bunch of civilians up along with him, the ones who didn’t get killed or maimed were all screaming! You want me to shoot them?”
“So you just ran?” Eric asks.
“We regrouped,” an older guy with a thick grey moustache says, exiting the tent. “With you.”
Sanchez shakes hands with him, then introduces us. “This is Major Bachus. Do everything he fucking tells you to do if you want to get out of this alive.”
After the bombing, the Ba’ath loyalists retook the town. They fled Baghdad before the invasion—knowing the city would fall—and now they are making their move to either retake the city, or to make it so hard to hold that we just give up.
Bachus orders us to march on the town and flush the Ba’athists out before they can solidify their hold and threaten Baghdad.
“I didn’t thin
k suicide bombings were these guys’ style,” Eric says.
We’re moving along in force toward the city on foot. More squads are mobilizing from different angles, cutting off all the roads. Once we’ve encircled the town, we’ll move in from all sides.
Sanchez shakes his head. “It’s not their style. Probably extremist Shiites did the bombing, which got the town to go along with the Ba’athists taking it back.”
“Bachus’s guys shouldn’t have run,” Eric says. “It makes us look weak.”
I grunt.
“You don’t got the balls for this, Big Steel?” Eric says, laughing.
“It’s not about balls,” I say. “I didn’t know what the hell a Ba’athist or a Shi’ite was a year ago, now I’m right in the middle of their shit? I don’t want to die for this. I gotta come back in one piece for Sophie.”
“If we die,” Eric says, “it’s for our country.”
“No one is dying,” Sanchez says, hitting us both hard on the back. “Keep your heads up and remember your training.”
“Heads down, though, if you hear a shot,” someone says.
Everyone laughs. Even me.
We enter a rocky landscape as the road goes from destroyed pavement to potholed dirt. The road is squeezed on both sides by large boulders, which grow gradually into 100-foot high jagged peaks.
Sanchez gives us the order to fan out.
Eric and I take cover behind a large boulder, and I pull out my binoculars. I sweep across the rocky hills in front of us, overlooking the road. The only way into town is through here, and we have to make sure it’s not fortified before we continue through.
I check all across the peaks, and see no one. I look over toward Sanchez, and he gives us the all clear.
We begin down the road, and it soon feels as if the mountains are swallowing us whole. Halfway in, the mountains reach their zenith, and they soon become much shorter as we advance past the center.
That’s when we see the first jeep.
The sun hits it just right, reflecting itself off the Jeep’s windshield. It bursts just long enough for us all to have seen it, and then it’s only clearly visible when we squint.
I pull out my binoculars, and notice dozens of other jeeps behind.
“Shit!” I shout. My voice echoes among the rocks. “At least a dozen vehicles coming toward us.”
Sanchez shouts into his radio, calling for backup. Even as he yells into the receiver, he’s signaling for us all to fall back.
Bachus comes by his side, tears the receiver out of his hand, and gives a new signal.
Fortify.
Sanchez looks back at us with wide eyes. I can tell he doesn’t agree with the order, but he’s not willing to speak out against Bacchus.
He pauses for a few breaths, then shouts, “Fortify the mountains! Go!”
Eric and I start climbing.
Bacchus yells out to us, “Reinforcements will be here in ten minutes. We just have to hold them on the other side of this pass for five!”
Eric and I find a flat surface near the top of the peak. There’s some large boulders in front of us offering cover. We hunker down and watch the jeeps below. They are kicking up thick trails of dust as they barrel toward us.
They must not have seen us, because they keep racing across the packed dirt road, two klicks away, then one klick.
When they are only a few hundred meters away, we get the order to open fire.
For the first time since I landed in Iraq, I squeeze the trigger. My rifle kicks a bit, just like it did in training. And there’s the crack of all the other rifles firing, just like in training. But now we are shooting at human beings instead of targets.
The jeeps immediately swerve and fan out chaotically. I see men jumping out and rolling. Others fall out lifelessly. Did one of my bullets hit them? There’s no fucking way to know. Maybe I just killed a man, or maybe I missed by fifty feet.
Either way, I fire again. I gotta get back home to Sophie, and I have to protect my brothers. Not to mention my actual brother.
Eric’s face is stone-cold as he fires. He’s suddenly serious and collected for the first time in weeks.
We both keep taking shots, even as the jeeps and Ba’athist soldiers start to form a line along the boulders below us.
When we first opened fire, it was a shooting gallery. Every shot was free—the question was just how good our aim was. Now that the hostiles are all behind cover—either behind jeeps or boulders—we have to get shots off in the split second when they expose themselves.
But the hostiles don’t show themselves unless they are firing, too. Muzzle flashes erupt all along their line.
