The Last Hour

by Charles Sheehan-Miles

  Being back in the Army had brought back a rush of emotions and memories that I didn’t want to deal with. It was close to the surface, closer than it had been since the day I’d been discharged. All I had to do was close my eyes and I was there, breathing in the air of Afghanistan.

  The thing was, it had all gone bad so fast. Less than forty-eight hours after Kowalski was killed, we were back out on patrol. Roberts got blown up, and Dylan was injured. I remember Colton calling over the radio, his voice frantic, “Sherman, get your fire team on line!” and I’d called back, “I don’t have a fire team!”

  The next day we met in the shack Colton called his office. Lieutenant Eggers, Colton and Martin, our platoon’s leadership, and me and Hicks.

  “We’ve got three new FNGs coming in next week,” Colton said. FNG means fucking new guy.

  “I don’t want ‘em,” Hicks said. “My fire team is set.”

  Martin grimaced. “That’s gonna leave us seriously unbalanced if Sherman takes all three. We know anything about these guys?”

  Eggers said, “They’re all straight out of Benning.”

  “Fuck,” muttered Colton.

  In the end, they decided I was going to take all the new replacements. And to be honest, I was too exhausted to care. I’d seen the guys I depended on, the guys I was supposed to take care of, decimated in a matter of two days.

  I wasn’t the only one in bad shape. Two weeks later I’d walked by Hicks’ fire team’s room and found the door conspicuously closed. The unmistakable smell of marijuana drifted out of the door. I just kept walking. It was my responsibility to do something about it. The Army had zero tolerance for drug use. On the other hand, what were they going to do to those guys? Send them to Afghanistan? Our squad was in such bad shape, and the new guys were such fumbling idiots, if the experienced soldiers in our squad needed to blow off some steam, who the hell was I to say anything?

  I did say something to Hicks. That was going to be the limit of my involvement. His guys were out on the wire that day, so I found him in one of the guard towers, leaning against the wall, his rifle cradled in his arms. He was staring off into space, his blue eyes gazing off at the landscape, not really paying attention.

  “Sherman,” he said as I got to the top.

  “Hicks,” I replied. “You got a minute?”

  “What brings you up here?” he asked.

  I leaned against the wall, looking out into the distance. It didn’t look like there was a live human being for a thousand miles except us.

  “Just wanted to give you a heads up. Not really my place to get involved, I guess. Your guys are smoking pot in their room.”

  He shrugged and frowned. “Yeah. I know.”

  I didn’t say anything, and after a minute he said, “You gotta do something to stay sane. If that’s the worst they do, I’m all for it.”

  “Pretty much what I figured,” I said.

  “You know what they saw,” he said.

  I did. Dylan’s pale face, as he bled out on the snow, me praying the chopper would show up in time. Roberts, as we carefully took the remaining body parts we could find and stuffed them in a bag. Kowalski and his crazy trail of kids.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know. I’m not judging. Just figured you needed to know.”

  I lit a cigarette, cupping my hand around the coal.

  “You married, Sherman?”

  I shook my head. “Nah. Broke up with my girlfriend the day I enlisted. It was long overdue.”

  He nodded. “Smart. It’s tough on wives. I send notes home to Stephanie. Real letters, instead of this email bullshit. I lie my ass off most of the time, and tell her we’re rear detachment, and nobody’s been hurt.”

  I sort of knew his wife. Stephanie Hicks was an attractive blonde lady with Scotch-Irish features, from a tiny town in southern Virginia. Two days before we deployed, she hosted a barbecue for all the soldiers in our platoon at their small house on the edge of the post. It had been an emotional, drunken bash, ending with Colton and Martin having a half-drunken fist fight in the backyard, a fight that ended with them sitting, leaning on each other, tossing back shots and laughing their asses off. Stephanie was a southern girl, who negotiated the party with charm and wit, but I caught her gazing at her husband with terror behind her eyes more than once that night.

  I nodded. “No point in making her worry about stuff she can’t do anything about.”

