Separate Lives Pt. 02

It was about that time that I noticed Sherrie wasn't dating—not at all. When I asked around, I felt like a fool. She hadn't dated since she and Ron broke up...and I never noticed. Isn't that terrible? My best friend and I didn't know.

Well, anyway, Cal and I started taking her out every so often with us to dinner and stuff like that, and sometimes to Fischer's for some dancing. Sherrie would dance fast dances with some of the guys, but she was awfully picky even then. Most of the men got turned down flat and some went away red-faced from whatever she said if they persisted. My Cal says Sherrie has a "real good" command of the English language when she wants to use it. He said it like he admired her for it. I guess that tells me what kind of language she commanded, huh? Well, I figured out Sherrie would only dance slow dances with Cal and a few older married men she'd found she could trust. On top of that, she wouldn't have anything but a little white wine when she went with us and only a couple of glasses lasted the whole night.

It didn't take a genius to see that she was "saving herself" for something and one day, I got her to talking about it. It took isolating her in my backyard back under the pecan tree and making her real comfortable with a lot of good food and a couple of hours talking about nothing in particular. Finally, she let down her hair a little and said she had this feeling that Ron was going to come back to town someday.

When he did, she said, he was going to see she wasn't fooling around with anyone and maybe he would forgive her for what she did "back then." If it took the rest of her life, she said, she'd wait for him to see how she'd changed and then she'd deal with whatever came next.

She didn't really have more than a slim hope they'd get back together, she said. In fact, she assumed they would not. It was like this whole thing was some kind of penance and she was just serving time until Ron released her from it by coming home and agreed she had changed.

Sherrie didn't know when he would come back, she just figured he would. I told her I could think of a couple of sure-fire ways to get him to come home. She wouldn't have any of that though. She was adamant she wasn't going to use any coercion though. I told her that sounded like she was setting herself up for a long, dreary life but she just shook her head and smiled knowingly at me. He was going to come back to town someday; she just knew it. I gave up talking to her about it.

I even tried to introduce her to some nice guys from Cal's work but she never would go out with them. I'm not real pleased with this whole mess but she seems to be okay with it. She is justnot going to date anyone at all. I had to accept it and let the discussion drop. I didn't have to like it though.

Sherrie filled out again after getting her mind around most everything in the second series of counseling sessions. She'd lost a lot of weight with the worry and self-recriminations and stuff, but now she's gained most of it back and she looks really great. I hate her. Even after having three kids of my own, my boobs aren't anywhere near as big as hers. It's not fair.

The woman seems to be more focused and happier than at any time since her divorce. She's a volunteer with the local PTA and works hard on the neighborhood watch program too...of all things, huh? Her life seems to be fun again; I guess her two roommates help keep her from getting too down in the dumps. Heck, they smile all the time and I guess that would have to give her a boost just about all the time, huh?

Oh...and Sherrie's doing good at work too. She had taken a job at a new accounting firm not too long after the divorce and has been promoted three times in the little bit less than three years she's worked for them. She has sixteen auditors and financial analysts working for her now and it looks like she's in line for a better job when the old fart screwing it up finally retires. She loves her work.

She's been coming over for barbeques for a long time now...whenever Cal and I have one...and she's just fantastic with the kids. She's like part of our extended family. Our oldest boy is five now. His birthday was last week. My three year old, Cal junior, is just like a son to her and my fourteen-month-old girl follows Sherrie around everywhere she goes. It's cute to watch my baby walk a few steps toward Sherrie, stand still when she feels her balance going, and then plop down on her bottom. Then she gets on all fours and crawls sooooo fast. She giggles like a maniac when she finally catches up to Sherrie. All three of my kids just love her to death.

Ron should be emailing us again any day now. It's been about a week and he tries to send Cal and me something every week or ten days. I show them all to Sherrie; she hounds me for the latest one if I haven't forwarded it on to her right away. I wonder what Ron would say if he knew?

