The Last Hour (Thompson Sisters), Sheehan-Miles, Charles [reading an ebook .txt] 📗

A medic picked up the little girl out of the Humvee and started to carry her toward the small crowd of villagers. She wasn’t injured enough to go out on the medical flight. She wore a blue flowered dress with long sleeves, long brown hair tied up in pigtails, and had big round eyes. As the medic carried her to the villagers, her eyes sought out Kowalski. He called out, “Wait!” and ran over to them.

Kowalski said something to her, and she nodded. I don’t know what he said. I’m sure she didn’t either. But whatever it was ... maybe something I don’t understand, because I’m not a dad with a little girl... she got it.

He took the little pink and white ribbon off his web gear and tied it up in a bow in her hair. She waved, and then hugged him. I had to bite my lip.

Kowalski turned around and walked back toward us. He saw me watching and gave me a nasty look. “What the fuck are you looking at, Sarge?”

I smiled, took a drag off my cigarette, and said, “Nothing, Kowalski. Nothing at all.”

Comet (Ray)

By the time the choppers cleared out of Dega Payan, it was getting dark, and very cold. Cold like I’ve never experienced before or since. I don’t know what the temperature actually was. But when you’re a thousand miles from nowhere, and there’s no electricity, and you can hear the wind howling down off the mountains, then the cold gets to be bone deep. The kind of cold that can make you wish you could just die and get it over with, where you get sharp pains in your extremities before they just go numb.

The kind of cold that can freeze an entire family in their home.

Sergeant Colton pulled back one squad, leaving only one on the perimeter. The rest of us holed up in a vacant hovel or in the Humvees, running them periodically to let the heat run. We rotated the overwatch squad out every two hours so they wouldn’t freeze to death, which meant no one got any sleep that night.

A number of us were going to have trouble sleeping anyway. Dead combatants were one thing. They were the bad guys. Not easy to deal with under any circumstances. But today we’d pulled thirty-four bodies out of those frozen, buried houses. Most of them kids.

I didn’t know if I was ever going to sleep again.

We stayed in the village for nearly a week. It was a mistake, but those were our orders. Apparently Kabul hadn’t sent the disaster planning money provided by the US to Badakhshan province that year. And someone in the provincial administration spent what money they had on who knows what. The result being a huge outcry across the country over the freezing deaths of 34 innocents. So someone in the White House, or in Kabul, or wherever, decided the US needed to make a show of humanitarian aid to the devastated village.

They needed it. There was no question there. We dug out the homes. We helped dispose of the bodies. We provided medical care, and food, and generators, and even little compact dung burning stoves someone dug up from somewhere. We cleared out the burned out girl’s school building, and Kowalski, who we all knew as an unmitigated asshole, transformed before our eyes as he organized a soccer game for the kids in the snowfield next to the school. Of course they didn’t have a soccer ball, but somehow he got one of the pilots to bring a basketball out on one of their flights.

Lieutenant Eggers was so impressed with this that he relieved Kowalski of any other duties for the remainder of our time in the village. The rest of us would be out there digging holes or patching walls or whatever, and then Kowalski would run by, the head of a comet, with a tail of twenty or more kids following. The little girl with a pink and white ribbon in her hair was usually at the head of the crowd.

Understand ... Badakhshan, as a whole, and our district particularly, were pretty pro-western. They’d suffered heavily under the Soviets, and even more so under the Taliban. Decades of neglect meant they didn’t even have the basics ... it wasn’t until last year that an actual road was put in to reach this village.

The only problem was, our presence brought attention to the village. By the fifth day, it brought Taliban insurgents.

The first sign came on the afternoon of day five. Because we were down one man, my fire team had also drawn light duty. We were on the roof of one of the buildings, trying to figure out how to patch it with the crappy materials we had on hand, and where I could keep an eye on Kowalski and the kids. And that’s when a shot rang out.

The kids scattered instantly, some of them dropping to the ground in the snow, others running for the confining spaces between buildings where they could hide behind the high walls. A second later, I saw Kowalski running across the field, chasing three stragglers to get them out of the line of fire.

My radio exploded to life. Second squad was under fire.

“Gear up!” I shouted, anticipating the Lieutenant’s next order. The insurgents had to be in the woods somewhere. Someone was going to get the order to flush them out.

Dylan and Roberts quickly threw their helmets on, and we got off the roof and joined Kowalski on the ground.

“Where did the shooting come from?” I asked.

Kowalski shook his head. “Not sure. Woods, I think.”

A second later the Lieutenant called me over the radio. “Gather the children in the schoolhouse and protect them,” he ordered.

“Shit,” Kowalski said. “They’re all over the place.” He started to call out their names, one by one. A few seconds later, heads popped around the wall. Kowalski used a