Ed Villein's Arc

Chapter 6 of 12

He wakes at 0400, same as always, and the first thought in his head is the same one that's been there for eighteen days: one of those men is leaving. The thought sits heavy, and under it comes another one, older and colder. Fallujah. Second tour. He gets up and makes coffee in the kitchenette of his rental, the kind of place that smells like other people's cooking no matter how many times he cleans. On the counter sits a photograph in a cracked frame—him and his brother holding their certificates from combat school, both of them grinning like they knew something the camera didn't. He doesn't remember who took the picture. He picks it up and studies his own face, the version that didn't know yet what it felt like to speak three words into a radio and watch a building come apart. The building had been a two-story structure with a collapsed corner, rubble piled against the entrance like broken teeth. His spotter called movement on the second floor, two shooters with a clear line on the squad crossing the intersection below. Ed had ten seconds to decide. He pressed the transmit button on his radio—the same model he still has in a box under his bed, cracked casing and bent antenna—and said the words. The sniper fired twice. Two bodies stopped moving. The squad made it across. That night Ed threw up behind a Humvee and his sergeant told him it gets easier. It didn't. It just became something he could do. He sets the photograph back down and pours his coffee into the sink. The executives don't get easier either. They're not soldiers in a building. They're men who poisoned his land for profit and laughed about it in depositions. But the weight feels the same—the knowledge that he's going to give an order, and someone is going to stop breathing because of it. He carried that weight in Fallujah because it meant his men went home. He'll carry it now because forty-seven people didn't. The decision is already made. It was made the day he found that barrel in the well. What he's doing now is just counting down the days until he presses the button.