by Emily Snow
“This is your clearance form for your NCOIC, you should be able to get on a plane soon.” She hands me another piece of paper. “This is his emergency number; he says when you finally hit the wall to give him a call.”
“Tell him I said fuck you. I won’t hit a fucking wall because I’m a soldier, not a coward.” I storm from the office and call my dad.
He answers immediately. “Son, is everything okay?”
“Yeah, I’ll be getting on a plane soon. I need you to talk to Mom. I need everything in this apartment packed up while I’m gone and I want every piece of furniture sold. If Mac’s parents want her stuff, they can have it. I want to be able to leave my lease and when I get back, I’ll stay in the barracks until it’s time for a duty station change. Have them check with Shannon, I’m sure some of the stuff in the spare room is hers.”
“Son, are you sure?”
“Dad, I just need this shit done. I can’t deal with it. What I can do is go back to the desert and do my damn job. Please, I didn’t ask for anything through all of this, just do this for me.”
I hear him sigh. “Okay, son. I don’t think you’re dealing with this right, but it’s your grief, not mine or your mother’s.”
I ignore the warnings he’s trying to send me. “Thanks. I gotta go turn in this paper work. I’ll keep you posted.”
Stage Four - Depression
I’ve been back with my unit for six weeks now. Before I left, my dad assured me that all the shit with our stuff would be taken care of. I haven’t talked to them since I’ve been back. I don’t need to think about home or the shit that’s there. We’re on a mission right now. I’ve been lying here for two fucking hours watching this target. My earpiece chimes, “Target is on the move, Nichols.”
“Roger. On it.”
Meadows chimes in. “He’s got an entourage with him, I don’t think we need to do this now.”
I grit my teeth. I need this. I need this kill. “It happens now. The entourage can be neutralized.”
My team leader speaks into my ear. “If you can’t get the shot, it’s a no go, Nichols. If his entourage is too big, it’s a no go.”
“It’s a go. I can get a shot.”
Meadows chimes in again. “Think with your damn head, Sergio.”
“Shut up, Meadows. I got this.”
I tune the rest of the chatter out. My target is clear. I dial in, take a deep breath and fire. He’s down, now to deal with the chaos surrounding him. Shots ring out from several directions; some are my guys, some are theirs.
After I take out part of his entourage, I hump it to get to my ride. Our Humvees are staged a block or so over. I’ve got to move to get to them. I know my team won’t leave without me, but I won’t push it.
Once we are back at our camp, I’m called in. Meadows is sitting in the corner of the room with my team leader and our OIC. My team leader throws his helmet. “What the fuck was that, Nichols? I told you repeatedly to stand down.”
I shrug. “That must’ve been after I turned down my earpiece. Too much chatter. I couldn’t concentrate on my job.”
Meadows stands up and slams his hands on the table in the middle of the tent. “Fuck you, Sergio. You put all of us in danger. I understand you have nothing to go back to, but some of us do.”
I charge toward him and get right in his face. “Well, my head might be in a better place if you guys would quit acting like I’m a fucking piece of crystal that’s going to break. I’m a fucking sniper. I was a sniper today. I did my fucking job, quite well actually. So get the fuck over it.” I spin to walk out of the tent while everyone yells at me. I ignore them. Fuck it. What are they going to do, send me to Afghanistan? Oops, I’m already here. Kill my wife and child? That’s fucking already been done.
I’m walking through the trailer park I live in here, which is technically a bunch of connex boxes, or semi-trailers without wheels. They’ve been retrofitted to be small one and two-man rooms. As soon as I enter my room, Meadows swings the door in behind me. I spin around. “You wanna do this now?”
“You’re fucking spot on. I wanna do this shit now.” He shoves me in the chest. “You risked the life of every guy on our fucking team today!”
“I saved countless lives today. Was it a little unorthodox? Maybe, but necessary.”
“For who? Some bullshit feeling you have?” he yells in my face.
“Because it needed to be done!”
“Again, for who?”
