The Deep Zone

“Do I hear a little Kansas there?”

“Yes, ma’am. Delacor, Kansas. You, ma’am?”

“Tampa.” Stilwell probed, assessed. His jaw muscles clenched. “Ketamine twenty cc’s IV,” Stilwell instructed a nurse without looking. “Through and through. You are a lucky young man, Daniel.”

“Ma’am?”

“Bullet missed bone. A couple centimeters lower and you’re minus an arm. I’ll clean you up, start you on antibiotics, get a drain in place.”

“So then I can go back?”

“Back where?”

“With the squad. Angel and all.”

“You’ll be here awhile. Maybe Kabul.”

“No way. Really, ma’am?” Kabul was the home of CENMEDFAC, the big military hospital. He looked more troubled by that possibility than by the wound.

“Way. We want you to have that arm for a long time. Hey, it’s not so bad here, Daniel. We have some vivacious nurses.”

“Ma’am?”

“Hot.”

“Oh. Well.” The grin returned. “Thass good. Thank you, ma’am.”

He yawned, the ketamine working. Without his combat gear, Wyman’s wide blue eyes and towhead buzz cut made him look more like the high-schooler he had so recently been than the expert killer he was now. That had been the hardest thing for Stilwell. Not the gore and carnage—those she saw in operating theaters every week. But the youth. Kids too young to drink whiskey in a bar damaged in every imaginable way and some that were simply unimaginable until seen. That was the hardest part.

Her Danny was fifteen and talking about enlisting already. In a few years, a doctor in some godforsaken corner of the world might be ministering to him. Her eyes felt hot. She put a hand on the exam table to steady herself.

“Are you okay, ma’am?” She had thought him asleep, but he had been watching, concerned, up on his good elbow now. He was worried about her. Stilwell patted his healthy shoulder, eased him down.

“I’m fine, Daniel. I was just thinking…”

“Ma’am?”

“Nothing. You go to sleep, Sergeant.”

Wyman rubbed his eyes like a little kid and dropped right off.

The next morning Angel visited. Wyman’s bed was one of ten in a long, rectangular room. Only two others were occupied: by a corporal who had dropped an eighty-pound mortar tube on his foot and a Humvee driver with back injuries from an IED.

The quiet struck Angel. Outside there were whapping helicopters and thrumming generators and outgoing arty thumping like the drums of God. Never quiet. Here, it felt weird. Dead. Angel stopped at the blue curtain drawn around Wyman’s bed.

“Wy. You awake? How you doin’, dog?”

“All good, Angie. Come on in here.”

Angel thought Wyman looked normal, a little drowsy maybe. His shoulder was bandaged and he had needles in both arms.

“What they sayin’, Wy?”

“No biggie. Hit muscle, missed bone.”

“How long you be in here?”

“Doc said couple of days.” Wyman was not going to mention Kabul. Bad juju.

“Ain’t the same without you on the five-oh, Wy.”

“Roger that. Anything happening?”

“Same ol’ same ol’.”

Wyman yawned. “I think they been giving me a little dope.” Crooked frown. “Don’t like th’ stuff.”

Angel chuckled. “Oh my. Back in the ’hood, dog… No, forget that. Look, Wy, I’m gonna go, let you sleep. You need anything?”

“All good, Angie. Thank you f’ comin’ over here.” Eyelids drooping.

“You send for me, you be needin’ something, hear?”

“I will. See you later.”

“Roger that.” Angel started to leave. Then he turned back and put a hand on Wyman’s good shoulder. “You sure you don’t need nothin’?”

“Needa get back on the fifty.” Wyman tapped Angel’s hand with his fist.

“All right. I’m gone.”

“Hey, know what? The nurses in here are vivacious, man.”

“They what?”

“Hot.” Wyman laughed, a groggy chuckle. Angel, not sure what the joke was, laughed, too. If it made Wyman laugh, it was a good thing.

Lenora Stilwell returned that evening, expecting to find Wyman better. Instead, he was feverish, BP and pulse elevated, skin sallow.

“Ma’am, I think I’m coming down with flu or something.” He said this without being asked.

“What are you feeling?”

“Hot. Sore throat. My body hurts.”

“How about the shoulder?”

“Hurts, ma’am.” Paratroopers’ pain thresholds were off the charts. If this one was telling her it hurt, it hurt.

She removed the dressing and a yellow reek rose from his wound. Between tribiotic ointment and IV ampicillin, Wyman should have been infection-free, but Stilwell was seeing puffy, whitish flesh flecked with dark spots, bacterial colonies oozing pus like rancid butter.

Stilwell cleaned and irrigated Wyman’s wound, applied more tribiotic, replaced the drain, and put on a fresh dressing.

“There’s some infection, Daniel. I’m putting you on a different antibiotic, tigecycline. And something for the pain.”

This time he did not argue. “Thank you, ma’am.”

“All right. Rest, drink a lot. I’ll come by later tonight.”

She did not return then, nor most of the next day, nor even the next. The same action that kept the doctors and nurses up to their elbows in blood for almost four days kept Angel and his squadmates in the field as well. On the first day, Viper and Tango companies surprised insurgent units moving in daylight, a rare thing but, as it turned out, no accident. The firefight quickly became a complex encounter that unfolded according to a careful plan—the insurgents’ plan.

They did not hit and run, as usual. In fact, they made contact and then engaged even more aggressively, taking a page from the old North Vietnamese Army tactic of “hold them by their belts.” This clutch of death negated the Americans’ artillery and most of their tactical air support. The initial action became a running battle that the insurgents seemed to have no interest in breaking off. Going to ground during the days, they were resupplied with fresh fighters and materiel each night and renewed their attacks on multiple fronts under cover of darkness. The KIAs and MIAs mounted. After the first day, medevac helicopters flooded Terok with an endless red stream of wounded troopers.

Angel wasn’t a casualty, but once he was finally back at Terok, he fell asleep in his gear and didn’t wake for ten hours. It was late afternoon, six days after Father Wyman’s wounding, when he walked back into the ward— which, though still white, was no longer silent. The ward was filled with damaged troopers. Extra beds had been