All for You

by Jessica Scott

  He’d managed. A week, and temptation always just a single shot glass out of reach.

  He’d keep managing if he wanted to keep his career. With the deployment looming, he couldn’t afford to screw up again. Not if he planned on being on that plane.

  He wasn’t going to let his boys go downrange without him.

  “I can’t help it if your tolerance is as low as a baby Chihuahua’s,” Reza said with a grin.

  Teague groaned and covered his face with both hands. “What are we doing here anyway?”

  He motioned around them to the classroom slowly filling up with officers and enlisted from around the unit. Some he was friendly with. Others, well, they weren’t exactly in his fan club. Reza tended to get cranky with the staff when they didn’t play nice or tried to make decisions for his soldiers. That was Reza’s job as the first sergeant and he’d be damned if any staff weenie was going to do his job for him.

  Reza glanced over at Teague. “You didn’t hear?”

  “Obviously not,” Teague said dryly.

  “There were five suicides this weekend. The corps commander has ordered a stand down. We’re getting training from the shrinks.”

  Just saying the words sent a twinge through Reza’s guts. He sat back in his chair, shifting uncomfortably. Fort Hood was a big post. It was inconceivable that he’d know any of the victims even though a couple of them had been in the brigade. And yet a nagging sense of unease stirred at the nape of his neck.

  Teague mirrored Reza’s stance. “Five suicides in a weekend? What the fuck is going on?”

  Reza slowly shook his head, rubbing his hand over his bottom lip. “I don’t know, man. It’s pretty bad. Three were in our brigade.”

  Reza kept watching the sergeants and officers as they filtered into the classroom.

  Reza’s phone vibrated in his pocket and he pulled it out. A single picture from Claire.

  A memorial. There were four of them in that picture, taken the day they were supposed to leave for Kuwait: Claire, Reza, Miles and Wacowski. Their first deployment had been in the bag. One more mission and they were going home.

  God, but had they ever been that young? The Thunder Run to Baghdad felt like a lifetime ago.

  Bitter resentment burned in him. He’d taken ’Ski to the docs and they’d told him to take a sleeping pill and get a good night’s sleep.

  Ski had never woken up.

  And Miles had died because Reza hadn’t been on that last mission. He’d been tied up, arguing with the docs.

  He’d lost two men that day. This day, seven years before.

  Claire never forgot.

  And Reza’s arms bore the tributes to his lost friends.

  “You okay?” Teague’s words cut through Reza’s ragged thoughts.

  Reza shifted, scanning the room, shoving the emotions aside. Stuffing them down as he started taking head count.

  Wisniak walked in, laughing with one of his buddies. He’d gotten out of the hospital last week and had been doing, oddly enough, really well, at least as far as Reza could tell. The wonders of modern medicine apparently had worked their magic for him.

  More than once, Reza had almost approached him. Asked him if he was doing okay. But the marks on his arms burned, the pain in his soul a raging inferno, reminding him that he’d spent days chasing Wisniak around before he’d been committed to the fifth floor.

  Days that he should have been leading his boys through battle drills. He hadn’t approached. Hadn’t been able to get past how much time the kid had taken from Reza training his boys, just to make sure that Wisniak didn’t kill himself.

  He’d lost too many men to the war. He didn’t trust the mental health docs to get it right. Not with Wisniak, not with anyone. The irritation smothered any concern over loyalty or lack thereof.

  Emily’s taunt burned in his ears. That’s a stunning lack of loyalty.

  He had loyalty. To the men he would take downrange again. It bugged the living hell out of him that he couldn’t get Emily’s taunt out of his head even after that moment at Talarico’s. He didn’t do stoic introspection and the fact that she’d poked at him pissed him off.

  He cared about all of his soldiers. It was simply that Wisniak wasn’t one of them. He took from the team; he wasn’t part of it.

  On the nights when he’d lain awake, his thoughts tumbling through time and space, chasing elusive sleep, he argued with her. Told her that some people needed more help than others. That “team” was something Emily didn’t understand. Couldn’t. With her neat hands and proper hair, he’d be willing to bet she’d never gone a day without a shower, let alone held someone while they bled out.

