One September Morning Read Online Free PDF

the calendar now?” Lassiter asks.
    “Guess I’ll have to,” Doc says, capping the pen.
    John was the one who had hung the calendar with photos of the Pacific Northwest on the wall, the one who’d kept their spirits up, counting down the days until their deployment ended, crunching the numbers in countless different ways. Three months is ninety-one days. Less than a dollar in pennies. Less than eight dozen eggs for the son of a chicken farmer like Emjay.
    Spinelli rolls up one pant leg and lifts a fat bandage to press at a raw cut underneath.
    “You get that sewn up?” Doc asks.
    “Noah gave me two stitches,” he says flatly. When Spinelli fell outside the building and sliced into his knee, he’d been sure it was a serious injury. “Look at all that blood,” Spinelli had said, awed by his gruesome knee. “You’ll probably have to medevac me to Germany.”
    “I don’t think so,” Noah answered solemnly as he pressed gauze to the wound. “See? It’s deep enough for stitches, but no tendon damage. I can sew you up right here, if you want.”
    Chenowith tipped his head to the side, obviously put out by Spinelli’s latest injury. “All right, okay. We’ll pull you two from the operation.”
    Which left Doc partnering with Hilliard, who couldn’t tell his ass from his elbow under the best of circumstances.
    Now Emjay bites into the licorice strand and wonders what it all adds up to. It must be the eighth time he’s gone through the details of this day, but he can’t seem to piece it together.
    “I’d love to take down the bastard that got John,” Gunnar says, extending one arm and pretending to stare through the scope of a rifle. “I wish they’d let me go out of the wire and track him down. I would.”
    “Who the hell did fire at him?” Hilliard asks, his jaw working on a handful of nuts. “Did anybody ever find the sniper?”
    “Hell, no.” Lassiter reaches toward Hilliard and grabs some macadamia nuts for himself. “Alpha Company searched the perimeters after it happened, never located the insurgent. But let me ask you, Hilliard, did you see us nabbing the sniper? Where the hell were you, anyway?”
    “I guarded the door, like Doc told me to do,” Hilliard says defensively. “You know I don’t want to be doing that crap.”
    “Yeah, we know, Hillbilly,” Lassiter says. The platoon is well aware of Hilliard’s reticence to do the patrols.
    Hilliard stops chewing. “You gotta wonder, what the hell were we doing in that warehouse in the first place?”
    “The mission objective was to detain suspected insurgents and search for rocket-propelled grenades,” Doc says succinctly. Sometimes he acts as if he’s keeping everyone in line, though Emjay thinks it’s mostly an act. Without rank, nobody gives a shit.
    “Anybody find RPGs?” Gunnar asks.
    Lassiter shakes his head. “Chenowith said there were reports of insurgents taking back some buildings in the warehouse district.” He wipes his palms against each other, brushing off salt. “I’d love to know how we got that intelligence. From the goddamned sniper, probably. And some officer believed it, some boss with his head up his ass.”
    For once, Emjay suspects Lassiter’s got something right.

Chapter 3
     
    Fort Lewis
Jim Stanton
     
    H e is going to be late for work.
    Checking for cars, Jim Stanton jogs across the street and onto a path that cuts through a densely treed park bordering the army base.
    You cannot report for duty late in the army without repercussions, and this fact has been so ingrained in Jim in the fifty or so years since he entered West Point that he still feels guilty calling in a bit late now that he has retired and moved over to the civilian side of the armed services.
    “No worries,” Teresa told him when he called in to the office at I-Corps, the elite Army Division here in Fort Lewis where he now taught at the Joint Readiness Training Center. “A retirement job,” Sharice called it, knowing that he’d