Peter Schnell was a loser.

Every Soldier in the Brigade knew it, especially him. It wasn’t that he was a bad guy, he just wasn’t actually good at anything.

He passed the Army Physical Fitness Test, but no matter how hard he tried, he always just made it by the skin of his teeth, coming off the timed run red-faced and blowing like a steam engine, barely ahead of the clock.

He usually had to walk off to the side after a run to throw up. Sometimes he didn’t make it very far, so most of the guys knew to give him a little space. He couldn’t seem to get in really good shape no matter how hard he tried. He always kind of reminded me of a sack of potatoes.

Weapons qualification meant he was the last guy off the firing range, barely passing again.

He had the bad haircut, the crumpled uniform, the hanging boot laces, the skewed crumpled “hat.” He was “that” Soldier. It ran so deep in him that it made you secretly wonder if it was the Soldier that was wrinkled instead of the uniform.

He’d been promoted to Sergeant by sheer perseverance and a lot of luck. They just needed a lot more Sergeants than usual that year. It happens sometimes. Especially during wartime.

Nobody really disliked him, but then nobody really thought of him as their best friend either. He didn’t hang out with the rest of the guys. He didn’t play video games or watch much in the way of movies because he tended to get nasty migraines.

He was no “leader of men.” Nobody would follow him to Hell. Maybe to the mess hall, at least on pizza day, but not to Hell.

The only thing he’d ever done that was notable was to climb into a burning Humvee to pull another Soldier out after an IED strike. The badly burned Soldier, PFC Tony Campbell, died in his arms a couple minutes later, before the MEDEVAC helicopter even got close. The kid had just rotated in, too. That had devastated him and pretty much shattered whatever self-worth Schnell had.

Schnell ended up getting a medal for doing what he did, but it felt more like the Command was saying “you really tried hard.” At the award ceremony when they described his attempt to comfort a dying Soldier, I remember he looked really green the whole time. You could see he felt like he had failed again.

His marriage, if you could call it that, was an absolute disaster. He’d gotten married more or less because his domineering mother had wanted him to. She introduced him to a girl named Janice who she liked a lot, probably more than she had ever liked him. He sort of got railroaded into it. The marriage lasted less than three years and it had ended uglier than usual while we were deployed. We hadn’t been out very long before rumors began to drift in. Janice had been seen at the club. Janice had been seen out with a guy at a restaurant. Janice was seen at a hotel with a guy. Janice had actually moved some guy into their house. Four different guys, a couple civilians and a couple military guys.

Pretty bold, moving some guy into their on-base house, and the Brigade Sergeant Major put a stop to that when he heard about it.

Rumor had it he stopped a couple careers over it as well, but I never knew for certain. He couldn’t really touch her civilian boyfriends, but no Soldier is ever beyond the reach of a truly pissed off Sergeant Major.

I guess somebody must have also told Schnell too; Janice found out he knew and emptied the house and their bank account, with all his combat pay and savings. She was long gone by Arrival Day, so he came back to nothing.

That might have been the worst part of it. He never got to confront her. He never got to face her, tell her what she was and make her own that shit, at least for a moment. Maybe gain a little self-respect back. Or in Schnell’s case, maybe grow a little self-respect.

He couldn’t even turn to his family, since his mother apparently believed whatever story Janice told her and pretty much disowned him. Or maybe Janice had just told her the truth, since neither of them really seemed to think much of him to start with.

All he could do was go ahead and sign the divorce papers that had been left on the kitchen counter, there was just no point to contesting anything. Six weeks later, the “shake and bake” divorce was complete. He had to pay Janice some maintenance for six months. She claimed to be broke; she even claimed she’d sold his car. Rumor had it that one of her boyfriends was driving his old car around, so she probably just gave it to the guy.

In that time-honored military tradition, a couple of the guys collected up some money and took him to a really high-end strip club in Atlanta. It was probably more out a sense of duty than because they really liked him. Instead of getting tons of lap dances and getting hammered like he was supposed to, I heard he’d spent the whole time whining to one of the girls there about how his life had turned to shit. I was pretty sure he was paying for her time while she listened.

Sergeant Schnell just wasn’t a winner. He never had been, and now he wasn’t going to get the chance.

He was laid out in his casket.

I attended his funeral for no real definable reason. He wasn’t one of my Soldiers; he wasn’t in my Company, much less the platoon I was responsible for. I didn’t know him all that well. I didn’t even know he was still in the unit. I vaguely remembered that he’d been assigned to the Brigade Staff sometime after we got back, but that was it. I hadn’t actually seen him in several months. By the time of the funeral, not many of us who had been deployed with him were even left in the unit. That’s a Soldier’s life, rotating to another unit every few years.

Maybe because of that, he’d let the Command know that he didn’t want his funeral to be mandatory and he didn’t want a full military funeral. Why drag people to a funeral for someone they didn’t even know? He wanted it all to be low key. For some reason, that bothered me. I even heard he was to be cremated immediately after the funeral.

