Chapter 1

First Lieutenant Andrea Foreman received the gurney from the two medics who rushed it into the ER. She pulled it into a curtained alcove where her team was waiting to assess the casualty. They had done this many times before, and the practiced ease with which clothing was cut off and equipment utilized made her both proud and sad at the same time. Her team was one of the best, which made her proud. That they had to have these skills at all was what made her profoundly sad.

“Staff Sergeant Robert C. Hickory, type A positive,” said Specialist Anderson, removing the dog tags around the soldier’s neck. He would also go through the pockets of the bloody uniform and secure any personal property found.

“I’ve got a compound fracture with a bleeder!” called out PFC Williams. “We may have arterial bleeding here!”

Lieutenant Foreman went to the left leg. Pain management wasn’t an issue, since Sergeant Hickory was currently unconscious. “Help me set,” she said. PFC Williams took the ankle and she gripped the shin just below where the two jagged bones were protruding from the skin. “One - two - three,” she said, and the leg was straightened. Bright red blood welled out of the open wound, which she pulled apart with gloved fingers.

“I’ve got bone fragments all over the place, and the popliteal artery is damaged,” she said. “Pressure points and surgery, right now! Move it, people, or we’re going to lose this one.”

Major Donald Ferguson stepped back from the leg containing the artery he had just repaired.

“He’s all yours, Tanya,” he said. “What’s next?”

Sergeant Tanya Phillips pulled the gurney out of the OR and into the recovery room. The patient had shown no signs of recovering consciousness, but his vitals were good, now that two pints of blood had been put back into his body. He had a long way to go. The emergencies had been dealt with. Now he would have to be cleaned up and the other cuts and bruises on his body tended to. They couldn’t cast the leg yet, but they could splint it with an inflatable collar and keep it rigid. The orthopedic doc had ordered tension on the lower leg, just to keep the bones apart until the surgeons back in Landstuhl could assess whether the leg could be saved or would have to come off above the break.

At 1703 hours, exactly four hours after the IED changed SSG Hickory’s life forever, the plane carrying him back to the huge Air Force hospital in Germany lifted off the tarmac of the runway in Iraq. It would be the last time SSG Hickory ever visited the country.

Not that he was aware of his early return to “the world.” His brain, traumatized by sound, motion and impact, would not repair itself enough to let him regain consciousness for another four days. But in some ways that was a blessing, because during those four days many painful things were done to his body in the interests of keeping most of it alive. He was stitched up in six locations. He was operated on in two. It was determined that the tissue damage resulting from the compound fracture was too devastating to heal properly and the lower leg was amputated four inches below the knee. Pressure inside his cranium was released by drilling holes in his skull. But he was breathing on his own, and his blood pressure was within acceptable limits.

He was put in ICU and people around him, none of whom he’d ever met before, hoped for the best.

SSG Hickory had been gone from his unit almost a week when he first opened his eyes. He knew something was wrong immediately, but he also knew, somehow, that there was nothing he could do about it at that instant. He began assessing his environment, in an attempt to gain information. It was just a habit, and he did it without conscious thought.

At that exact moment, thousands of miles away, Sergeant First Class Ralph Butler was supervising the packing of the belongings of his former third squad leader. They were being sent back to Riley, where the unit’s home base was. Not that anything would happen to them there. Hickory wasn’t dead, but he had no wife. The only person listed in his next of kin records was a sister named Claudia, who lived in Arkansas.

Butler watched closely as the two privates packed the boxes. It had been known to happen that valuable items went missing in situations like this, and he wasn’t having any of that crap on his watch. As the bottom of the footlocker came into view Butler saw stacks of envelopes and tablet paper with drawings on them ... crayon drawings.

“What the hell is that?” he asked.

Private Willie Nelson, who had enjoyed his name through high school, but wished his parents were dead within ten minutes of arriving at his basic training company, grabbed a fistful of paper and held it up to the Platoon Sergeant.

The other private picked up an envelope and looked at the front.

“Any Soldier mail,” he said. “He’s got a ton of it.”

