Son Of The Morning by Chris Stewart

Author:Chris Stewart
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Mercury Ink
Published: 2012-07-29T06:00:00+00:00

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Standing in the Operations Center, Sam smiled as he remembered that first night on patrol. Yes, Bono had proven thorough, ingenious, and ready to think outside the box. He would do anything to get the job done. Put him in a firefight and he wouldn’t hesitate. But he cared about the Iraqis almost as much as he cared about his own, and he had the ability to think about the larger picture at hand. If there was one thing Sam had learned, it was to respect and appreciate the opportunity to work with men like that.

Sam took a deep breath, and then walked toward his friend. “What’s up?” he asked as he sat on a metal chair next to him.

The other captain looked up. “Three hundred and eleven down,” he replied.

Sam stared straight ahead. “Fifty-four days to go.”

“Yeah, unless we get extended.”

Sam took out a handful of bubble gum, offered one to the captain, then shoved a couple of pieces in his mouth. Double Bubble®. Delicious. He’d been an avid chewer since his days in Little League. “Not going to happen,” he answered after softening the gum in his mouth. “We’re on our way home, my friend. They’re not extending soldiers any longer. They won’t keep us for more than a year.”

Bono huffed. “Regular army, maybe. Air Force pukes—no offense to your old man, the general—may be true as well. Those guys are filling their deployments then heading back home. But you know how it is for us Deltas. They don’t care if it takes us a month, a year, two years. Deltas don’t rotate home until the job’s done. And this is a freakin’ big job.”

Sam didn’t answer for a moment. Bono was probably right. “Life sucks when you’re a Delta.”

“Which is why we fought so hard to get here. And don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t love you, baby, you know that,” he reached over and slapped a desert cockroach off his knee, “but dude, unless you’re willing to dye your hair blond and start wearing a dress, I wanna go home.”

Sam chewed, blew a little bubble, and nodded his head.

The two men were quiet a minute, both of them lost in thought. Talk of home had a way of doing that.

“Three hundred and eleven,” the captain repeated after a while.

“Fifty-four and counting,” Sam answered again.

The unit radio crackled with static behind them and Bono looked at it, expecting something, but no voices came through.

“You’ve got tactical operations center duty all day?” Sam asked him.

“Until noon, that’s all.”

Sam motioned toward the nearly empty Operations Center. Two young specialists were working at computers, and there were some voices from behind the commander’s closed door, but other than that, they were the only ones there. “Not a bad day to have desk duty,” he offered. “You’re not missing any action. Nice and quiet. If you’ve got to sit at a desk, you got a pretty good day.”

The tactical radios crackled again as one of the teams called in their position report.

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