********

I found out that Afghanistan in early spring isn't the garden spot of the world either. Instead of blowing snow, we got blowing dust and I wasn't sure which was worse. Both have serious disadvantages. I think I'm tending toward a preference for snow though. At least it melts and goes away; dust and sand just get into small crevices and clog up the works. Twenty-five percent of our heavy equipment—bulldozers, dump trucks, rock crushers, etc.—were down on any given day because dirt had fouled air intakes, gotten into lubricating oil, or any number of other things. It's particularly galling because most of our machinery wasmade for environments where dust and sand are part of the working environment. I was beginning to suspect a little sabotage.

Two weeks after my first suspicion, Marine Lance Corporal Arvin Cantwell and I caught one of the nameless unskilled laborers screwing on an air filter housing that should never have been unscrewed to begin with. We didn't like hiring these guys because it was impossible to vet them and we had no idea if the local warlord had actually sent them as trusted workers, or whether the guy just wandered into camp. The one we caught might have been Osama bin Laden's cousin, for all we knew.

The handful of dirt and rocks we found in the air intake confirmed he had ties to one terrorist group or another so we turned him over to a trio of Afghani National Guard soldiers. They took him away and we never saw him again.

The incident put us on guard and our equipment up time improved dramatically, but other things continued to crop up. We had about forty days to go on our schedule so we clamped a tight security on all our vehicles. First, we parked them separately from the main "tent city" set up for locals and contractors alike. Then Lieutenant Fredericks put on a night guard around them and my crew also provided personnel for that task. My people weren't armed, but they could sure raise a commotion if they saw anything out of the ordinary. Their purpose was to get an alarm spread wide enough, and quickly enough, for some of those tough Marines in our security platoon could handle whatever came up.

There was a pervasive concern among all the imported contractor personnel that if something was going to happen, it was going to happen soon because once the road was bulldozed all the way to the border, disrupting it would be a strictly local event and easily repaired. We were uneasy and uncomfortable.

********

I'm going to have to have a talk with Melissa, I guess. Turns out she's been passing my emails on to my ex-wife, Sherrie. When I'd last talked face to face with Karen, Sherrie's name had come up as an obstacle in mine and Karen's relationship. Karen thought I wasn't "over" Sherrie yet and that she would always be some kind of ghostly presence between Karen and me. I thought that was ridiculous, but fortunately I bit my tongue before letting that word get out into the discussion. I don't know much about women, but I was smarter than that.

Anyway, that Melissa was giving Sherrie information about me. Melissa compounded the error by telling me that Sherrie was concerned about me. It was all so darned irritating.

In some way, although I had no control over it, it was a validation of Karen's concerns. It seemed to say that Sherrie was still a part of my life even though we'd been divorced over three years now. I really didn't appreciate Melissa telling me Sherrie wasn't dating anyone and would not date because of her guilt from the way she'd treated me so long ago. Big deal!

Unbidden, some of the good memories came back to me last night, though—like...that first afternoon I went into the little café on the main drag just off campus. I was plowing my way toward a mechanical engineering degree, attending class in the daytime and working at night to make ends meet. Sherrie was a waitress in the café and gave me the biggest smile when I sat down at a table at her station. I think I fell in love before she handed me a menu. There were other dreams, but that was the most striking.

********

It was in the mindset of being highly security conscious that I found myself watching a chubby young Afghani male in the mid-day chow line a week later. He caught my attention primarily because he appeared suddenly from between two of our big dirt haulers. I hadn't seen anyone in that vicinity as I'd walked by, so his emergence startled me. The more I watched him, the less I liked what I saw.

He'd come out of nowhere—as if he'd been hiding out there beyond the heavy equipment—and he was looking all around like a country boy just come to the big city. I set my cup down on the hood of one of the Marine Hummers and repositioned the M-4 on the strap that hung on my right shoulder. I put the muzzle pointing down and grabbed the pistol grip. That meant I had to twist the carry strap a little, but now I had the weapon ready for action. Seconds count and I'd just saved myself a couple if something was about to go down.

