Chapter 4 - What Pruitt Saw
Sergeant Major Dale Pruitt had been walking from the motor pool when the Humvee dust rolled across the gate. He was the kind of senior enlisted leader who did not hurry unless hurry was necessary, and when he saw Carver’s stretcher, he moved fast.
He knelt beside the first wound, then the second, then the third. He did not ask me who I was at first. He read the work.
The compression wrap on Carver. The field seal reinforced with torn fabric. The water ration marks written in grease pencil on Maddox’s sleeve. The splint made from a broken support strip. The way each man’s airway had been protected through transport. None of it was pretty. All of it was alive.
Pruitt looked at me differently after that.
“Who treated them?” he asked.
I lifted one hand.
Thorn snapped, “She could have caused those injuries.”
Pruitt slowly stood.
That was the first time I saw the anger in him. Not loud anger. Older than that. More dangerous.
“Captain,” he said, “that woman kept those men alive.”
The gate soldiers shifted.
Thorn heard it too. The shift. The tiny fracture in his control. He stepped closer to me, pointing again as if proximity could restore authority.
“She refused to identify herself.”
“My name and unit are above your clearance,” I said.
The words cost more breath than I wanted to admit, but they landed exactly where they needed to. Soldiers looked from me to Thorn. Thorn’s face tightened because men like him understand clearance the way some men understand money. It tells them where the walls are.
He did not know mine.
Then the Humvee stopped.
The dust parted.
May you like
General Holt stepped out.
And Thorn suddenly looked like a man remembering every report he had signed too quickly.
