Landings
Copyright© 2015 by Gina Marie Wylie
Chapter 1: Flying
I opened my eyes and took in the scene in front of me at a glance. I’d been having flying dreams since I was a teenager, where I flew standing up. I had to concentrate and spend a lot of energy staying up, but I could fly. Now, I was standing tall in the sky, just as I had in those long-ago dreams.
Ahead of me was a low ridge and blue sky behind it. Still, it was a substantial ridge. I concentrated very hard on lifting myself over the oncoming ridge.
It was instinct, nothing else. I’d spent a lot of my youth surfing the North Shore of Hawaii. Moving my body to make the forces on it keep me vertical was as natural as breathing. I was mildly amazed that I’d leaned forward. On a surfboard, leaning forward was preparatory to augering into a wave.
That was my first indication that this wasn’t a dream — it was the worst nightmare ever.
Off to my left, and several hundred feet lower, was the odd spectacle of a Humvee, pointed in my direction, flying through the air. It was level at that moment. I could see the passenger side door was open, and dim shapes occupied the seats.
Patty.
I remembered Patty suddenly. Patty had been sitting in the middle of the front seat, between me and the driver. Patty, the woman, if I’d been asked, I’d have said I loved more than life itself.
The Hummer wasn’t stationary, it was rotating end over end. A few seconds later it was horizontal again, wheels down, but much, much, lower. It pancaked into the ground, landing almost perfectly on all four wheels. I was a couple of hundred yards away, and I could see the tires explode. Even so, the Hummer bounded into the air.
The next landing was again correctly aligned, but this time it smashed into a copse of scrub pines, mowing down a dozen in an eye blink. It didn’t really go airborne, but it did start to slew. It hit more trees, and by then it was going sideways. It was like watching a bowling ball striking pins — trees flew every which way. All I could do was watch ... then it started to roll. It had hardly made a quarter turn when I saw the first pieces start to fly off.
I saw pieces explode away, and the scene vanished in dust and debris.
Patty.
That’s when I noticed I had my own problems. I’d tried to cry, but there were no tears.
I was leaning forward further than ever, feeling myself shoot across the front of a wave.
Except there was no wave, there was just air moving past me. I wasn’t flying; I was falling.
I had, I estimated, another few hundred yards to go, but by leaning forward, I’d picked up some forward velocity. The ground beneath me was dropping away, but not as fast as it had been.
For a second my addled brain was happy, but I realized two things almost at once. The ground was rising faster than I was covering ground ... and by connecting the dots, I was going to run out of hillside much faster than the hillside was going to recede.
How can the human mind calculate these things? If you contemplate how many variables a baseball fielder has to calculate to determine where a fly ball is going to land ... it seems inconceivable that they are under the majority coming their way.
I saw a piece of nearly black slate, about ten feet long and about two feet wide, pointed downhill. It looked kind of like a surfboard; I knew surfboards. I twisted a bit, and my swoop swerved. The ground, for the last few seconds, came up at a blinding pace. How could I judge it?
I hit that slate, nearly vertical now, my arms outstretched to my sides, like I was sliding down the front of a mondo wave.
The instant I touched that rock, the pain was beyond anything I had ever imagined. I sat down hard on my ass, my arms still outstretched. I looked like a dork, I thought.
Still, I was now surfing down the mountain. There were clumps of straggly pines, and I could steer my ‘board’ around them by leaning a little back and leaning a little this way and that. Again, it was instinct... leaning back slowed me down. I could judge when it was starting to get too rough and adjust my posture.
I stopped. It took a second, and then the “board” started to shift before I had quite realized it had stopped. I pushed down with my hands and swiveled my ass sideways to a rock that looked solid. My feet didn’t work, but I could drag my legs around, and a second later, I was sitting on that rock, watching more rocks that had been behind me going past.
It was my first chance to think, to take stock. I watched a rock bounce past and realized then that I’d carried out my flight in total silence. I couldn’t hear the air flowing past me, and I couldn’t hear the rocks move around me.
Patty.
The awful blossom had been on the left side of the Hummer, low.
IED.
We’d been on a patrol along a dirt track, 10,000 feet up a ridge in northern Afghanistan. I spoke into the thin air. “Testing, one, two, three, four.” It was pointless; my eardrums were gone.
Patty.
I could cry then, I found.
I’d never been able to spell even her first name. It was twenty-two letters long. Her last name was two letters longer. She’d smiled at me on her first day with the Brigade. “Call me Paddy.”
“Paddy is a man’s name,” I’d told her. “What’s your real name?”
Eventually, we’d settled on Patty. I’d been told that her name started with ‘Padmé,’ but I was one of those Star Wars purists who had never accepted Padmé Amidala.
Patty had come home to Mumbai to celebrate scoring a doctorate in history at Oxford. She’d gotten up to go to the restroom in the restaurant her wealthy parents had sat down to a meal when Muslim terrorists, on their way to massacre a hotel full of people, had paused to massacre a restaurant full of rich Hindus. Her father, mother, two younger sisters, and an older brother had died at the table ... but she had survived.
