January Dawn (6 page)

I opened the door to the shower room with my crutch and listened. No running water.
Good.
It was a little juvenile, but I felt more comfortable showering when nobody else was in there. It made it safer for me to get in and out without anybody seeing my scars.

I thought I’d have the showers to myself, but when I rounded the corner there was Alex Redman sitting on the wooden bench that ran along the center of the room. He was leaning forward with his elbows on his bruised knees and his head resting against his interlocked hands. His clothes were haphazardly strewn on the floor around him and he was wearing nothing but his G.I. boxer shorts. His mouth was moving in silent whispers. I think he was praying. I had seen a couple of the other recruits pray before lights out.

I shambled by him as I quietly as I could, not wanting to disturb him.

“Why did you stop?” he asked. “You could have beaten him.”

I’ve had enough of this
. My foot was hurting and for once I didn’t give a rat’s ass what he had to say. I was tired of his pouty, self-righteous arrogance.
I’ve tried to help you several times and you spat on me every time.
I very nearly blew up on him right then, but he must have seen the frustration on my face.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re the only one here that treats me like a human being. I’ve been a real jerk to you since day one and I’m sorry.”

I could tell that those words came out painfully for him.

“I wanted that promotion. I wanted to be platoon leader. I wanted to be top of the class. I wanted, I wanted, I wanted, but what have I accomplished? Nothing. I’m a joke. How can I lead this platoon if all they see when they look at me is my father? I hear them all the time talking behind my back, saying how my father is a traitor, and how he should be shot for what he did. None of them even know the truth, they just go around repeating all the lies they hear.”
So that’s what this is all about.

“What is the truth?” I asked. I had heard all the rumors, but Alex was the only one who could possibly now the truth.

“That’s the thing, I don’t know. My dad never told me and I hate him for it. This was supposed to be
my
career. I was going to land the fast track to become an officer. I was going to rise up the ranks and become a great general like he once was. How am I supposed to do that when I’m constantly facing the repercussions of my father’s sins? He knew this is what I would be facing here. Why didn’t he tell me?”

Alex looked at me through the narrow slits of his eyes, begging for an answer, an explanation, another lie, something to assuage the pain.

His tight lipped mouth formed a faint line. This was a side I had never seen of him before. He had always been solid and steadfast, but now he was being sensitive and vulnerable. I was right all along. This was a cry for help. I could have kept on walking, but I didn’t. It was clear he was struggling and I was in a perfect position to help.

I looked into his eyes and saw that he was scared and confused. And I think maybe, he was seeking somebody to explain to him why things were the way they were.
Get in line for that bucko
. At the very least, he might have simply been looking for a friend.

“Do you believe your father did what he did for the right reason?”

Alex paused, his shoulders sunk and he said, “I’d like to think so.”

“Then that’s all that matters.”

When I asked that question my mind flicked back to the night of the fire. Why did Mr. Jeffries have to go back? Why couldn’t he have left with me? What were those gunshots? Did he kill Mr. Stephens? Would he do that? My whole life, he preached the virtues of non-violence and forgiveness. He told me that I must not succumb to hate. The world had too much of it already. I was only torturing myself thinking these things. I had to believe that what he did was for the right reason.

“I want to prove to him that I can be as good a soldier as he was.”

“Then prove it,” I said.

“How?” A tear formed in the corner of his eye. He wiped it away before it could drop.

“There’s always a way.”

I realized I had been standing since we started talking, so I took a break from balancing on my crutches and took a seat on the bench.

“I should quit,” he said.

“You quit and you only prove what they’ve been saying about you.”

Alex rubbed at his watery eyes. “I must look like a pretty sorry case, don’t I?”

I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.

“You know, back in high school I was the quarterback of the varsity football team. I led my team out onto the field every Friday night and I called the plays and I controlled the ball and I almost won us the state championship two years in a row. I was the big man on campus, living the dream. People trusted me and nobody dared to talk about my father to my face. I heard some of the rumors there too, but not so much, because my father still holds quite a bit of respect in Savannah. But here…here it’s different. Here they…” He didn’t finish his sentence. “How will I ever lead men in combat if nobody will trust me?”

“I trust you,” I said. He scoffed. “Remember last week when I kept tripping over you during drill?

“Yeah.”

“For the life of me, I couldn’t get it down. I had a hard time learning the steps and the timing, but after I started watching you I started to get it. After a few days, I was doing it as well as you. And remember how you used to get mad at me every morning because I couldn’t make my bed correctly? I watched how you did it. I copied everything you did. By the end of the week, I was making my bed by myself. It was the same with a dozen other things, in class or in the barracks, whatever it was, I looked to you. The Army is something very different from what I’m used to and knowing you has made that transition a lot easier.”

