CHAPTER 20
Three troubled hours after falling into Luc’s bed, Brenna awoke. She squeezed the stem of her watch and the face glowed. Five-fifty. Tugging the light bulb chain, dim light washed the room. She sat gritty-eyed and heavy-limbed on the edge of the cot and raked her swollen fingers through her hair.
Day Two.
Maybe they could make it to the hotel. Four miles away, it would serve as home base. After yesterday, she was waiting for an armored car. Grace was a trouper, but there were still two days to go.
Meanwhile, she had a lead to follow up. Last night, in the Comm Center, she heard that a light infantry unit had been recalled to the airport HQ from their posting in the region outside the city.
It wasn’t significant in itself, except that every possible chaplain and psychologist in the battalion had also been called back to the airport to debrief them.
“Debrief?” she had asked one of the comm engineers.
It turned out the troops in question—like all the UNPROFOR peacekeepers, under strict orders not to fire unless fired upon—had been forced to watch helplessly while the Nationalists ‘cleansed’ a village.
After that horror fest, Brenna doubted the troops were sleeping well either.
In fact, she bet they’d be first in line for coffee.
She dragged her wool pants off Luc’s chair, thrust her long legs inside them, and pulled them up.
If she hustled, she could tape a few interviews before Grace stirred.
UNPROFOR could call it what they liked, but those chaplains hadn’t been summoned for debriefings. They were there to keep the soldiers from losing their minds.
Grace came to in a muted world, drugged and disconnected from reality.
She’d been slit open, stuffed with cotton, and left to die.
Why else would she feel this way? Ah, right.
Her eyes slid shut again, trying to put the memories out of her mind.
Sleep was better. In her dreams, Brenna’s gentle hands wove comfort through her hair.
Her eyes popped open again. What time was it? Where was she? How much of the day had she missed? She shook her head to clear the fog. Bad idea. Shaking hurt.
A tall medic appeared at her bedside. “Good mornin’.”
“I wouldn’t put it in writing,” Grace said, struggling to sit up.
T. Brownlee chuckled, picked up her wrist, and counted silently. Pulling a penlight from his pocket, he flashed it across Grace’s pupils. “How’s the pain?”
Grace withdrew from the intense beam. “I’ve been better.” Hissing through clenched teeth, she lowered her feet over the edge of the bed.
“I’ll be giving you some pain killers and antibiotics for the road.”
“Thanks,” she said. “What time is it?”
“You’ll not be running off,” T. Brownlee declared, withdrawing a stethoscope from his lab coat pocket, “until I have a listen. I heard some crackles last night. You need to be minding the lungs after inhaling explosive debris.”
Hooking the stethoscope into his ears, he placed the disc on Grace’s back.
She jumped.
“Sorry. Hard to find a bruise-free spot.”
Behind her, the infirmary door clicked open.
“Ma’am,” T. Brownlee said.
Grace twisted and glimpsed Brenna, inspecting her bruised back with narrowed eyes.
“I need a couple of minutes,” Grace said.
Lifting her eyes from Grace’s exposed back, Brenna nodded. “We’ve got a ride to the hotel.”
Later, squeezed inside the APC, shoulder to shoulder with Grace and four king-sized infantrymen in full gear, Brenna pulled the camera onto her lap.
“I recorded some interviews in the mess hall this morning,” she told Grace. “A chaplain and three of the soldiers who witnessed a massacre in a village west of here.”
She powered up the camera, referencing the thumbnail images on the LCD monitor to find the clip. She plugged an earpiece into the stereo mini-jack and handed it to Grace.
She pressed it into her ear and nodded.
Brenna turned the camera so Grace could see it, and started the playback. She couldn’t arrange for Grace to get any debriefing after the market massacre yesterday, but maybe listening to the padre would give her something to hold onto until she got home for some proper psychological help.
Head cocked, Grace concentrated on the tiny image.
Brenna leaned back, remembering the interview. As spiritual counsel, the padre had said, his most important job was to help the troops cope with the fact that they had been unable to help.
As a result of witnessing that massacre, he noted, many of the troops would suffer Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD.
They would be plagued by nightmares, panic attacks, flashbacks, and anxiety.
They would be irritable, work themselves to exhaustion, have difficulty sleeping, experience outbursts of anger, engage in high risk behaviors.
They would become depressed, withdrawn, and alienated from their loved ones.
Without professional counseling when they returned home, nearly twenty percent of them would commit suicide.
“Powerlessness changes your view of yourself,” he explained.
“It undermines your sense of personal integrity. You think you’re decent, but then you do nothing. That feeling of powerlessness is so overwhelming that you’ll do anything—including blaming yourself for cowardice or complicity, despite the situation being out of your hands.
When you tell yourself you’re guilty, that’s a way of saying you could have done something but for some reason, just didn’t. Guilt, bad as it is, beats powerlessness,” he’d said. “But guilt is a crushing burden.”
The interview ended. Grace tugged the plug out of her ear and handed it back.
Her body swaying with the lurching truck, Brenna eyed her sideways. “What the padre was saying— It’s kind of like you on the balcony last night, huh?”
A puzzled look crossed Grace’s face. “You were there, too, Brenna.”