The sand was in everything. My teeth, my rifle, my lungs. I couldn’t see twenty feet in front of me.
Twelve hours ago, I was Sergeant Jolene Puckett, 3rd Supply Battalion, running a routine convoy through a stretch of highway outside Al-Taqaddum that command swore was “low risk.” Twelve hours ago, I had seven soldiers riding behind me.
Now I had none.
The IED hit the lead truck at 0347. The second blast caught the tail vehicle before anyone could react. I was in the middle – the only MRAP still on its wheels, wedged between two burning wrecks with rounds snapping off the armor like hail on a tin roof.
Corporal Denise Hadley was slumped against the turret. I checked her pulse. Nothing. Private First Class Ricky Shoemake was pinned under the dash, conscious, screaming, both legs crushed below the knee.
“Stay with me, Shoemake. Stay with me.”
He stopped screaming around 0400. I was alone.
I grabbed every magazine I could reach. Two frags. One smoke. The M4 was functioning. The .50 cal up top was jammed and I wasn’t about to climb into that turret and make myself a silhouette.
They were out there. I could hear them moving between the dunes, voices low, patient. They knew what I knew – no air support was coming in this storm. Visibility was zero. The sandstorm had swallowed everything. My GPS was dead. My radio was cycling static.
I made a decision. I wasn’t dying in that truck.
I pulled Denise’s dog tags. I pulled Shoemake’s. I said a prayer my grandmother taught me in a kitchen in Tulsa when I was nine years old, and I dropped out the back hatch into the dirt.
The first shooter was closer than I expected. Maybe forty meters. I saw his muzzle flash before I heard the crack. Sand kicked up by my boot. I fired twice, center mass, kept moving.
I ran low along the berm, hugging the wreckage for cover. Another burst – this one from behind me. I spun, squeezed the trigger, heard a sound I’ll never forget. Then silence.
For two hours, I moved through that storm. I had no idea which direction was friendly. I just moved away from the fire. My lips cracked. My hands shook. Every shadow looked like a man with a rifle.
Then my radio – the one I’d given up on – crackled.
Static. Then a voice.
“Jolene? Jolene, do you copy?”
I almost dropped the handset. Not because someone was finally on the other end.
Because that voice belonged to Staff Sergeant Terrance Boggs.
Terrance Boggs, who was killed in Fallujah fourteen months ago.
I was at his funeral. I handed the flag to his mother.
I keyed the mic with shaking hands. “Boggs? Boggs, this isn’t – “
“Listen to me carefully,” the voice said. Calm. Steady. Exactly like him. “You need to stop moving. Right now. Do NOT take another step.”
I froze.
The wind shifted just enough for me to see what was three feet in front of me.
I looked down at my boots, then back at the radio, and whispered, “How did you know?”
The voice came back one last time. And what it said made every hair on my body stand up, because there’s no way anyone on that frequency could have known about…
What Was Three Feet in Front of Me
A pressure plate.
Old. Crude. The kind that’s been sitting in the dirt so long the sand had built up around the edges, half-buried like a tooth in a jawbone. Wires running northeast, toward a shape I couldn’t fully make out in the storm but which was almost certainly packed with enough ordnance to take my legs and everything above them.
I stood there for a long time. Long enough that my legs started shaking. Not from fear, exactly. From the fact that I’d been running on nothing but adrenaline for two hours and my body had just decided it was done pretending.
I keyed the mic again. “Boggs. Talk to me. How did you know?”
Static. Then: “Turn around. Forty meters back, there’s a culvert. Get in it. Stay low. Don’t use your light.”
The voice was his. I’d know it anywhere. That particular flatness he had, like he was reading you the weather. Terrance Boggs from Decatur, Georgia, who used to eat peanut butter straight from the jar with a spoon and had a laugh like a screen door in a windstorm. Who died on a Tuesday in November and whose mother, Sandra, had held that folded flag against her chest and not made a single sound.
I should have asked more questions. I didn’t.
I turned around, stepped exactly the way I’d come, and found the culvert.
What I Knew About Terrance Boggs
We’d served together for eleven months before Fallujah. He was my senior NCO when I was still a Specialist who didn’t know her ass from a compass heading, and he had a gift for teaching that wasn’t really teaching so much as just doing the thing in front of you until you understood.
He showed me, once, how to read a road. Not the official way they teach it at Sapper school, but his way. The way his grandfather – who’d done two tours in Vietnam – had taught him in a parking lot in Decatur when Terrance was sixteen.
“You’re not looking for the thing,” he told me. “You’re looking for the wrong thing. The rock that’s too round. The dirt that’s too fresh. The patch of ground that doesn’t match what’s around it.”
I got good at it. Not as good as him. Nobody was as good as him.
He was gone before I made Sergeant. IED strike, Fallujah, 0612 on a Tuesday. His truck didn’t burn, which the chaplain seemed to think was meaningful. I didn’t know what to do with that.
