Chapter 10 - The Open Road Ahead
The rain had stopped by 1700 hours, leaving the sky above Fort Campbell washed in shades of pale violet and cold steel.
The steam was rising off the wet asphalt of the parking lot outside the battalion headquarters as I walked toward my Buick. My coat was buttoned tight against the evening chill, my purse slung over my arm, my old umbrella hooked over my wrist like a walking stick.
Walking beside me, carrying my black leather handbag and matching his long, youthful stride to my slow, eighty-one-year-old shuffle, was Staff Sergeant Marcus Reese.
"You don't have to walk me all the way to the car, son," I told him, looking at the long row of vehicles parked under the sodium vapor lights. "I know where I parked it. It’s the only Buick LeSabre with a dented rear fender and a bumper sticker that says 'Nurses Save Lives, Doctors Just Take the Credit.'"
"I'm walking you to your car, ma'am," Reese said, his voice quiet, steady, and filled with a warmth that hadn't been there when the sun was high. "And if you come back next Thursday, you won't have to show a pass at the gate. I already spoke to the provost marshal’s office. You're on the permanent access roster."
We reached the Buick.
Reese opened the heavy steel door for me, bracing it with his hip so it wouldn't swing back against my knees. He set my bag on the passenger seat, then reached into his pocket.
In his broad, scarred palm lay the little brass crest with the blue shield and the diving white bird—the one with the initials T.E.R. scratched into the back.
He held it out toward me.
"Take it back, Captain," Reese said softly. "It belongs to you. You earned it fifty times over."
I looked down at the dull metal, then looked up into the boy's clear, gray eyes—eyes that looked so much like the ones that had stared up at me through the smoke of that bunker fifty-six years ago.
I closed his fingers over the pin with my own two hands.
"Keep it, Marcus," I said. "Your grandfather gave it to me so I wouldn't forget him. I never did. Not for a single day. But now it’s time for you to wear it. Wear it on your coat when you train those young soldiers. And when one of them thinks he's too big, too loud, or too important to listen to the people who need him most, you show him those two scratches on the bird's wing and tell him what it costs to be a real man."
Reese looked down at his closed fist, a single nod his only answer as his throat worked silently.
I climbed into the driver's seat, pulled the door shut with a solid, metallic clunk, and turned the key in the ignition. The old V6 engine coughed twice, then settled into its familiar, rumbling rhythm.
I rolled down the window two inches to let the cold evening air in.
"Captain?" Reese called out, leaning down slightly toward the glass.
"Yes, son?"
"The four names on that index card," he said, his brow furrowing with a sudden, serious intensity. "You said three of them were in Biloxi, Des Moines, and Dover. But who was the fourth?"
I paused, my hands resting on the thin plastic steering wheel.
The light from the post streetlamps was beginning to flicker on, casting long, sharp shadows across the wet tarmac.
"The fourth boy wasn't from Tennessee, Marcus," I said, my voice dropping into that quiet, distant tone that carries the sound of rain falling on distant jungle leaves. "His name was David Vance. General Raymond Vance's younger brother. The one they told the family died of malaria in a field hospital in Pleiku."
Reese froze, his hands dropping to his sides. "His brother? But... why would the General hide that?"
"Because David was in that bunker with me," I told him, shifting the Buick into reverse with a heavy clunk of the gears. "And David was the one who handed your grandfather the first box of machine gun belts when the Colonel gave the order to burn us alive."
I let off the brake, backing the car out into the lane, the headlights sweeping across the rain-slicked asphalt toward the main gate that led back to Clarksville.
May you like
Behind me, Staff Sergeant Reese stood under the yellow glare of the post light, looking down at the brass pin in his hand, the wind catching the collar of his jacket as the dark clouds rolled south toward the mountains.
The gate was three miles ahead, the road was open, and somewhere out in the damp Tennessee woods, fifty years of silence were finally beginning to crack wide open.
