The Death Agreement (2 page)

Taylor and I had both wanted to
pilot helicopters, so we signed our names to our career selection
sheet which contained 16 careers that we'd wanted, then waited for
Branch Night to find out if we would get Aviation. We'd passed the
exams but knew only about 10% would make it.

On branch night, we were ushered
into one of the large briefing halls, where we waited for the order
to reach under our seats. When the order came, I reached down and
found an envelope. Inside was my branch insignia, but I didn't open
mine right away, and instead watched the reactions of everyone
around me.

Most guys cheered and shouted.
They offered high fives and fist bumps to anyone willing to accept.
Not everyone seemed happy though. Some cadets stormed away or
cursed. No one dared to ask.

I'd seen enough. I swallowed hard,
opened my envelope, and my jaw dropped. Despite all odds, I had
been chosen to attend pilot training.

"Dude," Taylor said.
"Congrats."

"I can't believe it. I never
thought—" I paused. In my excitement I'd failed to register
Taylor's somber tone, slumped shoulders, and half-hearted smile.
"Aw man, I'm sorry. What did you get stuck with?"

He looked away.

I sighed. "That bad?"

"Yeah. Those bastards." He shook
his head. When he looked at me again, a smirk had replaced his
frown. "They're sending me to pilot training, too. Real bad news,
right?"

We laughed like a pair of hyenas,
then joined the others who had been chosen for the aviation branch,
and went out to do keggers. I don't think I'd ever gotten more
wasted in my life.

That night, Taylor and I did a
blood pinning as well. We took the backs off of our insignia and
punched them into each other's chest. As drops of blood dotted our
shirts, we joked about dying of a tetanus infection.

Post night came that spring. We
had known we were going to Rutger after we finished the Basic
Officer Leadership course, but weren't prepared to learn that we
would be going separate ways after that. It came as a shock that my
best friend would be half a world away.

***

Then came Rucker. It wasn't the
hell we had thought it would be, but it wasn't a vacation either.
The training instructors were hardasses, and we were still a pair
of jokers. Even during the annual combat exercise, they couldn't
strip us of our sense of humor. After that day of crawling through
the mud with live ammo fired over our heads, we still managed a few
wisecracks.

We did have real problems, though.
Most everything came at us in the form of tests and memorizing
ridiculous amounts of information.

Taylor had nearly flunked out of
the preliminaries, and I nearly got kicked out of the program for
slacking off in the simulator.

Late one evening, Taylor stopped
by my apartment and found me passed out on the couch with a stack
of books across my lap. "Jon," he whispered. "Wake up."

"I'm awake…well, I was until I
started reading through this shit."

"Listen, I got a plan to keep us
motivated."

I raised an eyebrow. "Does it
involve pictures of your sister?"

"I'm serious. Higher stakes. If
one of us quits or fails, the other kills himself. Simple as
that."

"Can we take out as many people as
we want first?" I chucked. The proposal was a joke, obviously, but
Taylor stared at me like he had expected a straight
answer.

He stood up. "Well?"

I bit off a piece of my thumbnail
and spit it out. "You're saying if I get thrown out you'll put a
bullet through your head?"

"I like to think I'm more creative
than that, but yeah, you got the general idea."

"Fine then. I'm in."

"Good," he said. "I'll see ya in
class tomorrow." He nodded and left.

I laid awake that night wondering
if I said the wrong thing. What if he wasn't kidding? Would he
really have gone through with it? In the end, I told myself it was
a joke like everything else.

Funny thing…after we made the bet,
my grades improved, as did his. Subconsciously I still worried
Taylor would actually do it. Maybe he thought I would, too. It
didn't matter. We both worked hard. In fact, his improvement
surpassed everyone else's, and gets this: he finished at the top of
our class.

The time we spent in Rucker ended
up being the best of our lives. If the situation were different, if
things happened how we expected, perhaps more of this story would
focus on those fun days when we had to succeed or kill
ourselves.

We parted ways after earning our
wings. They sent me off to Alaska and sent Taylor to
Hawaii.

I really wish I could go into
details about how Taylor fell in love and married Lorie while I
went through several crazy girlfriends. Or how Taylor bought his
first home in the suburbs while I was content living in a rented,
broken-down trailer deep in the woods. Career-wise, Taylor shined
as an officer and promotion came easy. Things were different for me
there, too. I hit a real rough patch and eventually got caught
dating an enlisted girl, earning myself an Article 15. As
punishment for fraternization, I received a General Letter of
Reprimand, which pretty much meant that I'd never be promoted
higher than 1st Lieutenant. So much for honor, right?

The way life shaped up, it looked
as if Taylor had found his calling, while I considered resigning my
commission the minute the contract expired. Through it all, we
remained close, and we never looked back with regret.

It's nice reminiscing about times
long past, but as much as I want to trap myself in those memories,
I can't. Boys grow up, shit happens, and the story goes
on.

Real change came three years
later. I called Taylor to give him the latest news. Lorie answered
on the third ring.

"Oh, Jesse's out right now," she
said. "Say, when you going to come visit? It's been too
long."

"I know. I want to. Maybe after I
get back. I just got word…I'm heading off to some nameless airfield
in Afghanistan."

"Oh, Jon. Be safe,
okay?"

"Yeah…I'll try. Thanks. Tell him I
called?"

"Sure. Talk to you
soon."

"Bye Lorie."

Taylor called me back an hour
later.

"I hear they're sending you out to
the sandbox," he said.

"It's my turn. Knew it was
coming."

