Logan
FOB near the Spratly Islands
Pain.
That’s all there is. A deep, searing ache that never really fades, just sharpens or dulls depending on how much I move.
My left shoulder feels like it’s been ripped apart and stitched back together by someone who didn’t give a damn about precision.
Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they knew I’d fuck it up again anyway.
When I finish PT, I walk straight into an even worse hour—one that stretches into eternity. I sit in a small room at the clinic, facing the grief counselor, forced to relive my friends' deaths like it’s some special circle of hell reserved just for me.
Both therapists tell me to take it easy. That I need to sleep. But sleep is a joke. If I manage a still, dreamless hour, it’s a win because any unexpected shift of movement sends fire licking through my muscles.
It’s my fourth grief session in as many days.
The counselor sits across from me in the small makeshift office.
It’s nothing more than a converted storage room—cheap folding chairs, a metal desk shoved against the wall, a box fan rattling in the corner.
But Lieutenant Colonel Sutton doesn’t look fazed by the surroundings.
He wears the same fatigues I do, his sleeves neatly rolled to his elbows, rank visible. Combat boots scuffed but laced tight.
“Rough morning?” Sutton asks.
I shift in my chair, trying to ignore the dull ache in my shoulder and the way the sling pulls at my neck. The camo fabric rubs against my skin, stiff and unfamiliar. Wrong somehow.
I haven’t worn fatigues this much since before flight training. Once I earned my wings, the flight suit became part of me—an unspoken marker of who I was. Of what I did.
Now it hangs in my locker. Untouched.
No flight status, no flight suit.
Can’t exactly wear the skin of a pilot when you’re not flying.
“Something like that,” I mutter.
He waits, like he always does. No pressure. No clipboard. Just that same patient stare that’s starting to piss me off a little less each day.
I keep my eyes fixed on the floor. “I can’t sleep anymore without seeing it.”
“Flashbacks?”
“No,” I say quickly, jaw tightening. “Not exactly. Just…memory loops. Like my brain’s stuck on repeat.”
He nods. “That’s normal. Doesn’t make it any easier.”
There’s a pause, long enough that I can feel my pulse tapping through my shoulder, where the muscle is still knitting itself back together. They said I was lucky. That I should be grateful. I guess they’re right. I’d rather feel the pain than the nothing I’ve felt since.
“I lost someone ten years ago,” I finally say. My voice feels foreign in the air. “My wingman. Reaper.”
It’s easier to start there. The scar that’s already scabbed over.
He doesn’t interrupt.
“We were flying F-16s. Training turned real. Russian jets. Too many of them. Too fast.” I inhale, the words dry in my throat.
A beat passes.
“He didn’t make it,” I say, even though that’s not really the whole truth. What I mean is I did, and I shouldn’t have. Not with the way the missile tracked him. Not with the way I couldn’t get my shit together fast enough to do anything.
“How old were you?”
“Twenty-two.” I glance up. “First time I watched someone die in the air.” First. Not only.
“Does the guilt still feel fresh?”
I blink. Swallow. That’s not the guilt I’m drowning in.
But I nod anyway.
He leans forward, forearms resting on his thighs. “You can’t carry it all, Captain James.”
“Yeah, well.” I drag a hand down my face. “I don’t know how not to.” My voice isn’t my own.
“You start by letting some of it out,” he says. “Like this. You talk about it. You feel it, even when it tears you apart.”
I look away, blinking against the burn behind my eyes.
“I’m not a guy who talks about shit,” I grit out.
“You are today.”
I huff a humorless breath. “Only because I’m in this damn uniform and can’t do what I’m trained for.”
“Your body’s healing,” he says. “But so is your mind. And you don’t get a medal for pretending like this doesn’t hurt.”
“I don’t want a medal.”
He nods once. “What do you want?”
The question slams into me. I don’t know. I really don’t.
“I want to feel like I didn’t fail him,” I whisper. “Like I still deserve to fly.”
Sutton nods slowly. “Then we start there.”
His words stick with me, rattling around in my mind as I walk toward the briefing room after we finished my session. They replay over and over like some warped mantra I don’t know how to believe yet.
Because I do carry it.
I’ve carried it for years.
Not just Reaper and now Ryan.
Every order followed.
Every mission.
Every life lost.