Mettle of Honor (gxg)

Chapter 8

Two weeks later...

At least the army medics had the decency to put them together in the hospital, Justice thought. It turned out that she was a little prophetic and felt horrible about it. They had done just what she had been worried about, hiked, and fought all the way to freedom, only to get shot. Well, Sara did. They had been moving slowly through the forest, with Sara carrying her over her shoulder, and her rifle held over her hand in a nonthreatening manner, when a young new recruit on their own side put a bullet through Sara's knee, spinning her to the ground while Justice landed on top of her, both in searing agony, before someone in charge stopped the shooting.

Once everything was sorted out, the two of them were finally airlifted out of the battlefield, then got their wounds stabilized before they were put on another flight, this time to Ramstein Air Base where they had spent the rest of the time recovering. They'd already done surgery on them both, as much as they could anyway. Justice was always going to have a limp, the shrapnel having done too much damage to the ligaments in her foot, and then a minor infection from not being treated in so long making it heal wrong. But Sara was in worse shape, because she was going to need a new knee, and that would take time to recover from.

"So, which one of us gets the nickname gimpy?" Justice asked Sara. "Or should we go with limpy?"

Sara just groaned, not wanting to answer that, but knowing that she was right. "I'll be gimpy, and you can be limpy."

"At least the girls will be happy, we should be around the house a lot more," Justice said softly, and with a trace of bitterness. Indeed, they'd already been told that they would probably both get medical discharges, since neither of them would be able to pass the physical requirements to serve with their injuries. That meant they'd have to find new civilian jobs with the training that they had, or maybe go back to school and start over.

They were still waiting for their phones and other personal effects to arrive from the barracks they'd been staying at back in Romania, but the hope was that they would arrive soon. Things like that were a lower priority than stopping the fighting that had broken out, so the best that they could do had been to get word to Justice's father, who would then tell Kate and Elsie that they were alive, and hopefully quell any fears that they had. They both missed talking to their wives, but had the prospect of seeing them soon making them feel better.

They'd tell them about the extent of the injuries later because that would be a different discussion entirely. Most of the time, they stayed in bed, watching whatever was on the TV in the recovery room, and talking about options after the army processed them, though they had to do physical therapy too. They did have one interesting interview with a pair of officers trying to find out what had happened to them and how they had wound up so far from the bridge.

Apparently, the story that Sergeant Wilson had told their superiors was that their position had been overrun by enemy armor due to a listening post failure, and that he'd had to retreat due to the tactical superiority of the enemy. He had provided no details whatsoever, but his superiors hadn't thought to question anything until the girls had shown up and told people what actually happened. The bridge and surrounding area had already been retaken by friendly forces, but even before that, unmanned drones had photographed the area, and the girls happily pointed out everything in the photos that corroborated their story. The tank was still in the river, and the armored troop carrier wrecked on the side of the road. Wilson hadn't even mentioned those, let alone the bridge being detonated, in his report because it happened well after he left. They didn't know what might happen to their ex-sergeant, but they no longer cared. However, abandoning a post, abandoning your troops, and then lying about it, usually didn't go over well in wartime.