Homefront

The tape played endlessly, the same several seconds over and over. Because that was Nina’s role that day. To watch.

A witness to the death of Janey and Ace and by implication Colonel Wood-Holly-and the people who died at Prairie Island.

And every day since, she watched the creases of worry etch deeper in Broker’s face when he looked at her, at Kit. As he contemplated the radioactivity that might have slipped into his blood and bones spawning tiny milky scurries of cancer and leukemia…

So she fixated day and night on editing the tape. Make a new tape titled “If Only”…

Rewind. Stop. Play Nina shouting, reaching for her pistol.

If only…

She got up, eased open the door, padded into the living room, and stood over the couch where Broker lay sleeping. His face was obscure in the darkness but she knew his face; the way, even under all the strain, it relaxed into an unlined boyish reverie when he slept.

The first time she ever saw him, she was younger than Kit. Thirteen years separated them. Her dad had squired Broker through the bad fight in Quang Tri City. Brought him back, with his war twin, Griffin, to run the Ranger course at Benning. The two of them appeared in the cramped backyard of the tiny house where the Army billeted Major Ray Pryce and his family. The summer of ’73.

Even at seven, Nina understood you sorted men by what they wore on their chests. Dad said there were two kinds of soldiers: the kind that fight, and the other kind. Broker and Griffin were identically lean and blooded in spitshined jump boots, new Ranger tabs, CIB and jump wings over the two rows of ribbons above the left blouse pocket of their summer khakis. Even the individual ribbons were the same: Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart on top.

Her mom had called her to the kitchen and sent her back into the yard, carefully clutching three frosted bottles of Lone Star beer.

She sat in her dad’s lap, long used to the smell of beer and cigar, while he harangued against the Army, the war. The stupidity of taking the 101st off jump status, putting them in helicopters.

She remembered every word he said. “See these two boys, Kit. They’re American Praetorians. That’s what the airborne and the marines divisions are, the volunteer backbone. This special operations crap we’re stuck in just goes on missions-hell, airborne and marine divisions win wars…”

But not that war, Daddy.

She remembered his words because they were some of the last words she ever heard from his mouth. Two days later he took his two boys back to Vietnam. He left before dawn, coming into her room and kissing her gently on the forehead, whispering so as not to wake her, “I love you, Kit. I’ll always love you.” Softly his blunt

fingers caressed her chest. “Remember, you have a Pryce heart in your chest. Don’t quit, honey; don’t cry.”

She had fought her way up through sleep and reached out her arms.

“Daddy?”

But he was gone. And this time he didn’t come back. Not even his body.

Nina bent over her sleeping husband and wanted to reassure him; she knew he feared the consequences of being exposed to radiation at Prairie Island. Feared that cancer was simmering in his blood, his bones. You won’t get cancer, Broker. You’re not the type. Her mother had died of breast cancer. But her mother had given in. Five years after her husband was taken off the missing list and presumed dead, she compromised and married a creep. She gave up.

Nina believed that Broker would never get cancer because he didn’t know how to give up.

She backed out of the living room and pulled the door shut behind her. What Broker didn’t understand was that the greatest fear and sense of loss she suffered was not for her dead comrades.

Of course she grieved. With her arm in a sling, she attended three funerals. Janey’s in North Carolina. Ace Shuster’s in Langdon, and Holly’s-closed, mostly empty casket-in a military chapel in Arizona. They found about as much of Holly as they did of some 9/11 victims. Some tissue that fit in a DNA-coded envelope.

The point was, her arm in that fucking sling. She had lost the use of her right arm, and after eight months of rehab, it wasn’t coming back. In the fight with George Khari last July, she had saved her life but destroyed her shoulder. She suspected that the doctors at Bragg had studied her MRIs, knew the problem, and were just giving her time to come to terms with it.

Patronizing her.

She backed away from the thought. Better to keep playing the tape over and over, backing it up, splicing into the seconds, trying to make it come out right. Because that was the real her going into that gunfight. Major Nina Pryce. D-Girl Nina Pryce.

Broker called it her Joan of Arc fantasy. Her uphill fight against the Army patriarchy. She’d soldiered through all the dumb jokes, sent two would-be military rapists staggering away clutching their genitals-you wanted me to touch it, asshole, you didn’t say how… She’d made up her mind: I will be the first woman general to fight a brigade in combat. Gone now, all that headstrong bravado.

But if she gave up the drama of that moment, she had to face herself as she was right now: a woman, another mom, closer now to forty than to thirty, with a bum shoulder…

Depression was just a waiting room where she paced in a circle until her name was called. She’d go into the doctor’s office. The doctor would run her through a simple set of range-of-motion exercises, note that she couldn’t remotely bend her elbow and reach up behind her back. Would write on a piece of paper: “Unfit for duty.”

Nina shook her head, unwilling to look her demons in the eye: her pride, her arrogance, her willingness to let Broker and Kit follow in the wake of her career like baggage…

Shit.

She had always been an unusually gifted tactician. So she knew exactly what she had to do. Just hit the fast- forward button. Accept her life in real time. The way it was now.

Uh-uh. Can’t deal with that yet.

So she hit rewind. Then she hit play and watched that last moment: Nina, always getting the jump, ahead of the situation, a kinesthetic fucking intellectual calling the play, going for her gun. There was still that split second before her hand came up empty.

When she was still somebody…

Chapter Sixteen

Broker awoke, alert and rested after seven hours on the couch. He reached into the back of the couch cushions, retrieved the shotgun, and unloaded it. He listening carefully for Nina, who was in the kitchen and had been since 4:00 P.M., after a few fitful hours of sleep. He quickly raised the wall quilt, opened the locker with the key around his neck, and replaced the gun and shells. Locked it up and lowered the quilt.

Then he took a quick shower and checked himself in the bathroom as he shaved. Last night’s events still glowed in his eyes. Calling for revenge.

But you won’t do anything dumb. You’ll call Harry, talk it through. Not go rip Klumpe’s fat throat out. Agreed? Agreed.

Okay. Because of the readmission conference, he woke Kit at eight, an hour later than usual for a school morning, bringing her a short glass of orange juice and a Sesame Street multivitamin, which he placed on the shelf next to her bed. Then he raised the blinds on her small room’s one window. No help there, just gray overcast. Nina would have another bad day. He turned back to the bed, grabbed Kit’s toes under the covers, and wiggled them.

“C’mon, get up. Daylight in the swamp.”

Kit emerged from a tangle of covers and quilts, stretched, flexed her hand, and studied the stiff scab forming