Any Soldier

by Lubrican

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Chapter Two

By March, 2009, Julia had enough experience with the Army to have learned that it wasn't a system that was user friendly. Her conviction that Bob was either injured or dead was like acid in her belly, though, and she couldn't let it rest until she knew which it was. She was rock solid sure that he hadn't just decided to stop writing.

She had tried everything she could think of, from contacting the public affairs office at Fort Leonard Wood, to going to the local Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter. In every case, once it was determined she had no official ties to the soldier in question, a stone wall was erected.

In complete frustration she had finally approached Ron Zelch, who had been teaching fourth grade at David Barton Elementary School for two decades. On the wall behind his desk were pictures of groups of men in uniform. She'd never paid any attention to them before, but now he was a potential source of advice.

"What can I do for you?" asked the man who was old enough to be her elderly father.

"Are you in any of those pictures?" she asked.

"Most of them," he said.

"I need your help."

When she explained it to him, he nodded.

"They have all these rules," he said. "But they aren't sure just what the rules actually say, and the safest thing is to say they can't help you."

"But all I want to do is find out if he's alive or dead," she moaned. "Surely that can't hurt anything."

"I agree," he said. "But it's easy to say 'no' so they do."

"How can I make it harder for them to say 'no?'" she asked.

He grinned. "That's easy. Just lie."

The lie they came up with was quite simple. They decided that Staff Sergeant Hickory had left some very valuable property in the custody of one Julia Miller, who was no longer able to maintain it and needed to return it to the soldier.

"Fine," said Julia. "But who will care?"

"Don't know yet," he said. "But we have nothing to lose, right?"

"I guess not," she said.

"First, though, I have to ask you questions," he said. “Lots of questions."

"All right," said Julia.

Lieutenant Colonel David Adkins stood, arms folded, as a sergeant strapped the prosthetic limb onto Bob's stump.

"The first fitting is almost always uncomfortable," said Adkins. "So expect that."

"Yes, sir," said Bob automatically.

"Don't let go of the rails, no matter how stable you feel," the officer went on. "Initially all we want to do is see how you compensate while standing. You haven't stood in quite a while."

Bob didn't tell them he'd been hopping back and forth to the latrine for weeks, tired of sitting in the chair all the time. He still took the chair outside, but inside the ward he almost never used it any more. He'd fallen a few times, but was good, now, at avoiding hitting anything with his stump. He still felt the phantom foot, but it wasn't so bad any more. He no longer had the urge to stand on it, for example.

The sergeant stood up. "Good to go," he said.

"All right," said LTC Adkins. "Grip the rails and try standing."

Bob made it look like he was straining. It would have been easy to pop up and try resting weight, finally, on his left leg. He didn't, though, because he was finally getting some attention and didn't want things to go in reverse. The sooner he could get a leg, the sooner he could get the fuck away from this place. They were talking about keeping him here six more months!

He let weight down on the prosthetic. There was pain, but only of an annoying kind. He couldn't help lifting his right foot off the mat, just to see what that felt like. He leaned and his hip hit the left rail of the parallel bars he was standing between.

"Careful," warned the office.

"It's not bad," said Bob. "I'm surprised, in fact."

"One thing the Army has is good prosthetics," said Adkins.

"I could get around on this," said Bob, taking a couple of hesitant, and very small steps.

"Oh this is nothing," said Adkins. "Your final leg will feel like you've always had it. You'll be able to run on it, maybe even play soccer if you don't overdo it.

"I don't think there's a lot of soccer in my future," said Bob.

"We'll see," said the colonel, leaning down to examine the interface between flesh and prosthetic.

"This is Sergeant First Class Valentine. How can I help you?"

"Is this casualty assistance?" asked Ron. “I need to talk to somebody in casualty assistance."

"I'm the Casualty Assistance NCOIC," said Valentine. "How can I help you?"

"It's not me. It's my niece. She's gone and got herself mixed up with a grunt and everything is fucked up, like usual when the Army's involved."

Valentine rolled his eyes. "What's the problem, sir?" he asked.

"First off, I want you to know who you're talking to," said Ron, his voice rough. "I'm Lance Corporal Ronald Zelch, service number 5663271, Bravo Company, Second of the first Infantry Regiment, United States Marine Corps. I ain't retired, because after two tours in Nam I got the fuck out. But I served my goddammed country, and I got two purple hearts to prove it."