Alex pinched at the bridge of his nose, rubbing away the last of his tears. “Yeah, my dad made me make my bed with hospital corners since I was seven years old. He’s real old school. He even did the whole bounce a quarter on the bed test.”

“Sounds rough.”

“Only when he was home. He was usually off on deployment. He would leave my mom to take care of all of us children. All
six
of us. When he came home for the last time, things changed. They started sheltering us more. They made us stop seeing some of our friends, my dad stopped talking about the military, and he took us out of the military school and put us in a private school. I was too young to understand at the time. I would get angry and get into arguments with my parents a lot. By my junior year I wanted to get out of there and run away from it all. Looks like I didn’t run far enough,” he said, standing up to hang his towel on the hook outside the shower stall.

He seemed to appear somewhat similar to his old self now and I thought he was ending the conversation, so I held my crutches upright and pulled myself to my feet.
My job here is done.

“Hey, thanks…for listening,” he said.

“Someone close to me once told me that every once and awhile we need somebody to pick us up off our knees and tell us that the sky isn’t falling and that we need only to open our eyes to see it.”

Mr. Jeffries did that for me more than a few times. He pulled me back from the brink of self-destruction and gave to me the gift of life.
I miss you Mr. Jeffries, wherever you are
.

Alex thought about that for a moment and then shot me an inquisitive look.

“What’s your story?”

“You’re not the only one running away from something,” I said, not wanting to say anything more. For a second, I felt that I could talk to Alex and tell him the truth, but the feeling passed. My life was my burden and nobody could help me with it. I had to deal with it on my own.

Alex nodded understandingly, slipped out of his boxer shorts and stepped into the shower. I took a shower in my usual stall at the end of the room and made it to my rack a minute before lights out.

As I lay in bed, I was comforted with the fact that I had helped someone in need. When I looked into Alex Redman’s eyes, I could see that I had gotten through to him and that he was back on the right track. I could sense something else in him too, something swarm, something satisfying, something concrete. Whatever it was, it got Alex’s motor running again.

For some odd reason that I couldn’t explain, that conversation with Alex elevated me from my depressive slump. A wave of hearty cheerfulness flowed through me as I lay there staring up at the ceiling. A smile slinked across my face. I had a warm bed, a solid roof over my head, a full stomach and now, a new friend.

I could get used to this life
.

We had been walking for nearly three hours after being dumped out the back of an armored personnel carrier and told to find our way back to base.

It was one of our final field exercises, meant to test all that we had learned. The entire platoon was taken miles into the woods surrounding the base and scattered about pell-mell, sometimes in twos, sometimes in threes, the rest in singles. They gave us a twelve hour time limit to return to base. We chalked this challenge off as another simple exercise, not knowing beforehand that it would take place in the dead of night or under below freezing temperatures.

We wore full combat gear, minus the hardware and our helmet. Out here was about mastering the art of camouflage and infiltration. We couldn’t have anything that rattled or shined.

Alex and I watched as our comrades were thrown piecemeal out of the back of the APC. It only served to build up the tension for when we too were finally dumped on the roadside under the cloudless night sky. We watched the taillights of the APC disappear around the bend.

Alex and I first needed to find our bearings and figure out which direction to head. This part of the base was unfamiliar to us. Travelling along the open road was a surefire way to get caught by the roving patrols. We knew it was only an exercise, but we had to think about it as if it was the real thing. Into the woods we went.

My entire relationship with Alex Redman changed after our talk in the shower room. I now shared an affinity for him similar to that of my other friends in the platoon. I understood him better than anybody, simply because I was willing to sit and talk with him.

I accepted Alex for who he was and he respected me for that, and I him, for never asking questions about my past, even though I knew he was curious. If it wasn’t for Mr. Jeffries voice still echoing in my head, I would have told Alex who I was and where I came from.
I will eventually,
I thought.

What was troubling me the most was that I was thinking about Mr. Jeffries less and less as the days went by. His voice of reason was fading. He told me not to trust anyone and here I was betraying his trust by trusting those he told me not to.
Am I wrong?
My friends are great. They respect me and appreciate me
.
Were you wrong?

Hayes and the others were hesitant to accept Alex at first, but I convinced them that he wasn’t the same moody dirtbag that they originally knew him to be. After a while, they accepted him into our little group of misfits and quickly forgot their previous misgivings. Alex Redman was a part of us now, being the leader he came here to be.