Lance Corporal Myers was with me at the front fender of the Humvee. His steel tray and coffee cup sat beside mine. There were only a few of us who would sit down while eating. We wanted to be able to see all around and react quicker to potential threats. So we stood, and the Hummer's fender was a nice ledge at a convenient height for our purposes. Billy (the Kid, of course) Myers was one of the squad leaders and we'd become pretty good friends over the past couple of months. He and I were the best shots in the group's sporadic, and highly unofficial, target shooting contests.

I examined and then loaded a thirty-round magazine in the M-4 every morning, just like the Marines did. I'd pulled the charging handle to lock the bolt back this morning as part of the loading operation, but now I thumbed the bolt catch release to send the bolt forward and chamber a round. As I watched the unknown young man, I clicked the safety off. My right forefinger was along the receiver, instead of on the trigger. I didn't want to fire accidentally; only a fool puts a finger on the trigger of a deadly weapon if he isn't ready to pull it.

"Sir...Mr. Masters...what's wrong?" Billy Myers had glanced down when he heard the bolt mechanism snap forward in my M-4 and saw I was loaded for bear.

"I'm not sure," I murmured, watching the young guy across the way. The kid had a strange expression on his face, intent, mesmerized...and scared.

Suddenly my suspicions were kicked into high gear. This Afghani was positively rotund, a very plump young male in a place where there just wasn't that much food to go around. The only fat males I ever saw in this region were older men with a comfortable amount of authority. Their very plumpness was a sign of their wealth and power. This young man didn't meet any of the criteria.

"Shit," I breathed softly. The young man was digging under his loose clothing, finally pulling a cord up the open v-necked over garment he had on. There was nothing I could think of in the Afghani wardrobe that matched what he had in his hand. He was walking quickly toward a big group of Marines and my construction contractors who gathered around the massive soup kettles waiting for seconds. I opened my fingers and let my cup of coffee drop.

"NOOOOOOOOO!" I yelled. The man spun around and looked at me. A gust of wind pasted his clothing to his body and I could see the outline of several big blocks of...something...wrapped around his upper body and waist like a vest. He turned and tried to run toward the group of men.

Yanking the M-4 up and putting the sights on the back of his head, I pulled the trigger. There were a lot of guys downrange and normally I wouldn't have fired, but nothing about this was normal. I saw the spray of blood, bone, and brain matter out the exit wound in his forehead. He pitched forward, dead before he knew it. I guessed, in a fleeting thought, that it was true a headshot killed a man instantaneously for all practical purposes. Whether it had or not, the detonator cord was not pulled and the gang of construction workers over there were not blown into tiny bits.

"BOOTS AND SADDLES! BOOTS AND SADDLES!" Corporal Myers was screaming the untraditional alert signal for the detached platoon of Marines into his radio. The young privates had heard the phrase in an old John Wayne movie that had made its way out to us and they'd adopted it as quick warning cry. The Lieutenant didn't like it, but he wisely put up with it.

There were more shots. They came from behind me. Billy and I whirled around to see a ragged line of armed men running toward the encampment. More were scrambling from a ravine no one had paid any attention to before.

The Lance Corporal and I both went to one knee and began firing. The M-4 fires single shots or 3-round bursts. I kept the selector on the semi-automatic setting and squeezed off round after round. There were more Marines getting into action now. I could hear the Lieutenant directing a squad into position to pour an enfilading fire on the line of terrorist fighters. Seconds later, the squad opened fire and the number of attacking terrorists began to decrease rapidly. I punched the catch release to drop the empty magazine and slapped another one into place, tapping it to make sure it was seated properly.

Hearing a discordant noise, I looked to my left. An old Afghani wearing a black turban, his face twisted with hate, was running toward me as fast as he could go, screaming imprecations at the top of his lungs. More importantly, he was firing a semi-automatic pistol at Billy and me. Billy wasn't going to be able to do anything about the new attacker. He was still engaging the group of terrorists coming in from the ravine. It was up to me.

I swiveled clumsily around—I'd been shooting to my front and he was coming at me from my left—and started shooting back. This time I moved the selector to automatic with my thumb and began firing three round bursts. The second group stitched three .223 caliber holes from his crotch to throat and he lost all interest in killing Billy and me. Still running forward, he simply leaned forward until he ran his face into the ground. It took a short time for him to bleed out through the gaping throat wound and the big exit wounds on his back, but he was effectively dead when he hit the ground.

