Dog Tags: A romance anthology featuring military and canine heroes

by Kate Kinsley

  “Well, I’m putting together a box for you guys. Do you need anything?”

  “Hmmm ... No, I don’t think so.”

  “That’s good, because I already taped it up.”

  Gabriel laughed. “It’ll probably arrive in two months when we’re getting ready to pack shit up and leave.”

  “Well, it’s none of that toiletry bullshit. I know you guys get enough of that. Just a few things for you guys to celebrate making it through another year in the sandbox.”

  “A little spirit celebration?” Gabriel asked in a hushed tone.

  Bastien chuckled. “I mean, I can. I thought about it but didn’t want your ass getting into trouble somehow. With your luck, you’d drink it and then all hell would break loose around you. I don’t think I could live with myself if I got your drunk ass killed.”

  “Eh, you’re probably right. Remember the last time?” Gabriel asked.

  “Do I ever.” Bastien smiled wide. “We’re lucky we only had a few sips of that hooch. And that they only used us for cordon.”

  “Goddamn was it fun though,” Gabriel said.

  “Damn straight it was.” Bastien hesitated a moment and silence sat between them. “I know you’ve always been the one looking out for me and making sure I’m doing alright, but ... you know, just keep your head up, bro. This too shall pass and all that.”

  “Jesus, Tony Robbins, do I feel inspired now,” Gabriel said jokingly.

  “Who is Tony Robbins?” Bastien asked.

  Gabriel laughed, and it seemed to ease some of the tension he held. “You may not be the most inspirational speaker, but you’re always good for a laugh, my friend.”

  “Court jester at your service.” Bastien bowed, though he knew Gabriel couldn’t see it. A performer, he had always been.

  “You throw some new flicks in there, by the way?” Gabriel asked. “I’ve been watching the same damn movies over and over again. Finished all my own, everybody else’s in the squad, and now that we’re out in the middle of nowhere, I can’t get any good knock-offs.”

  “Got it loaded, man! A bunch of good new comedies. Some horror. There’s one in there called The Watch with Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn. You gotta watch that one first. It’s good fucking shit. I’ve seen it about a dozen times already.”

  “You know I’m not big into Stiller,” Gabriel bemoaned.

  “Oh come on, man. We have this argument all the time ... Reality Bites, gold. The Heartbreak Kid, hilarious gold. Along Came Polly?! Hello!”

  “Alright, alright,” Gabriel conceded.

  “Dodgeball, Zoolander, fucking Tropic Thunder.”

  “I said alright,” Gabriel said through a chuckle.

  “There’s Something About Mary, The Royal Tenenbaums, Meet the Parents. I mean, come on, bro. You can’t deny the man’s talent.”

  “Okay, you had me until Meet the Parents. That shit was hot garbage.”

  “You are wrong, good sir,” Bastien said.

  Gabriel laughed. “You’re a lunatic.”

  “And you’re in denial.”

  Gabriel laughed again. “Alright. I’m gonna rack out here soon. Say hi to Zook real quick though. He’s currently sleeping on my boots.”

  “Hey, buddy!” Bastien said. “I miss you!”

  He heard a whimper come through the line.

  “Well, he’s awake now, ears perked right up, and I can officially feel my feet again,” Gabriel said. “We’ll give you another call soon, brother. Definitely won’t let it take as long as it did this time.”

  “Don’t even mention it. Just call when you can. You guys are almost there! You’re in the home stretch.”

  “Yeah,” Gabriel said softly. “Miss you, bro.”

  “Miss you too, man. I’ll get this box right out to you.”

  “Thanks,” Gabriel replied. “Bye.”

  “Bye, bro.” The line went dead and Bastien dropped the phone to his side. He sat there for a moment, his teeth grinding, his nerves spiked.

  He compelled himself to get up, to dispel the fear and worry from his brain, and he took the box to the post office, hoping it would make it to Afghanistan before his two best friends made their way back home.