  His breath caught in his throat as the woman he spent many nights arguing with in his head walked into the front of the classroom.

  Shit. He’d been told this was a sensing session—a group hug about everything the leadership thought was wrong.

  This was going to be so much worse.

  Clearing his throat, he slouched down in his chair in the back of the room and wondered if he could sneak out without the sergeant major seeing him. “Is the shoot house still on for tomorrow? I want to blow some shit up.”

  Teague shifted in his seat, slipping his cell phone into his jacket shoulder pocket. “As far as I know. Why?”

  “Haven’t you heard? Weapons are therapeutic.”

  Teague chuckled darkly. “Yeah, I think I learned that somewhere on the road between Baghdad and Mosul.”

  Sergeant Major Giles walked to the front of the room and some enterprising soul had the insight to call “At Ease.” Everyone shot to their feet in a show of respect for the senior enlisted man. Reza shifted behind a skinny lieutenant, not wanting her to see him. Not sure what he’d say or do if she did. He wasn’t hiding, per se, so much as he was simply using available terrain to conceal his position.

  It wasn’t like they’d slept together. They’d simply chatted at the bar.

  “All right, listen up. Give Captain Lindberg your undivided attention. No cell phones. No leaving. No interrupting. You will listen to what she has to say and you will learn something if I have to shove it up your ass.”

  Emily’s eyes widened but otherwise her expression remained neutral. There was that backbone again. Reza suppressed a chuckle at Emily’s stoicism. She kept her face carefully blank as she listened to the sergeant major. Obviously, she was not used to crazy, steely-eyed killers in the clinic. He doubted there was enough medication in the entire Darnall pharmacy to shrink Giles’s head. The man had what polite company called issues.

  She didn’t flinch when Giles told everyone to take their seats. But then she scanned the crowd and her gaze landed for a moment too long on him. He refused to look away, taking in the single lock of hair brushing her forehead. The indentation of her lip as she chewed it.

  Behind her professionally bland expression, he saw a flash of uncertainty. This was new for her, he realized. She might go toe-to-toe with a disgruntled sergeant in her own clinic, but right then she was facing an entire room of them. It would be disconcerting to a seasoned veteran, let alone a freshly minted army doc. He wondered if this was her first time outside of the sanctity of the hospital walls. If she’d never been around knuckle draggers before, how could she possibly understand the world that Reza’s soldiers were describing?

  If she’d never smelt the burned sulfur of spent ammunition, how could she explain away a nightmare of burning cloth and charred flesh? If she’d never been blown up, how could she possibly understand the momentary flashback between the boom of the thunder and the crack of the lightning and the gut-clenching terror as you tried to figure out if the explosion was an imminent threat or not.

  Her gaze flickered back to him. An instance of acknowledgment and then it was gone. But in that moment, Reza knew they were worlds apart and that nothing would ever span that distance. He knew war. He’d lived it.

  She knew nothing but talk of war.

  As she shifted her notes, a quiet revelati
on whispered across Reza’s skin. She was innocent. She truly thought she could make a difference.

  She wasn’t slick-sleeved because she sought to avoid the war. She was running toward the conflict in her own way—trying to help the soldiers she admired and respected.

  As she lifted her gaze and faced a room of roughneck infantry and armor officers and sergeants, he realized that she would never again be the same. Even as she sought to understand the war and what it had done to him, to his men, he knew she’d barely touched on their darkest memories and fears. Her innocence would be tainted today. Just by being around them, some of the war would leave a smudge on her innocence.

  He should have felt some bitter satisfaction that she would no longer be as sanctimonious if she lived through the war he’d fought. That she would descend to his level, would no longer be unblemished. But watching her shuffle her papers, he felt something new sidle up against his heart. The unfamiliar urge to protect: the fleeting hope that she would never face the war as he’d lived it.

