Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

“How many Marines have you met who can paint your portrait, and make it look like you, and at the same time recite in entirety the wonderful speech made by Prince Harry to his men before battle in Shakespeare’s Henry V ?”

Liberty smiled and began to quote, “‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he to-day that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition. And gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.’

“Elmore, it’s more than a speech. It’s the love of my life’s ethos. And it makes me cry when I think too much about it,” Liberty said. “Jack is so Jack.”

“The poet warrior,” Elmore said. “He lifts my heart.”

Then the old Marine snuffed back tears after he said it, rubbing away their wetness with his thumb knuckles.

He reached inside his back pocket and took out his wallet. He unfolded a piece of paper.

“Two years ago,” Elmore said, clearing his throat, “Jack wrote a poem for me. He has this secret soft and loving side to him. He loves God. Never doubt that boy’s faith, regardless of his foul mouth and rough exterior.”

Liberty looked at him and wrinkled her forehead.

“I know that, too, Elmore,” she said. “We went to Sunday School together. I saw him stop his car on a busy highway and rescue a stray puppy, when someone had dumped it in the country. And don’t forget what got him in the Marine Corps. His best friend was gay. Jack didn’t care. He loved Marco Gonzalez from the time they were little boys, and Jack risked ridicule from everyone by loving the boy. He didn’t care. He didn’t judge his friend. He loved him. It didn’t make Jack gay. It made him a good Christian! And I love Jack, and I loved Marco, too! Because Jack taught me.”

Elmore smiled. “You, too, know Jack’s secret soft side. Out with the boys, he’s just one of them. He keeps his faith in his heart and lives the honesty of the moment. Jack’s foul mouth, rude behavior, and abject honesty hide a lot of that secret soft side and, unfortunately, his Christian faith.”

“Not so secret if you know him, and not soft,” Liberty told the colonel. “A real man! Real men don’t worry about softness or what people think. They do what their hearts say. Kind of like a colonel I know, too.”

“So.” Elmore smiled. “That good-hearted man, a real man, he wrote this poem and gave it to me. I’m a Jesus guy, and Jack knew I’d like it. He calls the poem ‘Somewhere Beneath the Rain.’ Jack wrote under the title, ‘A Lyric Inspired by the Holy Spirit.’ I love that!”

Then the colonel began to read:

Liberty threw her arms around the aging Marine’s neck and hugged him hard.

“What will we do if Jack doesn’t come home?” she cried, and a whole new flood of tears rained from her eyes as she held on to Elmore Snow.

For three nights, Jack Valentine had walked with confidence. Moving after dark and going into hiding before sunrise to sleep through the day, he made good progress, unseen by anyone except the men in the truck he killed the second day, and a caracal that came sniffing just after sunrise the third day. The cat looked just like mountain lions he had seen as a youngster in the Guadalupe Mountains near El Paso, but stood half their size, and had long, black hair tufts coming off his ears like those on a lynx.

Jack lay still with his eyes open, blinking at the beautiful tawny cat with black muzzle and big, clear brown eyes. The animal came searching for rodents among the thornbushes where Jack had hidden to sleep through the day.

He had finished his last bottle of water with the end of his food when he had tucked himself to bed that morning, watching the nonaggressive cat nose around. Jack thought in another night’s walk, he should see signs of Haditha, the dam, and, hopefully, his cohorts. He could do that with ease, well rested, hydrated, and fed.

After no luck the fourth day, no food nor water, his lips already swelling, mouth sticky with thirst, Jack realized he had mistaken a low, long-running ridge for Main Supply Route Bronze, and had turned east too soon. Now, for all the Marine knew, he could be walking in circles.

When he realized the mistake, he felt stupid. He had wondered why he heard no traffic on the highway, and it just didn’t click in his tired brain. To make matters worse, the gunny had followed that long-running line of the higher ground rather than steering first by his little bubble compass on his watchband and using the land feature as a reference.

“Where the fuck am I,” Jack reeled, searching the darkness in every direction with his night-vision optics. Panic struck him hard. His gut twisted as he considered how much greater his thirst and fatigue would now grow.

He had fallen victim to an increasingly complacent routine. With each passing day, his confidence had grown, trusting his sense of direction and the high ground rather than fundamental, disciplined land navigation, shooting an azimuth with his little bubble compass, finding landmarks along that line and walking to them. Too simple. Too stupid.

Now he faced bleak water options, too. He had to do something drastic simply to sustain his life. Digging holes under Alhagi outcrops might find moisture, but Jack also considered he could be digging a long time with a little shovel and no result. Like the mesquite and ocotillo of his native desert near El Paso, Alhagi roots can grow thirty feet deep underground before finding water.

“I’ve got to drink piss,” he told himself, and filled one of the empty water bottles with it, rather than wasting the body fluid on the ground. Salty, foul-tasting, loaded with dangerous bacteria, the risk of illness easily won over his alternative, dying of dehydration and heat exhaustion.

“Piss drinking. It’s a last resort. I’m not there yet,” he said, scanning the horizon with his night-vision scope. “My best option now is to find a house. Deal with the inhabitants. Get food and water and press on.”

When he took the night-vision scope from his eyes, and rested them in the darkness, he noticed from his side vision an area along the skyline brighter than others. If he looked right at it, the bright area disappeared. If he looked away, he saw it.

“Imagination,” he thought at first, but remembered what a seasoned Force Recon Marine had taught him in Basic-Recon school about night fighting in Vietnam. They had no night-vision optics except the bulky Starlight Scope, and it was a piece of shit compared to the clarity of what every Marine had hanging on his helmet today. Instead of technology, those old war dogs had used their God-given night vision and mastered the darkness.

“Don’t look right at something to see it in the night,” the salt had taught Jack. “Look about ten or twenty degrees to the side. Let your rod vision go to work. Scotopic vision they call it. The center of your eye is filled with cones that see color and bright-lit objects. We’re day creatures, so we rely on our cone vision more than rod vision. Cones dominate our eyesight. But we do have a good number of night-seeing rods, if we just learn to use them.