Soldiers are Soldiers, even Peter Schnell, and the idea that there wouldn’t be a full funeral ate at me a bit. My wife was back home helping her mother with a house renovation, so I had way too much time on my hands. Schnell just kept floating to the surface of my brain. The thought ate at me until I got up that Saturday morning, put on my dress blues and headed over to Hill Chapel.

The Chapel was nearly empty when I arrived. Just the Brigade Sergeant Major standing near the casket and the Colonel looking out at the mostly empty parking lot. The Chaplain must have stepped out for a moment.

I went to pay my respects and looked down at Schnell. He was shrunken, kind of folded in on himself, and instead of his usual bad haircut, his head was shaved bald. He was pale and waxy.

“Cancer.”

I turned to face the voice. “Sergeant Major?”

“Brain cancer, Sergeant. Those headaches he always had? It was inoperable brain cancer.” He said it woodenly, staring at the body.

I closed my eyes for a second. “All the shit we saw out there and he gets killed by cancer? Helluva way to go.”

Something, almost a smile, picked at the corner of the Sergeant Major’s mouth. “It was, Sergeant. It really was.”

I blinked. He sounded almost ... happy. But a Sergeant Major is never happy. Not in my experience anyway. Damn sure not at a funeral for a Soldier.

He looked me over. “Your uniform looks good. I’ll need help folding the Flag.”

I nodded, I could do something at least. It wasn’t really a request anyway. We talked and I stationed myself at the back of the Chapel so I could come forward to assist with the Flag at the right time.

At first I thought it was going to be just me, the Brigade Commander and the Sergeant Major, but a little at a time, Soldiers started drifting in. Some in blues, some in utility uniforms, some in civilian clothes. A lot more than I would have expected, really. I guess it was eating at more than just me, but it was still just a sprinkling in the huge Chapel.

I was watching the clock move slowly forward when I heard a murmur run through the crowd. Schnell’s ex-wife had walked in with an older woman that had to be his mother. Janice brashly went straight to the front of the Chapel, and without even looking at the casket or trying to pay her respects, she headed straight for the empty next-of-kin pew in the very front.

Just as they were about to seat themselves, the Sergeant Major moved up and blocked them. He gently but firmly directed them back one pew. I could see Schnell’s ex-wife hiss an argument at him, but it was pretty pointless, the man didn’t get to his rank by giving in to anyone. Looking more than a little peeved, they moved back.

The world completely stopped making sense about three minutes later.

A long black limousine pulled up to the main chapel steps, almost soundless.

They got out, walked straight up the stairs to the main chapel doors, then straight down the center aisle of the Chapel. Perfectly in step, perfectly synchronized. It was unreal, more like a scene from a movie than anything from real life.

I could feel my brain glitch like a burst of radio static over the net as they went past.

A perfect set of the most attractive women I’d ever seen. Not girl-next-door-pretty or even “she should be in movies” pretty. They were eerily flawless and untouchable looking. Perfect, polished, and graceful.

A matched set in an odd way, even though they were completely different. A redhead with blazing green eyes partly hidden by a half-face black veil. An icy platinum blonde with pale blue eyes and pale white skin, a tiny rakishly canted veil just covering her forehead. An Asian girl, probably Korean from the look of her, with the same canted partial veil and a dark-skinned black girl with pale brown eyes above high cheekbones, wearing that same canted partial veil.

They wore the exact same dress, skin-tight, black silk, insanely short, with the back cut as low as legally possible. Black silk gloves and six inch spike heels that no woman I ever met would even try to walk in.

Yet, walk they did, in perfect syncopation, straight down the aisle. They moved with absolute grace and elegance. I’ll admit that I was distracted for a moment. An inane thought of “you don’t see that every day” rushing through my head before it was pushed out by an appreciation of the unbelievable view.

They went straight to the casket, falling perfectly into line along it, heads bowed, reaching slowly to each other until they were hand in hand. After a very long moment, they wordlessly peeled away from Sergeant Schnell and headed for the front pew.

The Sergeant Major stepped in their direction and I braced myself. He took funerals very seriously and, though the dresses, what there was of the dresses anyway, were black, they looked more like they belonged on a runway or on an escort than in a Chapel.

He stopped in front of the red head at the end of the pew, and to my utter and complete shock, he gave her a respectful greeting and very formally gestured for her to take her place in the front pew.

Each of the women paused in front of him, just long enough for him to address them with words I could hear across the suddenly soundless chapel.

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

Military funerals are solemn, quiet things, but Peter Schnell’s funeral was nearly dead silent. Everybody in the chapel seemed to be holding their breath, afraid any sound at all would break whatever spell had been cast. The Chaplain spoke, the Brigade Commander delivered a brief eulogy that completely left out any word of his family, and focused on Schnell’s hope that everyone would make the most of every bit of their life. I waited for something, anything, to explain the four women with their heads bowed, holding hands in the front pew, but nothing came.