"Thank you for your service, Lance Corporal," said Valentine, sitting up straight. Valentine was a history buff when it came to Viet Nam, and the unit this man had referenced had been through the thick of things. "How can I help you?"

"My niece got mixed up with a soldier, and he give her something to take care of for him until he got back from Iraq. Somethin' valuable. And now she ain't heard from him for months, and she's all worked up about it and she don't want no more to do with this thing he give her. She wants to give it back, but nobody will tell her where he is so she can do that."

Valentine rolled his eyes again. "What is this valuable thing, Lance Corporal?"

"It's a kid."

Valentine blinked. Then he smiled. This wasn't his problem at all.

"You've got the wrong office, Corporal," he said. "You need to get in touch with the family assistance office for the unit he's in.”

"Well, there's a problem with that," said Ron.

"What's that?" asked Valentine.

"When they was going together, she didn't want her parents to know about it, because she knew they'd raise a fuss, what with her being underaged and all that. And then, when she found out she was pregnant, he was about to deploy, so they got married on the sly and Uncle Sam don't know about it."

"Oh shit," groaned Valentine. Then "Sorry about that."

"I've heard worse," said Ron, grinning. "Anyway, she got some letters from him, but now they're being returned as no longer assigned. I kind of figured that meant he got wounded. At least I hope he only got wounded, because all hell is going to break loose when she turns up pregnant with no husband to produce because the Army won't tell her where he is."

"You mean the baby hasn't even been born yet?" asked Valentine. Nobody was more appealing to the media than a pregnant, grieving widow. If he could hand these people off to somebody else, and it blew up then, at least he wouldn't be involved.

"What do you have on this soldier?" asked Valentine. "Maybe I can do something for you."

Colonel William Bell leaned back in his chair and looked thoughtfully at SSG Hickory.

"Why are you so anxious to leave Walter Reed?" he asked.

"I think the question would be why is anybody anxious to stay?" replied Bob.

Bell ignored the comment. "According to what you've told me you have no family. You have nowhere to go, and no job lined up. Your enlistment goes for two more years, though I'm sure that will be waived by the medical board."

"Which will take another six to eight months, while I rot in that ward over there," said Bob.

"I understand you have only another month of rehab before they give you your final leg," said Bell. "At that point you'll be able to go on pass."

"For an evening, or maybe a weekend if I'm lucky," said Bob.

"Where would you go for a weekend?" asked the psychiatrist.

"Hell, I don't know," said Bob. "To a bar? I could sure go for a bottle of Scotch about now."

"A whole bottle?"

"Having a whole bottle doesn't mean you have to drink the whole bottle at once," said Bob.

"Alcohol abuse is not the answer to your problems, Sergeant Hickory."

"I wasn't aware I had any problems," said Bob. "Except being locked up here."

"You have anxiety issues," said the doctor, "as well as anger issues. You appear to be either living in a fantasy world or willing to become homeless just to leave this hospital."

"Why can't I go back to my unit?" asked Bob.

"Your unit is still deployed."

"All right then, I can go to the rear detachment."

"Which is fully staffed," said the doctor. "What would you do there?"

"Hell, I don't know. Go to the gym," said Bob, exasperated.

"We have gyms here," said the shrink.

"Stay with friends," said Bob.

"And their names are...?"

"You know I can't remember everything," moaned Bob. "That doesn't mean I'm helpless."

The psychiatrist looked at his watch. He had three more patients to see and then he could go meet Major Jenkins for handball. Major Jenkins was forty-one, in an unhappy marriage, and in need of some appreciation. Bell had been working on giving her the kind of attention he thought would make her flower, and he wanted to get to that. He wanted to pick that flower when she bloomed.

"What I know, Sergeant, is that you're not ready to leave Walter Reed quite yet," said Bell.

"Hell, Corporal, you haven't lost your edge, I'll tell you that," said SFC Valentine. "Even without the social you gave me enough to find him easily. He was put on an evac to Walter Reed in late November. He's still there in the med hold unit."

"You got a mailing address?" asked Ron.

Valentine spilled it off.

"I don't suppose by any chance you got the name of the CO," said Ron.

"Can't help you there," said Valentine. "It doesn't list commanders names. I got a phone number for the CQ (Charge of Quarters) desk, though."

"Let me have that," said Ron. He wrote it down. "Thanks, Sarge. For a grunt you've been an all right guy."

