Page 98 of Sully

Until the bomb detonated, sending me flying through the air, landing hard enough on my back to make me gasp for air.

Rubble shot out everywhere, heavy stones sourced from the nearby mountains flying and landing all around and over me.

“One landed on my head and I was out,” I told Bonnie, Chris, and Fischer. “When I woke up, I was still mostly buried. Had to dig myself out.”

I was playing it down for Bonnie’s sake. I had a nasty, gaping head wound. Was bleeding so bad I was blacking in and out, was disoriented and dizzy.

But in situations like that, even bleeding from the head, adrenaline could get you a long way.

It got me out from under those rocks.

I’d walked, stumbled, crawled the rest of the way across that road, finding a giant mass of rubble that had once been a building.

A building where my men had just entered.

I’d known.

Of course I did, in the back of my mind, that no one could have survived that kind of explosion.

It didn’t matter though.

Those were my brothers.

I couldn’t just walk away if there was even a chance that one of them made it.

I’d like to claim that you got used to seeing gnarly shit. And maybe, in some ways, you did. But when it was the limbs of your own men, familiar tattoos etched in their skin, little bracelets on their wrists from their babies back home, yeah, there was no getting through that discovery with your mental health intact.

I barely remember getting back to the Humvee. And I must have blacked out from the blood loss at some point because I had no fucking idea how I’d gotten from the Humvee and back to a hospital.

All I knew was I was in that hospital without any of my men. None of them had made it.

I had. Just because I was further away. Because I hadn’t been leading them into that building like I should have.

I’d spent weeks in that hospital, recovering from the head wound that had done some weird shit to my ability to communicate, lying flat on my back because of a compound fracture to my leg. I’d seen the pants sometime later that I’d been wearing, a big bloody hole in them from where my leg bone had been poking out.

There’d been the subsequent infection, then a shit ton of physical therapy to learn to walk again.

And, yeah, the mental shit.

The mental shit that meant I was never going back into the field again. The kind that had some higher-ups somewhere going ‘Yeah, let’s let that one go.’

Then that’s what they did. I left the only life I’d known for my adulthood, left to flounder in an unfamiliar world with a mind going dark places.

That was why I’d worked so hard to seek the light, to find the good, to have fun. Because I never wanted my mind going back there, wondering why I’d been the one to make it. I, who didn’t have a wife and kids at home, who didn’t have parents who would sob over my casket, who didn’t have anyone who would really give a fuck.

I shouldn’t have been the one to make it.

And there were times when… I didn’t want to keep making it. When I wanted to clock out, to right a wrong the universe made.

“Sully,” Bonnie said, reaching out for my hand, giving it a squeeze, pulling me back out of my memories. “I know a lot of people who are really glad you didn’t ‘clock out,’” she said, blinking back the wetness in her eyes.

“Yeah,” I agreed, squeezing her hand back. “Know that now. Things were different back then, though.”

“Well, this really narrows it down,” Chris said, turning to look at one of the women sitting at a desk. “Friends and familyof the guys who died in that explosion. Most likely family. Brothers.”

“On it,” the woman said.

“Why?” Bonnie asked.

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