Anna Richland - First to Burn

“Easy, Sergeant.” The flight medic who leaned into view squeezed a bag connected to the mask covering Wulf’s mouth. “You’re safe.”

While oxygen inflated Wulf’s lungs, a functioning corner of his brain demanded answers. His commander would never call an evacuation chopper for him, so who else had been hurt? Struggling against the painkillers, he tried to remember everyone’s last positions. Kahananui had been on his right. He has two little girls. Five meters ahead, Cruz had taken point. Was it Cruz? He pays for his mother’s diabetes drugs.

Wulf tried to turn his head and search for his teammates, but he couldn’t move. He tensed his abs and lower back and jerked to lift his shoulders, but again he couldn’t move. The certainty that one of his men needed him struck like a spear between his ribs, but no matter how he strained his arms and chest, he could not move. Not his arms, not his body, and by the gods, not his legs, despite the agony that intensified in his left one as the painkillers faded.

“Stop fighting, Sarge.” The medic was young, mid-twenties at most, but his voice carried over the chopper racket with the confidence shared by those who served in aviation.

Free of morphine fog, Wulf understood he wasn’t paralyzed, only slapped into a neck collar and strapped to a stretcher, complications that, like his injuries, weren’t insurmountable. But his teammates couldn’t conquer wounds so easily. “Whoshhurt?”

“I know it hurts, man. We’re eighteen minutes out from Camp Caddie, so hang on.”

Dammit, the medic didn’t understand him through the oxygen mask. He needed to see who was in this helicopter. Not knowing compressed his chest until he groaned.

“This will help the pain.” One of the man’s hands reached for something outside Wulf’s circle of vision.

Skīta. He didn’t want the guy to up the intravenous dope before he could discover who’d been hurt. The last thing he remembered was freezing in place when the team’s German shepherd had hunkered in a bomb-alert position in the middle of an apricot orchard.

Like their dog Garbo, they’d stopped. All, that is, except an Afghan training with them who’d been distracted by lighting a cigarette and had moved forward two more paces. The blast had thrown Garbo against a stone wall. Rocks, dirt clods and metal packed around the improvised explosive device had pounded Wulf’s helmet and body armor, mangling his leg. Fucking smoker. Could’ve killed us.

This time Wulf spaced his words as carefully as sniper shots. “Who. Else. Hurt.”

The medic’s eyes flickered to the port side of the Black Hawk helicopter. “Two Afghans. At least one’s not going to make it. And your dog.”

Relief that he’d been swept up with an evacuation of Afghan National Army soldiers, not one of his own men, crested with the newest wave of meds. Temporarily woozy, he slurred his next question, howshGarbo , but this time the medic understood.

“Ear and head lacerations, possible broken leg, but the pooch armor did its job.”

His system processed this smaller dose faster than the earlier morphine, providing only minutes of peace before the torment of growing fresh bone, a torture he imagined to be comparable to a drill bit tunneling through his shin, crested.

Locking his jaw stifled his groan, but barely. He hadn’t endured a lost leg since Antietam. He’d forgotten. “Hurts.”

“More?” The medic calculated with his fingers. “Sergeant, you have more pure in you than Keith Richards.” Eyebrows lost in the top of his helmet, he shook his head. “Can’t believe you’re lucid.”

This agony blended with memories of a September afternoon in high corn, moaning next to other Union volunteers as blood-frenzied flies circled. His pain had been caused by healing. Theirs, by dying. When he’d recovered enough to carry his unit’s drummer off the field, the ten-year-old’s eyes had no longer blinked at the sun. Some hurts were worse than regrowing bones, took longer to mend. At least today he didn’t face such a loss.

Instead, he gritted his teeth, concentrated on the pain of his nails digging into his fisted palms and planned. Without being able to test his strength or see his leg, he wouldn’t know the extent of his progress until the itching started. Didn’t matter. The moment the flight medic transferred him to someone who hadn’t seen his original injury and the straps were unbuckled, he’d walk away. He’d done it other times. He had to be ready because under no circumstances could he end up in the most dangerous place for an immortal soldier: a hospital.

“A transtibial with hemorrhaging!” The rage in her chief surgeon’s voice as he yelled at someone on the other side of the camouflage netting froze Captain Theresa Chiesa. Past the curtain was Camp Cadwalader’s emergency receiving. On this side, three surgical pods showed no signs of recent patients, and definitely not evidence of a soldier with a below-the-knee amputation and a big bleed. “Are you the one who called that shit in? What were—”

“Yessir, I reported the sergeant’s injuries.”

Whoever the other voice belonged to, he had balls to interrupt Colonel Loughrey. Nobody on the fifty-person combat hospital staff interrupted the boss. Not if they wanted to leave Afghanistan with their army careers intact.

“Well, Tinker Bell, lay off the fucking morphine. Your call mixed up the dead Afghan and a soldier with a two-inch incision on his fucking calf! Our guy didn’t even have a fucking concussion!” Something metallic banged, then crashed to the floor. It wouldn’t be the first time her colonel had kicked a folding chair or a rolling cart. “Wardsen put on his own butterfly strips before he waltzed out.”

Wardsen. That name was familiar. She flicked through the papers in her hand, orphans she’d gathered from random shelves and desks in the medical office. Filing wasn’t an officer’s job, and other doctors actively shirked administrative tasks, but she hated messy documentation. In a place as isolated as Camp Cadwalader, filing and labeling medical records as directed by Army Regulation 40-66 beat watching dust dry. Despite searching for half an hour, she hadn’t found any intake forms, charts, discharge records or follow-up notes to match the two inbound medevac calls about Staff Sergeant Wulf Wardsen, Operational Detachment Alpha-5131, 5th Special Forces Group. It was as if he’d walked off the helicopter into the sunset both times.

“Sir, I assessed him in-flight—” The voice contradicting Colonel Loughrey belonged to a flight medic. She’d wager her silver captain’s bars that the new total of incoming without follow-up was three. What was going on?

“Assessment! Piece of shit. Shitty as a latrine. Shitty as this whole fucking war! Sh-iii-t.” Her commander worked the word. Six months into the hospital team’s yearlong deployment, some doctors had begun smoking to relieve stress. Others had succumbed to profanity, none more than the colonel.

“Sir, I don’t understand.” The medic’s rising voice sounded confused, and she stepped closer to the curtain to listen. “Wardsen’s leg was fully opened. I held the bone—”

“What you held was your own dick.”

Theresa respected the pilots and medics who brought out the wounded—a riskier job than hers. Whatever problem had the boss worked up, she doubted the fault was medevac’s. Three bad calls could only be Special Forces covering for something, or for someone. They might be the toughest guys on the planet, but they shouldn’t be allowed to mess up hardworking troops like this medic.

“I won’t have my staff pulled off other soldiers—ones with real fucking injuries—or the night shift woken up from sleep—for your piece-of-shit calls.”