"I try to help out my jarhead friends whenever I can," said Valentine expansively. "Good luck to your niece. She's probably gonna need it. He should have told his unit he got married."

"I know, I know. Youth is stupid," said Ron.

"Hooah!" said Valentine.

"Semper Fi," said Ron, and hung up.

He turned to Julia, who was almost dancing with impatience.

"I got you an address," he said, grinning widely.

Bob gave a shot at joining a pickup game of basketball. Under normal circumstances he'd have been laughed off the court, but these weren't normal circumstances. Four of the players only had one arm. One was playing with two stumps where his wrists should have been. There was another man who had a prosthesis affixed to his thigh. Like Bob, he had the running adaptor attached. The running adaptor looked a little like a big J, fashioned from what acted like spring steel, but was actually a carbon fiber based material that was stronger than steel. The flex of the lower part of the J created spring and, with a little practice, a man could run on the adapter, using the spring to compensate for what the missing foot, ankle and calf could no longer do. It worked well for running. Basketball, however, called for the use of slightly different muscle groups, or at least muscle groups used in different ways.

To put it plainly, it was very awkward, and both men fell down a lot.

Nobody laughed. Instead, they were approached by someone - not infrequently a one-armed man - and helped back up.

Eventually the game devolved into a game of H.O.R.S.E.

Julia looked at the letter she'd just written. She hadn't told the children yet that she'd found their soldier. She'd held them off for months by telling them he was on a secret mission, and couldn't break cover to write back to them. It was what she'd come up with initially, and now she was stuck with it. If she told them he was in America, they'd want to write to him and expect him to write back.

And that was the problem. He was in America ... and hadn't written.

Her brain told her that meant he wasn't really interested. Her heart couldn't buy that. But she couldn't think of any reason why he wouldn't write, unless he was horribly injured and couldn't write. Ron hadn't wanted to push things with the man he'd talked to on the phone. He said they'd been lucky enough as it was, and that he wanted to stay under the radar of official notice.

Things would have gone a lot calmer had Julia just called WRAMC, which has an office called SFAC, or the Soldier Family Assistance Center. They would have told her Bob was recuperating and doing well, though that's about as much detail as they'd have given someone who wasn't a family member.

It's important to understand that the term "family member" doesn't mean, to the U.S. Army, what it means to most of us. To most of us Uncle Frank is a family member. But the Army can't accept something so simple. Instead, the Army has a form, called a DD Form 93, Emergency Data Card, on which the service member lists "family members." The form is used to identify those family members the service member wants notified if anything happens. The form is supposed to be updated yearly at a minimum, and prior to every deployment.

On SSG Robert C. Hickory's DD Form 93, only one name was listed: Claudia Strangline, identified as his next of kin and sister. There was a phone number and address on the card, written in pencil, which is the only writing tool authorized to be used for that purpose on DD Form 93. Pencil is also used to record the date of the last update. To this particular DD Form 93 was attached by paper clip a DD Form 106-A, telephone contact log showing the times and dates attempts had been made to notify Claudia Strangline of her brother's status. None of the attempts had been successful, and the last one was noted "number no longer in service."

So, if Julia would have called, and identified herself as herself, someone in the SFAC would have checked SSG Hickory's DD Form 93 and determined that Julia could be told little or nothing.

But she didn't call. She wasn't aware the SFAC existed. She wasn't aware that DD Form 93 existed. She was just concerned about the man she unconsciously thought of as her boyfriend, even though she'd never met him in person.

So, during Spring Break, instead of working in her classroom, Julia got in her car and drove sixteen hours straight to Washington D.C. Using a Google Map, she found Walter Reed Army Medical Center, an immense facility comprised of dozens of buildings, all of which have names that tell the observer nothing whatsoever about what goes on inside them.

For lack of a better plan, Julia simply went into the first building she could find a parking space next to and, having mastered Ron Zelch's technique, said "I'm looking for my husband. Can you help me?"

Bob walked now with only a slight limp. With pants on that covered the prosthesis, the casual observer might think he'd sprained an ankle, and was favoring it a bit.

He approached room 395B in building 1, Administrative Services Support Division. There was a small placard that protruded from the wall above the door. On both sides if the plastic card were the words "Records Management." He checked the note in his hand. This was the room he'd been told to report to. The name "Benson" was also on the note. It had taken him almost an hour to find the office, which was, perhaps, three hundred yards from where he started out.

