Pandemic

SIX.

Wade had loved to play Army as a kid growing up in rural Wisconsin. His parents didn’t let him play with toy guns, so he and his friends used sticks. His younger sister, Beth, preferred dolls and tea parties, but she sometimes joined in so she could be near him.

To him and his friends, war was wondrous play. The bad guys went down in a hail of gunfire. Sometimes, a good guy died, a noble sacrifice played out with plenty of drama.

At the end, they all went home happy and tired. They’d faced danger and fought through it. They’d looked death in the eye and walked away.

Wade would later look back on those summers as the best times in his life.

In high school, he became interested in sports and girls. He smoked a little dope and drank when he thought he could get away with it. He spent a lot of time hanging out in a bank parking lot with his friends. He had a lot of fun but had a sense of doing time until the rest of his life started.

Soldiers were leaving Iraq and fighting in Afghanistan. He wasn’t interested in war anymore because he had come to understand it as a horrifying thing. Once you died, you stayed dead. But the instincts of his childhood remained.

His high school years were winding down. He saw his whole privileged future laid out for him: college, high-paying job, marriage, house, kids, retirement, death. In many ways, he felt like an overgrown boy. There was no rite of passage for his generation. He wanted to challenge himself before catching that train. Soon, Wade would get to make his own choices. The right challenge, he knew, would make him a man.

He decided to join the Army. He expected his anti-war parents to try to talk him out of it, but they were proud of him. Even Beth, who’d long ago given up worshipping her brother, hugged him during their tearful farewell and later wrote him once a week. Those letters became his lifeline to the real world during his training and deployment.

After Basic Training, he was classified 11-B. Infantry. He ended up in the Tenth Mountain Division. His combat patch displayed two crossed swords suggesting the Roman numeral X. The Mountaineers. Lightfighters. Climb to Glory.

Wade got more than he bargained for in Korengal Valley in Afghanistan.

His platoon lived in a tiny outpost on an exposed mountainside. He froze in the winter and suffered in the summer. During the fighting season, Taliban fighters arrived from Pakistan and lobbed mortar rounds at them. They dropped bursts of plunging machine gun fire before disappearing over the ridges. They rigged improvised explosives on the roads. They ambushed the Americans from trees and rocks.

There was no glory in it. The weird thing was that he enjoyed combat far more than he thought he would. It was a rush, the most exciting thing in the world. As long as everybody in his unit made it out the other end of a firefight alive, combat was even exalting. He lived more in those intense flashes of fighting than in all the rest of his nineteen years put together.

And he found something else in war.

Love.

He loved the guys he fought with. They could be hilarious and sullen, wise and ignorant, fun and grating. The Army had all kinds. Sometimes, he couldn’t stand looking at them. But he loved them enough to die for them. He knew they’d do the same for him without hesitation.

When he fought, it was for them. The worst thing that could happen out in the shit wasn’t that he died. It was letting his comrades down and getting one of them killed.

This responsibility had kept him going after carrying seventy pounds of weapons and gear across miles of mountainous terrain. Made him stay sharp while functioning on little sleep for weeks at a stretch. Kept him fighting when the ground around him exploded during an ambush.

It was why he double checked his bootlaces before leaving the wire, carefully stripped and oiled his gun, performed every single mind-numbing equipment check. He gulped water to stay hydrated and watched every single step so he didn’t break silence.

Because if he made one little mistake, people got killed, and it would be on him. They depended on each other more than they did God.

The mission sucked. Afghanistan sucked. But still, he felt that he was making a difference there, that he was doing something good.

That was all he wanted: to be tested, to prove himself and to make a difference.

As his tour of duty in Afghanistan came to an end, Wade started to recognize the price he would have to pay. It would be hard as hell to assimilate into his old life. He would finally have to process the trauma he’d experienced. He would suffer withdrawal from the adrenaline of combat. He would despair over leaving the rest of the guys on that mountain to fight without him.

War brought out the worst in man but also the best.

Then Tenth Mountain flew home to a different kind of war.