Trial By Fire (47 page)

“In a nutshell, the president is going to announce that the armed forces of the United States are going to establish a security zone south of the Rio Grande, to be patrolled by us, with or without the cooperation of the Mexican government.”

Jan sat there for several seconds, absorbing what she had just been told. “How do you know that the Council of 13 is going to reject it? Have they made an announcement?”

Dixon, his face showing no signs of concern, played with his drinking straw as he answered. “No, not that I know of. But there are subtle ways soldiers have of broadcasting their intentions. Take that spot report, for example. It was from the division cav squadron watching International Bridge Number One five blocks fro.m here. Right now, as we speak, the Mexicans are preparing their side of the bridge for demolitions.” He turned and looked at Jan. “Call me paranoid, but it seems to me that our friends south of the border are trying to tell us something, and it ain’t

‘Welcome.’ ”

Mercy Hospital, Laredo, Texas 2025 hours, 7 September With nothing to do while he waited for the doctor to finish working on Lieutenant Kozak, Harold Cerro reread her report concerning her pla toon’s foray into Mexico that morning. It didn’t get any better with the third reading. Grammatically and structurally, it was quite good, unusual for a junior Army officer. Its tone and content, however, were self demeaning and apologetic in the extreme. Were the investigation into the cause of the border incident to be based solely upon Kozak’s statement, an uninformed person would walk away with the impression that Kozak had planned and been responsible for everything that had occurred from the loss of the Alamo in 1836 to the overthrowing of the old Mexican government in June. It was no wonder that Colonel Dixon had sent him to talk to her, both to assess her mental state and to get her to reconsider her first report and rewrite it.

Though Cerro didn’t relish his role as a “special projects” officer—

which, translated to English, came out as “shitty little jobs” officer—it was better than sitting in the current operations van at the main command post, answering telephones and watching majors thrash about and ping off the walls. It seemed even the most mundane things sent everyone at the CP into orbit on days like this one, especially when no one knew for sure what was going to happen. Staff officers from subordinate brigades, especially the operations officers, were on the phone every hour, asking for current updates on pending orders or changes to the rules of engagement.

Staff officers from the corps command post called more frequently, asking for additional information on the border-crossing incident. It seemed, at times, that the people at corps wanted to know everything about the platoon, down to the names of each individual who had crossed, their ranks, race, the amount of time they had spent in the unit, etc., etc., etc. About the only thing that the corps staff hadn’t asked for by the time Cerro left was what color eyes Kozak’s people had, though there were bets that someone would get to that question sooner or later. Such questions, in and of themselves, were bad enough. What made it worse was that the staff at corps never appeared to share any information with each other. In one incident, two corps staff officers, who Cerro knew sat next to each other, called within a single ten-minute period to ask the same question. Therefore, when Colonel Dixon had come up to him and handed him the file containing the reports of the incident, notes of the commanding general’s initial impression, and instructions to find Kozak, talk to her, and see if she wanted to change her statement, Cerro jumped at the chance.

“Captain Cerro, you can come with me now. The doctor is just about finished with your friend.”

Looking up from the report on his lap, Cerro saw the emergency room nurse he had talked to earlier. Far from being an angel of mercy, the nurse that stood before Cerro looked more like a sitcom character. The short, round Hispanic woman, in her late thirties, had a figure that had all the definition of a bowling ball. She wore her hair pulled back from her round face in a bun. The whites she wore, which no doubt had been fresh and clean hours ago, were soaked with sweat and stained with drops and smears of blood. Were it not for those bloodstains, as well as the haggard look and eyes that showed signs of emotional exhaustion, the nurse would have been an object of humor. But she wasn’t. While the chaos and pace of her activities differed from Cerro’s as night does from day, her look told Cerro that she, like him, had been dealing with the real world too long that day.

In silence, she led him to an examining room, where she entered after looking in at the small square window in the door. Opening the door for Cerro, she let him enter and left without a word, headed for her next task.

Lieutenant Kozak, lying on the examination table, had her legs dangling off the edge, her hands behind her head, elbows out, and eyes closed.

