Oregon Coast

I pulled the truck over so I could look her in the eyes.

"You don't have to wonder what I think of you. Under this suave and debonair exterior (unladylike snort from the passenger seat) I keep reacting to you the way my Black Lab reacts to a piece of bacon. I'm only holding myself back because I don't want to scare you off. I'm secretly wagging my tail and panting, and I'm about ready to sit up and beg!"

"Oh, so I'm a piece of bacon? You call that saying sweet things?"

We were both starting to crack up.

"But I love bacon! Lemme finish... Show me a guy who looks down on a girl because she had incredible sex with him and I'll show you a snobby, uptight loser. I have my faults, but I'm not that stupid. I meant what I said that night. You're a lovely, refined lady, and nothing that happened at John's place changes that. Stop beating yourself up over it. Let's just say that what happened out there stays out there, and have a fun first date."

She grinned, leaned over, and kissed me thoroughly.

"Thanks, I feel a lot better. But since this is a first date, that kiss will have to last a while. Keep your hands to yourself, buster!"

"Aw, damn! Is it too late to think twice about this?"

I don't think we stopped laughing until I kissed Jennifer goodnight on her front porch, way past her alleged curfew. I made a half hearted attempt to talk her into spending the night at my place, but she wanted to treat it like a first date and I wasn't going to push her.

Naturally, she had questions the next time I saw her. It started on a picnic in the International Rose Test Gardens that are the pride of the city. There was usually a jazz band playing in the park, and I had hoped for a relaxing, romantic Saturday, but it sure didn't start that way.

"Why didn't you ever tell me you were wounded in Afghanistan?"

"In the first place, it was an ugly, scary experience that I don't like to relive. In the second place, I don't care for loudmouth veterans- most of them never did even a quarter of the stuff they brag about. Third, this area is full of anti-war liberals, and I get tired of being looked down on for having done a hard job that no one asked me if I wanted."

Now those blue eyes were spitting fire, and I was almost missing getting shot at.

"Have I ever given you any reason to think that I would judge you for serving in the Navy? I told you about Grandpa serving on a PT boat in World War 2! Look, I trusted you with my body and my heart, and I haven't regretted it until now. If you don't trust me, I'm not wasting any more time on you!"

Okay, parts of that sounded promising, but I had some fast damage control to do. I grabbed her hand and she stiffened but didn't quite fight for it back.

"It's not that I don't trust you, believe me. I've heard your pride in your grandfather. I just hate to sound like I'm trying to impress you over something I don't feel particularly proud of. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and caught a bullet. It's not my favorite memory and it's nothing to brag about!"

Her hand was relaxing, and the other one came up and started playing with the buttons on my shirt.

"Okay, Brian, I understand how you might feel that way. But I'm really starting to care about you, and if something's bothering you I don't want you to shut me out. I wouldn't be here if I wasn't already convinced that you're a good man. Just accept that I'm on your side!"

"You got it, sweetheart."

My favorite smile was back, through some rather misty eyes.

"Sweetheart? I like the sound of that..."

"You better get used to it, then."

Then her arms were around my neck, and in the kiss was a promise of a bright future with this lovely woman. A long time later, she pulled back and dragged me to a bench overlooking the city.

"So what are your favorite memories?"

I started talking about the guys in my unit and the goofy stuff that went on while we were stuck in the middle of nowhere together. The dares to eat the local goat curry, the time someone managed to smuggle a bottle of Jack Daniels all the way back from the World and we treated the locals to an American war dance performed by a bunch of drunk, hairy, smelly guys in their skivvies, the obnoxious new ensign who spent a whole night in a Sani-Can when someone- no one ever said who- parked a bulldozer up against the door and walked off. Jen sat there holding my hand, laughing at the stories, and occasionally running her fingers over the scars on my arm. I was starting to feel a burden lifting that I had carried, without knowing it, since I woke up in the hospital in Germany bandaged up to my shoulder. Sometime around sunset she asked the question I had known was coming.

"Tell me about the ambush?"

I couldn't hold back if I wanted a future with her. I was looking out at the sunset turning the glaciers of Mount Hood red and gold, but I was seeing the dry rocky hills of Kandahar Province.

It had been just another chore, a convoy load of equipment and materials that had to be moved to the site for the next base forty klicks up the valley. My driver that day was Eric Jones, a black kid who had joined the Seabees to get away from the drug dealers and gangs of South Central LA. He worked hard, sent most of his pay home to help his younger siblings, and spent his off hours studying for the exams that might, if he scored high enough, win him an appointment to the Naval Academy. Most of us thought he would probably make it.

With us in the truck was Emerson Miyahara, our shy, quiet little corpsman. The teasing he got Stateside stopped abruptly our second day in country, when he ran through the middle of a mortar barrage that had the rest of us cowering in the bottoms of slit trenches to reach a Marine with shell fragments in his belly. Doc M was literally fearless when an injured sailor or Marine needed help, and the rest of the unit treasured him for it.

As usual, Jones was bugging Doc M to quiz him on whatever he was studying that week, and the rest of us were telling him not to bother since enlisted men have to get a lobotomy before they qualify for a commission anyway. We had repeated the same jokes so many times we could recite them in our sleep. The THUD of the roadside bomb up ahead made us all jump, as did the THWAP THWAP THWAP of AK-47s from hidden positions along the road. It always started with disabling a lead vehicle to block the road. Those Talibanis were generally crappy shots, but our trucks made big targets. Following the drill, we piled out, got behind the trucks, and started shooting back with our M-16s. Jones knew enough to pull to the side to clear space for our escort Bradleys and Humvees with the heavy weapons. Some idiot further back had panicked, though, and it was causing a delay while the escort worked around the truck in the middle of the dirt road.