Most of that had to be relayed to me later, because as I was firing that burst, the last shot he fired hit me in the left shoulder. The heavy round caught me just as I was awkwardly getting to my feet and moving toward the shelter of the Hummvee. I stepped into a depression and twisted my ankle before I could get there though. Already falling, the impact of the .45 caliber slug accelerated my fall and my head slammed into the Humvee's heavy fender. I'm told I went out like a light.

********

Melissa's Diary:

Ronnie's been hurt! They say he's been shot but I can't get anyone to tell me how bad or anything. I'm going to start screaming and scratching some people's eyes out if they don't tell me.

I didn't know it but Ron put me and Cal, as well as that Karen person I bet, down as "next of kin" to be notified if he died or got hurt or something like that. With no family, beyond a couple of second cousins—his only sister died in a car wreck a few years back—I guess Ron thought it was a natural thing to do. When he gets home, I'm going to hug and kiss him for thinking of us that way...and then I'm going to give him a piece of my mind about going places where they shoot at you and stuff.

Sherrie took it well, darn her. I couldn'tbelieve how cool she was about it. Heck, she was a basket case when she found out he was going to that country. Now she was calmly reassuring me and saying he was going to be all right. It was more of that drivel about how he was going to come home someday and nothing was going to prevent it. It was only a matter of time, she told me the other day. I hope she's right.

He hasn't seen my two young children either; they were born after he left to go to Denver and I want them to know him. Oh God, I hope he's okay.

********

I woke up in an Army run hospital in a compound on the outskirts of Kabul. My head hurt worse than anything I'd ever felt in my life. When I tried to move, a fiery pain lanced through my shoulder. My vision contracted to a narrow tunnel of blackness before slowly receding. Holding my body still, I lifted my head an excruciating inch or so off the pillow and tried to look around.

My right arm had a big needle sticking in the primary artery; a plastic tube lead from there to a bottle of what was clearly blood hanging on a pole next to my bed. There were some other liter-sized bottles up there too, but I didn't know what they were. On my left side, by craning my neck painfully around, I could see my shoulder was hidden by a mass of bandages. Experimenting with a tiny movement of my fingers, I confirmed whatever lay under the dressing was the source of the agony that had almost made me pass out.

A middle-aged woman in hospital surgical greens came in a door I hadn't noticed. She took one look at me and backed out of the room to call a summons down what I took to be a long hallway. In a moment, a man and another woman joined the first woman and they all arranged themselves beside the bed that I was just now figuring out I was in.

"How're you feeling?" the guy asked in a gruff voice. I could see the big silver eagles on the light green shirt under his white coat. I guessed he was a doctor.

"Shoulder...hurts...bad," I croaked. I'd had to swallow hard a couple of times just to manage that. I massaged my throat and pantomimed drinking something.

The doctor nodded and motioned to the first woman I'd seen to pour me a glass full of water from a steel pitcher. She put a straw in it and held it to my mouth so I could drink thirstily.

"Thank you," I told her. My voice was still hoarse and faint, but it had improved a hundred percent from my first attempt.

"Where am I?" I asked, glancing at each of the trio of medical personnel.

"Kabul," the doctor said bluntly. He started pointing one of those little flashlights in each eye, flicking it away, and then back. Finally, he grunted and put the darn thing away.

"What's your name?" he said suddenly, surprising me.

"Ronald Terrance Masters," I shot back. "What's yours?" He was beginning to irritate me.

"Doctor Evans," he said shortly, but he had a faint grin on his face as he said it. "You remember what happened to you?" he asked in a more amiable voice. I nodded slowly, careful to not move my shoulder.

"We were ambushed by some Taliban guerillas," I said slowly. "There was one suicide bomber and then a bunch of them attacking from out of a draw behind us...and some old guy with a pistol." I waited but there was nothing else. "I can't remember anything past that," I complained. The Colonel/Doctor nodded. Curiously, he seemed very satisfied about something.