  “Yeah, well ... they don’t get it. When I got home from my last Iraq tour, she thought I’d gone fucking nuts. We had to go into therapy. But the thing is, our therapist? She didn’t know shit. Not about this.” He waved his hand vaguely at the surrounding countryside as he said the word.

  I was uncomfortable. Hicks hadn’t been an enemy, but we’d never been friendly. But then again, we were peers, and he couldn’t exactly talk with the guys in his fire team about this kind of thing.

  “Anyway,” he said. “How are the FNGs working out?”

  “Too early to say,” I replied. “I think we might have a good one out of the three.”

  He nodded. “We’re going back out in a few more days.”

  I nodded.

  “Ten fucking days,” he muttered.

  I’d heard. After our departure from Dega Payan, the Taliban stuck around the district, ambushing convoys and drug smugglers. The repairs we’d done to the girls’ school were destroyed by the insurgents, who leveled the building. So we’d been ordered to base our platoon on a useless hill near the village and conduct sweeps. The rest of the company would be spread at three other nearby camps, which would undoubtedly draw in more Taliban, and then the fun could begin.

  “I’m trying to get my guys ready. But they’ve got no idea what they’re getting into.”

  He had nodded. “You’ll do all right, Sherman. And we’ll keep an eye out.”

  I had headed back down not long after that, relieved that Hicks and I had talked, even if it had only been for a few minutes. The talk created a bond between us, however tenuous, and when your life depends on people, you want that bond.

  I hadn’t heard from him since I left the Army, although he must be somewhere around here. His family lived in Virginia, and before we even left Afghanistan he’d requested a transfer to Fort Myers. I wondered if he’d gotten the assignment he’d requested, to the Old Guard, the Third Infantry Regiment. He had the kind of spit and polish they required, and he’d certainly earned a chest full of medals during his three wartime deployments. Idly, I thumbed through a base directory as I chatted with Bowers, but I didn’t see Hicks’ name. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t here, they didn’t print these things often. I glanced at the cover, and saw the edition in the office was printed in 2011. I slammed it shut.

  As the night wore on, we played some cards, and every couple of hours I walked the company buildings, checking for unlocked doors and people who were in places they weren’t supposed to be. But all stayed quiet. At three I told Bowers to get a nap, and covered the phone. And finally, gloriously, 7 a.m. arrived, and so did my relief. I waved a goodbye to Bowers, handed off the keys to my relief, and headed out the door for the barracks.

  It was cold out, but not bad. And as I walked, I guess I came to a sort of peace with where I was. Until things went bad in Afghanistan, I’d actually liked being in the Army. My problem here was two things: I’d been forced to come back, and I had nothing useful to do while I was here. I couldn’t do anything about the first problem, but I might be able to solve the second.

  I stopped, not far from the barracks. My path had taken me along a sidewalk that bordered on the edge of the cemetery. Before me, sweeping off into the distance to the Potomac River, was row upon row, thousands and thousands of graves of soldiers who had fallen in wars all over the globe.

  Roberts was taken home to Alabama to be buried by his parents, and Kowalski’s body went to Minnesota. But Weber was here. Somewhere in this cemetery, his body had come to a final rest after a sniper ended his short life halfway around the
world.

  I shivered, staring out at the endless field of graves. I didn’t know why Major Smalls had brought me here. CID headquarters was at Fort Belvoir, just south of Washington. I was basically on my own here. It didn’t make any sense, other than the proximity to Walter Reed, where the investigating officer was.

  That’s when the idea popped into my head. Maybe I could talk to Smalls about moving to Walter Reed. I’m sure they could find something useful for me to do there. And I’d be closer to Carrie. I checked my watch. It was 7:15, and I was meeting her in eleven hours. Time to get some sleep.

  All settled in? (Carrie)

  My office was directly across the hall from Lori Beckley’s, on a long hallway of glass fronted offices with glass doors. By the middle of Friday, my second day at NIH, I had a working computer and was finally wired into all of the systems there. Lori had already stopped by once that morning to check in on me, as had Doctor Moore, who seemed stiffly uncomfortable.