Entering the room he reported to a PFC dressed in desert camouflage, seated behind a steel and plastic desk. For perhaps the thousandth time, he wondered why the Army wasted combat uniforms by putting them on soldiers who were not in combat. He asked for "Benson."

The PFC routed him to a desk where a civilian motioned for him to have a seat beside someone else while she continued helping the person actually sitting at her desk. He dozed while two other soldiers were processed. He could tell it was a records update by watching what they did. He'd done it dozens of times himself.

Finally it was his turn. He told the woman his name and she extracted a file from a basket to the right of her desk. She opened the file and pulled out a card that was off yellow and about 3"X6" in size. She laid it in front of Hickory.

"We need you to update your DD 93. When we tried to contact your sister to notify her of your change in status, we couldn't reach her. We need her current phone number. And her address, if that's changed too."

Bob stared at the card. He picked it up and peered at his own handwriting. He looked up at Mrs. Benson.

"I have a sister?"

Julia just happened to park outside the DCI, or Department of Clinical Investigation, which is a research facility at WRAMC and does not actually treat patients. Oddly, everyone at WRAMC who does not treat patients, is vitally concerned with the welfare of patients and the happiness and satisfaction of family members.

Those who do treat patients are so overworked they don't care about much of anything any more.

So the first people Julia interacted with at WRAMC were eager to help. They were not used to using the process that the treatment side of the house used, involving HIPPA, consent forms, protocols, and dozens of other rules and obstacles to progress. Not in terms of letting a poor distraught wife find her husband, anyway. They had their own rules for research and dissemination of information. But that's another story.

Mrs. Edith Johnson, who had worked in the office of procurement for DCI for twenty-one years, and who was returning to that office from the cafeteria with a latte, was the first person Julia ran into, and Edith Johnson, who felt like she was a very small cog in a very large gear of a huge machine that, as far as she could tell existed solely to feed tax dollars into a black hole every day, was finally given a chance to do something for someone.

In twenty-one years Edith had learned a lot about how things worked at WRAMC. She knew about the Soldier Family Assistance Center, and proceeded to try to explain to Julia how to get there.

The emotions that had fueled Julia's frantic search for, and travel to Bob, drained away and suddenly Julia aware that she was impersonating a soldier's wife and was actually at "the Army" she had battled with for so long. And the Army had always won before. She was filled with despair.

Edith saw the despair in the young woman's eyes. She saw the tears filling those eyes. She sensed the breakdown that was about to occur. This poor girl didn't know where her husband was, or what his status was. The Army had failed her!

Edith resolved not to fail this woman.

"Come with me dear," she said soothingly. "We'll find your husband. I'll get you to him. I promise you."

Despair was pushed aside by hope. Could this possibly work? She just knew if she could only get to Bob that he'd explain everything. All she wanted was a few minutes with him, to make sure he was all right, and to tell him that the children were worried about him. Or would be if they knew he was injured. Her brain hurt, and she followed the woman into an office.

Edith shortcut the system by logging in to a database used for accounting and cost analysis. Each soldier who was quartered at WRAMC represented a list of expenditures. There was lodging, meals, clothing and associated support supplies. Every item used in treatment was carefully accounted for with an id number that went to a patient. More money was spent tracking sponges used in surgery than the sponges themselves cost.

Edith reverted to her professional self, which knew what to do.

"What's your husband's social?" she asked.

Julia blinked. She was caught on the very first question! Tears welled up in her eyes as despair rushed back in.

"I don't know," she sobbed.

Edith saw the breakdown creeping closer. Her heart went out to this young woman.

"It's all right. The stress is too much. Of course you can't remember everything," she said. "Don't worry, we'll find him. What's his name?"

"Robert Calhoun Hickory!" gasped Julia, overjoyed to be able to answer a question correctly.

Edith clicked keys. Her hand darted to her mouse, moved it, clicked twice, moved it again, clicked once, and then she typed some more.

"Got him!" she said, elated. She reached for a pad and wrote down a nine digit number. "Here's his social, so you don't have to try to remember it, dear." She beamed as Julia took the post it note and stared at it.

"What do I do now?" asked Julia, suddenly weary. She'd driven sixteen hours straight through, and was at the end of her energy reserves.

Edith looked around. Nobody was watching. Nobody was ever watching.

"I'll take you where you need to go," she whispered.

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