West to the End of the World

This Mournful Life

Three days earlier...

    Sergeant First Class Booker Ashly Dunbar — just Dunbar if you value your health — dragged himself through the bustling airport with a limp and a grimace. The nearly twenty-hour flight and the corresponding turbulence had not been kind to the four healing bullet holes in his left side. The Afghan desert had not been too kind either, but the thought manifested into the ache on his side. He could not recall a time when he had been in that much pain, but compared to the alternative, he would deal with it just fine.

    The alternative, however, had not been his own death. After serving sixteen years in the U.S. Army, and extensive deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan, the thought of himself dying had lost its menace. Yet, even the slightest fathom of losing any soldier in his platoon was a gut-wrenching portrait of the most absolute loss. Many of the men were significantly younger than the 36-year-old Dunbar. Some fresh out of high school, young enough to be his son. Although Dunbar had never been a father, he felt that losing a member of his platoon would be just as punishing as losing a child.

    That was why the importance of the pain in his side was as miniscule as a dust mote in the greater scheme of things. Despite a few injuries, namely his own, it had been a successful tour. He returned home with all twenty of his soldiers, though, not every piece of them — Private Adams, for example, lost two fingers. But without Dunbar, the damage would have been much greater.

    Dunbar's superiors often called him modest, but he laid no more claim to that character trait than the government did to the fact that it was incapable of minding its own business. Modesty had nothing to do with it. As far as Dunbar was concerned, providing assistance to others was just something that people did — well, most people. It was the right thing to do. Instinctive, like a mother rushing to the aid of a wailing infant. That does not, however, go on to say that Dunbar was incapable of accepting praise. He took credit were credit was due, but not for something that the average person was competent enough of accomplishing. There is no heroism in the orthodox, Dunbar believed.

    Aside from his beliefs, and despite the success of this last tour, he also could not embrace the reverence because there was still a ghost of his former grief lingering just beneath his shadow when he spared a thought for the tours that had not been as successful. These days, he tried not to think about them as much. His psychiatrist, Mrs. Avery, advised him not to out of fear that he could develop post-traumatic stress disorder. Dunbar thought she was full of shit, but took the advice anyway. There was no benefit from dwelling on things past.

    Dunbar, who was a tall, dark-skinned man that looked about as easily pushed over as a tractor-trailer, waded through the airport's rush. He kept his side guarded, quickly stepping around bodies that came too close to his. He thought that he must have looked ridiculous; one of the tallest, brawniest men in the crowd flinching whenever a woman with an arm-full of luggage came rushing by him like a pint-sized tornado. Although his mother always said he was "built like a Mack truck," at that moment he felt more like the reject of a soapbox derby.

    He thought that the airport had been overwhelming busy that day. More so than usual. He always knew airports to be congested with traveling businessmen, elderly retirees migrating south, and the occasional foreigner flying back to the motherland to visit family, but in all the years he spent booking flights and walking terminals, he had never once seen an airport as populous as he had that day.

    A stout, fair-skinned man in an expensive suit that shouted orders at, presumably, his secretary through the speaker of his slick cell phone collided hard with Dunbar's left side. Dunbar dropped his bag, the searing, blinding pain traveling back and forth through each of the four wounds like a pinball.