Pete had gotten up. He limped over to her. “The role of a soldier isn’t to ask why, or even determine the course of the fight. Our job is to just say yes.” He sat in the chair across from her. “We fight for the people we love. For the people next to us, and the people we left behind.” He gave her a sad smile. “Like your dad did.”

The words sluiced through her. “What?”

“I did some asking, and . . .” He looked at Ham. “I realized that I knew your dad.”

She stared at him, words escaping her.

“Have you ever heard of the battle of Tora Bora?”

“No.”

“It was the first battle in the war in Afghanistan,” Pete said. “A CIA spec op group, along with Delta and some selected Tier One operators, went after Osama bin Laden. We were trying to root him out of a series of caves in eastern Afghanistan, near Khyber Pass. Mostly it was the CIA and Delta, but we were working with some tribal groups as well as the British SAS and German KSK, so it was a huge joint operation. It was our first real hunting mission. We knew there would be casualties, and since it was early in the war on terror, the government went to extra lengths to keep casualties low. Your dad was flown in as emergency medical personnel on-site.”

“He was a top trauma doc at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, so . . .”

“Yes, well, we needed him. There were bunkers hidden everywhere, and just when we thought we cleared an area, a group of al-Qaeda or Taliban operatives would pop up and ambush us. It was chaos, scattered, and should have given us insights into how the war would be for the next twenty years. Bin Laden escaped to Pakistan, but the part I remember was the day we happened upon a cave that we thought had cleared. We were searching it, and suddenly a fighter came out of nowhere with a Kalashnikov and opened fire. I took three bullets, one to my leg, one to my arm, and one here.” He pointed to a faded, thick scar on his neck. She hadn’t really noticed it before.

“I was bleeding out, and they were afraid to move me, so your dad choppered into the site to save my life. He stitched me up right there, then stabilized my leg and arm, and . . . he saved my life, for sure.”

His expression turned grim. “Your father died a few days later, in an IED attack. Again, he’d gone into the site, and this time, a group of Taliban killed him and everyone in the bunker.”

Twenty years ago, but the news punched her again.