Dedicated to those who serve.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1: Stay With Me, Marine
Chapter 2: Gunny Wunny
Chapter 3: Plastic Dogs
Chapter 4: Dog Day
Chapter 5: Awol
Chapter 6: All Work And No Play
Chapter 7: Old Friends
Chapter 8: Dark Night
Chapter 9: Walking to Work
Chapter 10: Choices
Chapter 11: Contact
Chapter 12: About Poop
Chapter 13: Full-Bird
Chapter 14: Semper Fido
Chapter 15: Footfall
Chapter 16: Leatherneck
Chapter 17: Fetch
Chapter 18: No Place Like Home
Chapter 19: Collateral Damage
Chapter 20: Strays
Chapter 21: The Dragon
Chapter 22: Seek
Chapter 23: Family Reunion
Author’s Note
About the Author
Copyright
Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend.
Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.
— Groucho Marx
It was a mile back to the medevac site, and I couldn’t carry my best friend anymore.
I stopped and felt the limp weight slung over my shoulder, too heavy to go on. I’d carried him this way a hundred times in training. Two hundred times, maybe. But this wasn’t training.
This was real.
My muscles burned and my ears still rang from the explosion. I tried to listen for the distant wump wump wump of a helicopter coming in, but all I could hear was the rapid thump thump thump of my heartbeat.
Or was it Loki’s heartbeat, pulsing desperately next to my ear?
My shirt was covered in blood. Only some of it was mine.
No help could reach us down in this rocky ravine, exposed to sniper fire from all sides. I had to get across the dry riverbed and over that hill.
The riverbed.
Piles of rocks and debris littered the way across. Dozens of plastic bags. Why would there be plastic bags all the way out here, in this rough wilderness, nowhere near civilization? How did they get here? On the way over, I’d run across the riverbed without thinking, giving chase. But now, I hesitated. I looked at the trash and the rubble. I thought.
Every pile of rocks could hide another bomb, every mound of dirt could conceal a land mine. Every plastic bag could be a trip wire. Every step could be my last.
I exhaled. No time to hesitate. Better not to think about it.
“Come on, pal,” I grunted. “Oo-rah!”
I was talking to myself, really, stoking myself up. I didn’t even know if Loki could hear me, if he was even alive. I pushed that idea out of my head too. My thoughts were a maze, with traps around every turn. Dragons in the shadows. Better not to think about anything at all.
I put one foot in front of the other, stumbling, but moving forward.
The idea of stepping on a bomb pushed the pain and exhaustion out of my mind, replacing one shrieking fear with a dozen others. Loki groaned at my side. Alive.
I had to get him to safety, no matter how much my chest ached and my muscles burned, no matter the risk of stepping on a bomb or how much blood I was losing from the shrapnel wound in my leg.
You never leave a marine behind.
“I won’t give up if you don’t,” I whispered as I walked, talking just as much to calm myself as to comfort Loki. “You can do it! Stay with me!”
I was never much for begging, but just then I looked up at the sky, the hazy gray void over the mountains, and I mouthed one silent “please.”
Sweat ran down my cheeks.
I told myself it was sweat.
I knew it wasn’t sweat.
All I wanted was to get Loki safely on board the helicopter and get him to a doctor. I knew we’d be in trouble for running off on our own against orders, for putting the entire operation in danger. Maybe they’d even kick me out of the Corps for being so reckless.
It was almost funny.
I had never been reckless before. I guess I had Loki to thank for that. He was the reckless one.
Lesson learned, pal. Look where it got us.
I laughed. And then my knees buckled as I stumbled over the rocky ground. I fell, crashing my elbows into the earth. The elbow pads kept me from shattering my bones. I heard a low groan of pain, just beside my ear.
“Sorry,” I whispered. “I’m sorry, pal.”
The buzzing in my ears faded, and I could make out some other sounds now: the wind howling through the rocky crags, sweeping the snow off the peaks above me; machine guns rattling in the distance, sounding like a thousand doors slamming shut in anger.
I looked up and saw streaks of orange tracer fire slicing up a far mountain. Alpha Company must be in contact with the enemy. Echo Company was probably pulling back with their wounded. All but the two of us. I needed to reach them. The distance between us was the distance between life and death for Loki. Maybe for me too.
I had to get up off the ground, get moving, get to the landing zone. If I was still out here when the sun went down, the enemy would find me. They knew the rough hills better than I did. They could follow the blood trail easily enough and they could overtake me in the dark. Of course, by then, it wouldn’t matter. If I was still out here when the sun went down, my best friend would already be dead. I’d rather stay with him then, meet the same fate.
But other marines would have to risk their lives to find us. Semper Fidelis, the Marine Corps motto, means always faithful. The faithful part isn’t so hard. It’s the always that gets you. Always means always. Even after it’s too late. They’d come to find us, no matter the risk and no matter if we were alive to thank them.
The sun was sinking deeper, its burning crown dipping below the mountains, the shadows growing nightmarish and long.
