Chapter 5
I am telling you about Grant because the story does not work, does not mean what it should mean, if I leave him out of it. Thirteen of the fourteen Rangers in that ravine came home because Ava Stroud made a shot that should not have been possible at that range, in that fog, under that pressure. One did not, because the ambush had already taken its first cost before her rifle ever entered the equation, and no overwatch shot, however perfect, reverses what has already happened by the time the trigger is pulled.
Ava carried that distinction carefully for a long time afterward. Thirteen, not fourteen. She did not perform grief for Grant in front of the company, the same way she had not performed panic on the ridge. But Holt, who shared a transport flight back to the States with her four months later when both their deployments rotated out, said she kept a small printed photograph of Grant's unit graduation tucked into her field notebook for the rest of the deployment, and that she looked at it sometimes in the evenings, briefly, before putting it away again.
May you like
What came after the ridge was, on balance, the kind of outcome that deserves to be called good, even with Grant's absence inside it.
The after-action report credited Ava's shot with preventing what the battalion intelligence officer's assessment called a near-certain mass casualty event — the machine gun position, properly employed, would have likely killed or wounded the majority of the fourteen-man element within the first ninety seconds of opening fire. Command put her in for the Silver Star. The "ghost rifle" jokes stopped entirely and were replaced, within the company, by a quieter kind of respect that did not require commentary.