Before he said anything, Cerro studied her. Her boots, as well as the pants of her uniform, were covered with dried mud, which, Cerro thought, was from the crossing of the Rio Grande. From the waist up, she wore only a brown, regulation T-shirt stained with wavy white lines of salt from her perspiration, which made the shirt appear to be tie-dyed.

With her hands held behind her, her breasts, straining against the brown T-shirt, stood like two firm mounds, perfect and round. Since her eyes were closed and the nurse had left, Cerro stood for a moment and gauged, from a distance, their approximate size. He had always pegged her as having a B cup. Now, without the bulky class-A greens or the baggy camouflaged battle dress uniform to obscure them, he could clearly see that young Lieutenant Kozak was a healthy C cup.

Cerro was assessing Kozak’s dominant features when the door behind him burst open and a doctor came into the examination room, talking without looking up from a chart he carried. “Well, you’re in great shape there, Lieutenant. No concussion, no signs of fractures, nothing broken, except your nose.”

The doctor’s sudden appearance caused Kozak to take her hands out from behind her head and, grasping the sides of the examination table, push herself up into a sitting position. As she did, she noticed Cerro standing next to the door, blushing slightly, as if he had just been caught doing something wrong. It never occurred to her that he had been standing there eyeing her while she rested.

Looking first at the doctor, Cerro didn’t notice that Kozak had sat up.

When he had recovered from the sudden appearance of the doctor, as well as his personal embarrassment, he looked back at the lieutenant. It was only then that he realized he had been so busy staring at her breasts that he had not seen her face. What he saw bore no resemblance to the clean, soft face that he had come to associate with the young lieutenant. Her gentle features were obscured by a swollen nose covered with a piece of wide medical tape. Only the tip, swollen, scraped, and red from soreness, showed below the tape. Protruding from her nostrils were the ends of white cotton packing. As bad as her nose looked, however, the blue-black circles that began at her nose and surrounded her eyes made Kozak look like a boxer who had been knocked out. Without thinking, Cerro shook his head and mumbled, “Jesus, you look like hell.”

Unable to turn away from the doctor, who had tilted her head back and was looking at her nose, Kozak was about to give Cerro a cynical

“Thanks” for the less-than-cheerful comment, but thought better of it.

She had no idea why he was here. Even though she was convinced that, at that moment, she didn’t have a friend in the world, she didn’t want to take any chances and alienate a possible friend. So she held her tongue, letting the doctor complete his examination and allowing Cerro’s comment to pass unanswered. She would let Cerro initiate the conversation and set the tone when he was ready.

Assuming that Cerro was there to pick Kozak up, the doctor, finished with his examination, turned away from her and said to Cerro as he prepared to leave, “Well, Captain, she’s all yours. You should keep the packing in the nose for twenty-four hours.” Pausing at the door, the doctor looked back at Kozak. “Next time something like this happens, don’t wait ten hours before coming in. It would have been a lot less painful had we been able to work on your nose immediately after your accident.” Without another word, the doctor left. Kozak stared at Cerro, waiting for him to say something.

Feeling awkward, and not knowing how to start, Cerro stalled, moving over to a chair. Taking his Kevlar helmet from under his right arm, he dropped it on the floor from waist level, making a loud clunk that reverberated in the small examining room. Sitting down on the edge of the seat, facing Kozak, Cerro tucked his feet up under the chair but allowed his knees to spread apart. He held the folder containing the reports on the foray into Mexico against his stomach with both hands, and looked at Kozak for a moment, considering how he was going to do this.

