The Strong Gray Line by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Death of a Friend

Sitting in front of me, sweating and wide-eyed, were two teenagers. They were no older than sixteen years old. With jet-black hair and peach fuzz on their tight upper lips, they stared at me with deep black eyes. They hated me, I affirmed. The smell of dirt, sweat, and blood on their clothes settled into my nose and caught me in stride when I walked closer to them. They had their hands zip tied behind their backs, and they appeared docile, almost innocent, in the corner of the room. However, two hours before, our IA unit raided their home and detained them for killing Lieutenant Amar.

Earlier that day, Amar had received a phone call from the tip line about a possible weapons cache in the southern villages of Muqdadiyah.13 He grabbed a group of soldiers, loaded them in the back of pickup trucks, and raced off on Highway 5 to confirm or deny the report. Less than twenty minutes from the city, Amar’s truck hit a command-wired IED, which flipped the vehicle upside down. While the IA reported to us that they pulled security around his vehicle after the blast, we later learned that Amar and another soldier died from gunshot wounds. This discrepancy in the story made me believe that the other vehicles left them when they were in contact.

It was a cloudless, bright day, and the sun momentarily blinded me as I walked out of the detention cell. I staggered over to our vehicle, sunk into my gunner’s hatch, and gulped down a warm bottle of Gatorade. Amar was dead. I failed. A rush of guilt, anger, and confusion swirled inside of me. But as soon as those feelings appeared, for some reason, my thoughts returned to Jenny, to my son, to my parents, to West Point, and lastly to Amar’s family. “One more mile,” I whispered.

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