So Hilary Cole had spent the entire day after the destruction of her unit wandering about the woods aimlessly in the vain hope that she would somehow find another American unit. She didn't. Most units, once the word was out that there was a rogue unit roaming throughout that area, avoided it. That left Cole to spend another night alone in woods that were beginning to take on the appearance of a prison. With nothing but her parka to keep her warm, Cole threw herself on the ground and, between the shivers and sobs, cried herself to sleep.
On that morning, when stray beams of the morning sun came dancing through the trees and lit upon Cole's face, it took her several minutes to understand where she was. When she finally realized that her situation that morning was no better than it had been the night before when exhaustion had compelled her to drop to the ground and sleep, Cole began to cry. There was no sense to this. Crying would do nothing to improve her situation. Crying offered no solution. But then nothing made sense anymore.
In the midst of her own despair she heard a voice. It wasn't a very strong voice, and it had a rather mournful quality to it. But it was a human voice. Though she couldn't be sure if it was real or her imagination, that voice was the only thing she had. Pulling herself up with the aid of the tree she had slept huddled up against, Cole looked about, trying to determine where the voice came from. At first, with her mind still clouded by sleep and despair, Cole was unable to determine from which direction the voice came. It was as if the trees and her mind were playing a cruel trick on her, mocking her.
Then, as if it had suddenly been conjured up out of thin air before her very eyes, Hilary Cole saw it. At a distance of only twenty, maybe thirty, meters was the wreckage of some kind of overturned vehicle, half hidden by the wild chorus of trees that had been both a prison and a safe haven to Cole. She realized that she had spent the entire night not more than a few simple steps away from another human being who was probably as lost as she was. That she could have, in the state of mind that she was in the previous night, walked right past the man and his vehicle didn't dawn on Cole. The only thing important to her at that moment was that there, within easy reach, was another human being, a human who needed help, something that Cole was trained to deal with.
With a few easy bounds, Cole began to make her way to the overturned vehicle. As she drew near, the wreckage began to take on the appearance of a humvee. It was then that Cole realized that she hadn't paused to determine if the voice had been German or American. No matter, she thought as she weaved between the tree trunks. It was another person, a real person who was alive, and that was all that mattered. Only when she came to within a few feet of the vehicle did she slow down and then stop. Trapped under the vehicle, a hardtop humvee with a machine-gun mount on top, the gunner who had been manning the machine gun when it overturned lay silent, crushed to death. The sight of the body, still pinned beneath the humvee, drew Cole near. The soldier, a young man who couldn't have been more than twenty, still wore his helmet and web gear. His hands clutching the rim of the hatch and the grimace on his face told Cole that he had not been killed outright. Rather, he had survived the crash and had in his death throes struggled to free himself.
Cole turned away from that image but found no relief when her eyes fell upon the corpse of another soldier. This one, several meters away from the humvee, was that of a woman, a mere girl from the looks of her. Slowly Cole approached her, following the bloodstained snow that led from the humvee to her. When Cole reached the female, she slowly knelt down, reaching out to touch the face that was stone cold to feel. The female soldier, whoever she had been, was dead. Slowly Cole turned the body over. As the corpse came to rest on its back, strands of long red hair were caught by a slight breeze that stirred through the woods. A few wisps of hair fell across the dead soldier's face, now frozen in a sleeplike serenity. Were it not for the ashen color, it would have appeared to a casual observer that the young female soldier had fallen asleep instead of bleeding to death in the snow. For a moment Cole allowed herself to reflect on this tragedy and wonder why a girl who looked like she should have been at a prom instead of a battlefield had been shot and had died like this.
"She lasted most of the afternoon before she died."
The words, spoken by an unseen observer, startled Cole, causing her to jump back away from the female body and begin to scramble in panic back into the woods. Only when the voice spoke again, a hasty plea, did Cole manage to slow down and look for its source. "No! Don't go. Please don't go."
When she finally managed to stop and look around, she saw where the voice came from. Another soldier, a black man in his early thirties, sat against a tree across a small paved forest trail that she hadn't noticed before. He wore no helmet. His web gear and field jacket were pulled open in front, exposing his uniform shirt and a massive dark stain that covered his entire abdomen. As she looked, Cole could see that the field dressing that rested on the abdomen had turned colors and now was the same color as everything else that the soldier's dried blood had touched.
While Cole was still staring, the black soldier spoke again. "She lasted most of the day yesterday. Was able to get out of the humvee and crawl some." He paused, gasping for air while holding back a sob that threatened to cut off his story. "But she couldn't make it over here. And I…" There was another pause, now more to hold back the tears and sobs that so much wanted to come out. "I just couldn't, just couldn't get to her. So she just laid there, talking to me for nearly an hour before she finally stopped talking and…" Now there was no more stopping the tears. They just came."…And she died. Right there. Right in front of me. She died. And I didn't do a damned thing. Not a damned thing." The last comments were angry ones, angry words spoken through tears that flowed down the black soldier's face.
With one quick rush Cole ran up to the black soldier, knelt down, and began to wipe the tears away with her bare hand. "It's okay," she said automatically in the same tone, in the same manner, that she used to talk to patients as they were carried into triage. "It's going to be okay. Now please relax, just lean back and let me look." Without waiting for a response, Cole, with one hand on the soldier's face, reached down and carefully began to pull the blood-soaked field dressing away from his abdomen. There was some resistance as she started, because some of the dried blood held the field dressing to the bloodstained shirt and the wound itself. Slowly, gently, Cole managed to free it slightly, pulling it away so that she could see what was behind it.
Just as she succeeded in freeing the field dressing, the black soldier stiffened as sudden spasms of pain racked his body. Cole felt this but continued until she could see behind the field dressing. When she could, she knew why he had jumped. Even before she had moved the dressing a fraction of an inch, dark red blood slowly began to ooze around the dressing and run down across Cole's hand. Though she wanted to stop, Cole eased the dressing a little further away in an effort to see how bad the wound was. This, however, stopped as soon as she saw a section of intestine fall away from his abdomen and against the dressing.
Having seen all that she needed to, Cole carefully eased the dressing back into place. Though she tried to do so without causing the soldier any further pain, that was impossible. With the same effort that Cole put into being as gentle as possible, the soldier fought off wave after wave of pain and the urge to scream. When she had finished and the soldier had managed to compose himself, Cole looked at him, face-to-face. "I'm a nurse. And you're hurt real bad. I don't know what I can do, but I'll do what I can. Okay?"