Liam's List (9 page)

His words drove a sharp wedge between my
ribs. My throat grew so tight that it was hard to get out any
words. In a mental fog, I turned away from him and began the short
trek to the car.

It was a red Honda Accord. And it was
littered with bullet holes.

My bullets. From my assault rifle.

There, in the driver’s seat, was the man I
had killed. In the passenger seat was a young woman, whom I
presumed to be his wife. And cradled in her arms was a little baby
boy.

They were all dead. Gunshot wounds to their
heads and chests.

Time froze, along with my heart. The blood
stopped flowing in my veins.

For a long moment, I didn’t move. I simply
stared at their lifeless bodies.

Then my legs buckled, and I collapsed to my
knees.

Everything began to take on a strange,
distant quality. The sound of a helicopter approaching, its rotors
spinning, its blades whipping the air around them—it all got warped
and weird, like everything around me was being filtered through
water.

It was some time before I even realized
Merrick and Shelby were calling my name.

Though they stood facing me, I kept my eyes
averted.

I couldn’t afford their sympathy and
understanding.

Not now, for it would crumble all my resolve
faster than I could muster it.

Suddenly, my lungs couldn’t pull in enough
air and my head grew light.

“
You need to breathe,”
Shelby said. “Pull yourself together. Remember your
training.”

All my leadership training couldn’t prepare
me for this moment. All I felt was regret, remorse, grief, and
shame. I had killed an innocent family.

Killing the enemy was one thing; success in
combat meant killing the enemy by whatever means possible before
they killed me.

But this was different. I had killed the very
people I was meant to protect.

I had killed a young man, a young woman, and
a little baby.

Their lives ended—all because of me.

“
Hey.” Merrick grabbed
both my shoulders. “The situation was unclear.”

“
The situation is always
fuckin’ unclear,” I snapped at him, shoving at his chest with both
hands. “It doesn’t change a damn thing.”

“
Listen.” Shelby spoke
firmly. His voice was strong and it was calm. “You need to turn all
that anger, all that rage, all that pain inside you into energy. We
still have a mission to complete.”

Dust and debris began billowing across the
road as the Medevac helicopter descended on us and landed on
exposed dirt. Julian and several men from my unit walked as a group
toward it, lifting the injured infantry and the body bags into the
chopper.

Neither of us moved as the rotors started
spinning, picking up speed, the blades whipping the sky as it
whooshed into the air, flying away from us, away from the
carnage.

Shelby started to speak again, but his voice
was drowned out by the deafening sounds of over a dozen tanks
revving up and roaring to life.

“
Let’s roll!” I heard the
company commander’s order loud and clear in my earpiece. “We’re
pushing forward.”

The three of us started jogging toward our
convoy. Shelby was right. Despite feeling myself unravel inside, we
still had a mission complete.

In the military, the mission always came
first. It was doctrine.

The mission—that is, the greater good—always
took precedence over all else.

While Julian and Shelby dropped their heads
and lowered themselves inside the tank, I stood up through the open
turret hatch.

I needed the air, or I felt I would
suffocate—from pain or guilt, I didn’t know. Likely both.

Taking a deep breath, I silenced the parts of
myself that wanted to shout.

I needed to stay focused. I needed to keep my
bearings, stay in control, and keep my composure. I was a
lieutenant, and I needed to make sure my platoon remained
cohesive.

And though I couldn’t
control the anguish festering inside me, I
could
control how I behaved in front
of my men.

Meanwhile, Merrick stood by my side in the
open hatch. He cast me a darting glance before lifting his
earphones to his head.

Then the tanks turned down the road and
lurched forward, dirt and gravel grinding beneath the treads as our
convoy continued on to Lahib.

Our line of vehicles cast long shadows across
the rugged terrain. Squinting against the glare of the sun, I
scouted the surrounding area. Merrick remained standing beside me,
passing any pertinent information to the driver, the gunner, and
the men in the troop compartment through his face-boom
microphone.