I couldn’t allow other marines to come out here in the dark to look for our bodies. I couldn’t put more guys in danger.
I tried to get up, but my legs weren’t listening to me. My ankles wobbled. I slumped back onto the dirt. I couldn’t do it. All the doubts came rushing back at me. I couldn’t stay put and I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t hack it.
Marines were never supposed to give up. Marines always took that last mile faster than the miles before. Marines did not accept failure.
But I was failing.
I pictured my mother on the couch in the living room. She was grieving and nodding, sad but not surprised when two officers in their dress blues came to the front door with the bad news about my death alone in some wretched valley in Afghanistan. She’d lost another man.
I hoped, somewhere in that sadness of hers, there’d be a little pride, at least, that I’d been trying to save my friend. That I didn’t just walk away and abandon him. Would that comfort her at all?
And then, suddenly, a helicopter dropped from the top of a hill, fifty yards in front of me, and sank to the dirt in a cloud of dust. The dust shrouded everything in a reddish haze, and the helicopter vanished inside it.
I ducked my head to shield my eyes, and I only caught the first quick glimpse of the marines who’d come to the rescue.
Semper Fi, I thought.
They covered the distance between us in seconds. Before anyone could say anything, the dirt all around me kicked up in a tight line of bullet impacts. Two of the guys fired their own weapons back toward the ridge. The dirt stopped kicking up. Whoever had been shooting at us must have ducked for cover.
I felt Loki’s weight lifted from my shoulder, felt stron
g hands pull me from the ground, heard them calling my name, but I didn’t answer them.
“Loki!” my voice croaked out, raspy with dust and exhaustion. “Loki needs a medic. He’s wounded!”
I felt them dragging me into the dust cloud, toward the helicopter. More gunfire rattled around us.
“Come on, Gus, hang on,” someone told me. Was it Doc Vasquez? Why was he helping me and not Loki?
“Forget me!” I yelled. “Help Loki! Get him out of here!”
If Doc Vasquez answered, I couldn’t hear over the rotor blades and the high whine of the engines. Someone packed a new bandage onto the wound in my leg, and they hauled me into the bird.
There was a lurch as the chopper lifted off the ground and peeled away from the riverbed, tilting crazily as it sped over the mountains to safety. I felt myself sliding down the metal deck toward the back. Rough hands held me in place because I couldn’t steady myself. I was still groaning Loki’s name, and I knew my face was streaked with tears. I felt like a child.
The tail gunner was a shadow against the landscape below, totally still as the earth raced by beneath him. He fired off a couple of shots toward the hills to cover our getaway. It felt like hours since I’d collapsed on the ground with Loki. It had probably been less than five minutes.
“Where’s Loki?” I called out. “Where is he?”
That’s when I heard it: a faint bark, just to my left. I reached over to scratch behind Loki’s ears. The dog whimpered.
“Hang in there, good boy,” I cooed at him, my voice cracking. I tilted my head back to see my friend. The black Labrador retriever had closed his big brown eyes and rested his snout flat on the deck. His ears sagged back on his head. I felt my eyes getting heavy too. I was so tired.
“Stay with me, good boy,” I mumbled at Loki — my partner, my teammate, my best friend in this crazy war. I tried to hold my eyes open as long as I could, tried to keep scratching behind Loki’s ears and speaking in my most comforting voice. I knew, I just knew that Loki could understand.
My lips kept moving even after I didn’t have the strength to make any noise. I just repeated myself over and over, pleading for one thing, the thing I wanted more than anything in the nineteen years I’d been alive: “Stay with me, Loki,” I told him. “Stay with me, Marine.”
“Stay with me, Marine.” Master Sergeant Gipson said it under his breath, trying to keep me focused, but I wasn’t listening. I was staring straight into the eyes of the dog at his heel, a massive German shepherd named Ccujo, who was giving me a low, throaty growl.
Before you start correcting me, you should know that I spelled “Ccujo” that way on purpose. All the MWDs born and bred at Lackland Air Force Base have their names spelled with a double first letter so that it’s easy to tell where they were born. Dogs born somewhere else and bought by the DOD have normal names with a single first letter. It’s just something the military does.
Like the acronyms, all those crazy combinations of letters. MWD and DOD. MWD stands for military working dog. And DOD stands for Department of Defense. I guess I should have explained that first. The Marine Corps loves acronyms.
During basic training in North Carolina, I spent weeks learning all those crazy combinations of letters. Sometimes I feel like listening to marines talk to one another is like listening to the elves in the fantasy books my little brother Zach is obsessed with. It’s like a made-up language. The military has got some crazy way of saying just about everything in a way that only soldiers understand. I wonder if civilians who hear us think we’re actually speaking some elf language.
“Stay with me, Marine,” Master Sergeant Gipson said again in plain enough English, drawing my focus up to him. I was standing there in front of him, dressed in a full-body protective bite suit, sweating like crazy, puffed up like a marshmallow man.