I spin around, throwing shit against the walls. “For me, damn it! So I can fucking feel something!”
“Well, don’t take the rest of us with you,” he says quietly before leaving.
Sitting on my cot, I grab the bottle of homemade hooch one of my guys made and take a drink. No, we aren’t supposed to be drinking but again, what can they do to me? Take rank and pay? Yeah, but I don’t even care. I haven’t been able to bond with my unit since being back. It’s like they don’t know how to act around me and I don’t know how to act around them. They want to handle me with kid’s gloves and I just want to fucking kill some insurgents.
I need to feel that gratification of killing people who are evil. I guess in some warped way it makes me feel like I’m making it up to Mac for not protecting her and our child from the evils of this world.
A little while later, my team leader comes to my room. “Nichols, we’re sending you back stateside.”
I jump up from my chair and realize I drank a little too much. “What?!” I roar.
He shakes his head. “I know you feel like you need to be here. I get that you’re dealing with your own shit.” I try to speak to him but he stops me. “I get it. You’ve lost so much. But you’re taking risks that the team can’t afford. That shit today was the last straw. You’ve been going practically rogue on missions, the guys feel like you’re losing it. The CO, OIC and myself have decided that you need to go back stateside and do some mandatory counseling. I know what you did at your last sessions and I get why you did it. You felt like you needed to get back here. You thought if you got back here, you could avoid it, all of those feelings of loss. The agony. But you can’t, it’s there and you have to face it. You have to work through all the steps. No skipping, soldier.”
I finally just give up, knowing I’ll never get my way on this. I agree to go back stateside and see a counselor. I’ve only got three months left on my contract and even though I planned on retiring from the military, I’m not going to. I need something else. He’s right, I’m endangering my team. I don’t care about myself, but I could make it so that one of these guys don’t go home to their wife and kids. I can’t let those people suffer the way I am.
Once I’m back stateside, I call the number Thatch gave to me.
He picks up after two rings. “Thatch.”
“Doc, this is Sergio Nichols.”
“Ah, Sergeant Nichols, good to hear from you.”
“They sent me home. I have to make an appointment.”
“You have to make an appointment or you want to make an appointment?”
I sigh into the phone. It’s only three months. “Want to.”
“Great then. Let’s get to that.”
Stage Five - Acceptance
One Year Later…
The sessions with Doc did help, when I finally let them, but they weren’t really for me. Once I was out of the Army, I stepped back from the sessions. I left Ft. Benning and wandered around lost for a month or so. I travelled along the coast, finally decided to catch a game at UF in Gainesville and ended up liking the town, so I stayed. Although it was a small suburb of Gainesville, but still within fifteen minutes. I happen to like college football and it’s nice to be able to catch a game whenever I want. While I was traveling, my mom begged me to stop in Savannah and see the monument they placed for Mac, but I’m not ready.
I found it was so much easier to forget things when they weren’t staring me in the face. It took me a while to realize that even my job kept the things I didn’t want
to remember right in front of me. The military would always make me think of her and everything I’d lost while I was chasing bad guys on the other side of the world.
I have money. Money I don’t want because it’s from a life insurance policy. When I moved here, I knew I needed to find some way to get out my anger, all of the pent up energy I had rolling inside of me. That’s how I found myself in a gym training to fight. I’d had some training in the Army, but this was more intense.
I’ve been entering local MMA matches. People take that shit seriously around here. Hell, there is a gym in the next town that just got signed by Bellator. That was the moment that made me realize this could be more than a hobby, more than a way to get everything out. This could be my new career.
I’ve actually got a match with a guy from that gym, Marco’s Gym, in a few weeks. I’ve fought with him several times, then we both moved up a weight class. We had a pretty big match scheduled and I got food poisoning and hurled all over the fucking cage. I was determined I wasn’t backing down though. So, I paid for it and we had to forfeit the match and reschedule. He’s a fucking asshole, and I’m sure he thinks I am, too. His name is Huck. What kind of fucked up name is that anyway? If that isn’t enough, he’s got a fucking identical twin, Sly’s his name. I swear their momma must’ve fucking hated them. They used to fight in the same class. I have to say, I would love to see them match up against each other. They have another guy in their little trio named Lox and from what I’ve been told, they’ve been like brothers to him since they were small. They also have a young up-and-coming fighter with them called Gibbs. It seems Marco wants to keep their unit small, which in this world is smart.
