Chapter 27
Sarah
Two days of this now. Dawn to dark, nearly nonstop training designed to engrain muscle memory.
I stood at the edge of the clearing with my arms folded and my hip against the fender of the nearest Land Cruiser. Close enough to hear Donovan’s voice carrying across the open ground. Far enough that I wasn’t in anybody’s way.
In front of me, the rangers were working in pairs, buddy pairs I think is what Donovan had called them.
The concept was simple enough to understand from where I stood: one man moved while his partner stayed put and covered him.
When the first man reached his next position, he set up his rifle toward the threat and provided cover while his partner moved up and past him.
Never both exposed at once. Always someone watching.
It all seemed like a very aggressive game of leapfrog.
Zayn and Baraka were running the nearest pair. Baraka sprinted forward, covered maybe twenty meters of open ground, then dropped flat to the ground and set his rifle forward. “Set!” His voice carried across the clearing.
“Moving!” Zayn was up and running past him before the echo died, legs driving hard until he hit the dirt twenty meters ahead. “Set!”
And Baraka was up again. “Moving!”
“Reset.” Donovan’s voice cut the dust. “Make sure you guys are bounding in manageable distances. It should only be a few seconds that you are up and moving, at most. What was the ditty I told you to say in your head to measure the time?”
They all shouted it in unison. “I’m up, he sees me, I’m down!”
“Correct. Remember, fire without movement is wasted ammunition, and movement without covering fire is suicide.”
They ran it again. And again.
When the Citadel team had first arrived and started training these rangers, I’d watched from a distance like this.
I’d stood near the vet facility and thought it looked aggressive.
War games run on young men I’d gotten to know like family.
I didn’t understand why they needed to crawl through mud and reassemble rifles blindfolded. It had felt excessive.
I was wrong. I knew that now.
What I was watching today was harder and more aggressive than anything those early weeks had produced. The drills from before had a looseness to them. Baraka could argue mid-exercise, Jomo trailing behind on the obstacle course while the others waited, even some laughter between repetitions.
There was no laughter today.
The vet facility stood behind me. What remained of it. The concrete block walls still stood upright, scorched black from the inside. The roof gone. The interior gutted down to the foundation slab.
The rangers had cleared the worst of the debris, but the charred timber and warped metal sheeting were still piled along the south wall.
Every man on that training ground could see it from where he stood. Every one could clearly see why this training was needed now.
Andrew had the second group on the far side of the clearing, running a different drill. His rangers stood in varying tactical formations that were new to them. With their rifles in hand, they would wait apprehensively for his signal.
“Contact left!”
Every man spun to his left, dropped to the ground, and aimed his rifle in the direction of the imaginary threat. Andrew walked among them, adjusting a shoulder here, repositioning a rifle stock there. Then he brought them back to their feet and reset them.
“Contact right!”
They spun the other direction and went down again. Between the contact drills, he walked them through firing positions—standing, kneeling, and prone—showing them how to stabilize their rifles in each one.
Their training before was almost a game in comparison. The men had competed with one another for the fastest time or the cleanest run, bragging rights at the mess tent afterward.
This had none of that. Every face was locked in concentration. They ran their pairs and reset and ran them again. Nobody celebrated getting it right because getting it right was the minimum. The stakes beneath the exercise were visible on every one of them.
Andrew jogged over to Donovan’s group. He spoke, too low for me to catch, and Donovan turned his head to listen. They stood together for a moment.
Andrew clapped him on the shoulder and went back to his group.
Donovan stayed where he was after Andrew left. Hands on his hips, eyes on the rangers running the drill in front of him. To anyone else, he looked the same as he always had. Steady and competent, holding the whole operation together with his voice and his presence.
But I’d been watching him for days, and whatever was eating at him, he wouldn’t talk about it.
He wasn’t sleeping well. I knew this because he was in my bed every night. Three nights running now, I’d woken up to him rigid beside me. Whole body taut from his jaw to his fists.
Once, he jerked so hard out of his sleep that it startled me awake. Another time, I found him sitting on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, both hands pressed against his face like he was trying to hold something inside his skull.
During the day, he ran the training and he was good at it.
He had both the patience for it and the skill.
The rangers responded to him dutifully. But I caught him in the gaps.
Between drill sets, leaning against a truck by himself with his arms crossed and his eyes fixed on nothing.
At meals, he was physically present, but mentally, he was somewhere else entirely.
Andrew was carrying more of it than he had before. Running drills on both groups when Donovan went quiet, stepping in with corrections before the pause got long enough for the rangers to notice. Andrew did it without being asked, and he did it without making a show of it.
Donovan’s easy laugh was gone. So was the dry humor, the quick grin he gave me when no one was watching—all of it pulled behind a door I couldn’t open.
I’d tried once. Two nights ago, lying beside him after another bad stretch of sleep, I’d asked him what was going on. He’d said he was fine. He said it quietly and without any edge. Then he pulled me closer and pressed his mouth against the top of my head. That was the end of the conversation.
I let it go. I don’t push him. I’d never pushed him. That wasn’t how we worked.
But I knew it was connected to the training. The nightmares started when the drills changed. When the obstacle course became contact drills and the focus shifted from fitness to fighting.
And there was more. After the elephant, when I’d frozen with the syringe in my hand and he’d walked me through it, he’d talked that night about the work.
About what it cost. Underneath it all, I could tell he was suppressing a hurt that I couldn’t pinpoint.
I’d let it pass because he wasn’t offering more, and I didn’t know how to ask.
Whatever I was watching now, it was that wound. Pressing harder.
On the training ground, Donovan called the rangers in. They gathered around him in a rough arc, rifles across their chests, breathing hard. He talked to them and they listened. His words didn’t carry to me, but every man there had his eyes fixed on Donovan and none of them looked away.
