by Deek Rhew
He and Tracy had no backup, no plan B. Their free ride through life had been lost, and Sam had no idea where to go or what he wanted to do. He got into the habit of rising early and riding his bike without a destination on the quiet morning streets—not looking for anything, just taking comfort in the solitude of the deserted city.
One morning, he passed a small office with a big banner hanging outside that read First to Fight. He had driven by it a hundred times without notice, just another hollow venture in a soulless city. But this time, something clicked. He slammed on the brakes of his bike, skidding to a stop in the middle of a normally busy intersection. If anyone had been behind him, he would have been killed.
The thought of being part of something bigger, giving his life order and structure, had appealed to him so much he parked the black motorcycle and went into the small recruiting office.
Like the night of the accident, Sam would remember every detail about this pivotal moment for the rest of his life. The smell of polish and floor cleaner. The gunmetal desk. Small filing cabinet with the dent in the side. Dark, tiled floor. Posters of courageous-looking soldiers next to gold plaques for bravery on the wall. All of it meticulous, dust-free, and in perfect order.
The man standing behind the desk looked just as disciplined as the office surrounding him. His body hard and lean; his crisp uniform covered in patches and badges, all of which, though completely unfamiliar to Sam, seemed to be in perfect order too. The slim gold name badge pinned on the soldier’s starched, blue shirt read: Burdett. Square-jawed with a hard-edged face, the man appraised Sam as he entered the small office. After this day, he would never see soldier Burdett again, but he would never forget that name and the way their eyes locked.
No one in his family had ever been in the military, but Sam walked right up to the desk and told the soldier he wanted to sign up. The recruiter didn’t move or say anything for an entire minute, just evaluated the disheveled, out-of-shape derelict standing before him. The man’s eyes never left Sam’s face, and his expression did not change when he asked, “What can you offer your country, son?”
Sam had assumed he would tell them he wanted to sign up and that would be that. He didn’t know what he had to offer his country. “I want to get my life put back together. I am tired of wandering without a purpose. Don’t know exactly what I can offer other than my devotion and hard work, but I’m willing to figure it out if the Marines are willing to help.”
The man regarded him with piercing intensity. Sam, never one to back down, returned the gaze, unflinching. Soldier Burdett said, “All right, son, let’s see if you’ve got what it takes.”
When Sam got home, he told Tracy what he had done and that he shipped off to boot camp in two weeks.
His wife went ballistic.
“What the hell? You made this decision on your own without even talking to me first? This affects both of us, you know. Now suddenly I’m supposed to just drop everything and follow you around as they send you all over the goddamned place?”
“The plan was for you to follow me. We were going to see the world together, remember?” he shot back.
She hit him in the chest. “That was different, and you know it. I was going to be a soccer star’s wife; going from base to base is not the same thing. What if they send you to fight the war? That’s what the military does, you know. People die in wars! You’ve been having a rough time of it with your family and all, I get that. But you don’t just make this kind of decision without thinking it through. This will completely change everything.” She stopped in her rant for a second then looked hopeful. “Maybe it isn’t too late to back out? Like when you buy a car, they give you a couple days to change your mind?” She stared at him, her eyes pleading, and a huge, plump tear ran down her cheek.
He should have cared more, been more understanding, but he felt…nothing. The tears didn’t make him want to hold her. The desperate look in her eyes didn’t tug the strings of his heart into changing the path he had chosen.
Tracy had tried talking to him over the last few months, complaining he had become more and more difficult to reach. He’d pulled into himself and shut her out. He could see that. The problem: He had become powerless to do anything about it.
“Look,” he said, searching for the feelings that seemed to have vacated the premises and left no forwarding address, “I haven’t been myself, haven’t been a good husband. We can’t have kids right now because I can’t be a good father until I get past this…this blockage or whatever it is. I think the military will give me structure and put my life—our life—back on track.”
They had been talking about getting pregnant. Well, really it had mostly been her. She had always wanted kids, and in the last six months, she had been trying to convince him the time had come to start their family. He thought she wanted to fill the emptiness she felt as he pulled away, but it was the wrong reason to bring children into the world.
“We can get through this without doing something so drastic. There are people you can talk to. What you went through was pure hell, but we can find help, Sam.” This moment, like the one at the recruiter’s office, and the look in her eyes—one of despair and longing—scorched his memory. He wished he could take it back, a million times over, but he couldn’t.
She had been trying to comfort him, but, as had become the norm, he emotionally shoved her away. “You have no idea what it was like. The calls at three in the morning to come get Jake out of jail, or later, when I found him in the alley...” He choked up and struggled to get himself under control. “Found him lying there like that. Then all that happened with mom and dad. Your family is still alive. You can go there and have happy little reunions in your perfect little nuclear world. I can’t. Mine are gone, and I have nothing. If you understood that, if you understood me, you would know that just talking to someone will never be enough. That is such a weak way to deal with shit. I don’t get why people think you can talk your way through your problems. Everyone I love is gone, and all the words in the world will never bring them back.”