She made her way to southern Afghanistan to serve as a translator for the Brits. It had, she said, left a bitter taste in her mouth. The British were gutless cowards, more interested in avoiding Afghans than meeting them. After six months, she’d left Khandahar and come to Kabul to work with the Americans. She had been nearly as contemptuous of us, at first, as she was of the British.
Patty had been forthright. “I will stay with you Americans. You aren’t cowards. It’s your politicians that are cowards. When they order you to run away, I’ll return to India and see if they need help in Kashmir.”
Except we’d fallen in love. I’d ruined my army career falling in love with an Indian translator. I cared not at all.
Now, I was in a pickle.
I put Patty out of my mind. She wanted to see dead Muslims. Stacked as high as the mind could conceive.
That jarred me. What the mind could conceive ... I was deaf...
I lifted my hand to my radio, still attached to my shoulder. “Blackfoot, anyone. Blackfoot Six here.” I paused. “My eardrums are gone, my legs don’t work. I’m praying that Timex built this radio. I can’t hear you, but I pray to God you can hear me.
“You won’t believe me. I’m about five thousand feet below the patrol, about another five thousand feet down the valley. Yeah, I’m toast if there are any English-speaking Muks around — they will have radios. If I see a chopper, I’ll pop environmental smoke; I won’t hear it.”
I kept talking, and after about fifteen minutes, I saw a chopper. It was coming right for me. I waited until it was a couple of hundred yards away and popped green smoke and waved my arms.
The guys on those choppers are the best we’ve got. Two men slithered down ropes and went instantly to the ground, while the third came to me. I swear to God, he had an Etch-a-Sketch. “OK?” he wrote.
“Nothing below my knees,” I told him. Evidently, my voice worked just fine. He nodded.
“Hurts?” he wrote.
“Some, not as much as at first.”
He held up a syringe and then wrote “Morphine.”
“The Hummer?” I asked.
“Next bird. We saw where it ended up. Sorry.” He bent down and delivered the injection.
And that was it. I, Thomas Cross, Major, US Army, the S2 of the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 10th Mountain Division, checked out. I felt the sting of the injection in my leg, and I felt the medic’s hand on the back of my neck as he eased me down.
Oh, there were flashes, but they made no sense. I was never conscious for more than a few minutes — hardly time to focus on where I was and what was happening to me.
My next coherent thought was a nurse asking me something; I don’t remember what. I was in a hospital in Germany. They wouldn’t tell me anything, so I responded in kind. “You won’t tell me anything? Well, I don’t see any colonels. I’m ignoring you inferiors.”
I had longer periods of lucidity, but I met the lack of information with stubborn resistance.
It was a gray-haired major that broke me. I looked at his major’s oak leaf and did what I’d done before. I laughed, rolled over on my side, my back to him. By then, I could hear again, but I pretended to still be deaf.
Oh! He didn’t play fair! He tapped my ankle, and the pain was near my limit.
“My name is Curt Stubbins,” he told me. He presented me with a sheet of paper. “Please, if you will, my DOR.”
“10-9-88 ... sir, with respect, you must be a spectacular fuck-up.”
“I’m a shrink. I’ve never wanted to be anything else. I sure as hell don’t want to be a chuckle-head colonel. Do you understand that doctors who are majors are the same as RA first lieutenants?”
“Don’t give a shit. I ignore fellow majors, no matter their DOR.”
“You have a choice now, Major. You can make my day. Piss me off and you’ll get a medical discharge as soon as you get back to CONUS. You can talk to me and I’ll make up my own mind if you’ve lost it. You realize, don’t you, that the consensus is that you lost it the instant your slash croaked?”
How long had I gone without thinking about Patty? I was devastated and started crying.
The doc was blunt. “They want to give you a medal.”
“Whatever for?” I asked, mystified.
“You went flying off that ridge. Your Hummer landed 1120 yards, horizontally, from where the IED detonated. You were another 600 yards further and four hundred yards lower.”
“I thought I was flying. I’ve had dreams about that since I was in my teens. I always thought if I concentrated hard enough, I could really fly. I learned I really couldn’t.”
“And your lover?”
I suppressed my anger. “No one has seen fit to tell me ... but I can assume, can’t I? Along with the fate of everyone else in the command vehicle.”
“Everyone but you,” he said bluntly.
“I saw it disintegrate. For a second, I thought...” I shook my head.
“Major, can I speak frankly?”
“Of course.”
“You presented the Army with a pretty problem. A lot of people saw your departure; there was no doubt that five minutes later you were on the radio, requesting pickup. They couldn’t find you at first, but the chopper showed them where. Your first sergeant bounced a laser range finder off the chopper — you were more than 2200 yards away. You’d lost 5400 feet of altitude, and were a little more than 1700 yards straight line distance.”
