ONE

        For Staff Sergeant Thomas McLain the war ended on MSR Tampa a few kilometers east of Baghdad International Airport and a few days shy of his twenty-seventh birthday. It was a busy day.

        In the morning Tommy and his Quick Reaction Force had escorted an investigator and his interpreter out to look at an IED third platoon had found. The platoon had scooped up a suspect too, but after a lot of back-and-forth through the interpreter the investigator said cut him loose: he had nothing to do with it. He was just the usual dickless vagrant kicking around the landscape. Iraq was full of them. The third platoon guys were not happy, having seen three men dusted off in a Blackhawk after an IED took out their Hummer three days before, but the investigator wasn't buying it. However these guys made their judgments, he had made his. Tommy left the platoon waiting for EOD to come and make that little stretch of freeway safe for democracy while he escorted the investigator back to base.

        Things got exciting after lunch when the radio started squawking. Second platoon had been ambushed on Route Tampa and had managed to shoot their way out of it, but they had used up all their ammunition doing it. Tommy and company ran a resupply mission out to them at a safe place on Route Tampa. The platoon had been lucky and hadn't taken any serious casualties. Tommy was half expecting to be told to go find the bad guys, but everybody was ordered back to ECP7 for refit.

        Approaching the base they passed a convoy of civilian tankers full of diesel fuel, heading for the highway. Tommy flagged them down. "Y'all might want to think twice," he told the lead driver. "These guys just hit an ambush about three kilometers north on the highway."

        The burly driver chewed on his mustache for a few seconds, giving Tommy the eye. "North?" he said finally. "We're going south. I think we'll take our chances."

        Tommy shrugged and gave him a wave. "Drive fast," he said.

        Ten minutes later Tommy was standing with his battalion commander just inside Entrance Check Point 7, looking at a column of thick black smoke to the north, about three kilometers up the highway. "God damn it," said Tommy. "Permission requested to go and rescue those dumb sons of bitches."

        Permission granted, Tommy and the QRF jumped back in the Hummers and hauled ass. When they got to the ambush site, sure enough it was the same convoy they had passed, stopped dead on the highway and taking fire from both sides. The smoke was coming from a tanker in the middle of the convoy that had taken a hit from something, maybe a mortar, and was going to be burning for a good long while. "What kind of a dumbass can't tell north from south?" Tommy shouted over the noise of the engine and the tearing sound of small arms fire as his driver steered past two tankers that were nearly blocking the road, slewed around with their tires shot out.

        Mortar rounds were landing here and there, going wham but not doing any major damage, not yet. Tommy knew it was a matter of time before another lucky hit sent up another big column of smoke, and he truly did not want to see that close up. He started shouting into his radio and in a couple of minutes his guys had set up a base of fire and were pouring rounds into the tall grass behind a berm a couple of hundred meters to the west and into some trees and houses to the east. They had M2s, M240 Bs, M249s and Mark 19s to work with, and it all made a hell of a noise.

        Somebody who was on the ball had already called in a Med-evac and the pilot set it down in the middle of the chaos as gentle as could be in a clear space between two tankers. Tommy was running from truck to truck, jumping up on the cab to see who was alive and who was not. Fuel was pouring out of holes in the sides of the tankers and the road was covered with it; small arms fire was kicking up sparks and that made Tommy nervous as hell. Most of the drivers were just cowering, keeping their heads down and praying or crying or shouting, but some of them were hurt. Tommy and the other men he had detailed started pulling the wounded out and dragging them toward the chopper.

        The incoming fire was lessening a little. Tommy thought maybe the bad guys were starting to withdraw. The U.S. Army could put out a lot of firepower in a hurry. All he had to do was get the wounded out of these trucks and get everybody turned around and heading back toward the base before the whole thing went up. The smell of diesel fuel was starting to bother Tommy McLain a whole lot.

        When it happened he truly did not know for a second what had hit him: it was a lot like the time in Little League when he got an aluminum bat in the back of the head trying to throw out the runner. For a moment he was just dazed, wondering what had happened to make everything so strange, so confusing.

        The first thing he really knew for certain after that was that he was being dragged toward the chopper, just like the drivers he had pulled out of the cabs. Somebody was shouting that the sergeant was hit. He didn't know where he had been hit but he believed it: he had a general deep-seated feeling of awful bodily distress. He had time to think that he couldn't be dying if he could think so clearly and then knew immediately that that didn't mean jack shit, and then somebody opened the oven door and a great wave of heat washed over them all and the last thing Tommy heard before he passed out, faint and high beneath the roar of the fire and the throb of the chopper, was the sound of grown men screaming, burning to death.

TWO

        Chicago, why not?  People had been going up Interstate 65 to Chicago as long as Tommy could remember.  His Uncle Pete had worked in Chicago for a few years before coming back and buying the gas station in Lexington.  Some people only made it to Louisville or Cincinnati, but the go-getters pushed on up to the Big Town on the lake. Chicago was where the jobs were.