We rolled through several ghost towns where
deep craters dotted the landscape from IED explosions. Hours
earlier, we had our men check the streets for IEDs before we made
the journey, and they provided support to the Explosive Ordinance
Disposal teams.

Still, I was on the lookout for anything
suspicious, anything amiss. An abandoned car, holes in the road
filled with debris and wires, anything out of the ordinary.

We must have been thirty miles from the
target house when I caught sight of an old woman limping along the
side of the road.

I found it strange that she was out here in
the middle of nowhere in this godforsaken ghost town. Though she
seemed completely out of place, I didn’t want to be too quick to
react. Quite frankly, I didn’t want any more innocent blood on my
hands.

And I didn’t really think the Iraqi woman
could be a threat since she was holding the hand of a little girl
who looked to be no more than five.

As our tank rumbled past the Iraqi woman, I
kept my eyes trained on her, but she hung her head low, her gaze
cast downward. I must have blinked just when the bomb
detonated.

The air shook, the ground erupted beneath me,
and I was thrown off the tank.

Pitched forward by the blast, I was suspended
in the air for a fleeting moment before I landed with a loud thud.
My chest slammed hard against the earth, cracking my SAPI plate,
and pain exploded through my ribcage on impact.

The right side of my face smacked onto the
ground, snapping my head to the side.

Spots burst before my eyes and pain shot
through my brow, clouding my vision.

Through blurred eyes, I saw flashes of fire.
A dry wall of dust.

Heat boiled under my skin and I began
coughing up blackish-brown mucous.

I heard shouting. Men yelling. Orders being
screamed. Boots on the ground.

The rapid-fire sounds of enemy guns and the
concussion of grenades.

A piercing ringing in my ear. Sharp cries
filling the air.

More shots rang out. Bullets whizzed by
me.

Another explosion. The blast was so loud it
shot down my sternum, and behind my eyelids, the world went searing
bright.

I tried to get to my feet, but a sharp pain
sliced through my knee. My head felt like it had split apart and
then my vision went dark.

Chapter Nine

Liam

In the days that followed, I learned more
about what had happened. The bomb that was strapped onto the Iraqi
woman was powerful enough to destroy a Humvee, but not a tank.
Still, my tank had felt the brunt of the explosion. The blast
lifted it off its treads momentarily and pitched it forward.

After that bomb went off, a group of
insurgents had mounted an attack on our convoy, firing AK-47s and
RPGs from a rooftop. Then they detonated another explosive, one
that was powerful enough to obliterate a Bradley.

Though my tank had withstood the blast, two
other tanks did not. Five men from my battalion had been killed,
along with the suicide bomber and the little girl who was holding
her hand.

The blast that had catapulted me into the air
left me with a wounded arm, mild TBI (traumatic brain injury),
ruptured eardrums, and a knee injury. Thankfully, my Kevlar
protective plate had done its job. My ribs, though badly bruised,
were not broken.

But my friends, Brian Merrick and Jim Shelby,
did not fare so well.

The blast peppered Merrick’s legs with
red-hot fragments. Shelby had serious head injuries. Both men
suffered severe nerve damage and fractured bones. After they’d been
stabilized, they were airlifted to Germany to undergo further
surgery.

Compared to Merrick and Shelby, I had escaped
with relatively minor injuries and was Medevac’d to the
Intermediate Care Unit at FOB Anaconda.

While I recovered, I had plenty of time to
reflect. I could have been killed.

And I didn’t understand why I hadn’t
been.

Part of me wished I wasn’t alive.

Part of me wished I had died in the
blast.

While my surface wounds healed, the other
wounds inside me festered and deepened. I sat alone in the darkened
recovery room and stewed until dawn, replaying in my mind June
eighteenth. They day I had ended the lives of that innocent Iraqi
family.

I didn’t know where they had come from, I
didn’t know their names, and I likely never would. I only knew
because of me, they were dead.

And because of me, five men in my unit were
dead.

