Chapter 86
I GOT OUT of the chair, made for the door. I had my hand on the knob when Tommy called out, “Hey, Jack. Whatever it is, you should stay. Take my session, bro. Okay, Dr. McGinty?”
“Of course. Please, Jack. Sit down.”
I didn’t want to let the demon out. It was too big and still too raw. How could I tell a stranger what I’d managed to keep from myself all these years? How could I tell Tommy?
“This is a safe place,” McGinty was saying.
McGinty was wrong. It wasn’t safe. Dropping my guard with Tommy took more than courage. It was a high-risk bet with bad odds and an irretrievable downside. At the same time, the pressure to talk was building into a runaway need to admit what I’d done.
“I was flying a transport mission from Gardez to the base at Kandahar,” I choked out. “I had fourteen Marines in the back. You can hear a screwdriver drop in the cargo bay of a CH-46, so when the missile came through the floor… the sound… of the aircraft being ripped up…”
I envisioned the dead Marines piled up against the left side of the cabin.
I forced myself to continue. I described the crash and the aftermath: staring into the cabin through my NVGs, seeing the dead men, my friend soaked in blood.
“I had Danny slung over my shoulder—a fireman’s carry—and then Corporal Albert woke up. He begged me not to leave him there to burn. I already had Danny. I had to get him to safe ground. Albert was half-buried under the casualties. His legs were in pieces. I needed help to get him out of there. I promised him that I’d come back.”
The words were stopping my ability to breathe.
“Are you all right, Jack?”
“Jeff Albert told me that Danny Young was dead.”
“Do you think he was? How could Albert have even known?”
“I don’t know. It was night…. Danny didn’t speak…. I couldn’t feel a pulse because my hands… were numb.
“The way we’re briefed before each flight… is take someone out with you. You take out the most urgently wounded who are still alive first. If they’re dead, they don’t need to be rescued—everyone understands that.
“If Danny was dead, I saved a dead man and left a live man to burn up. I would’ve gone back.”
There was a long pause until McGinty finally spoke again. “Why didn’t you?”
“I died,” I said.