Home Front(62)

From her first day in-country, she’d known that every breath could be her last, and her nights were no better. She dreamed of fires and mortar and babies who forgot their mothers’ faces. She’d made an uneasy peace with death.

Injuries terrified her even more: the RPGs and IEDs ripped bodies apart, flung arms and legs into the sky and the dirt.

Never was her fear closer than on a day like today.

She was on a “hero mission,” which meant that she had flown across the desert to pick up the remains of soldiers who had died.

She had been doing far too many of these lately; each time she watched the ceremony, she imagined herself or her crew lying in one of these makeshift surgical hospitals, irreparably broken, waxy faced, crying.

Now she stood back from the hospital tent’s opening, among the crews that had been sent on the mission. All of them stood tall and straight, even in the pounding, pulverizing heat. Jolene and Tami, as pilots, could have stayed with their aircraft, but it never seemed right to them. So they were here, standing with their crew, to show respect.

The outlying-combat surgical hospital baked under the noonday heat.

The hospital was a row of dirty white canvas tents, connected by a network of wooden sidewalks. Inside, the floors were cement, stained with dark smears of blood. Jolene didn’t go inside; she was here to wait. The hero-mission procedure was very precise.

Besides, she knew what it looked like in there: cot after cot filled with the damaged and the dying. Gruesome, devastating injuries were survivable in this modern age. The field docs were nothing short of miracle workers.

It wasn’t just soldiers, either. Inside lay rows of Iraqi civilians, children and women, who’d been too close to an exploding IED or been hit by mortar fire. The smell was terrible, made worse by the unrelenting heat.

A doctor ducked through the tent’s canvas opening and held it open behind him. Six soldiers followed him out, pushing four gurneys. On each lay the black-bagged remains of a soldier.

Jolene and Tami immediately stood at attention and saluted. The look that passed between them was as solemn as the mood: each was thinking of how it would feel if the other were in that bag. Somewhere close by a mortar round hit, exploded through concrete. No one even flinched.

The doctor looked as weary as Jolene felt. He placed a hand on each one of the bagged bodies in turn and said simply, “Thank you.”

Jolene’s throat tightened. She looked down at the gurneys, knowing that the lost soldiers deserved this last measure of respect from all of them. One of the bags was small, too small, a bad thing. It meant that pieces were missing. The result of an IED or RPG probably. Beside each body was a small clear bag containing personal effects. Even though the bag was marked with bloody fingerprints, she could see the watch and dog tags and wedding ring inside.

It made her think of Betsy, holding up Jolene’s dog tags, asking if they would identify her …

The silence stretched a second more, and then someone said “Captain Craig” inside the tent, and the doctor went back inside.

Led by the gurneys and their silent watchmen, the two Black Hawk crews walked across the base to the waiting helicopters. Here again, the exact manner of transport was prescribed.

At Jolene and Tami’s helicopter, Jamie and Smitty saluted the bodies again; then they loaded the fallen soldiers onto the helicopter, using exquisite care, placing them just so.

As the loading went on, soldiers came from all over, some in uniform, some in civilian clothes, and formed two straight lines out from the helicopter’s open side door, saluting their fallen friends one final time.

She wondered who these fallen soldiers were. Husbands? Fathers? Mothers? Did their families know yet that their worlds had changed?

Jolene and Tami nodded to each other and climbed into the aircraft. Tami was left seat today. She leaned forward, placed the white hero-mission card in the windshield.

Jolene strapped herself into the right seat and began the preflight checklist. The helicopter doors were closed. Within moments, they were taking off amid a swirl of beige sand.

Below, the soldiers began to disperse.

On the flight to the Baghdad airport the crew was quiet, as they always were on hero missions. The deaths weighed heavily on their minds. The war had begun to heat up in the past few months. It had begun to be normal to be shot at, to be hit. Jolene heard the ping! of machine gun fire hitting a helicopter in her sleep and often woke up screaming. Last week, a bullet had gone through the window beside her head, shattering it, and bounced off her helmet. She’d felt the slightest thwack to her head and kept flying. Only later did she begin to have nightmares about it, to imagine her head exploding, her body coming back to her children in a black bag that was twelve inches too short.

By the time they made it back to Balad, Jolene was beyond exhausted. She hadn’t slept well in weeks, and it was beginning to take a toll on her. She couldn’t remember the last time there hadn’t been a middle-of-the-night mortar attack. She slept through the shelling but woke to the sound of the blaring alarm.

After the end of the mission, the maintenance crew swarmed to check out the helicopter. Jolene and her team walked away. On this dark night, there was no camaraderie, no “let’s go to the DFAC for pie.” Each of them, like Jolene, was thinking how thin a piece of luck separated them from the bodies they’d transported today.

“You okay, Tami?” Jolene said as they reached their trailer.