Your father was greatly liked and admired by everyone here who served with him. He was very wise, very kind, and very, very brave. He was killed saving me and the crew of his entire ship, and I am going to see that he receives a medal for his courage.
I know you are asking why this had to happen, why your father had to be taken like this when you and your mother needed him so badly. The only answer I can give is that your father was a very special kind of man. He was not greedy with his life; he wished to share it. Something inside made him go out to where there were people in trouble. Something inside made him want to help them and to make the world a better and safer place, both for his family and for everyone everywhere. We call such people heroes.
I could not bring your father home to you; his other shipmates and I have to stay here and finish the job he started. But I hope I will be able to meet you someday soon. Your father showed me your pictures often, and he was very proud of you both. You will be in my prayers, and if there is anything I can ever do for you or your mother, please get in touch with me.
There were moisture marks on the paper as Amanda folded the letter. Tucking it into the envelope, she placed it in her hard mail rack to go out on the morning flight to Conakry. Wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, she crossed her arms on the desktop and let her head sink down to rest on them.
Amanda was well into her second twenty-four hours without sleep, yet still she felt as if she never wanted to sleep again. She found herself wishing for a certain bold and youthful helicopter pilot and five minutes to call her own. Just five minutes. Enough time to bury her face into a strong shoulder and be held by a pair of gentle arms. Enough time for some one to whisper those kindly, futile words. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
Someone thumped briskly on the door to her quarters. Straightening in her chair, she wiped the heel of her palm across her eyes again before responding to the knock. “Enter.”
Stone Quillain appeared in the doorway, bearing a small battered ice chest with him. “Evening, Skipper,” he said jovially. “How’s it going?”
“Oh, fine, Stone. What can I do for you?”
“Oh, nothin’, nothin’ at all.” Doffing his utility cover, he crashed down into the chair facing her across the desk. “It is just that this is beer night over at the platform exchange, and since I was just passing by, I figured I’d bring your ration over to you.”
He popped the lid on the ice chest and produced a pair of Budweiser cans, condensation dripping from the chilled aluminum. With a theatrical flair he slammed them down on the desktop. As she had never even considered drawing her two beers-a-week ration since stepping aboard Floater 1, Amanda looked on puzzled.
“Thank you, Stone,” she said, “but I’ve really never been much of a beer person.”
“Know exactly what you mean, Skipper,” Quillain replied. “Although it’s a hell of a thing for a good rednecked Georgia boy to admit to, neither was I for the longest time. It just didn’t sit right. Sort of rasped on the way down. It took me a while to learn that I had to have a kind of a chaser with it to really enjoy a good glass of beer. Something to smooth things along, don’t you know?”
“Such as?” Amanda inquired, intrigued in spite of herself.
“Well, I find that a good grade of bourbon generally works for me.” His hand emerged from the cooler again, this time bearing a half-empty fifth of Jack Daniel’s. “You might want to give it a shot. It could change your whole view of beer drinking.”
An automatic refusal rose to Amanda’s lips, but then she paused. Something in Quillain’s eyes and voice, beyond his somewhat forced jocularity, hinted that the big Marine was trying to offer something more than mere alcohol. Amanda smiled. “You’re right. I guess it wouldn’t hurt to try it, anyway.”
A total of four empty beer cans had been consigned to the wastebasket, and only a thin amber film remained on the bottom of the bourbon bottle. Amanda Garrett realized that she was very close to being drunk on duty. She also discovered that for once in her life she simply didn’t give a damn.
She sat with her chair tilted back and her sandaled feet propped on the edge of her desk. Stone Quillain matched her slouched posture, his boondockers claiming a corner across from hers. Cradling his Styrofoam cup shot glass in his lap, he listened as she spoke, interjecting an occasional comment or encouraging grunt, an expression of somewhat studied sobriety on his angular features.
Amanda realized that she had been doing most of the talking for the past couple of hours. Nothing on matters of any great import and little of it particularly coherent, just a rambling on a string of minor topics, the flow loosened by the effects of the alcohol.
And yet she also felt better for the sheer inconsequentiality of it. The razor edges of existence were softening. Amanda recognized the effect. Like a drug addict completing a cold turkey withdrawal, she was coming out of her combat jag and reentering the normal world.
She tipped back the last few drops of whiskey out of her cup, able now to enjoy the warm glow of it flowing through her. This had been a bad one. “Stone,” she inquired. “Have you ever taken casualties?”
The Marine didn’t respond for a moment, but memories stirred behind his eyes. “Yeah. I’ve been lucky mostly, but I had to pay the butcher bill one time.”
“Where?”
“In Yugoslavia, or what was left of it. Kosovo.”
“Kosovo? I didn’t hear of us losing any Marines there.”
“You weren’t supposed to. Hush job.” Quillain took a hefty bite of the bourbon remaining in his cup. “It’s been a while, so I guess it doesn’t hurt to talk about it now.”
“What happened?”
“It was back in the spring of ’99, you know, when the ethnic Albanian majority, the Kosovars, in what had been the Kosovo Province of Yugoslavia, decided they were tired of being treated like field hands by the Serbian ruling minority. They figured it was about time for a revolution, and they threw themselves one.
“The problem was that the Kosovo Serbs were part of Slobodan Milosevic’s so-called Serbian Republic. A very mean outfit if you didn’t happen to be born a Slav. He sent in his bullyboys and just ran over the place like it was a possum in the road.”
“An apt simile,” Amanda commented. “Admiral Maclntyre’s told me some stories about doing duty in the Adriatic back then. It didn’t sound like a pleasure cruise.”
“Boy howdy, I’ll tell the world.” Quillain gestured with his cup. “This was just before NATO got into it with the bombing. We could see from air recon that things were looking nasty, but nobody knew for sure just how bad things were getting on the ground. The Serbs had chased out all the U.N. observers by that time, and the fragmentary intel we were getting from the Kosovar refugees was pretty ugly. Anyhow, NATO inserted a series of covert Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrols into the province to assess the situation.
“There were ’bout half a dozen teams all told: American Green Berets, British SAS, Marine Force Recon. I was with Recon back then, a butterbar louie fresh out of OCS with one cruise as an enlisted man behind me. Anyhow, I led a four-man fire team in on the Marine patrol.”
Quillain slowly shook his head. “I hope I never see hell, but if I do, Kosovo was good acclimatization.”
“That bad?”
“I couldn’t begin to tell you, Skipper. The place was crawling with Serbian militia and military police, all of them hate crazy and killin’ like rabid dogs. Killin’ just for the sake of killin’. And then there were the refugees — Albanians, Serbs, Gypsies — all of them just trying to get away to somewhere where they could stay alive.