I could see every muscle in Ccujo’s body tensing. The black and brown fur on his back pricked up. His tail pointed back, rigid. His mouth was closed, for now, but I knew that behind those dark doggy lips were two rows of sharp canine teeth that could chomp down with over two hundred psi. That’s pounds per square inch, which is a way of measuring pressure. It only takes fifteen psi to crack a human skull and seven psi to break a rib, so, you know, I was nervous.
Anyone staring down a dog like Ccujo would get nervous, even a marine. That was kind of the point. A cute, cuddly military dog wouldn’t be much good at scaring off criminals and terrorists, right?
I felt hot sweat trickle down the small of my back. I wasn’t just nervous about the dog. I was nervous about the crowd watching from the bleachers.
Just behind Master Sergeant Gipson and Ccujo, three hundred middle school kids squirmed around one another to get a better view. I was really starting to wonder why I’d volunteered to do this.
This was supposed to be my day off, but I had to show the Master Sergeant my commitment. Getting in the bite suit was like extra credit.
So, while other guys with days off were hitting the beach, flirting with girls, and generally relaxing, I was standing in the hot California sun waiting to get chomped on by a dog with a crazy horror-movie name.
I kept thinking of what my mother had told me the night that I came home and said I’d gone to the United States Marine Corps recruiter at the mall and enlisted.
“You signed up for infantry?” she asked.
I nodded. Didn’t say a word. I just nodded.
But Mom didn’t feel she needed to say anything either, I guess. She snorted once through her nose.
They say a picture’s worth a thousand words. I guess one of my mother’s snorts is worth a million. It sent my blood boiling. I fed Baxter and TJ some scraps from my plate.
“Don’t do that,” Mom snapped at me. “It gives them bad habits.”
“Infantry’s the backbone of the Corps,” I said. I didn’t want her to change the subject. I felt like explaining myself, justifying what I’d done. “It’s where the real men are made.”
“Real men?” Mom shook her head.
I had wanted to be a marine since I was nine years old. It was because of that cheesy ad on TV where the knight slays the dragon and then turns into a United States Marine in dress blues with a shining sword. As soon as I saw it, I wanted that uniform and I wanted that sword. I wanted to slay dragons. I had never been much of a talker, and the marines didn’t care much for talk. They were men — and women — of action.
“What’s infantry?” Zach asked. He was pushing peas around on his plate with the side of his fork to keep busy while Mom and I argued, but now he looked up at me. His tiny twig arms were poking out of a T-shirt with a troll on it, and he had on the big chunky chrome watch I’d given him last Christmas. It was way too big for him, a grown-up watch, but he almost never took it off. It clanged on the side of his plate as he set his fork down.
“It means I’ll be a rifleman,” I told Zach. “A warrior.”
My little brother was just finishing elementary school, top of his fifth grade class, and his nose was always in some thick book about wizards or elves or something. He made me read half of them aloud to him. I’d probably read a thousand pages about make-believe kingdoms and epic battles among monsters and gnomes and stuff. I was amazed a kid could read so much but still not know the word infantry. I mean, our country had been at war in the real world since he was born. But he knew more about these made-up countries filled with elves than he knew about our own.
I guess we never talked about real world stuff at home. It wasn’t his fault. Whenever there was news on about the wars, Mom would snort in that way of hers and change the channel.
“Like the guy fighting the dragon on that ad?” Zach replied. I guess he did pay some attention when I told him things. Or maybe he just liked the idea of his older brother as a character in one of his fantasy books.
I grinned — I couldn’t help it. Gus the dragon slayer.
“What about college?” Mom said, not even listening to Zach’s question. That made me mad, lik
e just because Zach was young his question didn’t matter.
“Yeah, like the guy fighting the dragon,” I told Zach. He grinned too.
“Hello?” Mom said. “College?”
I turned back to her. “I can do college after,” I said.
“After they eat you alive.” She slammed her fork down on the table. “After they take the best years of your life, chew you up, and, if you’re lucky, spit you out.”
“They will not.” I said. “I’m not like Dad.”
Mom’s nostrils flared like a thousand of her snorts were backed up in there, hot as dragon’s breath. I knew right away I shouldn’t have opened my mouth. I should have known better than to bring up Dad.
He’d been gone ten years already, but Mom still couldn’t forgive him for leaving. He’d been in the Marine Corps as an infantryman when I was a little kid. He was always away somewhere. I had only the haziest memories of him in his uniform, of him showing up for my peewee football games in his camouflage fatigues, of him and my mother yelling at each other late at night. He’d only been out of the marines for a month when he packed a bag and left us. He didn’t come back.
Mom stared down at her plate, her palms spread wide on the table. Zach watched us silently, looking between us for some idea of how he was supposed to feel. I knew he didn’t have any memories of our dad, but he knew I had upset Mom and he didn’t like that. The heroes in his books never upset their mothers. Except maybe by leaving home for noble quests.
“I mean, I …” I wanted to fix this, to explain to her and to Zach how this was a good thing. But I had no idea what to say.
“I’ll come back,” I finally told her. “I’m strong enough to do this. They won’t chew me up and spit me out.”
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