  It was early in the afternoon when I was deeply engaged in refining my original proposal for the fellowship when I heard a thump on the glass wall of my office. I looked up and was startled to see two teenagers looking in the glass. Beyond them, a group of maybe twenty people, wearing mostly shorts and t-shirts, stood in a rough semi-circle around a woman in a suit. All of them wore NIH guest badges.

  I quickly typed into the instant messenger application on my computer. Lori, what is that?

  She responded: Tourists. Public Affairs brings them through once or twice a day.

  Ugh. The two teenage boys were still staring in the window, and one of them had left smeared fingerprints on it. The other one licked his lips.

  I typed: I feel like I’m a zoo exhibit.

  She replied: You are. Don’t worry. They’re harmless. Just picture them as big friendly cows.

  Harmless maybe, but having teenagers gawking outside my office wasn’t exactly my idea of a fun time. I did my best to ignore them and went back to work. Doctor Moore had given me a week to finalize the plan for the fellowship, but I wanted it done quicker than that. The sooner I finished, the sooner I could get down to real work.

  My original proposal called for almost a year of data collection in the field. I’d be involved with a lot of the field research, but it also proposed research teams from three different universities, including Rice. That phase of the study had a huge budget: substantial travel, plus the cost of tranquilizers, collection equipment, DNA sequencing, and pathology studies. At the end of the first year, the second phase was all number crunching: we’d be hiring two contract programmers to set up the databases, cross reference the DNA samples, genetic drift, and hopefully identify what other vectors were allowing for the spread of MRSA infections.

  The tourists finally moved on and I got back to work. And the more I thought about it, the more I could live with it. After all, I was living my dream right here.

  It was almost five o’clock when the phone on my desk rang. It was Doctor Moore.

  “Carrie, can you stop by my office before you leave for the day?”

  “I’ll be by shortly,” I replied.

  A few minutes later, I wrapped up, logged out of my computer, then stood up and stretched. I hadn’t moved from that seat in nearly four hours. This would take some getting used to. I was accustomed to being on my feet, moving back and forth from classrooms to labs, being out in the field. Sitting in an office every day wasn’t something I was used to at all. Of course, later in the spring I’d be spending some time traveling in the field.

  For the first time I wondered how that would impact things with Ray. We didn’t know what was going on with the investigation, although he’d told me it might be months before they even held a preliminary hearing.

  As I locked my office I grinned. I hadn’t seen Ray since that awful morning when Major Smalls took him away from our hotel room. But we were meeting that night for dinner and drinks.

  I walked down the hall, which was now crowded with people getting out of there for the weekend. Doctor Moore’s office was one of the few that actually had a wall and a door, so I knocked. A moment later I heard him call, “Come in!”

  I pushed the door open. Moore had a corner office, with windows overlooking the ground outside. He was leaning back in his chair, jacket unbuttoned, tie pulled down. Something about Moore made me wary. Every time I was around him, I felt like his eyes were scanning me from head to toe, like a couple of radar dishes, jerking up and down, back and forth. I didn’t like it at all.

  “Thanks for stopping by, Carrie. I just wanted to check in and make sure you’re getting settled in all right.”

  “Thanks, Doctor Moore ... I’m doing fine. Working on the budget right now, I think I’ll likely be finished with the revised plan on Monday.”

  “Very good,” he said. “And you’re happy here?”

  “Yes, very much.”

  “If you need anything at all, please let me know.”

  As this short conversation proceeded, I just got more and more uncomfortable. His eyes never stopped roving, and as he said the last statement, he met mine. I looked away.

  “Well, then,” he said. “You have plans for the weekend? Getting all settled in?”

  I nodded. “My boyfriend and I are meeting for dinner. He’s in the Army and managed to get free for the weekend.”

  Moore frowned at the mention of Ray. That just creeped me out a little bit more, because he was married and a father.

  “Speaking of which, I should get going,” I said.

  “Yes,” he replied. “See you Monday.”

  I smiled, uncomfortably, and took my purse and fled.

