Could she have done something differently? Would a different choice on her part have changed the outcome? They flew in formation to protect one another, but Jolene hadn’t protected her partner aircraft; soon, somewhere across the world, a casualty assistance team would gather to give a family the worst possible news.
Tami and Jamie came up to stand beside her. They stood in front of their helicopter, which was scarred with bullet holes.
No one spoke. Each of them knew that one bullet in the right place, one RPG hit, and they could have been the aircraft on fire in the desert.
“Who’s hungry?” Jamie said, taking off his helmet.
“I’m always hungry,” Smitty said, coming up beside them, coughing. He gave everyone his trademark grin, but it didn’t reach his eyes. Tonight, for the first time, Smitty looked old. “I sure could use me a Mountain Dew.”
Jamie, as always, kept up a steady stream of conversation as they walked through the Green Zone. Everything he said was funny, and each of them wanted something to smile about. They ate made-to-order stir-fry and homemade milkshakes while the maintenance crew patched up their helicopter. All the while, they talked about anything except what was on their minds.
By midnight, they were back in the air, flying over Baghdad again. They skirted the most dangerous parts of the city. Now and then gunfire rang out—coming from opportunistic insurgents who could hear the helicopter and shot skyward, hoping to hit what they couldn’t see. They landed back at Balad without incident.
Jolene shut down the engine. The rotors slowed by degrees, the thwop-thwop-thwop more drawn out in every rotation.
Jolene finally relaxed in her seat. Through her night-vision goggles, the world looked distorted. Here on the black tarmac, she saw ghostly green images moving in front of her.
Absurdly, she thought of souls, walking away from their bodies; that reminded her of the crew they’d lost.
“My son has chicken pox,” Jamie said from behind her. “Did I tell you that?”
It was what she needed: a reminder of home. “Kids get over that fast. He won’t even remember it in a year. Betsy wanted strawberry Popsicles for every meal.”
“Will he remember that I wasn’t there?”
Jolene had no easy answer for that.
She unhooked the goggles from her helmet and unstrapped from the seat. When she stepped onto the tarmac, a wave of exhaustion overtook her, and it was not an ordinary tiredness; this was bone deep, a kind of standing death.
She wanted to know she’d done everything possible tonight, that she was not in any way at fault, but there was no one to tell her that, no one she could believe, anyway. The thought isolated her, reminded her of how alone she was over here. She wished she could call Michael, tell him about her day and let his voice soothe her ragged nerves. So many soldiers over here had that, a marital lifeline. Like Tami and Carl.
There was little privacy over here, and since Tami and Jolene routinely stood in the phone lines together, they heard each other’s conversations. She heard Tami whispering, I love you so much, baby, just hearing your voice makes me strong again.
She remembered when she and Michael had been like that, each a half of the whole. Tami came up beside her, bumped her hip to hip. “You okay?”
“No. You?”
“No. Let’s call home. I need to hear my husband’s voice,” Tami said.
They walked across the base to the phones. Amazingly, the line was short. There were only two soldiers in front of them.
Jolene let Tami go first, heard her friend say, “Carl? Baby? I miss you so much…”
Jolene tried not to listen. The truth was she needed Michael right now, needed him to say he loved her and that he was waiting for her, that she wasn’t as alone over here as she felt, that she still had a life at home.
When it was finally Jolene’s turn, she dialed home, hoping someone was there. Back there, it was two fifteen on a Saturday afternoon.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Michael.”
She closed her eyes, imagining his smile. She wanted to tell him more, share her feelings, but how could she? He would never understand. He wasn’t like Carl; he wasn’t proud of what she did over here. He didn’t understand how deeply she cared about the other soldiers with whom she served. At that, she felt even more separate, more distant.
A world away, she heard the creaking of his chair as he sat down, and that simple, ordinary sound reminded her acutely of the people she’d left behind and how they’d gone on with their lives, making memories that didn’t include her.