  But she wasn’t his. Not his to protect, not his to keep safe.

  Reza was no white knight, charging into battle to defend his lady’s honor. No, never that. But as he watched Emily lift her chin and square off with a group of roughneck infantrymen, he knew she would never be the same after today.

  And neither would he.

  * * *

  Emily shifted her notes and grasped a pen in her right hand, flicking the cap on and off. It was a nervous habit that had driven her father insane but today of all days, she was allowed. The blatant hostility from the room full of men was…well, “disconcerting” was too light a word.

  She was nervous. Nervous but not afraid. There was a difference. And after her weekend of pulling double shifts in the ER, hers was a no-fail mission.

  Something was drastically wrong at Fort Hood and these men were key to helping figure it out. They were the ones who knew their soldiers the best. They were the ones who could identify the soldiers on edge before she could.

  They could save lives. But they had to trust that the system would work, and if her previous conversations with Reza were an indicator, there wasn’t a lot of love lost between the men in the ranks and the docs in her office.

  Having so many eyes on her at once was unsettling at best. And when you considered what she was there to talk to them about—yeah, she couldn’t really count on a warm reception and an invitation to drinks afterward. She figured it was close to what a rabbit must feel like when facing a pack of wolves. She glanced around the room, seeing that every single right shoulder sported the giant combat patch of the First Cavalry Division, a patch that covered the entire space reserved to tell the world they’d been to war. Her own right shoulder felt conspicuously naked. She was a slick sleeve. She’d learned that term recently and it was not a term of endearment.

  But she wasn’t a rabbit and damn it, she was not going to back down from doing her job.

  The war was far from over. She’d get her turn to deploy. She knew that but standing there, in front of a room full of combat veterans, her carefully prepared speech escaped her. The notes on her slides, which had been vetted by the hospital commander, seemed somehow…empty. Futile.

  “I’m here…” She cleared her throat as her voice broke. “I’m here today to talk to you about behavioral health.” Someone coughed in the back of the room and she didn’t dare look up. She was afraid she would see Reza watching her again. Afraid she would look in his eyes and see something there that she wasn’t ready to deal with.

  There were demons hiding in the shadows of his eyes. She didn’t have to be a psych doc to see it. There was something deeper, though, beneath the shadows and the sadness etched into the lines beneath his eyes. Something that called to her. That urged her out of her tight, protected box. Something that made her want to reach out and seize the risk.

  To touch him. The truest part of him, not the harsh exterior he presented to the world.

  Refusing to be cowed, she lifted her gaze to scan the room once more. A mistake. The hostility was not in her head. Arms were folded across chests. Jaws ground furiously at being cooped into a hot classroom. Several cheeks were packed with chewing tobacco, their owners’ spit bottles close by.

  She was not going to reach anyone here. It dawned on her in that moment that the hospital commanders had no idea what the attitudes were down here in a line unit. How was she ever going to reach these men when they didn’t want to hear one word she had to say?

  The interpersonal conflict in her office seemed somehow so trivial. So distant, despite recognizing at least two commanders she’d gone toe-to-toe with.

  Swallowing, she set down her papers and folded her arms over her chest. She glanced in Reza’s direction, wishing she had a translator to help her figure these rough men out.

  An echo of the first argument she’d had with Reza danced at the edge of her memory. She was not going to reach anyone with carefully prepared PowerPoint sides.

  She swallowed and took a deep breath, speaking before her common sense took over and talked her out of it.

  “So how many of you think that behavioral health is for pussies?”

  Half the room burst out with coughs attempting to cover laughter. The other half were busy picking their jaws up off the floor. It had been a reckless gamble, one that would have made her father cringe in shame, but one that worked because the tension snapped, fizzling a little bit. Granting her an opening she might not have had otherwise.

  “Be honest.” She glanced at the sergeant major, who looked ready to brain the first officer or sergeant that raised his hand. “Never mind, don’t answer that.” She shot a quick grin at the sergeant major and a few more chuckles drifted out of the crowd. “Look, we all know that I’ve got you held captive for an hour and we can stand here and stare at each other or maybe we can talk about what’s going on that we’ve got so many soldiers willing to hurt themselves.”

