Chapter 2 - Crawl
Private Sarah Jenkins had completed the drill sixteen minutes before Vance decided completion did not matter. She had dragged herself through dust, climbed the wall, crossed the low wire, carried the weighted pack, and returned to the gravel lane with her chest burning from the rib injury everyone knew about and nobody had reported properly.
Two days earlier, a “training mishap” had sent her into the obstacle frame hard enough to knock the air from her lungs. Vance called it clumsiness. The medic on duty told her to rest, then looked away when Vance said soldiers did not get custom schedules because they bruised their feelings. Sarah knew her rib was worse than a bruise. She felt it every time she breathed.
Still, she had finished.
Vance stood over her in the heat, chewing peppermint gum over the stale smell of tobacco, tapping his silver ring against his belt buckle in that slow metallic rhythm she had come to dread.
“Get up, Jenkins. Or did you forget how to use your legs the moment you put on that uniform?”
Sarah pressed both palms into the gravel. Every muscle shook. Her vision blurred at the edges, but she forced one knee beneath her. She could hear the formation thirty yards away. Boots in dust. Held breath. Silence disguised as discipline.
“I said, up.”
His boot came down against her lower back, not hard enough to look dramatic from far away, hard enough to make her chest seize. She bit down on the sound trying to leave her throat.
“Please, Sergeant,” she whispered. “The drill is completed.”
Vance crouched close.
“It’s completed when I say it’s completed.”
Then he pointed toward the obstacle fence across the yard.
“Down on your belly. Low crawl. If your chest leaves the dirt even an inch, we start over.”
Sarah looked at the distance.
A football field of hot gravel.
Her rib pulsed like fire.
May you like
She lowered herself down.
And started crawling.
