Rock Paper Tiger by Lisa Brackmann

Author:Lisa Brackmann [Brackmann, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Suspense, Thriller, Contemporary, War, ebook
ISBN: 9781569476406
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2010-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE WAY THE military determines if you have post-traumatic stress disorder is, they look at how many traumatic and stressful things you personally experienced. Things like being in combat, seeing your buddies get blown up, things like that. So, I wasn’t in combat, and even though I was a convoy medic for a while and that was pretty fucking stressful, I never saw my buddies get blown up, only some already blown-up hajjis and the soldier nobody knew who blew his brains out. As for the gunfire and mortars and RPGs going off all the time, almost everybody in the sandbox had to deal with that, so that wasn’t enough. You try to make a claim based on that, they say either you’re faking it, or you had some pre-existing mental health problem, which, if true, might lead you to ask, then why the fuck did you send me off to war in the first place?

Trust me, they don’t have a good answer to that.

Of course, I did get blown up myself. Here’s why that didn’t count:

I was on my way to the DFAC for chow. Middle of the day. And what happened was, some hajjis decided to launch a couple mortar rounds, just to show they could, I guess, because they almost always did that at night. And one of them landed close by me, and I got hit pretty good by shrapnel and the concussion from the explosion. But I don’t actually remember that part.

What I remember is leaving my hooch and being kind of hungry and hoping there were still some tacos left, because Pulagang had already eaten, and she’d told me the tacos were pretty good. And then I remember lying on my back, staring up at the yellow sky. Everything was really quiet, I guess because I was deaf from the shock or the explosion for a little while. It was actually kind of peaceful. I just lay there, blinking at the sun, watching clods of dirt rush toward me and land in little puffs of dust.

Next thing I remember, I was lying in the aid station. Blanchard was working on me, and in spite of his being a dickhead, he was actually a pretty good medic, and he got me packaged up and ready to go in record time, all wrapped up in tubes and gauze and air-filled plastic like I was some kind of extra-fragile FedEx. I was so fucked up, I can’t even describe what I was feeling as pain; but I got some morphine, and I could nod and respond and grab his hand, and holding somebody’s hand never felt so good or important, like it was going to save my life.

After I was more or less stabilized but before the copter got there, Blanchard let Trey come in to see me.

“Oh, Ellie. Oh, Jesus.”

He was crying. Tears streaming down his face. He covered my hand with his, gently, like he was afraid he might break it. “Don’t worry,” he said.

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