Word has spread like wildfire about our upcoming match and everyone knows we despise each other so there is supposed to be a huge turnout. I have to say, this fight has me worked up, but I’ve never backed down from a challenge.
I’m so wrapped up in my own head walking into the small café to grab a cup of coffee, I run slam into a gorgeous Latino looking woman. To answer your question, yes, I have started to move on. Well, to be frank, I have sex with women. It’s not hard to find willing participants after fights. I fuck them and I go home, or they do. I fuck them to help me forget. I will never fall in love again though. That shit hurts too much when it’s over. So I’ve accepted that my fate involves women with very low morals.
The woman I slammed into spins around. “Watch where you’re going, ass- Sergio?”
I look at the woman again. “Liz?” It’s my late sister’s girlfriend.
She smiles. “Oh my god!” She jumps and hugs me. This girl has been through her own Hell. Her mother was sick for a long time with cancer before she lost her. Her father was a colonel on our base and he’s an asshole. He was a hardass to Liz and when he found out about her being a lesbian, he became a really hateful bastard.
“What are you doing here?” I ask her.
She gives me a sigh. “Long story. I don’t have a lot of time right now, but I’d love to do lunch one day soon and catch up. I’ll explain it all then. I really do want to talk. I’m new here, could use a friendly face.” She looks down. “Your mom called me. I was so sorry to hear about everything.”
I nod. “I would love to grab a bite and catch up one day. My number is still the same so give me a call.”
She smiles. “Great, I’ll see you soon.”
Losing my sister and then her mother I know almost killed her. After grabbing my coffee, memories of being military brats, my sister, Liz and Mac swamp my mind. I head back to the gym and train more. I need to push this shit from my brain.
One Week Later…
I sit at a small dive waiting for Liz to arrive for our lunch. My fight is creeping closer and closer. The more gossip stirs about it, the more my nerves get on edge. I hear the bell over the door ring and watch her walk in. I stand up and hug her before she sits down. “Good to see you, Liz.”
She smiles. “You, too.”
After the waitress bustles over to the table and takes our orders, we start catching up.
We make a quick conversation about what I’m doing now and what she’s doing now, which is stripping in some hell hole and I’m not happy about it. Finally, I know she’s holding something back so I ask her.
“Okay, so you have me curious. Catch me up on the other stuff,” I say with a laugh.
She gives me a small smile and a genuine laugh. “So, as it turns out, the colonel wasn’t my real dad.”
“What?”
She nods. “As it turns out, my mom had an affair with an NCO. I’m a product of that affair. He got pissed while Mom was sick, he didn’t want to pay for some treatments that Tricare wouldn’t cover. I took responsibility for the treatments, he blew up and told me he fucking hated looking at me. That I was a reminder of the one thing that made him a failure. Then he called my mother a whore to her face, while she was already upset and sick. It got physical and the MPs got called. Just another great night at the Haas house. She finally told me who my dad was. When mom died, I was left with a shit load of debt due to those treatments. Haas didn’t let me have a dime of the life insurance. He told me the only way he would was if I lived a straight life.” She laughs. “He’s so fucked in the head. I told him to fuck off, busted his nose and he had the MPs escort me off-post. I wasn’t allowed back on to get anything of my mother’s. I have nothing from my childhood. No pictures of her except some I had taken through the years that were in my possession. I needed a fresh start, so I came here to find my dad after some research. He’s a pretty cool guy, owns a gym, is into MMA fighting. It seems cool. We are getting to know each other.”
That stuns me. “What’s your dad’s name? Maybe I know him.”
