Casualties Read Online Free PDF Page B

“force of nature.” That was how she’d gotten herself from the mountains of New Hampshire to being a corporate big shot. Back in the desert, they kept tripping over people from companies like hers. Once, he recognized the initials of his mother’s company on a lanyard worn by the woman who ran the entertainment at Camp Ramadi, a “morale technician,” he’d read in the camp newsletter. Someone had brought a copy back to the outpost. Peterson had thumped the picture with his dirty finger like he was some kind of lawyer and this was his evidence.
    â€œWhat the fuck is a morale technician? I’ll tell you what it is: some bitch who makes more in one year planning parties and writing fucking newsletters than I’ll have after four years of putting my ass on the line for my country.” Peterson tossed the newsletter down in disgust.
    Robbie stayed out of it. No one knew what his mother did. When someone asked, he just said she was in “business.” He talked with pride about the small town she came from, how she’d raised him singlehandedly; that was something they could understand and respect. In the end no one cared what she or anyone else’s parents,wives, girlfriends, or fathers did. They cared about each other. He wondered if he would care about anyone or anything like that again.
    Robbie was on his third cigarette and halfway across the parking lot to the guys with the football when Korder finally showed up in his girlfriend’s Chevy. He was going on leave, too. His girl, Chrissy or Misty or something that Robbie never quite caught, leaned forward from the backseat, her arms draped over Korder’s neck. A tiny diamond glittered on her left ring finger. Korder told him she’d picked it out while he was in country and he’d paid it off a day or two ago. They were going to drive to her family outside Atlanta, then to his up in Pittsburgh. No one knew anyone; she and Korder met online four months ago. Korder was driving too fast; his left leg was bouncing, his finger tapping like crazy on the steering wheel while Drowning Pool blasted through the speakers. “New Hampshire?” Korder shouted over the music. “What’s up there?”
    â€œBest place in the whole world. Gonna stop in D.C. and see Rami too.” Robbie thought about saying,
C’mon, Kords, grab your pack and come with me
. They’d both be all right that way. But when they pulled up to the bus station in Jacksonville, all he did was reach over, his hand open. Korder gripped it and for a moment they stayed like that, unbreakable. Then Korder let go.
    â€œSay hey to Rami. Say hey to whoever the fuck you’re bangin’ in fucking New Hampshire.”
    There was no girl in New Hampshire, only an old farm with his great-grandmother, his uncle, and memories he’d been hoarding for months. The farm out on Lost Nation Road had been his refuge when he was a little kid. He hadn’t been back since he was sixteen, yet one night, a month into his second tour, he smelled the brook he’d fished with his uncle. He’d been awake for twenty-one hours straight and was standing in a ditch up to his thighs in icy water, engine oil, and blood. For seconds, the space of time it took to sniff and wipe his nose with the back of his wrist, he picked up the clean mossy smell of the stream that ran through the maples surrounding the sugar house. Then it was gone.
    He thought about that stream over the remaining months, recovering the hours he’d spent walking its edges with a rod and line, tramping down the mountain to the farmhouse with his uncle to clean the fish so his great-grandmother could cook them. During the long empty spaces between action or the nights when the pills he used for sleeping didn’t work, he conjured himself at age four plunging his arm into the sack of birdseed Big Ruth kept by the back door. He tried to remember the names of the birds that