She deserves to say it out loud without the fear of scaring me away.
“Whenever you get deployed in the back of your head you aways think to yourself, will I make it out alive?” My voice sounds as if it’s sandpaper. I swallow, forcing the saliva down my dry throat and continue. “My unit and I were deployed for combat in Iraq. Usually when you get deployed you can expect to be there for six months. But this time was different. We ended up being deployed for a little over two years before. . .” I swallow again, my jaw clenching as I remember how our last deployment had ended.
Grace caresses my face and swipes her thumb along my tense jawline to ease the tension.
I close my eyes and allow her touch to soothe me. When her hands are upon me it feels like salvation.
Turning my head I press a soft lingering kiss to her palm. Then I take her hand in mine and hold it against my chest.
“When you enlist you know what you are signing up for. But you don’t quite grasp it until you actually see it. And you begin to lose little pieces of yourself. Seeing all the violence andbloodshed, the horrors of combat, it changes you. It changed me. And to this day I wonder if it changed me for the better or just left me damaged.”
Her fingers tighten around mine. “You’re not damaged, Oak.” Her voice is a soft whisper. “You might be a little lost or feel broken, but that doesn’t make you damaged. Not to me. It makes you a fighter.”
My heart clenches as I bring her closer to me and tuck her head underneath my chin. I kiss the top of her head softly.
“Miguel, a brother in my unit, would always tell me to look at it from another perspective. He was always the one who kept reminding me that what we did didn’t make us bad people. Most days I believed him, but there were others when I couldn’t. Where taking a life took its toll. But it was kill or be killed and we had to do what had to be done. I don’t regret killing to save my brothers. I’d do it again and again if it meant they would come out of it alive.”
She nods her head against my chest. “I understand that, Oak. I think anyone would.”
“You’d be surprised,” I say flatly. Clearing my throat I then push ahead knowing what lies ahead of me. “We have done countless of missions before. And we always came out unscathed. A scrape here or there but in the grand scheme of things that meant nothing. If you came back with all your limbs and a beating pulse it was a good day.” I remember all those who hadn’t came back unscathed. How many we lost. How many we still continue to lose. “On this mission of ours we had to save women and children who were being held against their will from their own people. They were being used as puppets. They used all their people as puppets, even the kids who would come charging at us with gunfire.” A group of militia children had killed a group of men during combat. And it was fucking heartbreaking on both parts. Heartbreaking that we lost ourbrothers and heartbreaking that those children were trained to kill.
She shifts from underneath me and shows me those eyes of hers that hold nothing but compassion.
I don’t want to look in her eyes for what I have to tell her next. I don’t want to watch them change from compassion to disgust.
“Did you save them?” She asks quietly, helping me push forward.
I nod. “We did. I led the mission and we freed three women and five children from being tortured then killed. That’s where it was supposed to end.” It’s where it should have ended. I should’ve been the villain and stopped us from pushing ahead. They would’ve hated me for it, especially Roman and Miguel, but they would be alive. And I’d rather have them hate me alive than respect me dead.
“What changed?”
Fuck.
I feel the tears, hot and heavy, pressing behind my eyes as the air becomes thinner. “The woman kept pointing to the building over. She was frantically pointing from her daughter and then to the building. She was panicked, frightened and begging us. We realized she was telling us there was more kids being held captive.”
“That’s horrible.”
“It was but at the time I was Sergeant and we had done what was asked of us. We didn’t know what lied ahead and proceeding would be going in blind. Jude, another brother in my unit, had no desire on pushing ahead. He had a wife and a young kid back at home. I understood his reservations. He was the only one of us who had a kid, and he wanted to go back home and be a father.” That same love for his baby girl Blair, also led him to changing his mind.
“How did you feel?”
“I was conflicted,” I admit for the first time. I’ve never told anyone on how I felt about it but rather what I should’ve done. “We were about to enter a territory we had no authorization on. A building we hadn’t been briefed on and one that hadn’t been scoped. We would be going against our orders, defying our command, and potentially risking our career as Marines.” I had wanted to say no, that we had done our mission and we were out of there. But I couldn’t. As much as I wanted to I couldn’t have knowingly walked away when there was more lives to save.
“But?”
“But if there were more kids being held hostage, possibly with bombs strapped to them, I couldn’t walk away from that. I knew it before Miguel had convinced Jude. I knew it before Darius, Isaac, and Roman wanted to push ahead. No matter how they all felt it ultimately fell on me. I was the one who made the final decision.”
“And you decided to push forward.”
“Yeah,” I bite out, my body locked with tension. “I decided for us to move forward.”
“What happened, Oak?” Her voice is soft, gentle like a feather. And it’s such a stark contrast to the ice cold rage that’s causing my muscles to harden.
“Jude breached the door like he always does,” I begin, my voice gruff through clenched teeth. “I signaled for us to go ahead. We always followed my signal. The building was two floors with multiple rooms. The kids could’ve been held at gunpoint or strapped with bombs in any one of those rooms. They could’ve been placed together or separated throughout the building.”
“Were they separated?”
I breathe through my nose. “I don’t know.”
