The guy turned around to speak to someone, and a woman in blue scrubs put a couple of ice chips in my mouth. They felt like heaven.
“Doc?” I managed to croak.
The man’s eyes smiled. “That’s right. You’re in the field hospital at Camp Leatherneck. You’ve been here for five days.”
“Doc,” I croaked again, “have I still got my balls?”
He grinned. “Everyone asks that. Yes, you do, son.”
I closed my eyes, relieved
“My legs? Anything missing?”
“Well, you’ve lost some muscle mass from your right quadriceps and adductor muscles—your right thigh. It’s a very deep wound caused by shrapnel, and the femur is fractured. You were also shot in your left shoulder and had a collapsed lung. You’ve got some nerve damage, resulting in loss of fine motor function. We’ll know more in a few days.”
I was struggling to understand him: shot and blown up? Fuck me.
“You were comatose when you were brought in with severe blood loss,” the doctor went on. “We medically induce a coma when there’s brain swelling; you had blood poisoning and...” He stopped speaking suddenly as I tried to take it all in.
My brain creaked and whirred, and more memories came back in flashes. I wished they hadn’t.
“The guys who were with me? Chiv and Jankowski?”
The doctor’s eyes flickered away from me. I knew then that it wasn’t good news.
“They didn’t make it. I’m sorry.” He paused. “But the rest of your Unit were EVACD safely…”
I screwed my eyes shut, the pain of surviving was sudden and unbearable.
“You’ll be alright, son. You made it.” He patted my arm and forced a smile. “And if my girlfriend looked like yours, I’d be making a miraculous recovery, as well.”
“Caro?” I whispered, confusion tangling my thoughts into tight knots.
He nodded. “She’s been here every day. We could barely get her to leave long enough to eat. She’ll be back soon.”
“Caro,” I said again.
My eyes closed, but I was smiling.
The next time I woke up, the lights were dimmer. I thought there was something wrong with my eyes, but then I thought it must be night.
The curtain was pulled back abruptly … and I saw her.
Her beautiful eyes were wide and panicked, and her hand flew to her mouth. But then she looked at me, and every expression raced across her face: relief, fear, love.
I saw love.
“I knew you wouldn’t give up on us,” I whispered hoarsely.
She walked up to the bed, looking as though she wanted to touch me but wasn’t sure where to start. To be honest, there wasn’t a single part of me that didn’t hurt like fuck, but I still needed her touch. In the end, she held my right hand gently and kissed it.
“You scared me, Sebastian. Don’t do it again.”
My lips twisted in a feeble smile.
“Sorry, baby.”
I drifted in and out. I don’t know for how long, but each time I woke, Caro was still holding my hand. I wanted to tell her what that meant to me, I think maybe I did. I just remember that she didn’t leave.
Sometime later, a nurse interrupted us, explaining that they were getting me on a flight to the medical center in Germany. And Caro had been cleared to travel with me.
My memories of that journey are hazy. I was drugged up on a lot of meds, but I think my brain was kinda fucked, as well. There was a lot of pain, I remember that, and experiencing turbulence at one point. But Caro never left me: she held my hand, talking to me quietly the whole way.
There was a long wait when we got to Landstuhl. The critical cases were taken off first—guys with brain injuries and missing limbs. It’s hard to explain how that made me feeclass="underline" I couldn’t walk, couldn’t move my left arm, couldn’t get out of bed and had a fucking catheter in my dick, but I wasn’t critical. Good to know.
It felt like forever as we waited on the tarmac in the cold. Caro kept pulling the blanket up around my neck, trying to cover my shoulders, until I was loaded onto one of the fleet of blue buses with some other guys who were busted up.
The army chaplain came over to me, his eyes tired and his face gray with exhaustion.
“You’re here at the US army hospital. We’re going to take good care of you. We’re praying for you.”
I wondered how many times he’d said that this morning: a lot, I guessed.
