The Long Road Home by Martha Raddatz

Author:Martha Raddatz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2007-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

IN THE FRONT of the aid station, Colonel Robert Abrams stared in disbelief at the men lying before him. He’d gunned his Humvee, watching the streaks of tracer fire over Sadr City while he drove the four miles from brigade headquarters to Camp War Eagle. The ride had taken fifteen minutes. Though he’d received radio updates, Abrams was not prepared for what met him inside the gates.

The first thing he saw was the Alpha Company LMTV, all shot to hell, blood pouring off its left side. Nearby, naked and bloody soldiers lay moaning in the sand, their uniforms cut off and thrown in a growing pile. Abrams thought it looked like a slaughterhouse. Green plastic wrappers from field dressings were strewn everywhere, bloody footprints ground into them. Next to the station lay a pile of discarded M-16s and M-4s, the guns piled like a giant steel haystack. Abrams was horrified. A soldier doesn’t willingly abandon his weapon, he thought. And then: I couldn’t possibly have this many wounded soldiers.

Then he saw “Big Country”—Sergeant Robert Reynolds—lying on a litter.

“Big Country?” Abrams crouched beside him.

“Yes, sir,” Reynolds said. “Shit. Fucking A. Mother fucking A.”

Abrams stared at him. One of his best squad leaders, so massive that his M-4 looked like a toothpick in his arms, his head shaved high and tight, Reynolds now lay on the ground with a wound that had blown out most of his inner thigh. That’s when it hit Colonel Abrams—that his men were really at war.

Robert Abrams grew up around war but he had never lost anyone in combat. His father, Creighton Abrams, had commanded U.S. military forces in Vietnam between 1968 and 1972, when he became the army chief of staff. Robert “Abe” Abrams was the youngest of six Abrams children, but the only one to have shared a remarkable summer with his father in the Vietnam war zone—when he was only eight years old. In 1969, his two older brothers, already serving as army officers, by then were doing tours of duty in Vietnam. Abe was living in Thailand with his mother. When Julia Abrams was called back to the United States to spend a few months helping her daughter and daughter-in-law with newborns, she made what must have seemed to her friends an astonishing move: She sent young Robert to live with his father in Saigon.

The youngest Abrams was given a special camouflage suit—“jungle stripes”—with his name tag sewn above the pocket, just like what the soldiers wore. He spent his days with his father’s security personnel, riding around in jeeps and firing his .22 rifle on the range. In the evenings there was almost always time for father and son to have dinner together. Abrams loved hearing his father’s stories and over time would appreciate more and more the efforts his father made to maintain a bond with his son. It was an unforgettable summer; afterward there was never any doubt that Robert Abrams would follow his father and brothers into the army.

Abrams noticed Trent Upton walking forward through the light of the Humvees.

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