“I remember when Desert Shield was going on, the prep operation that led up to the first Gulf War. Things seemed rational enough. But then the bombs started falling on Baghdad, and everybody knew we were going to war for real—the first large-scale war since Vietnam. One night I was watching the news, and they ran a story on a female soldier who’d been ordered to ship out to the Gulf. They showed her at home with her family—a husband and two kids. Her children were crying, and her husband didn’t know what to do. He was about to be living with two crying kids who missed their mother, and she was the one going off to fight. And . . . I don’t know. Something welled up in me that I couldn’t keep down. Tears came into my eyes, my throat closed up. Sarah grabbed my hand and asked me what was wrong. I jumped up out of my chair and said, ‘By God, if they’re shipping mothers over there to fight, something’s wrong. I need to get over there.’”

“Are you serious?” Mia asked.

“You’re damn right. When I saw that girl packing up to leave her kids behind, I was filled with shame. I felt an absolute conviction that it was time for me and every boy I’d grown up with to get a rifle and pair of boots and go take care of business.”

“Jesus, Penn. That’s a natural reaction, I guess. But also childish. You never trained as a soldier.”

“Maybe not. But I know how to fight. And that wasn’t George W’s war, which was bullshit. It was the first one. Anyway, I guess on some level, when I was reading Serenity’s book, I kept seeing that mother from that newscast.”

“Was she black? The woman in the news story?”

“No, white.”

Mia nodded but said nothing further. It was strange to realize that by suppertime we might be sitting at the table with the young celebrity on Mia’s computer screen, a woman who has done far more dangerous—and traditionally masculine—things than I, a man ten years her senior.

“Well,” Mia said finally, turning her computer back around. “I can’t wait to see what all the fuss is about.”

Chapter 11

Walt Garrity watched Tom Cage shuffle into the visiting room at the Pollock federal prison and carefully take a seat at the empty table. The two men said nothing at first. They didn’t need to. They had survived the hell of Korea together. Heat, snow, VD, the Chinese coming over the wire in suicide waves . . . even the Bugout. Once you shared history like that, speech tended to be redundant.

“How you makin’ it?” Walt asked finally.

“Can’t complain,” Tom said. “Beats a sleeping bag in forty below.”

“Scraping ice out of the men’s noses.”

Tom chuckled. “Hypodermics taped under both armpits?”