Red found himself with the 17th Infantry. He wore no gloves, like the rest of the men, as he never needed them; he wore the normal Kevlar as required, and carried the normal M-16 as demanded, though he hardly used that also. What he did use was mostly around his waist and in his backpack.
They were going through another house. This one consisted of three apartments that had been abandoned and looted through already. Papers fluttered in the hot breeze, a trace of a gauze curtain moving in the window caught his eye. They turned a corner, and someone yelled, “Sarge!”
Sergeant Jackson, in charge of the squad, immediately followed the voice and then yelled, “Cutter!” When his name was called like that, Red knew that he needed to be in work mode. He stepped forward, already unhitching his backpack.
He looked past the man and saw a boy, not older than eight or nine, sitting on the floor and looking at them imploringly, his dirty face streaked with tears. Strapped to the boy was what looked like grenades and a series of C4 blocks.
“Jesus Christ,” Nimrod, one of the rednecks from Alabama, whispered, and Cutter refrained himself from making the sign of the cross. The other Southern redneck from the Florida Panhandle whistled lowly.
Red kept his helmet on but got the tools out of his backpack. Cutting pliers, some tape, who knew what. He needed to disengage that alarm clock.
“Can ya do it?” Jackson asked.
“Yes,” Red said quietly, and stepped into the room. The boy looked up at him, frozen in fear. “Shh,” Red said in a comforting tone. “You’ll be all right – “
The rest of the men came in, none of them looking at the side. Nimrod was the first to go down. To their right, a group of men came screaming into the room, but their screams were drowned out by their gunfire. Red went to pick up his gun, but something hit the boy before him, and he exploded in shards of flesh and bone shrapnel.
Surprisingly, the blast did nothing to him but throw him back a few feet. He should have been dead. Instead he heard the cries of the men who got caught in the explosion – he shouldn’t have been able to hear that, either. The boy was nothing but a spatter of blood on the wall.
He put his head in his hands, bloody hands. How did that happen, he wondered, as he looked across the room to see the rest of his squad lying in grotesque positions, pools of blood underneath them.
He whimpered, as he crawled to the first man’s gun he could reach. It was covered in gore, but he got it loaded. He himself was bloody and soaking wet. He looked down to make sure he had all his parts – he had only wet himself, which didn’t make him feel that much better. He started crawling head-first out of the apartment, back exactly the way they came, the muzzle of his gun leading first. As soon as he got the door, he threw it open, and there, before him and going through the truck, were the terrorists – who opened fire on him.
Red woke up in a sweat, whimpering again, holding in a scream. That wasn’t what had happened. He forced himself to remember what really happened:
They came upon the boy, strapped to the nines with explosives. The men walked into the room, sweeping it as they should have, and then having Red’s back as he cut each wire of the bomb to free the boy, who threw himself in his arms the minute Red said, “You’re okay.”
The ambush never happened, not to him. One of the other guys had told the story, and even that didn’t end the way his dream ended – the soldiers overpowered the terrorists, but lost two men in doing so.
He hoped Brixl didn’t notice…