"Gonna get a lot worse before it
gets better."

"I hope if it happens, it won't
leave me broken. I don't think I could handle being
disabled."

"Don't talk that way. A sniper is
sure to take you out the day you arrive."

I chuckled. "Of
course."

"Besides, you'll have someone you
know watching your back. I got my orders today. They're sending me,
too."

***

Each time the mortars dropped into
our base, Taylor asked, "Is today the day?"

"Probably," I always
replied.

We laughed it off after the
shelter-in-place sirens stopped blaring, but I knew one or both of
us might not make it home. So far we'd been lucky.

Close calls were common early in
the war. On one flight, Lee Thompson, a better man than I ever will
be, flew to my right. I saw a flash come from the mountain range
and tracked the fast-moving corkscrew of smoke as I dropped
altitude, deployed flares, and transmitted the location: "Incoming
9 o'clock."

The S.A.M. had a lock on my bird,
and ignored the flares shooting from underneath the landing sleds.
I took a deep breath and held it, waiting for impact. The missile
rocked my cockpit, striking dead center, but it didn't
explode.

"Randon," Lee said over the radio.
"I called in an airstrike. Are you okay?"

"A dud."

"Lucky. I can't believe that just
hap—"

Lee's bird exploded in a
horrifying fireworks show. I screamed as burning debris rained down
outside of Kabul. He had been watching me, and neither of us saw
the second rocket. His luck had run out.

After I landed, I hid from
everyone. Of course Taylor found me.

"It isn't your fault," he had said
and passed me a bottle of whisky that Lorie had discreetly sent
him.

I nodded. There wasn't anything I
could've done to save Lee's life, but I felt the heavy weight of
survivor's guilt just the same. If the missile that hit me hadn't
been a dud, I'm sure he would've seen the second one and made it
home to his family. I clenched my jaw and squeezed my eyes shut,
but the tears still came.

Taylor sat next to me, quiet. We
drank to Lee that night just as we had toasted to our other friends
that had given their lives.

After a while, Taylor nudged my
arm. "By the way," he said, "Lorie is pregnant. It's a boy, and
we're naming him after you."

Despite everything that had
happened that day, I couldn't stop the smile from spreading across
my face. Before I knew it, the tears of sorrow turned to tears of
joy. That was Taylor. He always found a way to make everything
better. I was lucky to have him as a friend.

There I go talking about luck
again. You want to know the worst thing about luck? It has a
tendency to run out for everyone.

The next day, on a routine flight
from Kandahar to Erazi, the rear rotor of my Black Hawk went
haywire, thrusting me into an uncontrollable spin.

I chose to attempt an
autorotation, a dangerous maneuver used as a last-ditch effort to
land a crippled bird. I knew the blades were spinning too fast, and
the odds of success were slim, but a small chance is a hell of a
lot better than no chance at all.

I cut the power and
prayed.

I don't remember the
crash.

***

"Wake up, Jon. Look at me." Taylor
slapped me in the face. "Look at me!" He slapped me again. Oddly,
two of him hovered at the edge of my vision, but after another
solid slap the images wavered then merged together.

"Where am I?"

"Field Hospital. They're taking
you outta here. Not today, you hear me?"

"What happened?"

His lips moved. I don't know how
long it took for me to comprehend what he was saying, but I do
remember the pain that suddenly caught up to me. I looked down, saw
my twisted, bloodied legs, and screamed.

"Don't look. You'll be okay.
Today's not the day, all right?"

I searched his face. His eyes were
stone and unreadable. Behind him, the tent flap blew open. I stared
out at the clear blue sky and noticed a group of Afghan children
kicking a soccer ball across the rust-colored sand. Their game
moved from of my field of view and a strange fear came over me. I
wanted to see those carefree kids one last time before I
died.

The layers of dust began a
miraculous dance, shaking and rolling, and I forgot about the kids.
Then the sand blew up from the dead ground, swirling into a vortex.
The beautiful patterns made little sense, even after the medical
transport chopper dropped into view.

By then, the pain had taken me to
the breaking point. I tried to focus on the good things I'd done in
my life, but my mind kept returning to how it had all been a waste.
Instead of enemy fire punching my ticket, I ended up on death's
doorstep because of some bullshit mechanical failure.

I looked back to Taylor then down
at my destroyed legs.

"Not today, Jon."

I shook my head, and absently
whispered, "I hope it is."

The world faded to
black.

***

I woke up in a real hospital,
surprised to wake up at all.

People in white scrubs came and
went in a blur. I never knew if it was day or night. Time had lost
all meaning. The only thing I remember clearly is the suffering.
The morphine never took the excruciating pain away, and I
constantly begged for more.

A doctor wearing large glasses and
a fake smile examined my legs. In a thick German accent, he said,
"This is bad, but could have been much, much worse."

I replied between gritted teeth,
"That's true of everything when your heart's still
pumping."

"This is correct."

"Asshole," I added.

He shrugged and his fake smile
grew wider.

I should've been happy to be
alive, but to be honest, I was pissed. Not because of the
helicopter malfunction that had led to a twisted, horrific wreck of
a left leg. No, I hated everything and everyone, because my
absolute biggest fear had always been becoming a
cripple.

I couldn't live that
way.

I wouldn't.

Faceless doctors poured into the
room followed by a procession of menacing nurses, each pushing a
tray full of surgical tools.

"You're not taking it, goddamn it!
I'd rather be shot."

The German doctor nodded to a
shadow at the head of my bed. "Hold him down. Don't let him pull
out the IV."