After an hour of traversing parallel to the road, we had a frightening run-in with another pair of First Platoon men, who we mistook for a patrol when we practically collided into each other in the dark forest. Shannon and Pike quickly allayed our fears when they announced their names. They brought us good news and bad news. The good news was that they knew which direction the base was. The bad news was that it was eight miles back in the direction we came from.

The four of us walked in silence in fear of being overheard by a patrol. We traveled within eyesight of the road on our right, so that we didn’t get lost. Occasionally, we would have to lay flat on the ground when we saw headlights. Their spotlights would penetrate the blackness of night in search of us. The daggers of light vainly lit up only a fraction of the densely dark woods. But it was better to play things safe.

Vehicles were easy to avoid, but foot patrols were a different story. Several passed within a hundred yards of our position throughout the night. The grisly barking of the war dogs and the blue-white beams of flashlights gave us ample warning and time enough to hide.

Sporadic bursts of gunfire boomed in the distance, breaking the silence of our hike. We knew the recruits weren’t provided with firearms, so it must have been the patrols. Some unlucky fellow must have gotten shot. Hypothetically speaking, that is. This wasn’t a live-fire exercise.

Every patrol had a referee attached within the unit. If you were engaged, the referee decided whether or not you were caught, killed or wounded during the altercation. These refs were usually drill instructors or officers from the locally stationed Eleventh Armored Division.

At around three in the morning, Alex huddled us together in the concealment of shoulder high bushes.

“Patrols are getting more frequent. I think we’re getting close.” Alex’s face was hidden in the shadows. Only a few puffs of frosty breath could be seen in the chilly night air.

“There’s no way we can continue our pace without getting caught. We’re walking blind.” Pike said. “These patrols have night optics and radio communication, not to mention their weapons. We have nothing but our knives, and we can’t even use those.”

Just then, several bursts of automatic fire clacked nearby. It couldn’t have been from more than half a mile out. The echoes of gunfire sent uneasy shivers down my spine. We were being hunted and we had nothing to fight back with.
If this is what combat feels like I’m in for a long ride.

“What if we got weapons?” I said.

“Yeah, and how do you suppose we do that, white boy? If you haven’t noticed we’re out in the woods being hunted?” Pike asked, while rubbing his hands together for warmth.

Pike was a cynical man, always quick to dispel anyone’s ideas, even more so if you were white. During my few weeks in boot camp I came to learn that racism was widespread in the military.

There were several divisions even within First Platoon when it came to race. Some of the white recruits in our platoon refused to have anything to do with the black recruits, and vice versa.

Pike, one of the handful of black recruits in the platoon, had a reputation for starting fist fights in the barracks. I couldn’t blame him. The comments one overhears in the barracks are not exactly flattering. I heard a lot of the same words that Mr. Stephens used to say to Mr. Jeffries. But Pike’s problem was his inability to determine that not all the white recruits in our platoon were racist. Alex and I harbored no ill will toward him, nor any of the other black recruits. In fact, Private Hayes was a good friend of ours. Pike should have known that.

“Distraction. We get their attention on one of us, then the rest take’em from behind. They never said we couldn’t fight back.”

“Colton, that’s genius. We can take their weapons and use them to fight our way back to base,” Alex said. He used my first name, which was odd. We had always referred to each other by our last names. I didn’t mind though, I never liked my last name to begin with. It’s just a name with no history. It didn’t mean a thing to me.

“What about their radio and tactical communications tablet?” Shannon asked. His young face and small frame barely visible in the darkness.

Shannon lied about his age when he enlisted at age sixteen, contrary to his father’s wishes. The platoon treated his youth as a liability. We saw it as an asset. Shannon had a ways to go to mature both physically and mentally, but the one thing he had going for him was his high intelligence.

“What do you mean?” Alex asked.

“If we get their radio, I can jam it. That’ll block their communications for a little while and make them go haywire, buying us some time. And every unit out here has to be outfitted with a GPS locator, per Army regulations. If we get the TC Tablet, then we will have direct observation of the locations of every patrol out here. If we get those, then we won’t be blind anymore. We could weave in and out of their patrols and be the first ones back to base.”

Smart kid.

Alex loved the idea. He immediately went to work framing a plan. He gave us all a role and we split up to take up our positions. Pike, Shannon and I scurried across the road and hid behind some pine trees a few feet off the curb. Alex stayed on the opposite side of the road. When I left him, he was on his hands and knees groping the ground in the dark.

I waited with my back against the tree and massaged my ankle. I was wearing a compression brace that the doctor gave me. I could walk on my foot just fine, but every so often I’d do something to aggravate it and I’d feel a slight tinge of discomfort.