"HELP ME!"

I looked around the other side of the tire I was behind and there was Doc M, out in the middle of the road, dragging Jones by the collar with bullets hitting all around him. Jones had bailed out the driver's side, and one of those SOBs had caught him with a lucky burst. Just the day before I had been chewing him out for unfastening his ballistic vest while he drove- tempting in hot weather but strictly forbidden for just this reason. He had it closed now, but they don't cover everything. I ran around the back of the truck in time to help pull Jones the last couple feet to safety behind the wheels. Doc's hands were flying as he stripped off Jones' vest and BDUs and started trying to stop the bleeding. Even I could tell that it was bad. Jones kept getting his hands in Doc's way, so I grabbed them and tried to calm him down. It was about that point that I noticed my left hand wasn't doing what I wanted, but I was too busy to worry about it.

A loud BOOM BOOM BOOM from the other side of the truck jerked my head around. I found out later that the escort commander, still struggling to get past the trucks behind us, had hollered for artillery. The gun bunnies reacted by plastering the Taliban positions with white phosphorous. The stuff smells like garlic, generates blinding clouds of eye-stinging smoke, and if a bit of it lands on a living body it burns down to the bone. The incoming fire stopped abruptly- they couldn't see anything to shoot at and were busy trying to avoid the burning WP. By the time the smoke cleared the Bradleys were up to us and any Talibanis who survived were long gone. I pulled my head back and saw Doc M crying. Then I noticed that Jones' hands had gone limp. He was gone. I put a hand on Doc's shoulder.

"Hey, Doc, you did all you could and more. You can't expect to save them all...."

He looked up at me and his eyes went wide. He grabbed for his bandages and I looked where he was looking and saw a big chunk of my arm missing. A wave of pain hit me, and that's all I remember until I woke up in Landstuhl.

When I looked at Jen she was sniffling a little.

"What happened after that?"

"By the time I was fit for duty again my enlistment was up. They asked me to re-up, but I had seen and done enough. I took my benefits and finished my degree. Doc M got a Silver Star for that day, and last May I watched him graduate from medical school."

"Thanks for telling me."

"Thanks for listening. It's not a great story."

"Just remember what you told Doc M."

"How's that?"

"You couldn't expect yourself to save them all either."

Wow. Beautiful, smart, and wise. I had been subconsciously carrying the burden of losing Jones ever since Afghanistan, and she had seen it and given me the clarity to set it down. I was so in love with this woman it wasn't funny. I thought it might be a little early to say so, though, so I settled for hugging her tightly and holding her like that for a long, long time.

Then it was my turn.

"Why didn't you tell me that you were a model?"

"Calling myself a 'model' makes me sound like a self-impressed airhead wannabe. I just used to do a little modeling to pay for college. It made me the contacts that got me my job at the ad agency, but I never felt comfortable with the high-fashion lifestyle. The neurotic models and designers, sleazy men sniffing around, and drugs everywhere got old really fast. I still pose for catalogs and stuff once in a while if a photographer I know asks, but I have no interest in getting any deeper into it than that. Portland's not exactly the center of the fashion industry!"

"So you're just like me."

"What do you mean?"

"You don't want to be defined by something you used to do for a living."

She was quiet for a few minutes, and then she suddenly tossed herself back into my lap.

"You're right! I just never looked at it like that. I was really being a jerk, wasn't I?"

"Not really."

Her hands were back to fooling with my shirt.

"Yes, I was, and you're just being nice about it. Know what the good thing about it is?"

I was really starting to like the look in her eyes.

"What?"

"I've got some really great ideas about how to make it up to you. Take me home!"

"To your place?"

"No, to yours!"

By the next morning, I would have forgiven Jen anything. The sight of her wandering around the big old farmhouse I lived in and was fixing up, holding a cup of coffee, wearing one of my old button-down shirts and nothing else, was the perfect icing on the cake. It hit me hard how right it felt to have her there, and how perfectly she belonged.

Before long Jennifer was spending most of her weekends at my place. Sometimes we even got out of bed long enough to get some work done! Jen was a kick to work with- still totally feminine but not at all afraid to swing a hammer or run a chop saw. She got a little unladylike one time when she whacked her thumb with the hammer, but even Emily Post would have given her a pass on that!

When she started picking all the paint colors I knew my plan was working. I had decided within a day of meeting her that she belonged as the lady of the place, and I was just waiting for her to figure it out too.

A year after that first weekend her entire running team gathered again on the beach at John's house. Karen and Dahlia were there too- they're actually very sweet girls once they decide to trust you, and the way John followed Dahlia around all weekend, I think he thought so too. John was next to me, with one hand gently holding me steady. They all grinned at me as I watched the prettiest girl in the world walk toward me in a white dress and bare feet, smiling that dazzling blue eyed smile. They knew the truth: she still left me weak in the knees every damn time I saw her. She still does, five years and two kids later. Those ruggers and ex-squids on my side of the aisle cost me some repair work after the Mother of All Receptions, but I didn't really mind. I'm only getting married once- I hit the jackpot the first time!