  Chapter Four

  Bastien didn’t think October 22nd, 2012 would be much different than any other day. He had kept the early morning thing going over the month or so since he had last spoken with Gabriel. He was even looking into culinary schools, something he had always dismissed previously as a fool’s dream. At the time he received the call that would force this day into his eternal memory, he was finally getting a haircut and a beard trim at the old barber shop down the street from his apartment. Al had been a friend of his dad’s, and Bastien went there more out of respect for Al than for the so-so haircut. Al didn’t always have the shake in his hands; it came on a few years prior, and had progressively gotten worse.

  That morning, Bastien asked for just a clean-up, a little trim off the top. He eyed the clippers closely as Al began. While cutting Bastien’s hair, Al always told stories of the old days with Bastien’s dad, tearing up T.C. Williams High School. Bastien hadn’t gotten much time with his father before he passed, so he enjoyed all the stories. He just wished he didn’t have to get the haircut to hear them.

  Al was cleaning up around Bastien’s ears when the phone rang from his pocket. Bastien jiggled it out, keeping his head as steady as possible.

  “You kids and those darned cell phones! Can’t even go a few minutes without ‘em.”

  Bastien passed him a shrug as he held the phone to his face to eye the number. “I got some buddies overseas, Al. You mind if I take this?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Go ahead. I got no one after you,” Al responded, pulling the clippers away from Bastien’s head.

  Bastien stood and answered the phone, taking a few steps toward the waiting area to be polite. “Hey fucker!! Two weeks from freedom, how does it feel?” he asked.

  There was silence over the line for a moment, and then a throat clearing, before a voice came on.

  “Um, is this Bastien Long?” the husky voice asked.

  “This is him. Who is this?” Bastien asked, his brows furrowing.

  “How you doing, Long? This is First Sergeant Robert Hannigan, calling on behalf of Staff Sergeant Gabriel Johnson. Do you have a moment?”

  Bastien froze. He couldn’t speak. He thought of all the possibilities, the reasons someone like Hannigan would call him.

  “Did I lose you, Long?” Hannigan asked.

  “No, I’m here, First Sergeant. Can I ask why Gabe isn’t calling me himself?”

  A dreadful few seconds of silence sat on the line between them. Bastien’s veins ran ice cold.

  Hannigan let out a heavy breath and said, “Listen, Long, I hate to have to tell you this, but I am obliged to inform you that Staff Sergeant Johnson was involved in an incident last week while on patrol. A note was found in his possessions instructing us to inform you if something like this were to happen. As we have already notified Staff Sergeant Johnson’s family, it’s now my duty to carry out this request.”

  Bastien sucked in a breath, his eyes wide, his mind in a fury. “Notified his family … of what?”

  A few more seconds of silence passed that felt infinite to Bastien.

  “An IED. I’m sorry, Long. He was ... he was a patriot, and he died a hero.”

  Bastien lost control of his legs, dropping down onto his knees atop the cape that still hung around his neck. “What about Zook?” Bastien asked through choked back tears.

  “Who?”

  “Bazooka Joe, his goddamn dog, First Sergeant!”

  Bastien heard the First Sergeant smack his lips and then leaf through some papers. “The dog was medevacked to Kabul … the 14th Combat Support Hospital. I’m unsure of the extent of his injuries.”

  “Is he still there?”

  Hannigan let out an annoyed sigh. “I don’t have that information, Long. He is in a different system now. I’m calling in regard to
Staff Sergeant Johnson. And now that I’ve done so, I think it’s best I let you—”

  Bastien hung up the phone, cutting Hannigan off, and he immediately removed the cape and handed it over to Al, trying his best to fight the tears that welled in his eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Al. I gotta go,” he muttered, and he pulled a twenty from his wallet and dropped it on the counter as he rushed toward the door.

  Al went to stop him, to give the twenty back, but Bastien was out of the barber shop before he could, his hair half cut and his fingers working the screen of his cell phone feverishly. The tears streamed down his face.