He ignored the pain in her eyes that screamed he couldn’t have hurt her more if he’d punched her. She had been with him, stood by him as he dealt with Jake. Been there when the call came from his hysterical mother when she couldn’t wake his dad up. Been there when they lowered him into the ground and cried with him as he wept after finding his mother’s lifeless body a week later. An empty bottle of sleeping pills on her nightstand. The note she left simply read:
Take care of yourself. I am sorry. It isn’t your fault, I just can’t deal with this and don’t want to be alone. Know that I have always loved you and always will. Mom.
The note had been written on their family stationary—Greetings From the Bradfords! superimposed over a picture of their last Fourth of July while the boys still lived at home. Teardrops, shed while she wrote, smudged the ink his mom had used to compose her final farewell.
When Sam put the order in for the double headstone, he’d assumed it would be years before they carved his mom’s final information. But the slab of granite, still untouched, waited at the engravers when he called and added to the work order.
He learned stoicism to survive. It became his closest and, in time, only friend. He compartmentalized his feelings and learned he had the unique ability to examine them from the outside. Sam could view his emotions with the same clinical detachment as a scientist examining a rare and unusual species of insect. He could then lock those feelings away, never having to experience anything.
Impassive detachment gave him the ability to block out the pain, but it prevented him from feeling the good too. He could pretend, and do a convincing job of it, which made it possible to do the work that would become his career but left him cold to those that cared about him.
Yes, Sam had been brutally unfair to his wife, but he just hadn’t cared anymore. He’d turned his back on her and walked out the front door.
28
Dear
Sam,
This is the hardest thing I have ever had to do…
The first time Sam finished reading the letter, he had to wipe away a tear running down his cheek. He stared in surprise, disconcerted by his wet fingers. Taking a deep breath, he reread it. After the third time through, he folded the letter, closed his eyes, and centered himself.
He envisioned a small glass cube on the floor before him. He stood and walked around it, examining it from all sides. In its clear depths, he could see all the pain, anger, love, and happiness he had experienced with Tracy, like an archaeologist studying a fascinating artifact pulled from some deep, ancient, and forgotten tomb. It was interesting how such experiences could make people, including himself at one time, euphoric but also drive them insane. He watched the twisting deluge of Chroma and images of their life as they played out on the glass surfaces.
At first, bright, happy pictures rolled on the tiny silver screens: him seeing her for the first time; them laughing until late into the night; their courtship, how hard he worked to impress her; how happy they had been in the shitty little apartment on Brookhaven, talking and making love; their intertwined bodies; waking together on weekends with nothing on the schedule.
Then the swirls and eddies started getting darker as events in his life grew out of control. The prism had become so dark, the planes that formed its sides turned black with sinuous foreboding. One last fleeting image of Tracy’s anguished face trying to reach out to him and his own angry rebuttal flicked across the six-sided shape. It then grew dark and still.
His chest cramped as a pang of intense loss struck him like a hammer, and he wondered if he needed to see the medic for treatment of a heart attack. He reached down and picked up the little cube, unlocked his mental closet, and put it in its designated place amongst its brothers. He closed the door of the little room, sealing it and all the other colorless objects in total darkness.
As he snicked the lock shut, the pang in his chest intensified, giving him pause. Would he experience the full breadth of the pain after all? He waited. The feeling passed, and he gave an internal shrug.
As Sam left the sleeping quarters, he tossed Tracy’s letter into the trash.
29
A couple of weeks after Sam received Tracy’s letter, his crewmate, Armon, picked him up for patrol. On the Jeep’s seat, a thick manila envelope lay like an omen. Without reading any of it, Sam worked through the stack of marriage-dissolving legalese, following the trail of yellow sticky notes to sign here and initial there, while Armon bounced and jounced them down the road towards the motor pool.
His friend remained quiet as Sam dropped the envelope in the mail. The click of the flap reverberated in his ears, like a door slamming shut on his past.
In the settlement summary letter, Tracy informed him she kept the house, the car—everything except for his clothes, some mementos, and his bike, which she put into a storage unit. The key had been included in the envelope. A week earlier, he’d heard she and the man she’d been sleeping with, Chuck, got engaged and, by all accounts, seemed happy.
When Sam returned to the States, he never bothered to let her know.
“Look out, ladies,” Armon called when they met up with the half dozen men in the squad, “we gots ourselves a free boy here, and he’s lookin’ to get laid. And man, oh man, looks like he just hit the mother lode. I ain’t seen so many ugly old pussies in one place since the nineteen fifty-five Hooters reunion.”
“Asshole,” someone said.
“That true? You a free man now?”
“That’s right, Collins,” Armon replied, “an’ he’s looking to get some. So you better be watching your purty little behind, or he’ll be slipping it to you in the shower.”
“All right, enough. Let’s go,” Sam ordered.
They headed out of the base towards the south side of the city, the banter among his men ending as they switched into professional mode. Their assignment, to patrol one of the many deserted suburbs, felt like more than just busy work, and he thought his men sensed it too.
