Chapter 30: College Plans

Monday, Labor Day, September 6, 2027

Riley found me down at the dock sitting on a lawn chair and drowning worms, trying to catch dinner. It was early afternoon, Labor Day, and if a nice bass didn’t jump into my lap, I was contemplating finding a soft spot in the grass and taking a nap. Neither turned out to be in the works.

I figured that out when I saw a tennis ball fly past me and land in the lake. I heard Barney give a happy bark and tear past me, launching himself into the water to chase down the ball. Any fish nearby were now swimming far, far away, so I began to reel in my line. I looked into my bait bucket and the worms looked pretty pathetic, so I dumped them into the water. I looked over my shoulder and found Riley smiling as she came down to the dock. She grabbed a lawn chair of her own and set it next to mine as Barney came out of the water on the beach and walked down the dock to us.

I scratched his ears. “Release!” He cocked his head to the side, and I repeated, “Release!”

Barney ignored me and looked at Riley. “Release!” she said, and Barney dropped the ball into her hand. “Good boy!”

“Useless mutt,” I muttered.

Riley laughed and tossed the ball back into the water. Barney followed.

We played this game a few more times but then Barney decided he was worn out and needed a nap. “No luck fishing, Dad?” asked Riley.

“Some days the fish are smarter,” I admitted.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure. What’s up?”

“Why’d you join the Army?”

I looked over at Riley and wondered where that had come from. “Why?”

“I’m serious, Dad. I asked Mom, but she said I needed to ask you.”

“I sure hope you aren’t planning on joining the Army when you get out of high school. If your mother doesn’t kill you, I certainly will!”

She laughed. “No, I am not going to join the Army.”

I shrugged. “Well, I can tell you what I’ve been saying for years, that I had nothing better to do, but that’s not complete. The truth of it was that I was simply very immature. I mostly goofed off, in school and out. The only things I liked were football, fishing, and, well, your mother.” I didn’t want to say that I was only interested in the three Fs – football, fishing, and fornication!

“You didn’t even want to try college?”

I shook my head. “If I had gone to college, it would have been like I was in the thirteenth grade. I wouldn’t have lasted a semester. I just wanted to get out and do something else, anything else. The army fit the bill.”

“So, when did you grow up?”

“Who says I have?”

“Dad!”

I laughed. Kelly would have loved that. “Probably my second day in Iraq. People trying to kill you tends to focus you immensely!”

“What happened?”

I didn’t answer her immediately. I removed my sunglasses and polished them with the tail of my shirt and then put them back on. I just looked out at the lake. It was calm and the only thing marring the glassy surface were the occasional ripples from a boat cruising along.

Riley sensed I wasn’t going to answer her, so she stood and grabbed her lawn chair. “Sorry, Dad.”

“It was our second day at Camp Custer,” I answered. Riley sat down again. “The place was an absolute shithole. We called it Camp Custer because somebody had posted a sign over the entrance saying, ‘Little Big Horn II’. The real name was Dush-el-Kebir. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. You never went outside the walls by yourself because your head would end up on a spike in the road if you did. Our second night there, Riley and I were on overwatch when the hajjis rolled up with a truck bomb, a big one. At first, I just couldn’t believe it, I mean, the Iraqi Army just let these guys through! Riley grabbed the radio to let the camp know, so it was up to me. I had the machine gun because they were so heavy, and I was the biggest guy on the team. I brought it up and began firing it into the truck. It was nighttime, dark, and the tracers looked like lasers; I remember that so clearly. Then the truck swerved away, and Riley grabbed me and pulled me down behind the sandbags. It’s a good thing, too, since the truck blew up and it would have taken my head off if I had still been standing there. It was the first time he saved my life.”

My daughter was watching me as I told the story. “What was he like?”

“Who? Riley?”

“You once told me you’d tell me more about him someday. What was he like?”

I snorted and shook my head, smiling. “He was as big a goof off as I was. He was from Tennessee, and we used to joke about which was worse, Tennessee hillbillies or Georgia crackers. I once told him that the difference was that a Georgia cracker married the prettiest girl in town, while a Tennessee hillbilly married the prettiest girl at the family reunion. He didn’t argue either, just started telling me stories about his cousins.”

“Gross!”

I teased, “You’re not interested in dating Miguel or Diego?”

“You want to get pushed in the lake?”

I smiled. “He was just an average guy. We met in basic training and were battle buddies. That meant we had to do everything together, take care of each other. Once we were at Fort Drum and he decided we needed to go find a strip club and I had to go with him as his battle buddy. He got wasted and I had to drive him home.”

“You went to a strip club?” she asked, shocked.

“Yes, I’ve been to a strip club,” I admitted.

“Does Mom know?”

I ignored the question. I wasn’t about to tell our daughter that not only did her mother know, but she had also gone with me once to a club in Atlanta; that was a crazy night! Not exactly something either of us was going to mention to the kids. “After basic we were both sent to the Tenth Mountain at Fort Drum and were in the same fire team. We did sixteen months together at Camp Custer, probably getting shot at every other day. Then we came home, and later that fall, we went back to Iraq and did another sixteen months. That place is seriously messed up.”

“Did he save your life just the one time? You told me he saved your life back when I asked you where my name came from,” she asked.

I looked back out at the lake. “More than once. I saved his, too. After a while we stopped keeping score.”

“How did he die?”

I turned my head to look at her, but I was seeing that night at Whiskey. “Saving my life.” I was silent for a bit, and then said, “There were eight of us at a place called Outpost Whiskey and twenty times that number of hajjis trying to break in and kill us. They had blockaded us from any rescue and had shot down two gunships sent to help us. We’d already lost three or four guys by then, and the rest of us were all shot up. I had to go outside the wall to rescue the pilots from the chopper that crashed there. I’d been hit a few times, not bad, but not good either, you know. As I got to the chopper, another half-dozen hajjis started for me, but then they got cut down. Riley had run across the compound, running through the mortar and rocket fire, and was firing as my backup. He was hit a couple of times doing that. Then after I got the pilots inside, he helped me get them to the bunker and we both got hit again. He was hit bad, too. He died after getting Jose into the bunker.”

“Jose? Sergeant Montoya? He was there?”

I nodded. “Bob Givens, you’ve met him, him too. We were all there. Out of the eight of us we were the only three to survive. Like I said, Riley died later from bleeding out, saving me while I got the chopper pilots. If he hadn’t, maybe he would have lived. We’ll never know.” I looked back out at the lake. After a minute, I asked, “What’s going on, Riley? What’s with the ancient history?”

“I’m trying to figure out what I want to do when I get out of Matucket County High.”