Randall leaned forward to push my beer glass towards me. “Drink, son.”
I drank. I didn’t have it in me to argue. “The storm cleared out about an hour later, but there was another front moving in fast. Comms were spotty and we couldn’t tell if the base heard us. Derlega said we should build a shelter for our wounded and head back down the mountain to get help. We couldn’t risk anyone else, he said. They’d be fine where they were until help could arrive.”
I’d never seen a living embodiment of the phrase “incandescent with fury” until that night. Randall looked like he might march off to wherever Neil Derlega was stationed to deliver a personal and customized ass-kicking. “He wanted. To leave. Men. Behind.”
“No. Hedidleave men behind,” I said. “I told him I wouldn’t go. We couldn’t move Barber. That’s his name. Jon Barber. Another man had broken a leg in a small mudslide that jammed his leg between two rocks. A third had a concussion. Derlega ordered me to go, and I told him he could go get himself fucked sideways by a pitchfork. He marched the rest of them back towards the base and said he’d enjoy testifying in my court martial.”
Jackson looked stricken. I expected to have my hand crushed where he held it, but his grip didn’t shift at all, even though I could feel that his entire body had gone rigid. Leaving a man behind is a cardinal sin in the military, the kind where anyone who knows will line up to escort you to Hell themselves.
“He’s the fucker who should have been courtmartialed,” Randall said under his breath. “Someone tell me that fucker got courtmartialed.”
“I could tell you that, but it would be a lie.” This time, I downed the rest of the beer so it would stop looking at me. “He’ll never go to Mars, and he’ll never make senior command, but he’s still serving. Homeland forces stationed somewhere out in Europe.”
I don’t want to repeat what Randall said in specific, but I can say it involved farm livestock, milking equipment, and delicate pieces of Derlega’s anatomy. “How’d you get back to the base?”
“The section made it back before the storm and brought out help. We were getting the second soaking of the day by the time they arrived. They couldn’t bring choppers out, so they brought in Jeeps, actual medics, and portable shelters. Unfortunately, by then, the soil had soaked through and it didn’t care for heavy equipment.”
Randall’s thoughts turned behind his eyes as he worked it out. “Oh, no. They parked Jeeps on mud.”
“They parked Jeeps on mudon a slope, as close to the wounded as they could so they’d have less distance to carry him. In their defense, they thought they’d stabilized the vehicle enough not to slide.” One hand strayed to my side to rub it. “They were wrong. It slid backwards. It was going to run Jon Barber down, so a bunch of us braced it to stop the momentum. That worked. Mostly.”
“Mostly.” Randall reached for another bottle of beer to fill my cup, but I waved him off.
“Five of us put ourselves against the back of that vehicle while the medics got Barber on a backboard. They needed a few minutes. We could buy them that, then push the vehicle out of the mud to send them on their way. We held it long enough for them to get Barber secured in back. The others managed to move before the Jeep slid. I’d sunk into the mud too far to pull free in time.”
Both Randall and Jackson blanched. “Fuck,” Randall said.
I shrugged, because what else could I do? “The ground was soft and muddy. That did a lot to mitigate the damage. Then I learned quite a lot about joint replacement and modern physical therapy techniques.”
Whenever I tell this story, I make light of what happened. Pain is uncomfortable, which sounds obvious, but that’s not how I mean it. Yes, the pain of the accidentwasuncomfortable. It hurts like all hell to have your hip broken, your leg unsocketed, and your spine a teeny bit mangled.
I know that when I say those words to a listener, they become uncomfortable, too. They become acutely aware of how their spine feels, how their leg connects to their hip. If they’re standing, they’ll shift their weight, even if they didn’t intend to, so they can imagine their hip in pieces.
You’re welcome.
I make light of it to lessen that reflex. I lived through this. Discomfort is contagious, and I don’t want to pass it on to anyone else. It’s part of why I blame my cane use or my limp on “moose wrestling”. I have never wrestled a moose, and I don’t recommend anyone else tries it, but it coaxes out chuckles and allows my listeners to release the tension. I give them permission to laugh and leave that discomfort behind.
Jackson’s family carried it with the sacred air of pallbearers. Unlike Joan when I’d told her this story. She’d made faces and flailed her hands and saidhow awfulin this tone like I’d suggested she ought to go through it for the sake of a deeper understanding. I know. That should have been my first red flag.
A hush bloomed into the dining room and filled the air with a somber weight. Laramie hadn’t moved, and he watched me with an evaluation in his eyes that I didn’t think I cared for. If I’d hoped my admission that I had, in fact, enlisted and done my service would win him over, I had another thing coming.
Laramie had decided he would never like me. He decided the moment I married his brother that he would never respect me. The only question that remained was if he would decide to ignore me and disdain me in silence, or if he’d make every interaction between us a misery.
Jackson, though. Jackson had scooted so our chairs touched along the sides, one arm around my shoulders and his other hand resting on mine. His body had tensed with his anger at the situation, and his worry for me, and no lie, that warmed me to my toes. I’d gone through that entire ordeal alone, from the day it happened to the day they released me from the rehabilitation facility. To have someone ready to help me now felt like I’d put down the weight of the world.
But an insidious little voice wondered, why now? Did he have the same biases his father did, and his brother did, about people who hadn’t served? Had he thought less of me before he knew I’d signed my soul over to the US of A? Sure, he’d talked a big game about people not serving without wanting to, but I wondered if he’d said that for my benefit, or if he believed it.
I had myself to blame for all this doubt. If I’d put my service in my portfolio for Mail Call Mates, we would never have had this discussion. Then again, we never would have had this discussion, and I wouldn’t know any of this about my new in-laws. A point to ponder.
Randall sat in his chair, his empty, foam-rimed glass tilted at an angle in his hands. He turned it around, watching the foam rings pass through his vision without truly seeing them. I wondered if he were imagining that accident, playing it over in his mind to visualize the situation.
“And you couldn’t stay in the service,” he said.
“No. I’m still not fully healed. I should be in physical therapy, but that’s an ordeal to obtain. They didn’t want me to stay in, anyway, despite needing doctors.”
“Why not?”
“Because if I stayed in, they had to drop the hammer on General Derlega’s son.” I spread my hands. “Instead, they gave me a promotion, a medal for my valor and sacrifice in saving another soldier’s life, and a medical discharge.”