Before long, a pair of headlights approached. I unsheathed my knife from my chest holster and drew a deep breath of the crisp air. The truck rolled closer at a lazy speed, its searchlight sweeping the forest around it. We waited.

When the truck was directly in front of us, a slew of rocks catapulted from the darkness across the road, pummeling the driver side window and bouncing across the hood.

The Humvee screeched to a halt. The searchlight sprung to life, scanning the far side of the road. Alex followed up his rock assault with his most violent scream. I had heard the boys in the barracks practice these wild calls before. They called it the rebel yell.

I could see the turret gunner up top swivel toward Alex’s side of the road. The driver and passenger exited the vehicle and quickly leveled their weapons in the direction of the howling madman in the woods.

Our turn. I made a quick hand gesture to the others and the three of us sprang into action. I scampered to the back of the vehicle where I could get my foot on the tire and spring myself up on top of the Humvee behind the turret gunner. As I brought my foot up onto the wheel I was startled when I caught a quick glance of a face in the backseat watching me. The referee.
Phew.

I launched up, took two quick steps, placed my knife under the gunner’s throat and declared, “You’re dead.”

Pike and Shannon almost simultaneously did the same thing to the other two soldiers. The backside passenger door opened and the referee stepped out. It was a young Lieutenant with the Eleventh Armored patch on his shoulder.
Oh boy. We’re going to get chewed out
.
Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.

“Three enemy KIA. No casualties. Nice job.” He said, without any emotion.

We didn’t waste any time. As the three patrolmen grumbled and played dead in the places they were “killed”, we ransacked the vehicle for the radio and the tablet and grabbed the rifles off their “dead” bodies. This whole operation lasted less than two minutes. I couldn’t help but smile to myself as we disappeared into the woods, dashing through the underbrush to get as much distance between us and the road as possible.

Alex took point, followed by Shannon with the tablet and Pike and I in the rear. As we trekked, I caught myself looking over Shannon’s shoulder at the tablet. It was an intriguing item.

Cased in hard plastic and protected by rubber corners, the rugged machine was about a foot long with a small keyboard along the bottom of it, a handle on the side, and a cloth flap that could be rolled over the screen to cut out any illumination. Like a wizard, Shannon swiped, flipped, and rotated his fingers on the screen, giving us updates on distance and patrol locations. He barely even looked up to see where he was walking.

“This is great. A couple of the surrounding units are converging on our ambush. The rest won’t have a clue what is going on. I clogged all radio channels,” Shannon said with a touch of pride.

“Which way do we go?” Alex asked.

“That way,” Shannon pointed to the northwest. “We should be clear for a little while.”

Knowing the locations of all the patrols allowed us to move at a faster rate, but it was a few hours before sunrise and we still had a ways to go.

After forty-five minutes of silent hiking in the frigid weather, Alex suddenly stopped in his tracks and held up a fist. The sign to stop.

“You guys hear that?” he asked.

We perked our ears up. All I could hear was the wind rustling the branches of the trees above me and then…a faint moan in the distance, almost like a voice.

“Another patrol?” Pike asked.

“No, can’t be. Nothing’s showing on the screen.” Shannon double checked the tablet and gave us a confused shrug.

There it was again, a grunt and the resemblance of a word being screamed.

“Coyotes?”

“No, I don’t think so. Let’s keep moving.” Alex waved for us to follow.

The noises got closer. We could hear bushes rustling now and multiple hushed voices.

It might be other recruits.
Someone else had to have made it this far. But why the weird noises? Was someone injured?

“Hel…Help! Get off of me.” It was a woman’s voice. As we moved closer we could make out several figures. Two stood about watching two others wrestled on the ground in front of them.

“Stop! Get your hands off me damn you. No.”
That sounds like Carrigan
!

The crouching man drew his arm up and brought his fist down on the trapped victim. The moaning stopped.

“Come on, Teague, do her and let’s scram. That bitch screamed pretty loud. Someone could have heard that,” said one of the other men.

I should have known it was Teague
.

A furious rage thundered inside of me. Carrigan was a tough girl, but right now she was outnumbered and outmuscled.

Before Alex or anybody could say anything, I took off at a dead sprint not knowing what I planned to do. I came upon the shadow that I knew was Teague, and at full speed drove my shoulder into him, tackling him to the ground. The roles reversed on the attacker as I sat atop him with my hands around his neck. I could feel the muscles in his throat tighten as I squeezed. There were more screams and shouts as Alex, Shannon and Pike moved in to secure the situation.