Chapter 5 - The Toll of Pride
Reese’s face had gone from white to a strange, hollow gray. He looked at the pin on my coat, his chest rising and falling in shallow, jagged breaths.
"What was his name?" Reese asked. His voice barely carried across the two feet of table between us.
"You didn't look at the back," I said.
I unpinned the brass crest. The metal was heavy, solid, the kind of brass they don't make anymore, cold from the draft in the room. I laid it on the table between his chili bowl and his water glass.
"Look at it," I said.
He hesitated, as if touching it might burn his fingers. But slowly, with hands that were shaking so badly he could barely manage the grip, he picked up the dark shield and flipped it over.
He saw the numbers first. 6-8-4-1-9.
Then his eyes moved to the tiny, jagged letters scratched beneath them, half-obscured by fifty years of tarnish and grease.
SGT A. REESE
CO. B, 2/502
The spoon fell from Sergeant Reese’s hand. It hit the table with a clatter that sounded like a gunshot, bouncing once before landing in the spilled water.
He stared at the metal. His mouth was open, but no sound came out. It was as if every breath in his lungs had been vacuumed out by an unseen force.
"My grandfather," he choked out. The word broke in the middle. "That’s... that’s my grandfather’s service number."
"Arthur," I said gently. "Arthur James Reese. Born in Dyersburg, 1947. He had a cowlick on the left side of his head that wouldn't stay down no matter how much pomade he used, and he talked about his mother’s peach cobbler until every wounded boy in that tent wanted to shoot him just to shut him up."
Reese’s hands closed over the pin. He squeezed it so hard the edges must have bitten into his palm, his shoulders beginning to hitch.
"He died four years ago," Reese whispered. "Stroke. He was seventy-one."
"I know," I said. "I read the obituary in the Tennessean. I sent a card, but I didn't sign my name. I just wrote: 'The wire held.' I didn't think anyone in the family would remember what that meant."
"He had a picture," Reese said, the tears finally breaking over his lower lashes, carving clean lines through the dust on his cheeks. "On his desk. Next to his Silver Star. It was an old black-and-white print of a girl in olive drabs with blood all over her apron, holding a pair of shears and looking so mad she could chew through iron. He never told us who she was. Every time I asked, he just said, 'That’s the angel who kept the devil from taking my boots.'"
He looked down at his own chest.
At the pristine, modern crest pinned above his pocket. At the identical eagle. At the stripes he had won with three deployments to Iraq and Syria, stripes he had worn with the arrogant swagger of a young man who thought he had invented sacrifice.
"I told you to take it off," Reese whispered. The shame in his voice was so heavy it seemed to bow his head toward the table. "I told you that you didn't have the right to wear it."
The dining hall was dead silent. Two hundred young men and women in the same uniform, bearing the same patch, were watching their sergeant—the man who drilled them, yelled at them, pushed them until they puked on the PT fields—weeping over a three-dollar bowl of chili.
Holloway stood behind him, his huge arms crossed, his face carved from dark stone. He did not say a word. He didn't have to.
"You're a good soldier, Sergeant Reese," I said.
He shook his head violently. "No, ma'am. I'm a disgrace. I disgraced the uniform. I disgraced my grandfather. I disgraced you."
"You made a mistake," I said. "There’s a difference between a disgrace and a fool with stripes. You let your pride get out ahead of your sense. Most boys your age do. My Arthur did the same thing."
I reached across the table and laid my wrinkled hand over his clenched fist.
"Your grandfather lived until morning," I told him softly. "I had to pump six pints of whole blood into him by hand with a rubber bulb because the gravity line broke. When the medevac bird finally set down on the pad at dawn, he was pale as a ghost, but he was breathing. He tried to take that pin back before they loaded him."
Reese looked up at me, his eyes red-rimmed and swimming. "Why didn't he?"
"Because I told him no," I said with a faint chuckle. "I told him he could have it back when he came to Clarksville and bought me the lunch he promised me. He never did. He was too stubborn to come look for an old nurse, and I was too proud to go chasing after an infantryman."
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I patted his hand once, then withdrew mine.
"Keep it," I said.
