Chapter Thirty-Two #2
At the edge of the valley, floodlights glared over a landing zone. The chop of rotor blades filled the air, low and rhythmic. My chest clenched. The smell of fuel and dust hit like a fist.
“Easy, Corporal,” a medic said, guiding me forward.
“No,” I croaked. “Not that. Not again.” I stumbled back from the too-familiar beast in front of me.
“Only way to base, kid.”
The rotors spun faster, the noise swelling until it became the same scream that had haunted my sleep. I stumbled back, shaking my head, hands pressed to my ears.
“He’s panicking—get him on board!”
They half-dragged me inside. I fought, uselessly, until the harness bit my shoulders.
The world narrowed to sound and memory—fire, falling, Johnson’s body as it jerked with each shot.
A sting in my arm. Cold fire. The edges softened.
Someone shouted, “You’re safe now, kid! You’re safe!
” I didn’t believe them. But the sedative dragged me under before I could argue.
The last thing I saw was the desert falling away beneath the helo’s lights, the night swallowing the mountains whole.
And through the blur, the same thought burned steady as a flare: Got to get home.
I woke to light so white it burned. A ceiling fan turned slowly above me. The air smelled like antiseptic and jet fuel. Somewhere close, a monitor beeped steady and smug—proof I hadn’t died yet.
“Easy, Lance Corporal. You’re safe.”
The voice was female, American. A medic leaned over me, eyes bright and kind. “You’re at Forward Operating Base Argon. You made it back, Marine.”
I tried to speak. Only a croak came out.
“Water,” she said, slipping a straw to my lips. “Small sips.”
The water tasted like metal, but it might as well have been holy.
They started questioning me before the IV bags were half-empty. Two intel officers—one young, one carved from stone—sat beside my cot with a recorder. “Lance Corporal Morgan, you were listed KIA on June eleventh. Tell us where you’ve been.”
I told them everything I remembered: the crash, the family that found me, the map drawn on a rice sack, the trek by night. When I got to the part about the villagers, the older man cut me off. “You’re sure they weren’t Taliban?”
“They were the reason I’m alive,” I rasped. “They are good. Kind. Leave them be. They are innocent.”
He didn’t answer. He and the other guy exchanged a look. Then he just clicked his pen and said, “Understood.”
They re-set my leg two days later. I remember the morphine hitting and the world bending sideways. When I woke, there was a new cast, metal pins, and an entire spool of gauze covering various parts of me.
Physical therapy came next—parallel bars, rubber bands, endless sweat. The nurse joked I was trying to sprint out of there. She wasn’t wrong.
A chaplain started visiting in the afternoons. Lieutenant Reeves. Army, mid-forties, voice like a gentle creek. Easy, peaceful. Soothing. He didn’t start with prayers. He started with silence.
Finally he said, “When you were in the mountains, what kept you moving?”
“Home,” I told him. “A promise.”
He nodded. “That’s good. Promises are lighter than guilt.”
We talked about my unit. My sergeant who dragged wreckage over me, Johnson’s last desperate attempt to help his men.
Poor Patterson who didn’t even stand a chance.
Reeves listened like the words were scripture.
Late one night, I admitted the guilt that wore me down more than the injuries.
They had been good men, kind men. They hadn’t deserved it.
Why them and why not me? When I broke mid-sentence, he didn’t reach for a Bible—just passed me a tissue and said, “You don’t have to earn being alive, son.
You just honor this second chance, and them, by giving your next shot your all. ”
I wanted to call her. Hell, it was the first thing I thought of when they handed me back a uniform.
But command still had me on ice—debriefs, psych evals, a goddamn mountain of paperwork.
They said I couldn’t make contact until the official notice went out.
So I sat there staring at the phone on the wall like I could will the rules to bend.
Weeks blurred into a routine—meds, PT, debriefs, more questions. I gained weight, got a haircut. One morning, Reeves appeared with paperwork in his hand. “You’re cleared, Lance Corporal Morgan. Stateside transfer. Time to go home.”
Home. Finally.
They drove me to the airstrip at dawn. The plane waited on the tarmac like a mechanical beast daring me to climb aboard. My palms went slick. The smell of jet fuel twisted my stomach.
“You all right?” the escort asked.
I swallowed hard. “Not yet.”
He handed me headphones. “These can help block out the noise.”
I hesitated but eventually took them. The engines roared, the plane lifted, and for a heartbeat, the panic almost won. But through it I heard Reeves’s voice, calm and sure: You don’t have to earn it.
When I woke again, the sky outside the window was softer, humid—the kind of air you could taste. Stateside. The escort helped me through the terminal, into a government SUV, and an hour later I was standing on a porch I barely recognized.
The door opened slowly. My mother blinked at me through a haze of last night’s whiskey, makeup smeared, hair a mess. For a second I thought she might slam the door, like maybe I was just another hallucination.
Then she laughed. Or maybe she sobbed. Hard to tell the difference. “You’re not real,” she said, voice small and cracked. “They brought me a flag. They said you were gone.”
“I got lost,” I managed.
Her eyes filled, and she reached for me with shaking hands. The hug was clumsy, half-hearted, like muscle memory instead of love. Behind her, the house smelled of liquor and lemon cleaner, the mix of a woman trying to drown one scent with another.
The escort gave me a nod, climbed back into the SUV, and drove off. The silence that followed felt heavier than gunfire.
I stood there a minute, letting her talk—rambling about neighbors, the VA, some check she never cashed. I looked at the photos on the wall: me in uniform, her younger and sober, people I didn’t remember. Everything frozen in time.
The quiet pressed too close. The air felt stale. My chest started to ache again. Home, but not home.
The place I needed to be was still a few miles south.
An old clubhouse, engines rumbling, laughter spilling through open doors, a girl with fire in her eyes who once made me promise I’d come back.
I set my pack down beside the couch, stared at my hands, and whispered the same words that had carried me across three months of hell.
Got to get home.