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“Yeah,” I said. “I thought maybe someone from the team might have sent my kit back. I found something that doesn’t belong to me and I’m trying to return it, but I have no idea who it belongs to.”
“I don’t remember hearing your name mentioned.”
“You wouldn’t. Our mission was classified. I was with SAD at the time.”
SAD – the Special Activities Division of the CIA. Black Ops, off the books, operating in enemy territory, doing things that would break international law. Our little ‘incident’ was recorded as an accident due to weather inside Afghanistan. Two Marines and a Navy hospital corpsman were killed when their chopper went down in a dust storm during a routine training mission. That was the official story, anyway. I was one of the five who got out with our lives.
I had an eight-inch scar on my neck to show for it and a month-long gap in my memory surrounding the whole event due to a brain injury.
He clicked his tongue. “Then I can’t help you. SAD stuff’s black. You’ll have to go to your original contacts. How did you get with SAD anyway?”
I laughed. “I’d tell you, but then I’d have to shoot you. But like I said, we had a DARPA contract, so…”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. Burn before reading.” He paused for a moment, thinking. “Why don’t you contact your SAD handler?”
“He’s no longer with SAD. They’re kind of sticky about forwarding addresses.”
“Good luck finding out. If you were with SAD, they’re pretty closed to your casual enquiry. I can ask around discretely but I doubt anyone will talk if you were with SAD and especially if you were part of that.”
“Thanks anyway,” I said. “Next time you’re in Hell’s Kitchen, look me up.” We said our goodbyes and I hung up, turning the envelope containing the letters over in my hand.
My call with Terry got me thinking that perhaps, in the mayhem that ensued when a Marine team came to recover us, my things and one of the team’s personal effects were mixed up after the crash. Because I was with a SAD team, it would be next to impossible to get names. I only knew my primary contact and the first names of the rest of the team – all former spec ops from various services – SEALs, Rangers, MARSOC.
I needed to know who was involved in our rescue so I could track down the owner of the letters. I was beginning to realize that it would be very hard to find out through official channels. So I turned to the news, and read back issues of Marine Corps Times, the Corp’s news source on any Marine deaths. I went back to the week we crashed – something I’d avoided doing that past year, not wanting to dredge up everything that happened.
Then I saw it.
Hospital Corpsman Daniel Lewis, Wilmington, N.C. Training accident.
Left behind was his new wife, Mira Lewis, (nee Parker) of Queens, NY and loving parents, Scott and Jeanne Lewis of Topsail Beach…
Mira… I picked up the photo of her in her wedding dress, her hair braided with wildflowers. She must have been named after Mira the star, also called Omicron Ceti, a red giant located in the constellation of Cetus. About two hundred light years from Earth, Mira was a binary star and one of the only non-supernova variable stars known.
How do I know all this about Mira?
I was that geeky kid with the backyard telescope who spent my nights trying to chart all the major stars in my science notebook instead of staying inside to play whatever video game was the latest amongst my peers. I often considered going into astronomy instead of computer science, but my love of building things – mostly computers – was stronger than my desire to sit in a lab in front of a computer screen and look at numbers. Which was what I ended up doing anyway, studying computer systems at Stanford.
Life is funny that way.
I read the obit and the family forum entries offering condolences. There was an article in the local paper about Hospital Corpsman Lewis, and how he was a medic with Force Recon…
I knew then it was the same team that came to rescue us when our MRAP hit an IED...
When the armored vehicle I was riding in was hit by a roadside IED, I was almost beheaded by a ragged piece of shrapnel that embedded itself into my neck. Two choppers were sent in to rescue us, and I was loaded in one, while the other chopper picked up everyone else. My only memories are of a grim-faced medic kneeling over me while I was loaded into the chopper. In the ensuing dust storm, our chopper went down and Lewis’s stuff must have been mixed up with mine when they pulled me out of the downed chopper.
I thought I’d put that part of my life behind me. Now, here it was, staring me in the face. The words of Lewis’s young widow were burned into my memory.
Please be careful over there. Don’t always do the bravest thing. Do the safest thing. Stay safe, please. Come back to me…
Other than a brief vision of my savior wearing protective gear against the sandstorm, I had few memories of the crash itself and the mayhem that followed, the fire consuming the chopper, killing several on board in a most-horrible manner. My uncle Colm told me what little he knew about it when I returned and spent several months in a VA hospital recovering from my near death experience. I’d lost a great deal of blood and had been in a coma for a month due to an infection. It had taken me six months to get back to my old self – if that old self still even existed.
He didn’t.
War changes you and tragedy makes you see the world in a different way. I’d had too many tragedies. First Sue. My dad. Then the crash. Now, Graham.
I read the obituary and some of the forum posts about Lewis. Friends wrote that he was wild man, fearless and heroic. He’d become one of the most highly trained medics, deploying with Marine Special Operations Forces. They did other duties, including going deep behind enemy lines.
