The Lucky One(16)

“Then I’ve been out here three hours.”

“In this heat?”

“I’m not broken, Beth. I had an incident.”

“You had a stroke.”

“But it wasn’t a serious one.”

“You can’t move your arm.”

“As long as I can eat soup, I don’t need it anyway. Now let me go see my grandson. I want to say good-bye to him before he leaves.” They started toward the kennel, Precious trailing behind them, panting quickly, her tail in the air. Cute dog.

“I think I want Chinese food tonight,” Nana said. “Do you want Chinese?”

“I haven’t thought about it.”

“Well, think about it.”

“Yeah, we can have Chinese. But I don’t want anything too heavy. And not fried, either. It’s too hot for that.”

“You’re no fun.”

“But I’m healthy.”

“Same thing. Hey, and since you’re so healthy, would you mind putting Precious away? She’s in number twelve. I heard a new joke I want to tell Ben.”

“Where did you hear a joke?”

“The radio.”

“Is it appropriate?”

“Of course it’s appropriate. Who do you think I am?”

“I know exactly who you are. That’s why I’m asking. What’s the joke?”

“Two cannibals were eating a comedian, and one of them turns to the other and asks, ‘Does this taste funny to you?’”

Beth chuckled. “He’ll like that.”

“Good. The poor kid needs something to cheer him up.”

“He’s fine.”

“Yeah, sure he is. I didn’t just fall off the milk cart, you know.”

As they reached the kennel, Nana kept walking toward the house, her limp more pronounced than earlier this morning. She was improving, but there was still a long way to go.





4

Thibault

The Marine Corps is based on the number 3. It was one of the first things they taught you in basic training. Made things easy to understand. Three marines made a fire team, three fire teams made a squad, three squads made a platoon, three platoons made a company, three companies made a battalion, and three battalions made a regiment. On paper, anyway. By the time they invaded Iraq, their regiment had been combined with elements from other units, including the Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, Firing Battalions of the Eleventh Marines, the Second and Third Assault Amphibian Battalions, Company B from the First Combat Engineer Battalion, and the Combat Service Support Battalion 115. Massive. Prepared for anything. Nearly six thousand personnel in total.

As Thibault walked beneath a sky beginning to change colors with the onset of dusk, he thought back to that night, technically his first combat in hostile territory. His regiment, the First, Fifth, became the first unit to cross into Iraq with the intention of seizing the Rumaylah oil fields. Everyone remembered that Saddam Hussein had set most of the wells in Kuwait on fire as he’d retreated in the First Gulf War, and no one wanted the same thing to happen again. Long story short, the First, Fifth, among others, got there in time. Only seven wells were burning by the time the area was secured. From there Thibault’s squad was ordered north to Baghdad to help to secure the capital city. The First, Fifth was the most decorated marine regiment in the corps and thus was chosen to lead the deepest assault into enemy territory in the history of the corps. His first tour in Iraq lasted a little more than four months.

Five years after the fact, most of the specifics about that first tour had blurred. He had done his job and eventually was sent back to Pendleton. He didn’t talk about it. He tried not to think about it. Except for this: Ricky Martinez and Bill Kincaid, the other two men in Thibault’s fire team, were part of a story he’d never forget.

Take any three people, stick them together, and they’re going to have differences. No surprise there. And on the surface, they were different. Ricky grew up in a small apartment in Midland, Texas, and was a former baseball player and weight-lifting fanatic who’d played in the Minnesota Twins farm system before enlisting; Bill, who played the trumpet in his high school marching band, was from upstate New York and had been raised on a dairy farm with five sisters. Ricky liked blondes, Bill liked brunettes; Ricky chewed tobacco, and Bill smoked; Ricky liked rap music, Bill favored country-western. No big deal. They trained together, they ate together, they slept together. They debated sports and politics. They shot the breeze like brothers and played practical jokes on each other. Bill would wake with one eyebrow shaved off; Ricky would wake the next night with both of them gone. Thibault learned to wake at the slightest sound and somehow kept both eyebrows intact. They laughed about it for months. Drunk one night, they got matching tattoos, each proclaiming their fidelity to the corps.

After so much time together, they got to the point where they could anticipate what the others would do. Each of them in turn had saved Thibault’s life, or at least kept him from serious harm. Bill grabbed the back of Thibault’s flak jacket just as Thibault was poised to move into the open; moments later, a sniper wounded two men nearby. The second time, a distracted Thibault was almost struck by a speeding Humvee driven by a fellow marine; that time, it was Ricky who grabbed his arm to stop him. Even in war, people die in auto accidents. Look at Patton.