Chapter 3 - The Crest with Two Scratches
Command Sergeant Major Jesse Vance did not enter a room; he struck it like a mortar round.
He was fifty-two years old, standing six-foot-three in pressed operational camouflage, with a jaw carved out of Cumberland plateau sandstone and jump boots polished until they mirrored the ceiling lights. Across his chest were four tiers of combat decorations, topped by the Master Parachutist badge and the Combat Medical Badge with two stars.
Beside him walked Lieutenant Colonel Harrison, the battalion commander, clutching a leather dispatch case and looking like an officer who had just watched his morning briefing drive off a cliff.
The room moved as one body.
Two hundred pairs of combat boots slammed into the linoleum. Chairs screeched back. Two hundred soldiers snapped into rigid, breathless immobility. The concussive thud rattled the glass display cases along the entryway.
"AT EASE!" Vance didn't shout, but the low frequency of his voice vibrated through the floorboards.
Nobody relaxed. Every chin stayed locked, eyes staring at the plaster ten inches over the head of the person across from them.
Vance marched down the center aisle. He didn't look at the steam line. He didn't look at the two hundred paratroopers. His eyes were locked on Staff Sergeant Reese, who was standing frozen beside my table, his thumbs glued to the seams of his trousers, sweat glistening in the hollow behind his ear.
Vance stopped four inches from Reese’s right shoulder.
"Staff Sergeant Reese," Vance said, his voice dropping into that quiet, terrifying timber that makes grown men want to crawl beneath the baseboards. "Did I just hear you ask a recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross if she wandered in from a nursing home for a handout?"
Reese’s throat hitched. "Sergeant Major... the visitor's pass wasn't visible, and—"
"Did you lay your hands on her table and demand her papers like she was an uninvited stray in your personal clubhouse?"
"I was attempting to enforce post access regulations, Sergeant Major."
"You were attempting to puff your chest out because you thought an eighty-one-year-old woman in church shoes was an easy mark to make yourself look like a commander of men," Vance said, his face completely devoid of expression. "You have eaten five hundred meals beneath that bronze plaque. You form up outside that doorway every morning at zero-six-thirty. And you didn't have the situational awareness, the decency, or the basic soldierly instinct to recognize the face of the woman who held thirty-two severed arteries closed with her bare fingers while the North Vietnamese Army walked mortar rounds down the center of our triage trench?"
Reese looked as though he were going to be sick on his boots. "No excuse, Sergeant Major."
"You’re damn right there’s no excuse."
Vance turned on his heel. The steel in his spine didn't bend, but as his eyes settled on me, the iron in his gaze melted into something that looked startfully like reverence. He took off his patrol cap, tucked it neatly beneath his left arm, and bowed his head slightly.
"Captain Braddock," Vance said, his voice deep and warm. "Welcome back to the division. We had no notification from the gate. If the adjutant’s desk had known you were on post, you would have had an officer escort from the state line."
"I don't need an escort to eat beans, Jesse," I said, offering him a faint smile. "I drove my Buick. The transmission shudders a bit when it shifts into second, but it gets me over the state line. And I told your gate guard I was here on personal business. He gave me the pass."
I reached into my pocket, pulled out the blue lanyard with my laminated visitor’s card, and laid it neatly on the table beside my empty water glass.
Lieutenant Colonel Harrison stepped forward, extending his hand. "Captain Braddock, I am Colonel Harrison. I command the 326th. It is an extraordinary honor to meet you. Your citation hangs in our regimental briefing room."
"I know," I said, taking his hand with a grip that still held some of the wire-strong tension from thirty years of wrangling feverish grade-schoolers. "Arthur always said they painted my chin too sharp. But the photographer took the picture twenty minutes after we landed at Camp Evans, and I hadn't slept in seventy-two hours, so I couldn't complain."
"Captain," Harrison said, his eyes cutting sideways to Reese, who stood like a statue waiting for the lightning bolt. "Regarding this NCO's conduct—"
"Leave the boy alone, Colonel," I said quietly.
Reese’s eyes twitched toward me in absolute shock.
"He did what young men with stripes have done since Washington’s boys stole chickens at Valley Forge," I continued, looking Reese up and down with an old woman’s unsparing clarity. "He’s got muscle, he’s got rank, and he hasn't yet lived long enough to learn that the things in this life that can kill you don't usually come wearing helmets. He thought I was small. People always think old women are small until they have to lift one."
I stood up.
My left hip gave a dry, splintering pop. Jesse Vance moved instinctively, his huge, leather-tough hand sliding beneath my elbow to brace my weight. I let him take it. When you are eighty-one, you don't let pride keep you from a solid hand when the weather is turning.
"Sergeant Reese," I said.
He snapped his head toward me. "Yes, ma'am?"
"My bowl is finished," I told him, nodding toward the half-eaten chili. "Carry my tray up to the scullery. And while you're standing by the wash rack, take a good, hard look at the base of that bronze plaque. Not at the big letters. Read the six names at the very bottom. The ones stamped in the small lead."
May you like
Reese swallowed. "Yes, ma'am."
"Because one of those names," I whispered, stepping close enough that he could smell the peppermint lozenges in my coat pocket, "belongs to a nineteen-year-old boy named Thomas Reese. He was from Giles County, Tennessee. And fifty-six years ago, he gave me something I came here today to return."