From the examining table, Kozak watched Cerro as a bird watches a cat circling the tree it’s in. He kept staring at her face, which no doubt looked like hell. At least, she thought it did. If it looked half as bad as it felt, it was terrible. During the initial exam, one of the nurses had looked at Kozak’s face with a pained expression. With a sigh, the nurse had grasped her hand, telling her not to worry, that the black and blue would go away as soon as the swelling went down. Instead of serving to calm Kozak, it had only worried her, creating an uncontrollable urge to find a mirror and see what it was that caused everyone to stare. With Cerro sitting there, holding folders that no doubt contained statements and reports concerning the crossing of the Rio Grande, it would be a few more minutes before she got to look at her own face. ,

Seeing that Lieutenant Kozak wasn’t going to make his task any easier by initiating the conversation, Cerro decided that he might as well just launch into it. After all, diplomacy, subtlety, and regard for someone’s feelings never seemed to blend well with the spirit of the bayonet. Praised by raters throughout his career for his direct, frank, and uncompromising approach to all matters, Cerro now found himself wishing he had a few more skills in dealing with people. Sidetracked for a moment by that thought, he wondered if he was concerned about his approach because Kozak was a woman. No, he was sure that wasn’t it. On the day he had observed Kozak’s squad get overrun, he hadn’t even considered the gender issue when he “counseled” her. No, that wasn’t the reason he was uncomfortable. Was it because she was hurt? That could be. After all, he felt the same way whenever he had seen any of his own men wounded or injured. But that wasn’t it completely, for in the past Cerro had always been able to say something to the wounded. Even when faced with a man from his own unit who had lost a limb, Cerro had been able to work through his natural revulsion of injured people and say something appropriate.

Yet here he was stymied by a lieutenant with a simple broken nose and two black eyes.

That was it. Suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, the reason for the unaccustomed empathy that was hamstringing his efforts to carry on, struck Cerro. Instead of looking at Second Lieutenant N. Kozak, infantry platoon leader, Cerro had been looking at himself. Without realizing it, he had projected himself into Kozak’s position as he read the reports and weighed her actions. The feelings that he was experiencing were not those of a male seeking to protect the female of the species. Nor were they of one human experiencing sympathy for an injured fellow being.

Instead, Cerro found himself having trouble dealing with Kozak because he had true insight into the emotional upheaval that she was going through, the same upheaval he, as a second lieutenant, had experienced after his introduction to combat. For the briefest of moments, he was able to see Kozak in a light that transcended all differences. He saw her not as a person of a different rank, or sex, or age, or anything. She was, at that moment, the newest recruit to what W. E. B. Griffin referred to as the brotherhood of war.

With his own emotions in check and a clear idea of how to approach Kozak, Cerro started. “The G3 has sent me to talk to you, one on one, after reviewing all the statements and reports concerning this morning’s crossing of the border by your platoon.”

Once Cerro finally began to speak, Kozak breathed a sigh of relief. He had, while he had sat there staring at her, made her feel uncomfortable and very vulnerable. It had been as if she were a specimen under a microscope, open to examination and unable to do anything. Now that he had started talking, at least she could respond to his initiatives and comments.

Grasping the edge of the examining table, Kozak nodded, responded with a “Yes, sir” that was barely audible even to herself, and waited for Cerro to play out his initial hand.

Deciding to cut to the heart of the matter, Cerro moved his feet out from under the chair and planted them firmly on the floor, leaning forward, resting his elbows on his knees. When he was settled in his new position, he looked into Kozak’s swollen black eyes. “The G3 believes that you need to rewrite your statement. It is his opinion that you are being far too critical of your actions. Were this report to go forward as is, there is the chance that you might open yourself to undeserved criticism and possible disciplinary action that would be unwarranted.”

After a short pause, during which she looked down at the floor, then back into his eyes, Kozak asked Cerro what he thought. Although he knew that she was asking specifically about the proposition that he had presented to her—the rewriting of her report—Cerro understood that what she was really asking for was his opinion of her actions as a platoon leader, as an infantryman, and as a soldier. Deciding that this was no time for great philosophical discussions or subtle mental jousting, Cerro decided to talk to Kozak in a manner that he wished someone had used with him after his first battle. He dropped the folder with the reports to the floor and linked his hands. “Lieutenant Kozak, you done good.”

Though Kozak had been hoping to get around to Cerro’s assessment of her performance, he had surprised her by doing so right off, and it showed. As before, she sat on the table, in silence, and let Cerro go on.