The loud Humvees required them to wear headsets to communicate, but no one said anything as they trudged down the dusty road.
Sam focused on the terrain, looking for threats and inconsistencies among the desolate, crumbling buildings, burned car skeletons, and holed-out businesses. These had, at one time, been restaurants and clothing boutiques, but now they only served the lingering ghost patrons unable to move on from this world.
The farther they travelled past the decimated debris that littered the streets and decorated the landscape in a morose tableau of genocide, the more tense he became, like an electric wire forced to carry a larger and larger current.
Something’s not right, Chet said. His alter ego hesitated, as though unsure what conclusions to draw based on the facts laid out before him.
What is it? Sam questioned. He could see no signs of life, and none of his men raised an alarm as they continued down the quiet streets.
I don’t know…something. Wait.
“Halt.” Sam’s voice interrupted the static on the intercom. The small group, traveling no more than a couple miles an hour, did not delay as they followed his order, and with a soft squeak of brakes, the Humvees came to a stop. Already on full alert, his men prepared to move, trusting their CO’s instincts.
“Did you see something?” Armon, his assistant squad leader, asked as he scanned the area around them, searching for threats.
“No.” But the hair on the back of Sam’s neck stood on edge. Chet didn’t say anything for a minute, but something felt wrong. Off somehow. Sam didn’t know what threat they faced, but he followed his instinct.
Back! Chet yelled in his head.
“Back! Back! Back! Now!” Sam shouted.
In unison, the drivers of the Humvees threw the vehicles into reverse and hit the accelerators. Their training and complete faith in their CO prevented any hesitation. That simple, vital trust saved their lives. The large vehicles hadn’t travelled more than ten feet and were still speeding up when everything went to hell.
An RPG sailed through the air, launched from inside one of the abandoned buildings. The missile soared past the empty space where the lead Humvee had been just seconds before and exploded into a rusted car skeleton on the far side of the street. The big vehicles stopped, and the Marines piled out. Through the cloud of smoke created by the explosion, Sam glimpsed armed men running out of the building. Bullets from automatic weapons pinged off the Hummers and pulverized the ground around them.
The crew took up the 50 caliber machine guns mounted on the Humvees while other soldiers fell to defensive positions. But the thick smoke prevented the men from being able to see, forcing them to fire blind.
Sam radioed for backup and ordered his men to the outside flank positions.
As his soldiers fought, the militants started falling. The smoke began to clear, giving them better visibility. Ten, maybe twelve men advanced on Sam’s position, while others fought crouched in doorways. The men raining bullets down on them from the windows on the third and fourth stories of the building proved to be the worst threat.
Sam could see two. He lined up his rifle on the first, held his breath, and took the shot. The man slumped, half hanging out the building, his gun falling to the dirt below. He sighted in on the second gunman and had been about to pull the trigger when he heard the call through his headset, “Man down! Man down!”
Sam steeled his concentration, centering himself. Nothing could be done without removing the threat from above. Again, he held his breath, aware that every passing second could mean the difference between his man living or bleeding out. He pulled the trigger.
Through the rifle’s site, he saw the enemy’s head explode like a watermelon as the projectile tore through the man’s face.
Sam looked around, evaluating the situation that had begun to turn in their favor. He cursed under his breath when he spotted Armon lying in the dirt, bulle
ts ripping the bloody ground around him. He needed to get his man out of the line of fire.
Next to him, Collins crouched behind the hood of the Humvee. A precise, methodical shooter, the other man pulled the trigger with a calm, practiced ease. With each report of his gun, another bad guy fell.
Sam got Collins’ attention. “I’m going to go get him.” He indicated toward the fallen soldier. “Ready?”
Collins nodded.
Sam threw a smoke grenade, letting it billow for a few seconds. He relayed his intentions through the intercom and charged in.
The enemy gunfire turned towards the new target, and Sam responded with his own. He dodged and weaved, working toward the unprotected soldier lying vulnerable in the dirty city street.
Sam reached the big man and rolled him over. The lower back of Armon’s uniform had soaked through with blood.
“What the hell, boss?” the injured man croaked. “You are the dumbest cracker I ever met in my life.” Drops of dirty blood clung to his dry lips, and his breathing was labored.
“Shut up, I’m here to save your stupid ass. Let’s go.” Sam cupped his elbows under Armon’s armpits and dragged the 250-pound man back towards cover. “Ever think about skipping a meal or two?” Sam grunted.
When Armon didn’t answer, Sam knew that if he didn’t hurry, he might as well not do anything at all. He dragged the big man to the periphery of the fighting when a slug tore through his thigh. Collins, still covering him, found the target and put a bullet in the gunman’s forehead. As Sam went down, two of his men grabbed him and Armon, hauling them to safety.
A MEDEVAC chopper left the base as soon as the first man went down, and while they waited for its arrival, the medic tried to slow Armon’s bleeding. Someone else wrapped a tourniquet around Sam’s shredded leg. As the last of the militants fell, the men loaded the injured soldiers into the helicopter and flew back to base.