I should have known the Iraqi woman was a
suicide bomber. She was completely out of place in that ghost town,
and she had no reason to be there, no reason to be wandering down
that dirt road. There were no villages, no towns in sight for
miles.

I was the first to spot her, and I should
have been the one who stopped her.

Now I couldn’t sleep. Didn’t want to. Every
time I closed my eyes, panic clawed at me, threatening to fill my
head with bloody images. I saw children dressed in blood, babies
dressed in blood, soldiers dressed in blood, women dressed in
blood. I felt stained.

Every night I saw ghosts. Every night I saw
blood on my hands.

There were times I wanted to smash my hands
over my eyes and crash my head into the wall.

I felt like I was fighting for my sanity.

But if I thought I’d hit rock bottom, I was
wrong. Two days later, Julian paid me a visit.

“
You look like shit,” was
the first thing he said when he stepped into my room.

I struggled to sit upright, ignoring the
protestations in my limbs. Every muscle screamed with pain. “I feel
like shit.”

His eyes flashed something—pity, maybe even
compassion. “Sorry, man. I’m sure you’ll be out of here soon.”

In time, I asked him, “Have you told
Viv?”

Julian nodded once. “I called her the day you
left the ER. She was worried sick about you.” After a pregnant
pause, he said, “And she still is.”

Seconds passed. I felt his eyes on me, but I
couldn’t bring myself to meet his gaze. “Tell her not to worry,” I
said.

“
Why don’t you tell her?”
he snapped.

I looked up and tried to read his face. His
jaw was set, his expression hard and determined. Still, I said
nothing. I wasn’t ready to talk to Vivian. Not yet.

But every day, as darkness fell and the night
came alive with mobile shadows, I conjured up the memory of her
face and clung to it like a lifeline.

“
Look,” Julian said
tersely. “When I found out you were dating my little sister, I
didn’t have a problem with it. But if you continue to ignore her
and play with her feelings, then you and I are gonna have a
problem. Do I make myself clear?”

Sighing heavily, I scrubbed a hand over my
scalp. “I’m not playing with her feelings. I’ll call her. I just
need more time.”

Some of the anger seemed to leave him. “Look,
don’t blame yourself for what happened. It’s difficult to tell
who’s friendly and who’s not. Not everyone’s the enemy, but
sometimes it’s hard as hell to tell the difference.”

I flinched. “It was my job to tell the
difference.”

“
Remember what our drill
instructor said?” Julian asked, but then he reminded me anyway. “He
told us to turn off our ‘human switch.’ You either kill or you’re
gonna get killed. If you hadn’t opened fire on that car and it
turned out they were suicide bombers, you would have been killed. I
would have been killed. A lot of us would have been fuckin’
killed.”

As if by its own will, my trigger finger
began shaking. “I opened fire all right. On the wrong people. That
woman who actually turned out to be a suicide bomber—I did nothing.
And look what happened!” I jammed a hand over my finger to stop the
shaking.

Julian studied me with narrowed eyes. “You
all right, man?”

“
I’m fine,” I said
wearily. “How are Merrick and Shelby doing?”

Julian didn’t speak for a minute. His face
was completely unreadable except for a tiny muscle that fluttered
in and out at the base of his jaw. “I’m sorry,” he said at last.
“Shelby didn’t make it.”

My chest tightened as the
need for oxygen battled with the
grief and
shock that choked my insides. It burned a path to my throat and I
swallowed with difficulty.

For a long moment, I stared at Julian and he
stared back, his eyes now vacant of any energy that used to define
them.

Shelby wasn’t just my good
friend. He was
our
good friend.

We had all connected since
the day we enlisted. Shelby, Julian, Merrick, and myself—we were
all native San Diegans. Our high schools had surf teams
and
surf PE. And like
any true
Sandy Eggan,
we ate our burritos with fries inside them. The four of us
had trained together, worked together, gathered for meals together,
and fought alongside each other.