To so much as look at her, you knew: this girl was born to do one thing down here on God’s green earth and that one thing was to serve. Had that glimmer in her eyes, y’know? She’d go out-the-wire with us on any and every mission — night recons, air assaults, you name it. She was young, not yet five. Raring to go. Ready for anything. And loyal, too. A true member of the tribe. We bled for her, and she bled for us. I think her name was Molly, if I remember right — after Molly Pitcher.
One night, we’re on this snatch and grab op, when, on our way up to the objective, she doesn’t catch the scent of this one Soviet era mine buried in the dirt on the edge of a pomegranate orchard. They covered over the smell somehow, with diesel or mud and, well, you can guess what happened next. Guys running, radios crackling, dust and bust-open pomegranates everywhere, their red sticky bits all over everyone. They call in the medevac. Her handler, Bronco, he’s got shrapnel up and down his leg but she’s — turns out, she’s the one took the brunt of the blast. She doesn’t whine, or yelp, or cry, not once, even as the minutes tick by, a panicked waiting in the darkness, before the flaps of the bird could be heard and it finally finds where we are and settles and sends stinging nettle-sands over pomegranates and all. We slide her onto the stretcher, load her into the bird, wave goodbye, as the bird lifts up, and the onboard medic slips an IV into the vein in her foreleg — to stop the bleeding, treat for shock — same as you would for any person, any fellow soldier, or, at least, we try to.
She hardly knows what’s happened to her or what’s going to happen. “It’s gonna be alright,” Bronco tells her, riding alongside her. “It’ll be alright, girl.” A tactically gloved hand reaches out in the green cabin light to soothe her but, before the bird can haul ass over those hills that touched the sky, to reach the field hospital in the next valley, she’s already gone down that dark path in the woods where only the shades of heroes tread.
I kept a picture of her saved to my desktop a long time. I’d show it to people at work. In the picture, she’s all geared up, grinning, that glimmer in her eye. People always liked that picture of her. I’m not even sure where it is anymore.
J.G.P. MacAdam is the first in his family to earn a college degree. His publications can be found in The Colorado Review, The Atticus Review, JMWW, Pithead Chapel and Consequence, among others. His novelette “A Square of Dirt” about the birth, life and death of a firebase in the Tangi Valley, Afghanistan is available from ELJ Editions. You can find him at jgpmacadam.com.
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