He turned back to his computer and tried to make sense of the memo on his screen. He got about three sentences in before he realized he couldn’t remember which weapons system this memo related to, or why any of it mattered in the slightest degree.
Grunting in frustration he pushed himself up out of his chair and logged off from the computer. There was no way he was going to get any work done, not until he got his head clear, and that meant he needed to go swim some laps.
Just as he stepped out of the cubicle he heard the chime as his BlackBerry received a new text message.
“I cannot deal with you right now,” he told his phone, and walked away.
FORT BELVOIR, VIRGINIA: APRIL 12, T+4:02
When they flew him home from Afghanistan, one of the first thoughts through Chapel’s mind had been that he would never swim again.
He’d grown up in Florida, swimming in the canals with turtles and manatees. He’d gotten his SCUBA certification at the age of twelve and his MSD — the highest level of nonprofessional certification — by eighteen. He’d spent more of his youth in the water than on dry land, at least according to his mother. He’d seriously considered going into the navy instead of the army, maybe even becoming a frogman. In the end, he had only decided to be a grunt because he didn’t want to spend half his life swabbing decks. He had learned quickly enough that the army liked soldiers who could swim, too — it had been a big part of his being chosen for Special Forces training — and he had made a point of doing twenty laps a day in the nearest pool to keep in shape. It had become his refuge, his private time to just think and move and be free and weightless. He’d never felt as at peace anywhere else as he did while swimming.
Now that was over.
A man with one arm can only swim in circles, he’d thought. He had been lying in a specially made stretcher on board a troop transport flying into National Airport. He had spent most of the flight staring out the window, feeling sorry for himself.
His life was over. His career was over — he would never go back into the theater of operations, never do anything real or valuable again. No one would ever take him seriously for the rest of his life — he would just be a cripple, someone they should feel sorry for. He pitied himself more than anyone else ever could.
That had ended when he got to Walter Reed and started his rehabilitation. He’d been a little shocked when he met the man they sent to teach him how to live with one arm. The physical therapist had come into the room in a wheelchair because he was missing his right leg. He was also missing his right arm, and his right eye. He’d been a master gunnery sergeant with the Marines in Iraq and had thrown himself on an IED to protect what he called his boys. Not a single one of them had been injured that day. Just him. “Call me Top,” he’d said, and he held out his left hand for Chapel to shake.
Chapel had reached automatically to take that hand. It had taken him a second to remember his own left hand wasn’t there anymore. Eventually he’d awkwardly reached over and shook Top’s hand with his right.
“See?” Top had said. “You’re already getting the hang of it. You make do with what you’ve got. Hell, I should know it’s not easy, but then, I never expected life to be easy. I know you army boys think life is one long vacation. In the Marines we have this thing called a work ethic.”
“In the army we’ve got this thing called brains; we use that instead,” Chapel had fired back. When they both stopped laughing, there were tears in Chapel’s eyes. The tears took a lot longer to stop than the laughter. Top let that go. He didn’t mind if his boys — and Chapel was one of his boys now, like it or not — cried a little, or screamed in pain when they felt like it. “A soldier who can still bitch is a happy soldier,” Top had told him. “When they shut up, when they stop griping, that’s when I know one of my boys is in trouble.”
There had been plenty of tears. And plenty of screaming. The artificial arm they gave Chapel was a miracle. It would mean living an almost entirely normal life. It functioned exactly like a real arm, and it responded to his nerve impulses so he just had to think about moving his arm and it did what he wanted. It was light-years beyond any prosthetic ever built before. But being fitted for it meant undergoing endless grueling surgeries as the nerves that should have been serving his missing arm were moved to new places, as electrodes were implanted in his chest and shoulder.
If it hadn’t been for Top, Chapel was pretty sure he wouldn’t have made it. He would have eaten his own sidearm, frankly. But Top had shown him that life — even a life limited by circumstance — could still mean something. “Hell, I’m one of the lucky ones,” Top had told him one day while they were doing strength-training exercises.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Chapel said.
“Hell, no. Everything that he took away, God made sure I had a spare handy. There’s only three body parts you only get one of — your nose, your heart, and one other one, and I got to keep all those. Now, my little buttercup, shall we get back to work?”
It had taken a long time for Chapel to confess to Top what he missed the most. “I wish I could still swim,” he said. “I used to love swimming. I can’t get my magic arm wet, though.”
“So take it off when you go swimming,” Top suggested.
Chapel shook his head. “Won’t work. I mean, I guess I could kick my way around a pool if I had to. If my life depended on it I could tread water just fine if I fell off a boat or something. But without two arms, I’m not going to break any speed records. I’ll never swim laps again. That was the main way I got exercise before.”
“I always hated swimming, myself,” Top said. “Never liked going in over my head and getting water in my nose. But okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Okay, starting tomorrow, you’re going to teach me how to swim with one arm and one leg.”
“I can’t do that,” Chapel said. “I don’t think it can be done. And anyway, I’m not a teacher.”
“So you got two things to learn with that big army brain of yours,” Top said. “As usual, the marine is going to have to do the hard part. And probably drown, too. Nothing new about that, either.”
Chapel had known exactly what Top was trying to do. He had wanted to shake his head and say that kind of psych-out wasn’t going to work on him. But he trusted Top by then, trusted him more than he’d trusted anyone before in his life. So the next morning they had gone down to the hospital’s swimming pool with a couple burly orderlies (who still had all their limbs), and Chapel had taught Top how to swim.
Top did drown, twice. Each time he was resuscitated, and each time he got back in the pool. He had to be dragged out of the water by the orderlies so many times they refused to help anymore and quit on the spot. Top put in a requisition for more orderlies, and they kept going. The results weren’t ever perfect. Top swimming with one arm and one leg looked kind of like a drunk dolphin flopping back and forth in the water. He had a lot of trouble swimming in a straight line, and even one lap of the pool left him so exhausted he had to rest for an hour before he started again.
In the end, though, Top could swim. “I ever fall off an ocean liner on one of those celebrity cruises, I guess I’ll be okay,” Top had said when he decided they were done. When he’d successfully swum ten laps, in less than eight hours. “Now, Captain Chapel. Sir. You want to tell me why we went to all this trouble? Sir, you want to tell me why I forced you to do this demeaning task, sir?”