Chapter 4 - The Relic on the Coat
Reese didn't take the tray immediately.
He stood there as if an artillery round had detonated in the room without making a sound, the concussive force rattling his internal organs while leaving the walls intact. His mouth opened, but nothing came out. The skin beneath his eyes twitched violently.
"Thomas... Reese?" he whispered.
"Corporal Thomas Reese," I said. "Squad automatic rifleman, Company B. He had freckles on the back of his neck, an illegal pack of Lucky Strikes sewn into the lining of his flak vest, and a bad habit of humming gospel tunes when he was scared."
I unpinned the little brass shield from the lapel of my gray wool coat.
The metal was cool against my skin. It wasn't the polished, shiny gold stuff you buy at the post exchange. It was dull, blackened around the raised rim, with two distinct, jagged gouges carved deep across the white bird's wing.
I held it out in the palm of my hand.
"Take it," I told him.
Reese looked at my open palm as if I were offering him glowing embers. He lifted his right hand, his fingers trembling—the very same fingers that had snapped in my face two minutes earlier—and picked up the pin with the reverence of a priest lifting a communion wafer.
When he turned it over, his breath caught in his throat.
Scratched into the flat lead backing with the tip of an entrenching tool was a service number and three initials: T.E.R.
"My grandfather," Reese choked out, his knees visibly wavering. "My dad had his dog tags, but... they said everything else was lost when the field hospital took a direct hit. He never talked about it. He died when I was twelve. He just had this big scar across his collarbone and a limp that kept him from working the farm in the winter. He told me... he told me an angel pulled him out of a hole."
"I wasn't an angel," I said, adjusting the collar of my coat. "I was twenty-five years old, five feet tall, soaked in blood that wasn't mine, and angry enough at the North Vietnamese Army to chew a steel cotter pin. Thomas took a piece of shrapnel under his clavicle that missed his sub-clavian artery by the thickness of a postage stamp. I had my thumb jammed into the hole in his neck while two men carried him up the skid of a slick that was already taking small-arms fire through the tail rotor."
Colonel Harrison looked at Command Sergeant Major Vance. Neither man spoke. There are moments in military life where rank ceases to function as a barrier and becomes an audience to history.
"He gave me that pin when we landed at Camp Evans," I continued, looking at the boy standing before me. "He unhooked it from his collar while they were rolling him toward the triage tent. He told me, 'Take it, doc. You keep it until I come back for it.' He didn't come back to the battalion. They shipped him to Japan forty-eight hours later, and I never saw him again."
Reese stared down at the scratched initials. A single tear broke over his lower eyelid, tracking through the dust and sweat on his cheek. He tried to wipe it away with his sleeve, ashamed of crying in front of his entire company, but his hands were shaking too hard to hide it.
"He lived to be sixty-eight," Reese said, his voice breaking. "He raised three boys. He taught me how to shoot a deer. He used to sit on the back porch in the evenings with an old transistor radio, just staring off toward the woods."
"He was thinking about the ones who didn't get on that helicopter," I told him. "We all do. It doesn't ever leave you, son. Not when you're thirty. Not when you're eighty."
I pointed toward the table. "Now, pick up that tray like I told you. Take it to the scullery. Then you walk over to the battalion headquarters. I didn't come here just for the chili, Sergeant. I came because I have something in my purse that has your grandfather's name on it."
May you like
Colonel Harrison stepped aside, gesturing toward the double doors. "Captain Braddock, my office is down the hall. May we offer you a cup of coffee that didn't come out of an industrial dispenser?"
"Only if it's hot, Colonel," I said, leaning lightly on my umbrella as I took my first step. "My bones are like a barometric gauge. It’s going to rain before four o'clock, and I don't care to be stuck on the interstate when it does."
