Chapter 4 - The Dust of Chu Lai
Colonel Vance sat down across from me, sighing as he pulled out the metal chair.
"You always were too soft on the loudmouths, Quinn," he said with a wry smile.
"I wasn't soft, Marcus. I just remember what it feels like to be twenty-seven and terrified of looking weak," I replied.
My mind drifted back, as it often did on Thursdays, to 1968.
The heat in Chu Lai wasn't like Tennessee heat. It smelled of diesel, swamp water, and iron. I had been twenty-five years old, an Army nurse with clean boots and trembling fingers. Thomas had been a young captain with an easy grin and a habit of bringing me wild orchids he picked off the tree trunks outside the compound.
When the mortars hit on a rainy Tuesday dawn, the aid station took direct shrapnel. The doctors were down. Thomas's company had been ambushed on the perimeter ridge. I remember the smoke filling my lungs. I remember tearing my fatigues to make tourniquets.
Thomas had been brought in on a canvas stretcher, his chest torn open. He held my hand with whatever strength he had left, pressed his battalion pin into my palm—the blue shield with the white bird—and said, *"Keep them alive, Quinn. Don't let them quit."*
He died ten minutes later.
I didn't cry that day. You don't have the luxury of tears when there are seventeen more boys lined up on stretchers waiting for someone to stop the bleeding. I pinned his brass crest inside my shirt, right against my skin, and worked for thirty-six straight hours until the relief choppers landed.
Fifty-six years later, that little piece of brass was still pinned to my chest.
"Quinn?" Colonel Vance’s voice pulled me back to the present. "Are you alright?"
"I'm fine, Marcus," I said, blinking away the fog of memory. "Just thinking about why I drove out here today."
"The anniversary," Vance nodded respectfully. "Tomorrow is the fifty-sixth year."
May you like
"Yes," I said. "And I don't want that young sergeant ruined over a bowl of chili and an old woman's pride."
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