Butler sorted through a dozen envelopes. Most were blue, pink or yellow. The ones on top were addressed to him, not “Any Soldier”. The return address was from someone named Julia Miller, in Boonville, Missouri. There were at least ten of them in the group that Nelson had handed him. He lifted them to his nose. Perfumed.

“Hickory ever talk about a girlfriend?” he asked.

Nelson looked up and shrugged. He tried to shrug at every question. He’d gotten more attention in his eight months in the Army than he could have used in his entire life. It might have helped if he could play the guitar and sing. He could do neither, however.

Private John Rhyes shook his head. “Never, Sarge.”

“Hmph.” Butler handed the bundle of letters back to Nelson. “Put them all in there. Mark them as personal correspondence on the receipt.”

“Yes, sir,” said Nelson, and then winced.

“How many fucking times do I got to tell you I ain’t no fucking officer, Nelson?” growled Butler. “I work for my fucking living!”

“Sorry Sarge,” said Nelson.

“Well get that sealed up and take it and your sorry ass over to the APO. And get a fucking receipt!”

Julia Miller, aged twenty-two, and in her first year as a real, live, certified second grade teacher at David Barton Elementary School, in Boonville, MO., clutched the letter to her breast as she hurried down the hallway to her room. She wasn’t worried that Alicia, her aide, wouldn’t be able to control the class. She was just in a hurry to share with them the latest development in their project.

Julia had become aware of the “Any Soldier” mail concept on the internet. She was unaware it had been official during the Gulf War, but had become unmanageable during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The services had tried to stop it, but the quantity of mail addressed to “Any Soldier” had continued to swell. The US postal service didn’t give a damn. All that mail required stamps, and that was good. They forwarded it to the APO, or Army Post Office, which had to do something with it. If they just pitched it and some asshole representative of the media found out about it and reported on it, it could be very bad press. So they kept shoving it on down to units, and letting them worry about it. This mail was a perfect example of the old saying: “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” Most units loved it and passed it out to the troops as a diversion from the crushing routine of cleaning weapons and hoping you didn’t die on the next patrol.

Julia simply read about it on a ‘Support Our Troops’ kind of website and thought it would be a good citizenship project for her class to do.

So she had all the kids write a letter, put them all in a big manila envelope, and sent it off to “Any Soldier, Iraq.”

Hearing nothing for a month and a half, she had about given up on the idea when a letter came, addressed to her class with a return address that was completely unintelligible in terms of making any sense, except for the name: Staff Sergeant Robert Calhoun Hickory.

That first letter had shocked her to her core. That was because that first letter ... the first six pages of neat handwriting from a man she’d never met, and who was ten thousand miles away, and who was writing to seven year old children ... made her loins tingle.

He was warm, and funny, and thankful to the children. He told stories about children their age in a far away country, children who smiled and begged for candy and gum. He described beautiful buildings and a night sky that had so many stars in it that they lit up the ground when there was no moon. He told them tidbits of what his life was like, such as what he ate, and how often he got to take a shower.

It wasn’t that it was all sweetness and light. He did mention that it was a dangerous place to be, and that war was never a good thing to be involved in. But he used those comments to encourage them to find ways of resolving conflict without escalating it to violence. He told them they were lucky to be safe, and to listen to those who would keep them that way, including Miss Miller.

There had been a separate page in that letter, addressed only to her. He had thanked her personally, and told her he’d never forget her or the children, because their letters had reminded him of why he was there, and why it was worth it. His letter had made it clear he never expected to hear from her or the children again, but encouraged them to write to more servicemen.

The class would have none of it, of course. Staff Sergeant Hickory might have started out as “any soldier,” but now he was “their” soldier. They had questions for their soldier. Julia winced at some of those questions. Several children wanted to know if he had killed anybody, and what that was like. She didn’t feel like that was an appropriate question for someone so young to ask ... maybe for anyone to ask, outside the mental health arena. They wanted to know if he had children, and she was afraid that was too personal a thing to ask a man who might be separated from said children. In the end, she decided that she wasn’t the one to censor their letters. She just apologized to him in a personal note and told him he didn’t have to answer anything that made him uncomfortable.

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Any Soldier

Lubrican

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