“You had two broken ankles, and your eardrums had burst. Again, being honest, you broke your ankles twice. The first breaks were certainly from the IED, the second when you landed. I can’t imagine how you survived.”
“I fell out of the Hummer. I surfed the sky, then I surfed the hill.”
“Surfed?”
“I grew up on the North Shore of Hawaii. Surfing is in my blood. Evidently, surfing is like riding a bike — once you learn, you never forget.”
“I don’t understand.”
“As I fell, I leaned forward and picked up ground speed ... giving me more time before I landed. I picked out a rock that looked like a surfboard — when I hit it, I nearly blacked out from the pain — then I sat down and steered around trees and big rocks. I didn’t think, I didn’t do anything but watch where I was going. I knew Patty was dead; I saw the Hummer hit and break up.”
“You think you were lucky.”
“I think no such thing. There was luck involved, indeed so. But most of it was bad. There were five of us in the Hummer. I might have survived, but no one walked away. All the way down the mountain, I traveled on autopilot — all I thought about was that I hope Patty died quickly. She did die quickly, right?”
“Do you want me to lie, sugarcoat the truth, or can you take it straight up?”
“Straight up,” I told the man.
“Did you ever see pictures of the Challenger explosion?”
“Yes, I was twelve, watching the launch live. I thought it was pretty fireworks and called to my father, who was shaving just then. He took one look, and the next thing I knew, I was sitting on my parents’ bed, and he was telling my mother to keep me there until further notice. So, yes, I’ve seen pictures and had the misfortune to watch it live — even if I didn’t understand what happened for another week.”
“Major, I’ve seen the reports; I worked on the investigation of that accident. The godawful truth is that everyone on the crew survived the explosion.”
I blinked, and he went on. “The Challenger crew had a couple of minutes and a bit more to make their peace with God. The people in your Hummer had about twelve seconds.”
I’d heard about survivor’s guilt; who hasn’t? It was a common affliction among ground combat troops. I’d thought I was immune up until that instant.
I have no idea how long I cried.
The major was patient. “You have some time, and then you have some choices. Think about them. You can leave the army — with your ankles, you’ll never be airborne qualified.”
I laughed. “I have never been, and I never want to be airborne.”
“Another net positive. Clearly, you are rational. Still, your ankles are worth only a 33% disability. You are clearly vulnerable to PTSD — but show no signs of it, at least not yet. Besides getting a small pension, you’re eligible for a number of GI benefits. How do you feel about going back to college?”
“About as much as I look forward to an airborne assignment.”
He grinned. “The bad news is that you are sounding more and more rational.
“You can simply resign from the Army and tell them to take their pension and shove it — that would put you back in the “nut case” category.
“You can elect to continue in the Army. You would undergo a few months of physical therapy — also available after any of these options. If you accept military-supplied physical therapy, you are a braver man than I am, Gunga Din. After the PT, you’d spend some time on light duty. You are unlikely to see me again, but some other doofus like myself would decide if you are well enough — mentally and physically — to continue in the Army. Ops officers don’t grow on trees. Unless they find you drooling over corpses in twelve to eighteen months, you’ll be back in the ‘Stan.
“My personal favorite, and what I’d like to suggest, is that you can request survivor’s leave after the therapy, and spend a couple of months sitting on a beach someplace, soaking up the rays and contemplating what’s next. Find a yummy, willing co-ed; have carnal relations with her — get your ashes hauled early and often. Contemplate how lucky you are to be alive, and mourn those who didn’t as best as you can. Spend most of your time contemplating the future and not the past.”
“Any other pearls of wisdom?”
“If you’d grown up in Podunk, Idaho, I recommend never going home. Hawaii is an exception to the usual rules — still, you’d be better off if you went there later rather than sooner. Avoid people who remind you of the past — concentrate on the future.
“There are, in all practicality, a mess of options where you can resign your commission and get a small medical pension. There are other options where you can resign and score a number of nice benefits ... and if you decide to pull the plug later, no one will care. There are any number of routes where you return to service in something like your old job. I’d wait a year or two before trying that, if I were you.”
I told him I’d think it over.
That night I was watching old movies on cable and I saw the Kenny Roger’s movie “The Gambler.” His gravelly voice was as impressive as ever, and the basic message seemed to speak to me: “You have to know when to hold ‘em; you have to know when to fold them. You have to know when to walk away; you need to know when to run.”
The breaks to my ankles had been clean, I was told. They were going to knit together just fine, but as the Dr. Stubbins had said, it wouldn’t be good to jump out of airplanes. That was fine with me, I had no desire for Airborne wings or a Ranger patch.
For a couple of months, I was going to roll around in a wheelchair, then short periods on crutches, gradually growing longer. In three or four months, I’d be ambulatory again, but I wasn’t to run for at least six months, and better eight or nine. Better, I thought, to hold ‘em for a while. See how things worked out before making any changes.