Chapter 13 - The Unbroken Line
Two months later, the sleet had turned into the hard, gray cold of mid-January.
The yellow house on North Second Street was quiet again, but it wasn't the same kind of quiet as before. On the small oak side table in my front hall, sitting between the bowl where I keep my car keys and my plastic-framed picture of John in his flight suit, was a photograph Reese had taken with his phone and had printed at the drugstore in Oak Grove.
It showed the two of us standing on the frozen grass of the parade field.
I had my chin up, my blue cape wrapped tight against the wind, looking like an old hawk that had seen too many winters to care about the frost. And behind me, his hand resting on the back of the chrome chair I had refused to sit in, was Staff Sergeant Daniel Reese, looking straight into the lens with the steady, quiet eyes of a man who knows exactly what his name is worth.
At six o'clock on a Tuesday evening, my phone rang.
It wasn't the Colonel. It was Daniel.
"Captain," he said, his voice coming through the receiver with the hollow, metallic echo of a cell phone inside a concrete hangar.
"Sergeant," I replied, sitting down on the telephone bench in the hall. "Why are you calling me during dinner? Fort Campbell serving chili tonight?"
"No, ma'am," he said. He paused, and in the background, I could hear the high, whining scream of turbofan engines warming up on a flight line—the deep, rhythmic thrum of C-17 Globemasters getting ready to swallow three hundred men and their gear.
The sound is the same in twenty-twenty-four as it was in nineteen-sixty-seven. It’s the sound of the world getting ready to move young men away from home.
"We got the alert order at fourteen-hundred," he said, his voice dropping into the flat, professional calm of an NCO whose bags are already on the pallet. "Company B is moving out. First lift leaves at twenty-two-hundred."
I closed my eyes for a second. The skin around my knuckles went tight.
"Where are they sending you, Daniel?"
"Can't say over the phone, ma'am. East. Somewhere with a lot of sand and not many trees."
"You have your cold-weather gear?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"You have that notebook with the names?"
"It’s in the left breast pocket of my body armor," he said, and I could hear the faint rustle of heavy nylon against his microphone. "Right behind the plate. Next to Granddad's lighter."
I sat in the dark hallway of my yellow house, listening to the turbines whine five miles away across the state line. Fifty-six years ago, I had watched boys Daniel’s age climb into the cargo bays of C-141s at Travis Air Force Base with their duffel bags between their knees, looking out the tiny round windows at the California hills and wondering if they were ever going to see an oak tree again.
"Daniel," I said, my voice steady, the nurse coming back into my throat with the force of an iron hinge.
"Yes, Captain?"
"You're a squad leader now. Not just a sergeant with stripes. A squad leader."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Your job isn't to be the bravest man in the ditch," I told him, looking at the photograph on the oak table. "Your job is to bring those eight boys back to their mothers in one piece. If you have to hit one of them with a canteen to make him keep his helmet on, you do it. If you have to run through the smoke to pull one out of the wire, you do it because his grandfather is waiting for him to come home and fix his truck."
"I will, Captain," he whispered. "I swear to you, I will."
"And Daniel?"
"Ma'am?"
"Look at your collar."
There was a silence on the line, five seconds long, filled only with the roar of the jet engines and the distant shouting of loadmasters on the tarmac.
"I’m looking, ma'am," he said, his voice thick.
He was wearing the pin. The blue shield. The white bird with the laurel branch in its beak. I had given it to him the day we listened to the tape in my kitchen, pinning it above his Bronze Star with my own swollen, arthritic hands while he stood at attention beside my refrigerator.
"That bird has flown through more lead than you’ll ever see, son," I said softly. "It knows the way home. You just hold onto it."
"Yes, ma'am," he said, his voice cracking slightly before he pulled it back together with the hard discipline of his training. "I have to get in line for the manifest, Captain. They're calling Bravo Company."
"Go on then," I said. "Don't keep your boys waiting."
"Captain Braddock?"
"Yes, Sergeant?"
"Thank you for the chili."
I let out a soft, dry laugh that sounded like an old leaf falling onto the porch. "It was too salty anyway, Daniel. Be safe."
The line clicked dead.
I didn't hang up the receiver right away. I held it against my ear, listening to the dial tone hum through the wires, connecting my yellow house in Clarksville to the flight line at Fort Campbell, to the barracks, to the parade grounds, to the ditch at Duc Pho that had been covered over by elephant grass forty years ago.
Outside, through the front window, the night sky to the north lit up with a pale, flickering yellow glow as the first C-17 lifted off the runway, its four massive engines tearing the winter air into ribbons as it climbed through the clouds, heading east into the dark.
May you like
I set the phone down on the cradle.
I didn't turn on the kitchen lights. I walked into the front room, sat down in John’s armchair by the cold window, pulled my blue wool cape around my shoulders, and watched the red running lights of the transport plane disappear into the stars, wondering—as every soldier who has ever stayed behind must wonder—who among them was going to come back to read the names on the wall.
