Chapter 2 - The Writing on the Wall
Sergeant Reese didn’t turn around right away.
A man like that—thick-necked, heavy-shouldered, carrying the unbroken swagger of six years in jump boots and two tours downrange—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 blink.
He was looking for the flinch he was accustomed to pulling out of people. But when you have packed wet abdominal dressings into the belly of an eighteen-year-old boy in a rain-slicked bunker while hundred-and-twenty-two-millimeter rockets tear the timber ceiling off two feet above your helmet, a young staff sergeant puffing his chest over a bowl of beans doesn’t register as terror. He registers as an inconvenience.
"You think you’re funny, ma’am?" Reese asked, his voice dropping into that low, flat gravel men use when their pride realizes it has walked into a room with no back door.
"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 great deal of paperwork later."
The two corporals flanking him shifted their weight on the linoleum. The one on the left, a tall boy with pale freckles and a nervous tick pulling at the corner of his mouth, cast a quick, uneasy glance over his shoulder toward the lintel above the stainless-steel steam tables.
The dining facility had gone completely still.
It is a peculiar thing, the silence of two hundred paratroopers. A civilian cafeteria goes quiet with scraping chairs and stage whispers. A military hall goes quiet like an aircraft engine cutting out at ten thousand feet. Forks hovered halfway to open mouths. Plastic trays sat motionless. Even the civilian line-cooks in their white paper caps had stopped ladling mac-and-cheese, their wooden spoons dripping onto the counter while their eyes stayed glued to Table 14.
"Look at the wall, Staff Sergeant," the young specialist at the next table whispered under her breath. She didn't look up from her green tray. She kept her eyes pinned to her napkin, her knuckles bloodless. "Just look at it."
Reese’s eyes flickered to the girl, fury flashing across his brow at a junior enlisted soldier daring to speak out of turn. "Mind your lane, Specialist."
"Turn around, Reese," someone else called out from four rows back. It wasn't a private’s voice. It was raspy, dry, carrying the flat authority of someone who had burned his youth in the Euphrates and didn't have patience for playground games.
Reese hesitated.
Slowly, reluctantly, as though turning his head were surrendering a fortified position, he pivoted on the heavy rubber soles of his boots.
Above the food line, mounted directly onto the polished red-oak paneling beneath the crossed bayonets of the division crest, was a cast-bronze plaque six feet long. Above that plaque, cut into royal-blue block lettering eighteen inches high, was the formal dedication of the hall:
CAPTAIN QUINN BRADDOCK MEMORIAL COMMONS
326th Medical Battalion — 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile)
“When the Sky Burns, the Shield Holds.”
Beneath the lettering, hammered in high relief, was the portrait of a young woman in jungle fatigues. Her hair was pulled back in an unruly knot beneath a steel pot, wire-rimmed glasses perched on the bridge of her nose, a stethoscope slung around her neck, and a field dressing clutched in her right hand.
Pinned to the collar of that bronze blouse was a single insignia: the blue shield with the diving white raptor.
Reese stared at the wall.
The color began leaving his face from the hairline downward, like water draining out of a cracked bucket. His broad neck seemed to shrink inside his stiff collar. His hands, which had been planted flat and aggressive against my Formica table, lifted off the laminate as if the surface had suddenly been wired to a generator.
He looked at the bronze face above the steam kettles.
Then he looked down at me.
At the white hair pinned behind my ears. At the wire-rimmed spectacles resting on my nose. At the gray wool coat with the dark, tarnished brass pin sitting on my left lapel.
"No," Reese muttered. His voice had lost its parade-ground thunder. It sounded thin, like dry corn husks rubbing together in a November wind. "No way. That’s... that’s from Firebase Ripcord. That was fifty-six years ago."
"Fifty-six years and two months," I said, picking up my paper napkin and dabbing my lips. "And they told me when they dedicated this building five years back that the chili was served on Thursdays. I didn't drive up here from Clarksville to inspect your barracks, Sergeant. I came because my stove has an electrical short, my kitchen is cold, and this post makes the only red-bean venison chili south of the Ohio River that tastes like real grease."
The freckled corporal took two deliberate steps backward, separating himself from Reese as if the sergeant had just been sprayed with aviation fuel.
May you like
"You're... you're her?" Reese stammered. "You're Quinn Braddock?"
"Captain Braddock," a voice thundered from the double vestibule at the main entrance. "And you will address her as such while you stand at the position of attention, Staff Sergeant, before I strip those stripes off your sleeves and make you eat them off the scullery floor."