“Thank you,” said Caro.
I didn’t say anything.
I was only at the hospital for two nights while I was ‘processed’. I heard one of the nurses tell Caro that Landstuhl was a Level I trauma center, treating over 2,000 guys like me every year. Some were flown in from Iraq; most from Afghanistan. We were treated and moved on. Treated and moved on.
I was given the choice of being flown back to San Diego or to go to an East Coast facility. I was considering the options when Caro made the decision for me, explaining to the nurse that it would be easier if I was near home—her home.
She didn’t ask me—she just assumed. But to say I was having second thoughts would be a fucking understatement.
I knew I was finished as a Marine. Sure, I could get some desk jockey job, but that shit just wasn’t tolerable. I was a fucking cripple, and would be eligible for some sort of disability. Twenty-seven and finished—a useless, pathetic piece of shit.
I didn’t want Caro to do what everyone expected and to ‘stand by’ me. She didn’t need me slowing her down: she was brilliant and beautiful and brave. I was shit scared of seeing the moment her eyes looked at me and regretted that we were together.
I knew Ches would take me in, but he was barely getting by as it was, with kids and a wife crammed into a two-bedroom cottage.
But I didn’t contradict her, didn’t say what I was thinking. Instead, we flew out to Walter Reed in Maryland on a Thursday at the beginning of May.
The journey from Germany was long and painful, and I was pretty certain they hadn’t given me enough meds for the trip, and even though the plane was kept cool, sweat was pouring from me. But there were guys who were far worse off; I had no right to complain. I couldn’t talk to Caro either—I had nothing to say.
A fleet of Marine ambulances were waiting at the airport. They don’t tell you that when you enlist: you never expect to need to know that the military has as many ambulances as Armored Personnel Carriers.
I’d been at Walter Reed for two weeks. Caro stayed the whole time. I wanted her to go, but I couldn’t manage to say the words either. We sank into silence, and I hated myself more each day.
I was most comfortable with the other guys. I did physical therapy with a Navy SEAL named Dan. He was strolling around on a pair of stubbies, those training prosthetics they give to guys to help them get used to having no legs.
He laughed when I told him he looked like a dork, and he did a few spins to show off.
“Fuck my luck,” he said, grinning up at me. “I used to be 6’ 4” and weigh 225 pounds. Now I’m 4’ 4” and weigh 160 pounds. Shit, I’ll have to update my driver’s license.”
His family was in Nebraska and he was hoping to surprise his wife by walking on his made-to-measure C-Leg prosthetics before her next visit.
“Stubbies aren’t so bad, but the others—it’s like kneeling on moving stilts,” he explained. “But ya get used to it.”
I was still in a wheelchair at the time, my left shoulder too weak and too damaged for me to use crutches yet, although my broken femur was healing.
Dan had met Caro so he wanted to know if I’d been getting any. I didn’t answer that.
“I’m horny as fuck,” Dan said, “but I guess my wife will have to ride me for now.” He sighed. “At least I’ve got my balls.”
Yeah, some guys hadn’t. I guess I was lucky, but I’d be lying if I said that there weren’t a lot of days when I wished the bomb had taken me, as well. How come I lived when Chiv and Jankowski were dead? How was that fair? Why the fuck had I been allowed to survive?
I knew my head was fucked up; hell, I didn’t even want to have sex. Ever since the first time with Caro when I was 17, I guess you could say I had a high sex drive, but now ... not so much. I still thought Caro was the hottest woman I’d ever seen, but that was part of the problem. I wasn’t the man she’d known. I was … less. And I hated that. I’d lost a lot of muscle weight and I’d turned into a scrawny motherfucker. I felt impotent—I probably was. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d woken up hard. The docs told me that was the meds and everything would be okay when I reduced the dosage. But it wasn’t just that—I hated the man I saw in the mirror, the man who’d fucked up, the man who’d seen his buddies die.