Chapter 5 - The Command Post Confrontation
Brigade Headquarters was a two-story red brick building with white columns that looked like it belonged on a small college campus if you ignored the armored fighting vehicles parked in the courtyard and the armed sentries at the front doors.
Colonel Sterling walked with me down the polished corridor. Every officer we passed stopped, backed up against the wall, and saluted. They weren’t saluting the Colonel; they were saluting the ribbon Sterling had insisted on pinning to my gray wool coat before we left the mess hall—a small bar of white and purple that had lived in my jewelry box between a plastic rosary and my mother’s pearl earrings for half a century.
The Silver Star.
We entered the Colonel’s office. It was large, paneled in dark oak, with large windows looking out over the parade grounds where a company of infantrymen was running in formation with full packs, their cadence calls drifting through the glass like a rhythmic chant.
In the center of the room, standing at parade rest between two leather chairs, was Staff Sergeant Reese.
His belt was gone. His cover was sitting on the corner of the Colonel’s desk next to a bronze paperweight shaped like a tank shell. Without his wide utility belt, his uniform hung slightly loose, making him look younger, smaller, and stripped of the mechanical armor that gave him his swagger.
Command Sergeant Major Vance was standing by the door, arms crossed over his chest, his eyes bored into the back of Reese’s skull like drill bits.
“Sit down, Staff Sergeant,” Colonel Sterling commanded as he walked behind his desk.
Reese didn’t move. “Sir, regulation states that an NCO under reprimand—”
“I told you to sit down, Sergeant,” Sterling repeated, his voice dropping into that dangerous, quiet register. “And right now, the only thing keeping you from being a private first class by sundown is the grace of the lady sitting across from you.”
Reese’s eyes flicked to me. There was no anger left in them now. What I saw was something every nurse learns to recognize within five minutes on a triage floor: the sheer, hollow shock of a young man who has stepped on a landmine of his own making and is waiting for the smoke to clear so he can see how much damage he’s done to his own life.
He sat down on the edge of the leather armchair, keeping his knees together and his hands flat on his thighs.
“Sergeant,” I began, resting my walking stick against the arm of my chair. “Do you know where your father’s father was born?”
Reese swallowed hard. His vocal cords sounded dry. “Biloxi, ma’am. Biloxi, Mississippi.”
“And what was his name?”
“Thomas, ma’am. Thomas Jackson Reese. He died when I was twelve.”
“Did he ever talk to you about the Army?”
Reese looked down at his boots. “No, ma'am. He didn't talk much at all. He had a limp in his right hip, and he worked at the boatyard until his lungs gave out. My dad told me Granddad was a mechanic during the war. Said he worked in the rear depots.”
I let out a soft, dry laugh that sounded like dry leaves scraping over concrete.
“Thomas was no mechanic,” I said, reaching into my pocket and pulling out the yellowed envelope once more. “Your grandfather was a squad automatic rifleman with Company B, Second Battalion, Twelfth Cavalry. And he was the most stubborn, foul-mouthed boy from Mississippi that ever wore green canvas boots.”
Reese’s head jerked up. “You knew him?”
“I didn't know him long,” I said, looking out the Colonel’s window at the young soldiers running in the cold rain. “About forty-five minutes, all told. But forty-five minutes in a helicopter with the belly shot out and three men bleeding onto your boots makes you know someone better than forty years of Sunday dinners.”
I leaned forward, my old eyes holding his with the steady, unblinking authority that thirty-one years of dealing with high school boys had perfected.
“Do you know what he said to me when I cut his shirt off, Sergeant?”
Reese shook his head slowly.
“He told me to take my hands off his jacket because I didn’t have the proper rank to touch his uniform.”
The color that had started to return to Reese’s face vanished completely.
May you like
“He was nineteen,” I whispered. “He had two bullet holes in his shoulder and half his right ear was gone, and he was still trying to act tough because he thought if he showed he was scared, he’d die right there in the grass. Just like you did thirty minutes ago in that mess hall.”
***
