"Captain Cerro, you can come with me now. The doctor is just about finished with your friend."
Looking up from the report on his lap, Cerro saw the emergency room nurse he had talked to earlier. Far from being an angel of mercy, the nurse that stood before Cerro looked more like a sitcom character. The short, round Hispanic woman, in her late thirties, had a figure that had all the definition of a bowling ball. She wore her hair pulled back from her round face in a bun. The whites she wore, which no doubt had been fresh and clean hours ago, were soaked with sweat and stained with drops and smears of blood. Were it not for those bloodstains, as well as the haggard look and eyes that showed signs of emotional exhaustion, the nurse would have been an object of humor. But she wasn't. While the chaos and pace of her activities differed from Cerro's as night does from day, her look told Cerro that she, like him, had been dealing with the real world too long that day.
In silence, she led him to an examining room, where she entered after looking in at the small square window in the door. Opening the door for Cerro, she let him enter and left without a word, headed for her next task.
Lieutenant Kozak, lying on the examination table, had her legs dangling off the edge, her hands behind her head, elbows out, and eyes closed.
Before he said anything, Cerro studied her. Her boots, as well as the pants of her uniform, were covered with dried mud, which, Cerro thought, was from the crossing of the Rio Grande. From the waist up, she wore only a brown, regulation T-shirt stained with wavy white lines of salt from her perspiration, which made the shirt appear to be tie-dyed.
With her hands held behind her, her breasts, straining against the brown T-shirt, stood like two firm mounds, perfect and round. Since her eyes were closed and the nurse had left, Cerro stood for a moment and gauged, from a distance, their approximate size. He had always pegged her as having a B cup. Now, without the bulky class-A greens or the baggy camouflaged battle dress uniform to obscure them, he could clearly see that young Lieutenant Kozak was a healthy C cup.
Cerro was assessing Kozak's dominant features when the door behind him burst open and a doctor came into the examination room, talking without looking up from a chart he carried. "Well, you're in great shape there, Lieutenant. No concussion, no signs of fractures, nothing broken, except your nose."
The doctor's sudden appearance caused Kozak to take her hands out from behind her head and, grasping the sides of the examination table, push herself up into a sitting position. As she did, she noticed Cerro standing next to the door, blushing slightly, as if he had just been caught doing something wrong. It never occurred to her that he had been standing there eyeing her while she rested.
Looking first at the doctor, Cerro didn't notice that Kozak had sat up.
When he had recovered from the sudden appearance of the doctor, as well as his personal embarrassment, he looked back at the lieutenant. It was only then that he realized he had been so busy staring at her breasts that he had not seen her face. What he saw bore no resemblance to the clean, soft face that he had come to associate with the young lieutenant. Her gentle features were obscured by a swollen nose covered with a piece of wide medical tape. Only the tip, swollen, scraped, and red from soreness, showed below the tape. Protruding from her nostrils were the ends of white cotton packing. As bad as her nose looked, however, the blue-black circles that began at her nose and surrounded her eyes made Kozak look like a boxer who had been knocked out. Without thinking, Cerro shook his head and mumbled, "Jesus, you look like hell."
Unable to turn away from the doctor, who had tilted her head back and was looking at her nose, Kozak was about to give Cerro a cynical
"Thanks" for the less-than-cheerful comment, but thought better of it.
She had no idea why he was here. Even though she was convinced that, at that moment, she didn't have a friend in the world, she didn't want to take any chances and alienate a possible friend. So she held her tongue, letting the doctor complete his examination and allowing Cerro's comment to pass unanswered. She would let Cerro initiate the conversation and set the tone when he was ready.
Assuming that Cerro was there to pick Kozak up, the doctor, finished with his examination, turned away from her and said to Cerro as he prepared to leave, "Well, Captain, she's all yours. You should keep the packing in the nose for twenty-four hours." Pausing at the door, the doctor looked back at Kozak. "Next time something like this happens, don't wait ten hours before coming in. It would have been a lot less painful had we been able to work on your nose immediately after your accident." Without another word, the doctor left. Kozak stared at Cerro, waiting for him to say something.
Feeling awkward, and not knowing how to start, Cerro stalled, moving over to a chair. Taking his Kevlar helmet from under his right arm, he dropped it on the floor from waist level, making a loud clunk that reverberated in the small examining room. Sitting down on the edge of the seat, facing Kozak, Cerro tucked his feet up under the chair but allowed his knees to spread apart. He held the folder containing the reports on the foray into Mexico against his stomach with both hands, and looked at Kozak for a moment, considering how he was going to do this.
From the examining table, Kozak watched Cerro as a bird watches a cat circling the tree it's in. He kept staring at her face, which no doubt looked like hell. At least, she thought it did. If it looked half as bad as it felt, it was terrible. During the initial exam, one of the nurses had looked at Kozak's face with a pained expression. With a sigh, the nurse had grasped her hand, telling her not to worry, that the black and blue would go away as soon as the swelling went down. Instead of serving to calm Kozak, it had only worried her, creating an uncontrollable urge to find a mirror and see what it was that caused everyone to stare. With Cerro sitting there, holding folders that no doubt contained statements and reports concerning the crossing of the Rio Grande, it would be a few more minutes before she got to look at her own face.,
Seeing that Lieutenant Kozak wasn't going to make his task any easier by initiating the conversation, Cerro decided that he might as well just launch into it. After all, diplomacy, subtlety, and regard for someone's feelings never seemed to blend well with the spirit of the bayonet. Praised by raters throughout his career for his direct, frank, and uncompromising approach to all matters, Cerro now found himself wishing he had a few more skills in dealing with people. Sidetracked for a moment by that thought, he wondered if he was concerned about his approach because Kozak was a woman. No, he was sure that wasn't it. On the day he had observed Kozak's squad get overrun, he hadn't even considered the gender issue when he "counseled" her. No, that wasn't the reason he was uncomfortable. Was it because she was hurt? That could be. After all, he felt the same way whenever he had seen any of his own men wounded or injured. But that wasn't it completely, for in the past Cerro had always been able to say something to the wounded. Even when faced with a man from his own unit who had lost a limb, Cerro had been able to work through his natural revulsion of injured people and say something appropriate.
Yet here he was stymied by a lieutenant with a simple broken nose and two black eyes.
That was it. Suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, the reason for the unaccustomed empathy that was hamstringing his efforts to carry on, struck Cerro. Instead of looking at Second Lieutenant N. Kozak, infantry platoon leader, Cerro had been looking at himself. Without realizing it, he had projected himself into Kozak's position as he read the reports and weighed her actions. The feelings that he was experiencing were not those of a male seeking to protect the female of the species. Nor were they of one human experiencing sympathy for an injured fellow being.