To everyone who's been wanting me to write that book for the last eighteen years -- here's a taste.
Prologue
All across the Middle East, the world watched and held it’s collective breath. Not just from the televised image of a British schoolchild being held hostage by Saddam Hussein who defiantly reared back his hand to slap the megalomaniac dictator; but also from the spectacle of the world’s fifth-largest and first-largest armies staring each other down across the sands of the Sahra al Hijarah and the Neutral Zone. The winds of the winter sandstorms whistled cold through the huddled troops of the Allied nations. Americans, Saudis, Kuwaiti Free Forces, Egyptians, Jordanians, British, and French Foreign Legionnaires encamped next to one another, staring northward to the largest and most formidable fighting force in the Arab world, although we didn’t know at the time the reputation was undeserved.
The men of the Iraqi Army that stared back across the desert at us were not all soldiers. Most of them had been plucked off street corners and deposited in the desert wastes without uniforms, food, water, or (more importantly) even weapons. One was simply a USC theatre student home for Christmas Break less than a week before the Iraqi police had drafted him and plunked him into an infantry unit still wearing his USC sweatshirt.
And still more soldiers were pouring into the northeast quarter of Saudi Arabia as the plan to invade and recapture Kuwait built to it’s inescapable conclusion. Planes from Germany, Britian, France, and the other Allies continued to land hourly and discharge their cargoes of men and materiels to support the invasion effort.
The stars burned cold and hard and bright that evening. The temperature was hovering around 10 degrees Fahrenheit in the dead of the January night, and everything the eye could see was covered in sheets of clear, bright, slippery ice from the freezing rain that had pounded Central Missouri earlier in the day. Weathermen had been unanimous that the freezing drizzle wouldn't cross south of the Interstate 44 boundary that frequently divided weather systems in Missouri, but they'd been unanimously wrong, and as soon as the sun had begun to dip lower in the afternoon sky the sub-freezing temperatures had caused the drizzle to overlay everything with thick sheets of cold, hard ice. This particular soldier was fairly sure that the ice was covering his heart as well.
He'd never remotely felt anything like this before. His emotions raged, conflicted within him. He watched the Ford Taurus pull slowly away from the Battalion parking lot, blacker than any emotion he could name, and felt another part of his heart rip in two. Inside his wife and infant son were returning home to their house in Waynesville to wait for his return. His wife was a resident alien here; he'd taught her to drive only six months ago, and she'd learned to keep the books and do the budget just this month. The baby was not even three months old, and he had wondered at the time if he'd even be here when his son was born. Leaving this newest member of his family; this tiny life that depended so heavily on him, was perhaps the worst of all.
He couldn't think about that right now. He already felt the hot tears stinging his cheeks as he watched the car crawl down the icy streets towards Waynesville and their little home twelve miles away. The heaviness in his chest was a dead thing, without life, cold, and empty.
He was a soldier, and he had a duty to his country, his friends, and his family. He'd realized when he'd joined the service thirteen years earlier that he might have to go into a war zone some day, but he'd managed to avoid Nicaragua, Grenada, and Panama, and figured it wouldn't ever happen to him.
And now it was happening.
The idea of desertion flitted across his mind, and he just as quickly dismissed it. He supposed he could disappear into Canada, or go to his grandfather on the reservation--they'd never find him back in the wild parts there. Shoot--the military didn't even actively look for deserters anymore, and he sure as hell did not want to go to Saudi Arabia into a shooting war.
No, dammit--he didn't even give the idea any more than a passing dismissal. He was a soldier, and had a duty to his friends who were going. He didn't have to like it; just go, and do his duty. He stared up at the cold stars in the brutally cold skies and drew deep, bone-chilling breaths to help stay the sobs he felt welling up out of him. He turned and carefully picked his way across the icy-slick parking lot in his hard rubber-soled jungle boots. Designed for maximum comfort and traction in the soft, wet, hot places of the earth, they were little comfort and downright dangerous in the subfreezing cold and held little hope against the glasslike ice covered ground. Even though the soldier had grown up in Chicago area winters he still fell twice working his way back to the Battalion classroom where the Hospital had gathered for deployment.
The 30 mph winds tore through his lightweight jungle fatigue uniform like it wasn't even there. The cold was comforting, helping him to concentrate on keeping warm instead of the other matters pressing in on his consciousness. He glanced over against the outside wall of the building and saw other members of his Company likewise huddled. Some solemnly smoked cigarettes, the orange light playing relief against their pained expressions. Some wept openly. At least one pair huddled together in open embrace--a pair of married soldiers being deployed together, but to different areas. They reassured each other they would see each other again, oblivious to the others nearby who wrestled with their own private weights-of-the-world on their shoulders.
A muffled sob sounded from his right from another soldier wrestling with his own mortality. Jack turned away, slightly embarrassed at his eavesdropping. He took a tentative, careful step in the jungle boots, trying desperately not to fall and break a leg or hip on the ice that was everywhere. He decided he didn't care one damn bit for deploying to another third-world country and leaving his family behind in the dead of winter. Not one damned bit.
And, if he had his 'druthers, he never would again.
(Copyright JD Long 2008; not to be used without permission.)