  Two hours later, I got off the train at DuPont Circle. I’d gone home, showered and changed, then walked back to the Metro. Earlier in the day the auto shop had called to let me know my car was ready, but I could wait until Saturday to pick it up.

  Outside the train station, it was crowded, people walking in all directions. I hadn’t been to DuPont Circle in years. It hadn’t changed much. Crowds of people, ranging from teenagers to college students to slow moving grandmothers, crowded the shops and restaurants. We were meeting at Kramer Books, a bookstore combined with a bar, which had been one of my favorite spots during my freshman and sophomore years in high school.

  Ray was already at the table when I got there, with a beer and an open book sitting in front of him. I watched him for a second, my eyes slipping over his broad shoulders and lean waist, the stubble which was considerably more than 5 o’clock shadow, the casual way he reached out and drank his beer without looking up from the book. I slipped up behind him and leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. He smiled and turned his head to meet my lips.

  “You look relaxed,” I said.

  “You look beautiful.”

  I felt myself flush as he said the words. I loved the way he looked at me. I slipped into the seat across from him as he closed his book.

  “So…” I said. “Has the Army found anything for you to do yet?”

  He shook his head. “No, but ... I had an idea. I think I may ask them to put me at Walter Reed instead. Then I’d be right next to you.”

  I felt a rush of pleasure at that idea. “Do you think they’ll go for it?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “No idea. Really, I don’t see any reason why not. But I didn’t seriously think they’d pull me back on active duty in the first place.”

  “True,” I said. Then I leaned forward, and because I don’t have any filters, and because I’d pretty much dropped every wall I had with Ray anyway, I said, “Why don’t you see if you can transfer, and then you can live with me at the condo? I’m only one train stop from Walter Reed. You’d be working right across the street from me.”

  Ray’s eyes widened and his mouth quirked into a grin. “Did you just ask me to move in with you, Carrie?”

  I winked at him. “So what if I did?”

  “If you did, then I’d have to say, hell yes.”

  I reached out
at the same time he did, and we took each other’s hands. At that moment, looking in Ray’s eyes, I was as happy as I’ve ever been in my life.

  Falling (Ray)

  Two weeks later, my transfer to Walter Reed was approved. With the Army being the Army, I had to spend all day on Friday getting clearances signed and stamped before I could clear the post, but I got it all done by three in the afternoon. I hadn’t gotten to know anyone on post really, so there was no one to say goodbye to. I simply packed my duffle bag and called a cab.

  Thirty minutes later, the cab dropped me off on the corner of Montgomery and Wisconsin Avenue in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside Washington, DC. The weather was freakishly warm for January, close to seventy degrees. I paused for just a second outside the building, looked around, and just breathed in the atmosphere of the passing traffic, the people on the sidewalk, the shops and restaurants all around. I was growing to love this neighborhood.

  Of course, I thought as I lifted my duffel bag over my shoulder and entered the lobby, I have to admit that if it was just me, or even just me and Carrie, we’d never have been able to afford to live here on our meager pay. She was living in the condo rent-free, thanks to her dad who bought it some time back in the eighties.

  I wasn’t going to stress about that. The concierge, a friendly lady in her forties, waved me over as I walked in.

  “Mr. Sherman? Ms. Thompson left a key for you in case she wasn’t home yet when you arrived.”

  “Thank you,” I said, taking the small envelope. I opened it up. Inside was an electronic key-fob for the elevator, and a door key.

  “Have a great evening,” I said as I walked away. I swiped the key-fob and rode the elevator to the top floor.

  Carrie lived in one of two top-floor apartments in the building. With six bedrooms and a rooftop balcony, it was clearly meant exclusively for the wealthy. When I got to the door I unlocked it, then deactivated the alarm and carried my bag into the living room.

  Except for very occasional visits, the condo hadn’t been occupied in ten years. Furnished with an odd, eclectic mix of furniture and art from a dozen different countries, it was unique. The hallway was lined with portraits of Carrie and her sisters, but all of them were at least ten years old.