“Vance DeMarco. He owns Marco’s Gym,” she says casually.
I sit back in my chair, stunned. Talk about a small fucking world. “You’re shitting me?”
“No. Do you know them?”
“That asshole Huck and I have a match in a few weeks. He’s my biggest competitor,” I grumble.
“Oh, well you won’t get no argument from me on the asshole part. He’s definitely an asshole. He hates me,” she says plainly.
“What do you mean he hates you? How could he hate you?” I ask, getting pissed.
“Marco has always been like a dad to him, so he’s protective of him and he doesn’t trust me,” she explains. “But everyone else has pretty much accepted me into the fold.”
“Do they know about your job and your life?” I inquire.
“No. It’s none of their business.”
“Liz, you gotta tell them. Don’t be ashamed of it. From what I know of them, even that dick, Huck, they pretty much are a close-knit group and they accept people for who they are. They don’t expect them to fit into a mold. I’ve also heard only awesome things about Marco. He’d fight to the death for those guys. He does consider them his kids. I’ve watched him with them, so I can only imagine how he feels finding out about you.”
A large figure stands next to our table. “I knew we shouldn’t trust you.” The figure, which is Huck, shakes his head. “Fucking snake in the grass.” He storms out of the restaurant as I’m about to jump up and beat his ass.
Liz reaches across the table to stop me. “Don’t. I’ll handle him and my dad. Marco knows how military brats stick together. I’ll explain it.”
I nod and take a sip of the water sitting in front of me. I’ve known Liz long enough to accept that she’s going to take on some battles herself and I’m sure she can handle this one.
She sighs. “So, the fight’s coming up?”
I sit back. “Yeah, it’s going to be a little brutal.”
She snorts. “A little brutal? You two hate each other.”
I shake my head. “I wouldn’t say hate. We just get off beating the shit out of each other. We’re both cocky assholes.”
“Well at least you admit it freely.” We spend the rest of our lunch making jokes and talking like the brats we grew up be
ing.
Two Months Later…
As I pound into the current trophy tramp under me, she cries out. “Oh god, Sergio, your cock is so big! You fill me up!” She keeps on and on. I’d love to stuff a gag in her mouth so she’d shut up, but that’d probably get her off more. I think her name is Kelly. I’m not even sure, after tonight’s match she dropped to her knees in the locker room and sucked my dick like a champ, so I followed her to her place. I’m almost finished now. If I can just get that picture in my head that I need to go over the edge. Her hair, her face, the love of my life.
“You better be ready because I’m about to come,” I grunt out.
“Yes! Yes! Oh god yes!” she screams in an overrated porn star voice.
I give one last thrust and finish. I roll off of her and pat her arm. “Thanks.”
She rolls on her side and gives me a grin. “You’re welcome.”
I let out a breath and jump up from the bed. Pulling the condom off, I toss it in the toilet, flush it, and start dressing. “You’re leaving already?” she questions, standing in the doorway.
I shrug. “Yeah.”
She scoffs, “Really?”
“Yeah, really.”
She goes to smart off but I stop her. “Sweetheart, you all but coiled around me like a damn snake before I left the arena. If you didn’t want to be treated like a by-the-hour escort service then you shouldn’t treat yourself like one either,” I finish saying as I pull my shirt over my head, slipping on my boots. I start for the door and turn back once more. “Think about that before you offer yourself up on a damn platter for some asshole like me next time. I’m just some jock with a dick and a semi-load of issues.”
On the way back to my place, I shake my head. I’m almost twenty-seven years old, I’m a veteran, I’m an amateur fighter and a fucking widow.
I’ve got a long day ahead of me tomorrow. I made Elizabeth a promise that I would come spar with Huck tomorrow. I don’t really like the guy but he and Liz have buried that hatchet, so to speak. She asked me to help him. He’s got a match with a Russian guy in a few weeks. The Russian is a dirty motherfucker and keeps even worse company. I dislike the Russian guy more so it was a pretty easy choice.