Chapter 2 - The Wall Behind Him
Sergeant Reese didn’t turn around right away.
A man like that—broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, carrying six years of jump pay and the swagger of two combat tours in the sandbox—doesn’t turn around just because an eighty-one-year-old woman in church shoes tells him to. He stared down at me instead, his jaw clamped tight, waiting for me to flinch.
He was looking for the fear he was used to pulling out of people. But when you’ve held the arterial bleed of a nineteen-year-old boy in a rain-slicked bunker while 122-millimeter rockets tear the timber ceiling off over your head, a twenty-seven-year-old sergeant puffing his chest over a bowl of institutional chili doesn’t register as terrifying. He just registers as noise.
"You think you’re funny, ma’am?" Reese asked, his voice dropping into that low, flat growl men use when their pride starts backing them into a corner.
"I don't think I'm anything at all, son," I said, resting my hands in my lap. "I just suggested you turn around. It saves a lot of paperwork later."
The two corporals flanking him shifted their boots on the linoleum. The one on the left, a tall kid with freckles and a nervous twitch around his mouth, cast a quick glance over his shoulder toward the lintel above the stainless-steel steam tables.
The dining facility had gone completely still.
It’s a peculiar thing, the silence of two hundred soldiers. A civilian room goes quiet with whispers and scuffling chairs. A military room goes quiet like an engine cutting out at ten thousand feet. Forks hovered halfway to mouths. Trays sat motionless. Even the civilian line-cooks in their paper caps had stopped ladling mac-and-cheese, their eyes fixed on the spectacle unfolding at Table 14.
"Look at the wall, Staff Sergeant," the young specialist at the next table whispered under her breath. She didn't look at Reese. She kept her eyes glued to her green plastic tray, her knuckles pale. "Just look at it."
Reese’s eyes flickered to the girl, fury flashing across his brow at a junior enlisted daring to speak without being addressed. "Mind your lane, Specialist."
"Turn around, Reese," someone else called out from three rows back. It wasn't a private’s voice. It was raspy, seasoned, carrying the weight of stripes that had been earned in places where men didn't have time to play tough guy over lunch.
Reese hesitated.
Slowly, almost reluctantly, as if turning his head were conceding an entire continent, he rotated on the balls of his combat boots.
Above the food line, mounted on the polished oak paneling beneath the battalion’s crossed bayonets, was a brass plaque six feet long. Above the plaque, painted in royal-blue block lettering eighteen inches high, was the formal dedication of the dining facility:
CAPTAIN QUINN BRADDOCK MEMORIAL COMMONS
326th Medical Battalion — 101st Airborne Division
“When the Sky Burns, the Shield Holds.”
Below the lettering, cast in high-relief bronze, was the likeness of a young woman in jungle fatigues, her hair pinned back in an unruly knot, steel-rimmed glasses resting on her nose, a stethoscope slung around her neck, and a field bandage clutched in her right hand.
Pinned to the collar of the bronze shirt was a single insignia: the blue shield with the diving white raptor.
Reese stared at the wall.
The color started leaving his face from the hairline down, like a glass of milk being emptied into a sink. His tree-trunk neck didn't look quite so thick anymore. His hands, which had been resting flat and heavy on my Formica table, lifted off the surface as if the laminate had suddenly been wired to a twelve-volt battery.
He looked at the bronze face on the oak wall.
Then he looked down at me.
At the white hair. At the wire-rimmed glasses sitting on the bridge of my nose. At the worn wool coat with the dark, tarnished brass pin sitting on my left collar.
"No," Reese muttered. His voice had lost its bullhorn gravel. It sounded thin, like dry grass. "No way. That’s... that’s from the A Shau Valley. That was fifty years ago."
"Fifty-six," I corrected him gently. I picked up my napkin and patted my mouth. "And they told me when they dedicated this building five years ago that the chili was served on Thursdays. I didn't come to inspect your barracks, Sergeant. I came because my kitchen in Clarksville is cold, my stove takes twenty minutes to boil water, and this post makes the best red-bean venison chili south of the Ohio River."
The corporal with the freckles took two involuntary steps backward, detaching himself from Reese as if the staff sergeant had just been tagged with radioactive dye.
May you like
"You're... you're her?" Reese stammered. "You're Quinn Braddock?"
"Captain Braddock," a voice thundered from the double doors at the main entrance. "And you will address her as such while you stand at the position of attention, Staff Sergeant, before I take those stripes off your sleeves and feed them to you on a paper plate."