His mother, Sandra, was a small woman in a navy blue dress who’d driven up from Decatur alone. She didn’t cry during the ceremony. After, when I handed her the flag, she looked at me and said, “He talked about you. Said you had good eyes.”
I’d thought about that a lot in the fourteen months since.
The Culvert
I got in. Pulled my knees to my chest. The storm was still screaming overhead but down there in the concrete channel it was almost quiet, just the low moan of wind and the occasional distant crack of something burning.
I waited for the voice to come back.
It didn’t. Not for a while.
I sat there with Denise’s dog tags and Shoemake’s dog tags in my left fist and my M4 across my knees and I thought about Sandra Boggs in her navy blue dress. I thought about my grandmother’s kitchen in Tulsa, the linoleum floor, the way she’d make me say the prayer twice because the first time was never slow enough.
The radio crackled.
“You’re about two klicks south-southwest of Checkpoint Bravo,” the voice said. “There’s a patrol. They’ve been trying to push out but the storm’s got them pinned. When it breaks, you move northeast. Don’t cut across the open ground. Stay in the low terrain.”
I pressed my back against the culvert wall. “Who is this. Really.”
A pause. Longer than the others.
“You know who it is, Jolene.”
And here’s the thing I haven’t told anyone. The thing that kept me up for six months after I got home, staring at the ceiling of my apartment in Killeen while my neighbor’s dog barked at nothing and the highway hummed outside.
I did know.
I knew the way you know things in the dark that you can’t explain in the light.
The Part That Doesn’t Make Sense
I’ve tried to run it down. Rationally. I’ve sat with it and turned it over and looked at it from every angle a person can look at something.
The frequency I was on was a dedicated battalion push. Encrypted. Not something you stumble onto. The voice knew my name, not my rank, not my call sign. My name. The name Terrance used when he was being serious, when the joking was done and he needed you to actually listen.
He was the only person in-country who called me Jolene instead of Puckett or Sergeant or, from the junior enlisted, ma’am in that way that always made me feel about ninety years old.
I’ve thought about equipment malfunction. Crossed signals. Some kind of auditory hallucination from dehydration and stress and blood loss, because I was losing blood, I found out later, from a fragment in my left shoulder I hadn’t even felt.
Maybe. Sure. Maybe.
But here’s what I keep coming back to. The pressure plate. It was there. I confirmed it myself once the storm broke and there was light enough to see. EOD came out and cleared it two days later. Old device, probably Iranian-supplied components, exactly where the voice said it was.
Nobody on that frequency knew about the minefield. The patrol that eventually found me, four soldiers from 2nd Infantry under a Staff Sergeant named Gary Pruitt who had about four words to say to anyone about anything, they’d had no visibility, no drone coverage, no intel about what was between me and them.
Pruitt looked at me when I told him about the radio. He had a face that had stopped being surprised by things somewhere around 2004.
“What frequency?” he said.
I told him.
He checked his own radio. Looked at me again. Said nothing.
What the Voice Said Last
Before the storm broke. Before Pruitt’s patrol pushed through. I was still in the culvert, maybe forty minutes after the last transmission, when the radio crackled one final time.
“Sandra’s doing okay,” the voice said. “She got a dog. Big yellow one. Named it after her dad.”
I didn’t know Sandra Boggs’s father’s name.
I do now. I called her when I got home. Six weeks after I landed at Fort Hood, still not sleeping right, still flinching at cars backfiring in the Walmart parking lot.
She answered on the third ring. I told her I’d served with Terrance. She remembered me, the one with good eyes.
I asked her, casual as I could manage, if she’d gotten any pets recently.
Long pause.
“I did, actually. Big yellow Lab. Silly thing.” She laughed a little. “Named him Walter. After my daddy.”
I sat on the floor of my kitchen in Killeen and put my back against the cabinet under the sink and held the phone against my chest for a long time.
The linoleum was cold.
I thought about a kitchen in Tulsa. A prayer I’d said twice because the first time was never slow enough. I thought about a road you learn to read not by looking for the thing but for the wrong thing.
I thought about Terrance Boggs eating peanut butter with a spoon, telling me I had good eyes.
I still don’t have an explanation. I’ve stopped looking for one. Some things you just carry.
I carry Denise’s dog tags and Shoemake’s dog tags in the left front pocket of every pair of pants I own. I carry Walter’s name like a stone.
And sometimes, when it’s late and the highway hums and the neighbor’s dog barks at nothing, I think the nothing might be something.
—
If this one got under your skin, pass it on to someone who’d understand it.
For more tales of betrayal and military life, check out My Captain Sent Us Down That Road. His Picture Was in the Enemy’s Backpack. and My Spotting Scope Shattered and I Realized It Wasn’t an Accident.
