They all stood in an awkward silence another five minutes, each man remembering what scraps and remnants he could of serving beside Tom. The memories became dimmer with the passing years, though nobody cared to admit it. Two of the men owed their lives to Tom and both cried quietly but unashamedly.
Finally, Jack led the procession back to their cars. They drove five miles in a caravan over twisty back roads to The Gut, a remote roadside eatery that had somehow become part of this little ritual. The Gut was little more than a shack, a shabby collection of cramped booths and chipped, linoleum-topped tables. Someone had called ahead and four tables had been jammed together and reserved for the party. Except Jack, the offspring of a military professional, the rest of the men came from hardscrabble backgrounds and were quite at home there.
Jack sat at one end of the tables, Selma at the other. She also had grown up with Tom, had had her pigtails pulled by him in kindergarten, had flirted shamelessly and relentlessly with him throughout elementary school, had dated him continuously through high school, then broke it off when Tom left for his Army Basic training.
Selma had deep roots in Allentown, her family having settled there a hundred years before. They were immensely prolific types and there was barely a block in the city without her kin. She had no intention of leaving her family and friends, of living the gypsy life of a military wife. The night before he left for boot camp, she and Tom had a loud, raucous fight. The first battle in their relationship, it was also the last, both swore resolutely to themselves when the brawl ended. That firm divorce lasted all of three days, before Selma hopped a train for Georgia and they were married, till death do they part, the day after Tom completed basic training.
Selma was a large black woman, bighearted and fiercely independent. It was clear that Tom would be the only man in her life. They had produced two lovely children, Jeremy and Lisa, and raising them had occupied whatever loneliness Selma felt.
A gargantuan breakfast was served-ten plates piled high with flatcakes, five dishes overloaded with greasy bacon and greasier grits, ten pots of stiff black coffee, and an assortment of local side orders. The Gut was no place for the health-conscious.
Conversation flowed easily as the men caught up on their lives-who had gotten married, divorced, had children, and so forth. The men had all gone their separate ways, those who got out jumping into various professions, and those who stayed in, buffeted by the Army’s chronic wartime needs, bouncing through an assortment of assignments. But they had survived a war together. They had fought and bled and nearly died together. That bond was more special than a common college or fraternity brotherhood: it lasted a lifetime.
“Remember the day it happened?” Floyd eventually asked, sipping his coffee and staring at Jack. It was time to get down to business. The table was loaded with empty dishes. A sullen waitress in the corner eyed the mounds of empty plates but made no move to retrieve them.
“Like I could forget,” Jack answered, giving a look down the table at Selma, who quietly produced a resigned nod. She eased back in her chair, cupped her coffee in her hands, and settled in for the talk.
Pete Robbins, two seats down, muttered, “Tell you what I remember most. There was a sandstorm like I never seen before or since. Stuff filled your ears, crawled up your nose, couldn’t see two feet.”
“Yeah,” Willy Morton joined in, “the third day of the war. We had that big fight the day before, the one at that sand dune, remember? Still can’t believe we all made it through that fight.”
Three or four men began nodding. Yep, they remembered.
Floyd put down his coffee and leaned back in his chair. “And then Captain Wiley got ordered to move to the next village. They said by the radio emissions there had to be a big headquarters there. We was supposed to knock it out.”
Selma, at the other end of the table, sipped from her coffee and patiently let the men ramble on. It was the same thing every time, the men recounting the day Tom died, going through the painful details as if it happened yesterday. She knew what it was, survivor’s guilt. They needed to return to that day and explain what happened because it was too late to change it. Well, nothing would change it, so she guessed talking it out had to suffice.
Willy Morton, then the team medic now a doctor with a razor-sharp brain, performed most of the narration about that day, about Jack planning their assault, making the exhausted men rehearse and rehearse again, treating them all like packhorses, forcing everybody to haul a triple load of ammunition and six canteens of water. By the time the captain had finished adding more of this and a lot more of that-extra claymore mines, extra AT-4 rocket launchers, and so forth and so on-each man was hauling well over a hundred pounds through the hot desert. Jack had seemed to have a premonition, Willy explained, but nobody objected or complained.
Yeah, that’s right, Walter Guidon chirped in. A crusty, foul-mouthed Cajun, he’d been with Jack in the Panama invasion, too, and quickly recounted a similar incident there when Jack had a hunch-a seer’s eye, he called it-and changed the plan at the last minute. Good thing, he said. The old plan would’ve gotten them all butchered.
Then Willy took over the story again. A furious sandstorm hit and left them all blinded as they moved in for the attack. Selma heard again how Jack made them all lash one another together with a piece of rope, how Jack led the team like a staggering mule train through the driving sand straight to the objective, and how the sand obscured what an intelligence catastrophe they were walking into.
It was a headquarters for sure, but left out of their briefing was that it was guarded and protected by nearly three hundred Iraqi soldiers, outnumbering Jack’s ten-man team by thirty to one.
Evan Johnson, the heavy weapons man, picked it up at that point. A simple southern country boy with a flair for homespun phrases, after describing what a big, nasty surprise it was, he said it was like sticking your fist in an “uptight hornet’s nest.” Four years before, Evan had used the metaphor of sticking your fist in a “big pool of bone-starved piranhas”; the reunion before that, like landing in a pit of “seriously annoyed snapping turtles.”
Selma vaguely wondered what it would be in another four years.
But before they knew it, the attackers were the defenders, surrounded and, as a result of the blinding sandstorm, unable to receive air support, or helicopters, or artillery, or even reinforcements. The battle raged for six hairy hours. Both sides pounded away with enthusiasm. Had Jack not ordered every man to carry triple the normal ammunition load, they would’ve been slaughtered after only an hour or two.
Like Selma, Jack sat quietly and allowed the men to recount the horrors of a day when by all reason they all should’ve been killed.
There was a reason for the prolonged story, though, and at the appropriate point the others fell silent and allowed Floyd to pick up the thread. He and Tom had been boyhood friends, after all; it was by now part of the tradition that he got to narrate the sad ending.
The battle had raged over five hours by the time Floyd weighed in with considerable drama. The team now was desperately huddled inside two small buildings on the far edge of the village. They were little more than huts, but the walls were thick mud that swallowed whatever the Iraqis shot. The noise of bullets and explosions had long since grown monotonous. Evan and Willy were wounded, barely conscious; the tourniquets Jack had tied were all that kept them alive. A few others had been nicked and bruised, but nothing too severe. Ammunition was now precariously low, a few rounds, then they’d be throwing rocks and spitting at the Iraqis; Jack had long since given the order to fire only at the sure targets. Iraqi bodies littered the ground around the two buildings, including two large piles of corpses where the enemy had twice tried to outflank Jack’s position and rushed straight into lethal blasts from the claymore mines he had added to their packing list.