  He spent two hours calling twelve different numbers trying to track Zook. He first called a friend in his old unit who was deployed to Afghanistan to get a good number for the hospital in Kabul. He reached the 14th Combat Support Hospital, but it took him half an hour to reach the right personnel. Eventually, an administrator informed him that Zook had been medevacked to Landstuhl Regional Hospital in Germany after a few days, once he was stabilized. The injuries included extensive tissue and bone damage to Zook’s right leg, a punctured lung, and broken ribs. That’s all the information the Captain could give Bastien, but she did provide him with the number to Landstuhl. The number, of course, was for the hospital as a whole, and it took Bastien another twenty minutes and four phone calls to connect with the right person there.

  Bastien was racked, emotionally and physically, but he was motivated by the desperate need to know Zook was okay, that he was in good hands. An administrator at Landstuhl let him know that Zook had been stable when he was medevacked stateside to a specialty facility near Lackland Air Force base in Texas just a day before.

  She too provided him with the name of the facility and a number, but he was met with a ringing phone with no answer several dozen times. He left message after message begging for someone to call him back, to let him know his buddy was okay. As he waited several hours for the call back, he felt himself become a shell of a human, broken beyond any reasonable fixing. He couldn’t comprehend that Gabriel was gone, couldn’t bring himself to accept that there would be no reconnection. There would be no crab cakes and IPAs on the Annapolis coastline. There would be no more phone calls or pep talks. No more drunken nights reveling over life and all her eccentricities. No more watch parties and chats about It’s Always Sunny and The Office. No more music recommendations and useless trivia. No more Gabe.

  He wanted to call Gabe’s parents, wanted to tell them how much their son meant to him, but he refrained. He knew that what he was going through paled in comparison to their own pain, and he needn’t add to it. He thought about Gabe’s sister Jacqueline, and how close they were. He hurt for them and he cried for them as he waited beside his phone with bated breath—a bottle of half-drunk tequila beside him, no shot glass necessary.

  It was eight o’clock in the evening by the time the facility called Bastien back, a full eight hours after finding out one of his best friends was dead and the other close to it. He was buzzed by that point, drunk really, but when the call came through, he composed himself and he answered.

  “Hello?!”

  “Hi, this is Dr. Amber Richards with the Lackland Emergency Veterinary Hospital, reaching back out to Mr. Bastien Long.”

  “This is him. How is he?”

  “You are his previous handler?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I emailed you all the proof. Mission K9 Rescue should’ve shot you a message as well. I just want to know that he’s okay.”

  “Bazooka Joe took shrapnel to his right side resulting in traumatic injury to his right hind leg and ribs, as well as some internal injuries. It was first expected that he would keep the leg, but currently he’s battling an infection. We’re keeping him on close watch, but there’s a high likelihood that he will lose the leg if the infection doesn’t clear up.” The doctor took a deep breath. “It’s going to be a long road for him.”

  “Okay, I’ll come right there,” Bastien said.

  “Um, Mr. Long, there isn’t much you will be able to do here. He just needs time.”

  “I can be there for him. I can show him a familiar face. That’s what I can do.”

  “I understand,” she said.

  “Thank you for your time, Doc.”

  “No problem. He’s in good hands, Mr. Long. We will continue to fight for him until he sees this thing through.”

  “Thank you,” Bastien squeaked out through the tightness in his chest. “Thank you.”

  He hung up the phone and immediately pulled up the Expedia app. Flights were expensive with it being so last minute, but he didn’t care. He needed to see his friend, needed to see to it that if something terrible happened, if Zook took a turn for the worse, that he would do so with a familiar face by his side.

  He tried to sleep that night, but he’d close his eyes and see Gabriel, and a highlight reel of their decade long friendship would play, from basic training to one week ago when an improvised explosive device snuffed out the only family in this world Bastien had. He cried throughout the night, until he felt as if there were no more tears to give. But more tears did come, with a restless few hours of toss-and-turn riddled sleep here and there in between.

  Chapter Five

  He was a mess in the morning, his eyes bloodshot with thick bags beneath them. He took one look at his half-cut hair and decided to just shave it. He then took a hot shower, popped a few Aleve, and took a good hard look at the hollow man staring back at him in the mirror. He found himself almost unrecognizable, like he had become someone else overnight. The freshly shaved head had a little something to do with it, but so did his darkened eyes.

