Kilo-61 (Damned of the 2/19th Book 19)- Ongoing

The Face of My Father

Snowy Pines Motel
Outside Blackbriar Ridge Training Facility
North Dakota
United States of America
19 Feb, 2002
2130 Hours

Heather had returned from checking out the wounded people on the crew. She had told Donaldson and me that the twisted ankle was minor, but she'd bound it up, and had removed four pieces of shrapnel from the lower back and buttocks of another one of the privates. She'd set the nose of the last of the wounded, handed out Tylenol-3 to the wounded, then checked everyone else out. The worst was a female private who had a minor case of frostbite that had not been treated.

We'd been able to hear her yell at the Colonel and the Staff Sergeant all the way in the room for allowing the Private to get frostbite even though she had complained of her feet being cold. Donaldson was currently out giving an extreme cold weather safety class to everyone, requiring the Staff Sergeant and the Lieutenant Colonel to attend.

The Lieutenant was asleep under the comforter, having stripped down to her bra and panties. I'd gotten a glimpse of her goodies, and had to admit, she had nice small breasts and a round firm ass that was definitely a pleasing sight.

Hey, I'm old, not dead, and she was a good looking woman in a thick bodied way that I found appealing.

Heather sighed and kicked her feet up on the table, lighting a cigarette and taking a deep drag. I passed her an empty can to use as an ashtray and she smiled at me.

"The Major's fucking pissed," I said. Heather frowned at me and I blew her a kiss. "Letting the Private get frostbite because he didn't care that her feet was cold was goddamn negligent."

"If it'd been Alfenwehr she'd had probably lost both of her feet," Heather snarled. She pulled off her BDU top and sat back, wearing the brown T-shirt. "Goddamn it, did they stop teaching extreme environment leadership?"

I just shrugged, scrolling through data and letting it all just blur together. I was looking for anything I didn't recognize. The little lizard was paying close attention and I knew he'd bring it up if anything unusual popped up.

"What were you like when you were a private, Ma'am?" Paige asked.

The words kept scrolling by. I stopped once, but it was just my own name that popped up from the FORCE XII trials out of Fort Hood. I held down the down arrow key and kept watching.

"Like you," Heather said. When Paige looked doubtful she laughed, "I'm not kidding. I was 19 years old, fresh out of college, and a brand new 91 Alpha. I got assigned to this hellhole unit, and then sent out to replace a medic that had been killed by a sniper a few months before."

Westlin appeared in my mind's eye. Her face twisted with pain, blood running from the corner of her mouth as she coughed. Her tears making clean streaks through the dirt on her temples. She had a scrape on her cheek from where she'd gone face first into the tarmac after the heavy 7.62mm Soviet sniper round had punched through her gut. I could still smell Atlas, the sharp astringent smell of the site, the BO from Westlin and me, the smell of blood off of her and me both, and the fumes of the fuel tanks at the edge of the Upper Helipad. I shook my head to banish Westlin back into the back of my mind and focused on the text, scrolling up a few pages till it looked familiar and started again.

"...Stillwater was in charge, my first week I learned to wear an armored J-Suit, got taught how to treat NBC casualties as well as how to do medical operations in an NBC environment, then my whole job was just to wait for the casualties to roll in," Heather said. She tapped her ashes in to the can and took a long drag off her cigarette. "Less than a month later my squad leader was killed and Stillwater pinned Corporal rank on my collar and made me take command of Support Squad. Two weeks after that the site suffered a massive detonation, killed all but about six people, and I got shot through the stomach by a Soviet medical doctor." She lifted up her brown T-shirt to show off the scar. An X just under her belly button with a thick puckered scar in the middle. "Bastard shot me right in the uterus. My first, but not my last, gunshot wound."