She shakes her head. “No, you should. Please tell me… I can take it. I’m just… I don’t know, it’s just too horrible to imagine you anywhere near an explosion.”
I hug her closer to my chest. I know what she means.
“What happened then?”
I sigh. “One of my men told me that once we got to that godforsaken place, we realized it was a trap, but it was too late. There was an investigation later. Can’t give details on it: I signed an NDA when I left the unit, but well you can imagine: our intel had come from a… corrupted source, they had double-crossed us. The hostages we had come to rescue were on the floor already, they had been dead for at least a couple of days.”
“Oh my God,” Kenna murmurs softly.
“Supposedly, about the time Jonny saw the bodies, I heard a faint click when an IED was triggered by mistake by one of my boys. He stepped on a switch hidden in the floorboards of that hovel. There were eight of us, we turned tail as soon as we realized there was a bomb. The shockwave hurled us backward when it hit us. Only six of us made it out of there.”
“Oh, love, were you hurt in the explosion too?” she asks.
I nod. “Yes, but I don’t remember the pain, not even from afterward. I guess I was too heavily medicated to feel anything, but that’s when I must have gotten the scars I have on my back… from shrapnel, I think…”
Kenna stands on her knees and pulls my shirt collar away to see.
I grimace a bit, that’s not exactly a pretty view. I’m never comfortable around people shirtless because of it, not that I’m that squeamish, but I don’t like to be stared at.
“Oh, no, oh love!” she hugs me, her fingers diving under my skin to gently stroke over the scarred tissue marring my old Ranger tat.
I tense a little. I’m not used to people touching me like this, but it doesn’t take me long to relax, she’s my babydoll: she can touch me all over if she pleases.
“Do you know how this… how this happened?” she asks, her voice breaking.
I scratch the back of my head. “One of the guys who made it, told me I didn’t run out immediately like I should have. I stopped to… help him. I took cover and dragged him with me but twisted, giving my back to the explosion to keep him from being hurt. He was barely in his twenty back then, he had just made the team and that was only his second operation. He’s okay now. We keep in touch. It got pretty rough for him for a while. I have the scars only. I don’t have the memories that come with them, but my brothers do.”
She nods, cupping my hand in her much smaller ones. “What of Jonny?” she asks.
My vision blurs and I shake my head.
“Oh, my God, Wyatt! That’s awful… there are no words. I can’t begin to imagine. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
I noisily gulp down air. “Thank you.”
“I truly liked him, he was such a funny, loving guy…”
I frown at her. “You met him?”
She nods. “You were with him when I met you. How did he…? What happened?”
I sigh. “Jonny happened. He was a very selfless, loyal guy. Like I said, he was the one who spotted the bodies on the floor, he was further than any of us into the house, he pushed three of our buddies back when he realized we had been made, but by the time I heard the switch go off… he was just too far into the room to…”
My body grows tense again, I’m never going to get over my best friend’s life ending over there, even if he did die a hero.
“Once outside, we didn’t have time to recover from the blast, we were surrounded by enemy snipers and put under siege. I’ve been told we tried to find cover as we attempted to recover from the explosion going off at close range. Visibility was pretty low and we couldn’t hear a damn thing anymore.”
“Because of the explosion?”
I nod. “Yeah, I still hear the ringing sometimes.”
Kenna grips the front of my uniform shirt in her hands.
“We got a few of them, some of our guys were excellent shots no matter the conditions, but it was simply too carefully planned on their side, by the time our backup team got there, six of us were down and that included me, I was presumed dead.”
Kenna starts to cry in earnest again.
I kiss her forehead and pull her into my arms. “Babydoll, you don’t need to hear this…”
“No, no… I do,” she mutters onto my chest, sniffling.
“There isn’t much to tell…”
Not after I finish sanitize the story I do have, anyway. I’m not about to traumatize her further. She’s brave, my babydoll, but today’s been rough on us.
I go on: “I don’t know what happened exactly. But, while we were attacked, so was our camp. They bombed it, our echo team was wiped out, eleven members out of twelve died. Everything was destroyed. I honestly don’t even know how the fuck our beta squad got as many of us as they did out of there.”
“Oh, God…”
“When I woke up next, I was in a hospital bed in pretty bad shape and I didn’t remember a thing from the past two weeks or so, which I’m assuming is why I don’t remember you, love.”
She nods. “We met a week before you got deployed.”
I kiss her temple, softly stroking her back.
“Did the doctors tell you what was wrong with you?”
“Yeah, sorta… they said I was in a coma for a while because of the blood loss. My shoulder blade and clavicle were fractured, my back was well… you can imagine, and I had been shot too. Once in the leg, once in the shoulder, once in the head.” I tell her, touching the spots where the bullets went through, and when my finger grazes the scar on my eyebrow, Kenna whimpers.
“How is it that you made it, love? I mean. I am immensely grateful that you did, but how?” she asks.
“It was a low-velocity, small-caliber bullet. The impact with my brain was minimized by this ridge here —I tap my eyebrow— it offered a rebound surface. They told me that the sniper shot me in the leg and shoulder at close range with a rifle, but then he was disarmed by my brothers. I was lying on the ground, they tackled the bastard, but they didn’t know he had a small handgun, he pointed it and shot me at an angle, long-range.”
Kenna’s head pushes up from my chest and she hisses as if in pain, her eyes glistening with tears. “If he… if he had used the rifle…”
I’ll be dead right now, I think but I don’t tell her that.
“I was extremely lucky. I mean, even being small caliber, the bullet could have caused a lot more trouble and really fuck me up if it had gone through, but most of the issues I have are from the micro-fractures in my skull, both from the bullet itself and the blast.”
“And your memories?” she asks, her voice so low I can barely hear her as she speaks against my neck.
“They say they’re mostly irretrievable at this point. I mean, it would take a miracle really, and I think I’ve already gotten my share of those. The doctors told me there was minimal damage to my limbic system, but my hippocampal formations in the right-frontal lobe were affected enough that I developed partial focal retrograde post-traumatic amnesia. Which is a mouthful to say that basically I can form new memories and retain them and I can remember everything from my past, in terms of skills and episodic memory, but the two weeks or so before I got shot, were completely erased from my brain. Events from the six months of my life prior to the raid night are kind of foggy but they’re there. It’s how retrograde amnesia works: it kinda progressively decreases the further back you go in time. So I have zero recollection from those two weeks, aside from a few… impressions. Then I have some from the three preceding months, some more from the prior six and so forth up until my thirty-first birthday or so. That’s when my amnestic curve flattens completely and I start to remember everything normally.”