  He focused his thoughts on Zook, on the friend still living and breathing and fighting, and—though he hurt beyond any hurt he’d known since his mother passed, and his father a decade or so before that—he was propelled forward by the need to support Zook, to bring him home to Baltimore and give his hero of a best friend the retirement he deserved.

  He had three bloody Marys on the flight down to San Antonio. He couldn’t help himself, even though the hangover from the night before remained strong. Hair of the dog, as they say, and he needed the calm it provided.

  A friendly older gentleman with a southern twang chatted him up along the way, and though Bastien despised small talk, he appreciated the distraction. The elderly man (“Joe Grossman from Texarkana, Texas, and yessiree, that is a real place!”) had paid for Bastien’s drinks too, despite his protests, and he had thanked him for his service, and Bastien felt appreciative of the man and those like him—the people who learned from the Vietnam War and the disgusting nature of those warriors’ return, the people who could distinguish between politics and service.

  Bastien didn’t check a bag. He had only his backpack with toiletries and a few changes of clothes, so after the plane landed, and he said his goodbyes and salutations to Joe, he rushed to the pick-up area to wait for his Uber.

  The twenty-minute ride felt like an eternity, and the driver’s attempts at small talk were far less well received than they were with Joe.

  When they finally arrived at the Lackland Emergency Veterinary Hospital, Bastien rushed out of the vehicle, passed the driver a quick thank-you, and raced through the sliding glass doors of the facility.

  He met a receptionist at a large desk in the foyer.

  “Hello, darlin’, how can I help you?” she asked.

  “I’m here to see Zook. Bazooka Joe. He was brought in a few days ago.”

  The receptionist put a hand to the phone receiver. “You know which department?”

  “I’m not sure. Probably orthopedic or ICU. I spoke with a Dr. Richards.”

  The receptionist looked over her shoulder toward a co-worker behind her and asked, “Dr. Richards, isn’t she ICU.?”

  The co-worker nodded. “Amber, yeah. She’s ICU.”

  The receptionist looked back at Bastien. “You aren’t going to be able to get in those rooms, but there’s a waiting area up there, third floor.
I’ll try and give Dr. Richards a call to meet you there if she’s available.”

  Bastien put his hands together. “Thank you so much.”

  “No problem, darlin’. Elevators are to your right.” She pointed down a corridor, lifting the phone receiver with her free hand. “Third floor, make a left.”

  “Thank you!” Bastien said again, and he hurried down the corridor to the elevator bay.

  He counted every second of the thirty-minute wait. He thought about heading back to the reception area to see what the deal was, but before he could, a door beside the empty ICU reception window opened. From the doorway came a naturally beautiful middle-aged woman with her amber hair bunched up in a head cover. She wore full scrubs, a white coat, and she had covers for her Crocs too. She looked at Bastien apologetically with tired eyes as she approached.

  She extended a hand as he stood and said, “Mr. Long? Dr. Amber Richards. So sorry for the delay.”

  “It’s okay,” Bastien said, shaking her hand. “How is he?”

  She let out a slow breath, her eyes averting to the tile floor, which struck Bastien as a very bad thing.

  “He took a turn for the worse late last night,” she said. “I was called in and we decided that it was in his best interest to amputate the leg. I’m sorry, Mr. Long.”

  Bastien fought the tears that begged to come. “But ... but he’s going to be okay?”

  “He’s still out of it right now,” she responded, her sharp green eyes filled with remorse. “It’s going to be a battle. But his temperature is going down. And his white blood cell count already looks better. I can’t reiterate it enough—Bazooka Joe is fighting for his life right now. It’s going to be a long road. But he seems to be quite the fighter.” She smiled, though it looked to be difficult for her to pull off, no doubt a byproduct of her profession. “And he obviously has a great support system. It’s just going to take time.”

  “Time, I’ve got,” Bastien said. “Thank you, Doc. I really appreciate you taking such great care of him. All of you.” Bastien forced a smile, looked to her with hopeful eyes. “When can I see him?”