Chapter 4
Chapter 4
A aron’s voice shook the memory loose. What had been a difficult day for Aaron had turned out to be a very hard day for me. Turning around and disobeying a direct order did not make me many friends. None actually. My isolation continued.
One afternoon, after a rather difficult workout of flying 200s, the man in the priestly garb found me. Another bag of chips in his hand. I was standing at my locker, putting on dry clothes. The room was empty save us. He stepped closer. Within two feet. Emptying the bag of chips into his mouth.
“Tell me something”—he spoke around the crunch—“Why’d you turn around? Go back?”
“He wasn’t going to make it.”
“The obstacle course is, by design, a singular achievement. Start as a group. Get judged as individuals.”
“And yet we suffer as a group if one person fails to make time.”
“Orders are orders.”
I looked right at him. “It’s a bad order.”
“That attitude’ll get you thrown out of here.”
“Sir”—I glanced at his robes—“or Father, or whatever it is you do around here. Do I look like I care?”
He raised his eyebrows. “You know, you’re only the second one on record to do that. ”
“What? Disobey an order?”
“No.” He laughed. “Go back. Help the stragglers.”
“Maybe I was the only one who could, sir.”
“Maybe.”
“Permission to speak freely, Father sir?”
He smirked. “Granted.”
I wasn’t sure if I was in trouble or not. Would they discipline me? How? If so, I wanted to get it over with. “What is it that you do here? Why are we having this conversation? Why are you here?”
He considered this. “They tolerate me.”
The dichotomy of “they” and “me” was not lost on me. Regardless, I’d had it with this man and his stupid riddles. “If you want to sift me, then do so. Be my guest.” I gestured outside in the direction of the obstacle course. “I went back. I’d do it again.”
He sat on a bench opposite me. “You don’t fit in too well around here, do you?”
I wanted to say, “Thanks for the revelation, Captain Obvious,” but did not. Instead, I said, “No, Father sir, not really.”
“Not really or no?”
I pulled on a sweatshirt. “No.”
“Why?”
“Well... we’re busy during the day and there’s not much time for social—”
“No, why’d you go back?”
I shrugged. For the first time I answered his question with a question. “Does it matter, sir?”
He wiped the corners of his mouth with a napkin, then pointed to Aaron’s locker. “It did to him.”
I shrugged it off and said nothing.
He rested his head on the lockers. “You know him?”
“Sir?”
He tapped Aaron’s locker.
Given that my heart and mind were east with Marie, I had kept to myself and not embroiled myself in the who’s who of my class. In truth, I didn’t care. I shook my head. “Not really.”
“So you really don’t know who he is?”
Another shake of my head.
He raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
I pressed him. “What?”
“The fact that you don’t know who he is, and more importantly whose he is, makes turning back that much more significant.”
I was done with this strange man, this stupid conversation. And if I had my way, I would soon be done with the academy.
He was about to leave when he turned back. “You still haven’t answered my question.”
“Which one?”
His expression softened and his eyes focused on me. “Why’d you do it?”
“I don’t think you’d understand.”
“Try me.”
It was no use. What would a priest know about that anyway? He was just a pansy, passivist has-been who couldn’t hack it so he traded BDUs for white robes. I shook my head. “Just something somebody told me a long time ago.”
He chuckled. “You mean after you climbed back onto Jack’s boat a second time?”
That stopped me cold. How would he know about that? I didn’t put that in my application, and I’d never told anyone else—save Marie. I stood there with my mouth open.
He leaned closer. “David, maybe we’re not trying to get rid of you.” He patted my shoulder. “Maybe I’m just trying to figure out why you’re really here... and who you want to be when you grow up.”
Aaron’s voice brought me back to here. To now. To the snow, to Gunner whining and Bones’s coffin stretched out before me.
Aaron continued, “I would later ask Bones, pointing to this mystery cadet who’d returned for me. ‘You ordered us not to do that.’ Bones had nodded. ‘Did you know he would?’ He nodded again. Knowingly. ‘He can’t not. It’s just in him.’ I remember studying that man. The quiet cadet who disobeyed a bad order to do what his heart told him he couldn’t not do. I turned to Bones and asked the question that changed the trajectory of my life. ‘You teach me how?’ That night I burned my letter and later returned my dad’s revolver to his safe.” He reached in his pocket and removed a worn coin made from copper. “But I kept the bullet. Tried to give it to Bones as a thank-you. A memento of sorts. In typical Bones fashion, he had it melted down and turned into this medallion, engraved with eleven words that matter to him and me. They became my raison d’être. I’ve carried it every day since.
“In the years following, Bones became my tutor. In every area of my life. I am who I am because of”—he gestured—“this simple, towering man.” Another pause. This one longer. “Because of my political connections, and because of the debt my dad felt to Bones, he helped create a way for Bones to do what he did with me on a broader level. To work with many of our agencies. Below the radar. Literally underground. With a singular mission: to rescue individuals. Lost. Taken. Stolen. Deceived. A decade in, and Bones had personally returned over five hundred sons and daughters to their parents.” He eyed the crowd. “Many of them yours.” He held up a small wooden box. “Because all of his work was classified, his medals were given, hung around his neck, and then taken back five minutes later. And stored in this cigar box in my dad’s office. He later passed it on to me.” He shook the box. “Colonel Ezekiel Bones was and is probably the most decorated government servant I’ve ever known, and yet he never said a word.” He opened the box. “There are more Purple Hearts in here than places on your body to hang them. And...” He teared up. “I was invited into my father’s office the day they hung the Congressional Medal around his neck.” I shook my head. I never knew Bones had been awarded the Medal of Honor. He’d never mentioned it. “And then in classic Bones fashion, he thanked my dad, lifted it off, laid it in this box, and boarded a plane for some faraway country where some kid needed somebody to kick down the door.
“On the day I was elected vice president, some twenty years after my father held the post, I was sitting in his, now my, office, wondering just what in the world I’d gotten myself into. In walked Bones. He sat, put his feet up on my desk, lit a cigar, and said, ‘Tell me what you know about sheep.’
“I knew the answer. ‘They’re completely lost without their shepherd.’
“Bones listened, considered my words, and nodded. ‘Then be one,’ he said. ‘And be a good one.’”