Chapter 10 - The Walk of Honor
Friday morning broke cold and clear over the rolling hills of Christian County. The rain had washed the sky until it looked like polished blue glass, and the frost on the parade field sparkled like crushed salt under the morning sun.
Four thousand soldiers were drawn up in battalion formations across the vast expanse of grass, their bayonets catching the light, their guidons fluttering in the sharp north wind. To the west, the division band was warming up with the low, brassy rumble of tubas and the sharp rattle of snare drums.
In the reviewing stand, three generals and twenty colonels stood with their hands behind their backs, their coats stiff with medals, their breath pluming in the freezing air.
At the edge of the asphalt apron, where the VIP guests were being escorted to their folding chairs, Staff Sergeant Reese stood waiting.
He had spent four nights in the basement of the division headquarters, under the flickering fluorescent tubes, turning pages that smelled of mildew and vinegar. He had copied down two hundred and fourteen names into a black vinyl notebook he’d bought at the PX. His right middle finger had a callous from the ballpoint pen, and his eyes were bloodshot from reading mimeographed casualty reports until midnight.
His uniform was immaculate. The trousers had creases sharp enough to slice paper. The brass on his belt buckle looked like molten gold, and above his left pocket, pinned precisely one-eighth of an inch above his ribbons, sat the blue shield of the Forty-Fourth Medical Detachment.
Next to him sat a chrome-plated wheelchair Colonel Sterling had sent over from the post hospital.
I stepped out of the staff car the Colonel had insisted on sending to Clarksville that morning. I wasn't wearing my church coat today.
Over my shoulders hung a dark blue wool cape—the original field cape issued to female medical officers in nineteen-sixty-seven, with the gold captain’s bars still pinned to the collar tabs and the lining faded from dark scarlet to the color of dried brick.
"Staff Sergeant Reese," I said, leaning on my cane as I reached the pavement.
"Captain Braddock," he replied, coming to rigid attention. His eyes didn't look at my cane or my white hair. He looked straight into my eyes, his jaw firm, his boots mirror-shined.
"You look like a soldier today, son."
"Thank you, ma'am."
"I am not sitting in that damn chair," I said, pointing the tip of my cane at the chrome wheelchair.
Reese blinked. "Ma'am? The Colonel said—"
"The Colonel isn't walking across this grass," I told him. "I walked off the field at Duc Pho with two fractured ribs and shrapnel in my calf, and I am not going to be rolled across fifty yards of lawn like a sack of laundry in front of four thousand boys who think eighty-year-old women are made of sugar."
A slow, wide grin broke across Reese’s face—not the mocking smirk from the mess hall, but the fierce, proud grin of a combat soldier who recognizes the same iron in someone else.
"Then I guess we're walking, Captain," he said.
He stepped to my left side, tucked his left arm behind his back in the regulation posture of an escort, and held out his right elbow.
"Take my arm, ma'am. The grass is frozen, and it’s slick near the goal line."
I took his arm. His sleeve was wool, scratchy and warm, and the muscle underneath was like a fence post—just like I’d thought that first day when he leaned over my chili bowl. But this time, the fence post wasn't there to keep me out. It was there to hold me up.
The division band struck up *The Girl I Left Behind Me* with a crash of cymbals that made the crows fly out of the pine trees behind the stands.
As we stepped off the asphalt onto the frozen turf, Colonel Sterling’s voice boomed through the public address system, echoing off the concrete grandstands and the brick headquarters buildings across the avenue.
*"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, SOLDIERS OF THE DIVISION. ESCORTED BY STAFF SERGEANT DANIEL REESE, BRAVO COMPANY, FIRST BATTALION... CAPTAIN QUINN BRADDOCK, UNITED STATES ARMY NURSE CORPS, RETIRED."*
The silence that followed the announcement was complete. The band stopped playing.
Across that fifty-yard field, four thousand men and women in camouflage didn't wait for the order from their company commanders.
It started with a single platoon sergeant in the third row of the cavalry squadron—a man who had seen three deployments to the Euphrates and knew what that dark blue cape meant. His right hand snapped to the brim of his patrol cap in a salute that cut the cold air like a blade.
Then the next company went.
Then the next.
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Within five seconds, four thousand soldiers had snapped to attention and raised their right hands, their faces turned toward the old woman in the blue cape and the young sergeant with the mirror-shined boots who was walking three inches at a time across the frosty grass.
***