        There wasn't much left for him in Kentucky, that was for sure.  Tommy drove by the house and sat looking at it for a moment, at other people's lawn furniture, at the porch swing and the old oak and the peeling paint, and then wondered why he had come. There was nothing there but sad memories.  Then he called the Holmeses' and found out Mrs. Holmes had died the year before, dropped dead one day in her garden.  Bill Holmes told Tommy to come on by and gave him a beer and told him how his wife had always said that he was her favorite student of all time.  Bill looked old and worn out and Tommy got the impression he was just waiting to go join his wife. It made Tommy sad, more than he'd thought it would, maybe because Mrs. Holmes had been a substitute for the mother he could barely remember.  

        The McLain family was history now in this town.  There were plenty of people still around who knew him, had known his dad: on Main Street he got a lot of slaps on the back and a couple of free drinks and a lot of well-meaning horseshit about being a hero, but he could tell there was nothing here for him anymore. The last thing he did on his way out of town was to go visit the graves.  Nothing had changed. His mother and father and sister still lay side by side in the old cemetery in the hollow, under the sun and the rain and the stars.  He jumped in the car and went.

        Brian Dawson had gone off to UK in Lexington and then wound up in Chicago.  If Tommy had ever had a best friend it was Brian, though he'd had his doubts for a few years there as Brian got gentrified and Tommy got hammered into shape by the army. There had been a couple of awkward meetings.  But Brian had turned up out of the blue at Tommy's dad's funeral and told him if he ever wanted to check out Chicago he had a place to stay.  Tommy had called him from Fort Hood when he got out of the hospital and told Brian to look for him in a week or two.

        He crossed the Ohio at Louisville and wheeled north.  Southern Indiana was pretty much like Kentucky, just the other bank of the big winding river that had brought everybody's ancestors west a couple of hundred years before.  But as he went north the woods thinned out and the vistas got flatter and farther, and when he stopped for gas somewhere north of Indianapolis the people already sounded different and there was a chill in the air: he had gone from South to North in half a day.  

        He had second thoughts about the whole thing, riding the brake through the bottleneck on I-80 in the crowded northwest corner of Indiana and then charging up the gut through the South Side of Chicago on 90-94, night falling and the skyline of the Loop twinkling ahead.  He wasn't sure if he could take a steady diet of this shit.  Swinging out onto Lake Shore Drive with the lake shimmering on his right and the wall of skyscrapers to the left made him feel a little better: bright lights and good times ahead.  Tommy was ready for some fun.  The last year or so had been gruesome.

        Brian lived in a place called Lincoln Park, near North Side and full of high brick houses all jammed together. The narrow streets under the trees were pretty but the Park part of it evidently did not refer to a place to leave your car. After he spotted Brian's address Tommy cruised for half an hour before he found a legal spot to drop the worn-out Chevy he'd bought off an Iraq-bound E-4 at Fort Hood.  He humped his duffel bag the three blocks back to Brian's place and rang the bell.

        "Jesus, Tom.  You look like you been through the ringer," Brian said, stepping back from a quick hug with a couple of hard back-slaps thrown in.  "You all healed now?"

        "Pretty much."  Tommy dropped his bag on the floor, looking around the place.  High windows, bare wood floor with a rug over it, nice furniture: a real grown-up's place instead of the college-boy dump Brian had lived in down in Lexington.

        "Damn, it's good to see you.  You want a beer?"

        "Wouldn't fight one off."  Tommy was having doubts again.  Brian was different: he had put on weight, cut his hair.  Here it was a Sunday night and he was wearing corduroys and a sweater.  He looked like a banker, which was what he was.  He had a job in the Loop and was making tons of money, to hear him tell it.  It showed.

        Brian wanted to know all about Iraq and Tommy gave him the canned rap he had worked up to tell people about it, which didn't even come close.

        "You should write a book about it, man."  

        Brian was serious, apparently.  Tommy looked at him for a second and snorted a little. "It'd be a short one. 'Everything sucked and a lot of people got hurt.  The End.' "

        Brian just nodded, giving him a long look.  "Well, you made it.  You out for good now?"

        "I guess so.  My hitch ran out while I was in the hospital.  I wanted to re-up but the doc wouldn't clear me.  He said it was time to go join the VFW and fatten up on potato salad, let my insides heal."

        "So what are you planning to do?"

        Tommy looked around the room for a moment, then back at Brian.  "Damned if I know."

        They drank a little more and got caught up on mutual acquaintances, which took about a minute.  Tommy didn't really care about any of them. With the second beer Tommy tossed Brian a couple of war stories after all, and then Brian had to go to bed because he had to work in the morning.  He fixed Tommy up with a spare key and a spare pillow and at ten-thirty Tommy was standing at a window in a dark room looking out at a strange city and wondering what the rest of his life was going to be like.  He wasn't sure about Brian, but if he had learned one thing, it was that you needed friends in this life, and all the rest of Tommy's friends were still in Iraq, the ones that were still alive anyway.