I hear the first gurgling scream from our side only seconds after the enemies open fire. It’s from somewhere in front of us, lower down the ridge.
Eric and I keep our focus on following Bacchus’s orders. If we can just hold here long enough, reinforcements will arrive, and we’ll push them back.
I duck behind the boulder, sight across my rifle, and pop out. I adjust my aim and squeeze off a controlled burst toward one of the exposed hostiles, and before I can even see if I hit, I duck back for cover. This is how we were trained to shoot; to minimize the time we are outside of cover to maximize the efficiency of the shots we take while exposed.
“Big Steel! Little Steel!” a voice shouts from below. It’s Murphy’s deep, rumbling voice. “They hit Willis! He’s fucking dead! I’m pinned down here. Must be like twelve fucking guys trying to hit my black ass! Those racist fucks!”
“Just stay behind cover,” I shout back down to Murphy. “Once reinforcements are here, we can come for you.”
“Fuck that,” Eric hisses. “We should go get him now.”
I grab Eric by the arm, holding him so tight that he’ll rip his arm off if he tries to break free.
“Murphy!” I shout back down. “If you stay in cover, can they hit you?”
“Nah, Big Steel! They can’t hit me. I just can’t fucking move.”
I look Eric in the eye, and he finally nods.
“Alright,” I shout back. “Stay put, we’ll get you as soon as reinforcements are here.”
“Hold for three more minutes!” Sanchez’s voice echoes through the rocks.
Shit. It’s only been two minutes? It felt like at least twenty. Only two things in the universe can warp time like that: the gravity of a black hole, and war.
“What the fuck!” Murphy screeches.
Then I pop out just in time to see the rocket. It whizzes toward us, and I dive back for cover.
First I feel the deep rumble beneath my feet, from deep within the rock, then I hear the explosion.
“Aghhhhhhh!” It’s Murphy’s voice. “I’m hit!”
I look at Eric, and before I can grab him again, he jumps out of cover.
“Fuck!” I shout. My hand is in my pocket now, touching the shredded remnants of the letter to Sophie. I put it in my pocket to remind me not to do anything stupid. Not to get myself killed. It’s a reminder that if I die, she’ll never hear my last words. She’ll never hear how I really feel about her.
But Eric is as good as dead without me, so I jump out of cover and chase after him.
The moment I’m out of cover, I see the line of jeeps below us. Some are on fire, but only a few seconds after I’m out of cover, I hear bullets whizzing past me.
Eric is crouched below another boulder, but this one is too small to fully protect him.
“Eric!” I shout.
“I got this,” he says, and then, as if he’d just tempted fate, he wails and falls to the ground.
I see the red blossom out across his gut, and I charge toward him, slide down beside him on my knees, and drop my gun. I go flat on the ground to avoid getting hit, and Eric opens his mouth to speak, but blood gushes out.
“Mason,” he gurgles. “Fuck, Mason!”
Murphy’s voice finally dies down. He’d been screaming the whole time, but now he’s dead silent.
I press my
hands to Eric’s stomach to stop the flow of blood. I press both palms down against it, but I feel Eric’s life oozing out around my hands.
“No use, bro,” he says. “I can feel it’s over.”
“Shut the fuck up,” I shout at him. Then I scream. “Medic! Fucking medic! Man down!”
“Medic can’t bring me back from the dead,” Eric mumbles. “Sorry I got you into this, Mason. Make it out for—”
He starts to convulse, and I hold him tight, as if preventing him from shaking will keep him alive somehow.
The convulsions stop after only a few moments, and I know then that my little brother is fucking dead. Bullets cut through the air right above my head, and I’m tempted to just stand right up and let them cut me down.
Sophie would be alone then, wouldn’t she? But maybe that’s for the best. Maybe she doesn’t need a man like me. A man who can’t even keep his own fucking brother alive. I was right by his side, all I had to do was hold him there. And I got distracted and let him go. And now he’s gone.
If I can’t protect Sophie, then what good am I to her?
16
Mason
I wake up drenched in sweat. That fucking scene plays itself back not just through my memories, but through my dreams. It’s not enough to live through my brother dying in my arms one time, it has to keep happening over and over, again and again.
I’ve never become numb or desensitized to it. It’s never gotten any easier. But living through it so many times finally helped me to get through it. It might have taken over a decade, but I did get through it. It came close to breaking me at least a dozen times, but I held on. I endured. And now I’m back, ready to face my mistakes. Ready to make good on my old promise.
I wash my face, take a shower, and clear my head. After an hour or so, after I’ve gotten some food in me, the nightmare fades away back into my subconscious. I start to look forward to the future rather than dwelling in the past.