Page 94 of S.O.S. Billboard

“No,” she answered as patiently as she was able with the acid eating at her gut over how the Marines had failed her man. “So I can ask you a few things.”

He complied slowly, despite his fears, turning tear-filled, troubled orbs to hers.

“Okay. I’ll try to give you answers to the best of my ability,” he replied stoically.

O’Shea pulled her thoughts together and began.

“I’m sure your therapist has already put forth a few of these things, but maybe coming from me, someone who…cares deeply for you, it might make a bigger impact.”

O’Shea had almost said “love”, but now was not the time to muddy the waters. It was time to clear away the murk that clouded Billboard’s relentless stream of self-condemnation.

“First,” she questioned, “did you derive any pleasure whatsoever while doing what you did?”

He flinched and regarded her with disbelief in his set jaw. “No. Of course not. No decent human being could.”

O’Shea was not intimidated.

“Exactly. Because you are a decent human being.” She wiped away a tear that had somehow escaped the corner of his eye, and asked another question.

“If you could have said no to the role you were given; if you knew you wouldn’t suffer any consequences from your CO byrefusing, would you have continued, or would you have taken the out and walked away?”

Billboard snorted uncomfortably. “I would have…”

He suddenly looked so conflicted that O’Shea felt bad for asking such a probing question, but with difficulty, she gave him time to phrase his answer.

“I…actually don’t know. I was the senior member of our team, and if I hadn’t done it… Dammit, O’Shea. One of my team would have had to take it on, and then they’d be stuck with the demons that haunt me. I’d never wish that on any of them.”

There was his kind soul again, if only he could see it.

“Okay,” O’Shea agreed. “But let’s say none of your buddies would have had to take up the gauntlet.”

“Then I would have told our commander where to stuff it,” Billboard replied swiftly and gruffly.

O’Shea nodded against him. But now…

“This last question is the hardest,” O’Shea warned, but she went ahead with it before she could overthink on pushing him. “Did you gain valuable information using the…methods you employed? Did your actions save lives, Billboard?”

His whole body tensed. “I’ve thought about this, endlessly, and revisited it with Doctor Ed, but regardless of the answer I’m about to give you, it hasn’t eased my remorse.”

“I understand that,” O’Shea answered firmly. “But I still want to hear whether or not your actions made a difference.”

Billboard sighed. “Yes. Ineveryinstance where I complied with orders, it either saved a village from being captured, or kept civilians—women and children—from being slaughtered. Sometimes the intel warned of rogue factions who were planning to launch surprise attacks on our base, which we were able to combat once we found out.” His face held pain. “But knowing that doesn’t help, because my brain keeps asking, does the end justify the means?”

That query, O’Shea could tell, came from deep within Billboard’s heart, and she wanted to back off, but she couldn’t soften yet.

“I’ll piggy-back on that, then,” O’Shea stated, needing desperately to make her case. “If you hadn’t extracted word of those plots from the terrorists, and someone on your team had been killed because you lacked that intelligence…” She let that hang and posed a second scenario. “Or let’s say you’d become friendly with some of the kids in a village that was in the terrorists’ path for destruction, how would you have felt if any of them had been slaughtered?”

“I… I did know some villagers,” Billboard answered gruffly. “And it would have destroyed me if they, or any of my buddies had been hurt or killed.”

It was exactly the answer she’d expected.

“So, it seems to me that the positive outcomesdidmake the extraction of information vital,” O’Shea reprised, “even if it went against all your principles.”

Billboard turned and stared at her with creases in his forehead and also bracketing out from around his pinched mouth.

“That’s what eats at me,” Billboard admitted with a shudder. “I didn’t want to do the things I did, but I know I’d do them again given the same circumstances.”

“As would any reasonable human being,” O’Shea assured him, stroking comfortingly at the lines on his face. “You’re a good man, Billboard. A good man who was put in an untenable position. Now we’ll leave all that behind and focus on the here and now. Okay?”

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