  She made the mistake of looking in Reza’s direction.

  He was watching her, his dark gaze intense, his mouth flat. At least he wasn’t glaring at her. That was progress, she supposed.

  She gripped the pen in her hand and motioned toward the men before her. “So maybe we can put aside the canned slides and talk about why you hate the shrinks. And maybe I can explain what it is that we do. And maybe, if we work together, we can save a life.”

  The silence was back, a wet blanket settling over the room. She glanced around as the brief opening she’d attempted to walk through shriveled and shrank.

  “I have a question.” Reza raised his hand. His eyes glittered darkly. “Sergeant First Class Iaconelli, ma’am. My question is: Why do we have to spend so much time chasing after the shitbirds who are smoking spice or some other shit that’s not meant for human consumption and then when we try to throw them out, you all stop the process and tell us they have PTSD?”

  “Ike, your attitude is part of the damn problem.” All eyes turned in the direction of a hard-looking sergeant first class. He had no hair and there was a hint of a black tattoo ringing his neck. Sergeant First Class Garrison was a big man. “Intimidating” was too light a word for him. And yet, on his left hand, a wedding ring shone bright gold. Someone had tamed this man. She found herself wondering at the woman who’d married him then pulled her thoughts sharply into focus. “You can’t run around calling our soldiers shitbirds. They’ll always do what you expect and if you expect them to screw up, they’re going to live up to your expectation.”

  “I don’t expect them to be smoking it up in the barracks on the weekend,” Reza snapped.

  Emily held up one hand. “Sergeant Garrison, thank you for getting straight to the heart of the matter. What you’re talking about is not simply about drug abuse. You’re talking about soldiers who are self-medicating. Instead of using the proper channels to seek care, they’re choosing instead the easier path of smoking marijuana, or what is it you called it? Spice?”

  “It’s synthetic marijuan
a, ma’am,” Garrison said.

  She’d had no idea there was such a thing, let alone that soldiers were smoking it. “Thank you. Regardless of their drug of choice, the reason for using is often to deal with symptoms of anxiety that they’re otherwise managing or not managing very well.”

  Reza lifted his hand and she swallowed the flit of nerves in her belly as she pointed at him. “Yeah, well, I’ve got real warriors who need help who won’t go to the damn R&R Center because there’s all these slick-sleeved little punks in there trying to get out of drug charges.”

  It was a cold statement, one that shook her, reminding her that this was not a sympathetic room. And that Iaconelli was not a sympathetic man.

  “You raise an interesting point, Sergeant Iaconelli. The facts are that most of our suicides over the last two years have been among first-term soldiers who have never deployed,” she said, speaking loudly to cover the nervous waiver in her voice.

  Garrison straightened where he’d been leaning against the wall. “Y’all know I got blown up a little over a year ago. I had a really tough road back. The thing I learned over that time is that our boys are struggling. Whether we see it or not, our boys need our help.” He turned his gaze to Emily.

  Reza scowled and shook his head. “Look, Garrison, you’re not the only one who got blown up downrange. But the point I’m trying to make is that it’s our boys who won’t go get the help because of all the ash and trash taking up the appointments.”

  Emily held up her hands but Garrison interrupted her. “Ike, you need to shut your damn mouth. Just because you drink yourself to sleep every night as therapy doesn’t mean someone else doesn’t need a different way to cope.”

  “Fuck you, Garrison,” Reza spat. “I’m the reason the rest of your platoon came home from the last deployment.”

  A red-haired sergeant stood. His right hand was bunched in what looked like a perpetual half grip and it took Emily a moment to realize that it was a prosthetic hand. Her skin went cold. She’d never seen physical evidence of the war this close before.

  “Girls, girls. Can we please listen to the good captain explain to us the services she offers? I for one would like more information on how to not accidentally almost kill myself in the future.”