He dismissed them. The group broke apart, and the rangers moved toward the bunkhouse and the mess tent. Andrew fell into step beside Donovan and they walked together. As they spoke, Donovan shook his head repeatedly.
I pushed off the fender of the truck and went back to what was left of my work.
I was awake when it happened again.
No light in the cabin. I’d been asleep for maybe an hour before his breathing changed. Each breath got shorter and more forceful, his chest rising in quick, shallow hitches against my back.
Then his whole body locked. His arm was draped across my waist, and it went rigid. The tendons in his forearm pulled tight where it pressed against my stomach.
I lay still. Sometimes it passed. Sometimes the tension would rise and crest then break. He’d settle back down without ever surfacing.
This time, he said a name.
“Owen.”
It came out hoarse. Ripped from somewhere deep, and it was not a murmur. The anguish in the single word made my chest hurt.
“Owen. No.”
I put my hand on his arm. Gently. The muscle was stone beneath my fingers.
He came up fast. One sharp inhale and his body curled forward, hands gripping the sheet. His breathing was ragged.
I sat up beside him.
He dropped his head. His hands were still fisted in the sheet, and his shoulders rose and fell with each breath.
I waited.
“Who’s Owen?”
He didn’t answer.
“Donovan. Who’s Owen?”
He sat there for a long time. His breathing slowed, one breath at a time. The fists in the sheet loosened. His hands went flat on his thighs.
“Owen Parker.” His voice was low and rough. “He was a kid in my unit.”
I waited again. My hand stayed on his arm.
“Twenty-two. Fresh out of basic training. A tech geek who could go on forever about anything. He’d talk your ear off about radio frequencies or signal encryption and the best firmware for a handheld GPS.
And he followed me around everywhere I went.
I told him to leave me alone more times than I can count.
Didn’t matter. He just kept showing up.”
He went quiet. His jaw was moving like he was chewing the next words he was about to say.
“He was a new guy, and I took him under my wing to mentor and train him. Six months, I trained him leading up to a deployment. He soaked up knowledge like a sponge.” Donovan’s hands pressed harder against his thighs. “The command asked me if he was good to go to deploy. I told them he was.”
I didn’t speak.
“I sent him out. His first mission on his own. I looked at everything he could do, and I decided he was prepared for it.”
“What happened?”
“He died.”
The two words hit hard. Like a judge’s gavel.
“I made the call,” he said. “I looked at a twenty-two-year-old kid who trusted me, and I told command he was ready. They sent him out. He didn’t come home.”
His head was still down. The faint light from the window caught the outline of his profile. His head was bowed, and his whole body was hunched forward.
“That’s why I left the Army,” he said. “I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t look at another young soldier and be the one who decided whether they were good enough. Because the last time I did that, I got it wrong.”
His pulse was racing under my hand where it rested on his arm.
“And now you’re doing it again,” I said quietly.
He turned his head toward me. Even in the dark, it landed.
“Every day.” His voice was stripped bare. “Every drill I run, every scenario I walk them through. I look at Zayn. I look at Baraka. I look at all of them. And I see Owen.”
Silence held in the cabin.
I understood now. All of it. The nightmares that started when the training changed. The gaps during the day where the steadiness cracked. It was what I’d heard behind his words weeks ago.
The training had changed because the threat had changed.
Obstacle courses and patrol formations had become contact drills.
How to move when someone was shooting at you.
How to fight and survive. And Donovan was the one teaching them.
Similar work to what he’d been teaching Owen.
And it had all culminated in Owen still getting killed.
I pulled my hand off his arm. He looked at me.
“I lose animals,” I said.
He was quiet.
“I lose them all the time. Animals I’ve treated for weeks. Animals I’ve put my hands on and poured everything I know into keeping alive. I do the work right. I follow every protocol. I make the best call I can with what I have, and sometimes they die anyway.”
He didn’t look away.
“When I was in school, I lost a horse. A mare with a displaced colon. I’d done the surgery twice before on other animals, and both times it worked. This one, I did everything the same. Every step. And she died on the table.”
I pulled up my knees and wrapped my arms around them.
“I called my dad that night and told him I wasn’t cut out for it. That if I couldn’t keep a horse alive doing a procedure I already knew, I had no business being a vet. And he said, Sarah, if you didn’t care, it wouldn’t hurt this much. The hurt is how you know you did everything you could.”
Donovan’s breathing had settled. He was listening.
“You trained Owen the best way you knew how. You gave him everything you had. You made a judgment call, and it was the same kind of call every person in charge of someone else has to make. That doesn’t mean you got it wrong.
It means the outcome was terrible, and you’re the one who has to carry it. ”
“He was twenty-two.”
“I know.”
“I was the one who said he was ready.”
“And you might have been right. Ready doesn’t mean invincible. I’ve released animals back into the wild that were strong and healed and had every chance, and something killed them the next week. That doesn’t mean I was wrong to release them. It means the world took them in spite of that.”
He sat with that. Turning it over somewhere inside himself.
“I can’t promise you nothing will happen to these rangers,” I said.
“Neither can you. But the alternative is they face what’s coming with nothing.
No training. No preparation. Just uniforms and rifles and whatever they can figure out on their own.
That’s what they had before you got here. And it wasn’t enough.”
He exhaled. Long and slow. His shoulders dropped by a fraction.
“You train them the best you can,” I said. “And then you trust them to use what you gave them. That’s all anybody can do.”
He reached for my hand. His fingers closed around mine and held on. Tight.
I didn’t pull away. I didn’t try to say anything else.
I leaned into his shoulder and stayed there, his hand around mine. I couldn’t truly make his burden any lighter, but I could make sure he didn’t have to bear it alone.