Author's Preface
30th October 2007 East Madison, Wisconsin
The fluorescent lights of the East Madison recruiting station hummed with a quiet, persistent buzz, casting a cold glare across cheap faux-wood desks and framed posters of soldiers in tactical gear. Outside, the autumn wind whipped dry oak leaves across the asphalt of High Crossing Boulevard.
Inside, eighteen-year-old Richard sat straight in a vinyl chair, his large hands folded calmly over his knees. Beside him sat Staff Sergeant Miller, a battle-tested Infantry recruiter with a tight fade and a stack of official paperwork spread across his desk.
"You're sure about this, kid?" Miller asked, leaning back in his chair and clicking a black ballpoint pen. He tapped the top of the enlistment packet. "An 18X contract isn't a stroll through the park. Most eighteen-year-olds walk in here asking for supply, mechanics, or a neat desk job in Germany. You're asking for Special Forces Candidate right out of the gate."
"I'm sure," Richard said. His voice was steady impossibly calm for a high school senior committing the next half-decade of his life to the military.
"You passed the ASVAB with a 94, GT score well over 110. You qualify for literally any MOS in the book," Miller said, eyeing Richard closely. "With an 18X contract, you're looking at five years active duty minimum. Five years, private Sokolov. That's Infantry OSUT at Fort Benning, Airborne School, SOPC, and then SFAS Selection. If you wash out at Selection, the Army doesn't send you home to Monona. They drop you straight into a conventional airborne unit, wherever they need boots on the ground."
"I understand that sir. But I won't wash out," Richard said softly. There was no arrogance in his tone, just a quiet, immovable truth. Beneath his cotton shirt, the skin across his back was pristine not a scar, not even a blemish.
Miller chuckled, shaking his head as he slid the heavy DD Form 4 contract across the desk. "I like the confidence. Born in Monona, full U.S. citizen by birth... background check cleared through MEPS Milwaukee. You're good to sign."
He handed Richard the pen, pointing a calloused finger at the signature line at the bottom of the page.
"Five years active, three years IRR," Miller reiterated, his voice turning formal. "Once you sign this, you're committing yourself to the United States Army son."
"I understand that sir."
"Good"
Richard took the pen. The blue ink flowed smoothly as he traced his name across the line: Richard Sokolov. As he placed the pen back on the desk, he felt a strange, subtle hum deep in his chest a feeling not unlike the heavy static that had blown out the lights in the apartment the night he was born. He was entering a world of severe physical trial, combat, and extreme danger... a world where uncertainty and danger awaited him.
"Welcome to the Army, candidate," Staff Sergeant Miller said, reaching across the desk to shake his hand with a firm, solid grip. "Now. Go home, tell your folks, and keep your nose clean until ship day."
---
January 2nd 2008 Monona Wisconsin
The bus station was eerily quiet this morning-no commuters, no honking horns, just a peaceful, bone-chilling cold settling over the pavement. His mother, Tatiana, known as Tanya to everyone else, stood in her modest blue dress, holding a worn handkerchief tight in her fist.
"You look so handsome, мой мальчик," she said weeping, gently brushing down the jacket of his civilian clothes. "Твой отец... would have been proud of you."
"Да, папа," he murmured.
Hearing those words brought a heavy, sudden ache to Richard's chest. Four years ago, a brutal hit-and-run on the highway had left Aleksandr Sokolov fighting for his life on an operating table a fight he ultimately lost hours later. Richard had been only fourteen then, standing helpless in the hospital waiting room as his father slipped away. Tatiana reached up, her trembling fingers touching the side of Richard's cheek. She looked into his hazel eyes, searching for the ghost of the man who had brought her across an ocean nearly two decades ago.
"Обещай me you'll be careful," she whispered in Russian, her voice dropping so low the cold morning air almost swallowed it whole. "The world in uniform... they test you, Richard. They look closely at everything."
"I know, Мама," Richard replied softly in English, placing his broad hand over hers. He offered a slight, reassuring smile. "I've always been lucky, remember? I'll keep my head down, do what I'm told, pass the courses, and stay out of the spotlight."
Tatiana's heart clenched at his words, Удачливая, he called it. He truly had no idea.
"Не рискуй, Ричард", she insisted, her grip tightening on his hand with a sudden, desperate intensity that startled him. "Возвращайся живым, хорошо?"
Richard blinked, slightly taken aback by the strange, dark edge in her voice, but attributed it to her old-world Russian superstitions and maternal panic. "Мама, it's just infantry training. I'll be fine."
Before she could say another word, the heavy air brakes of the Greyhound bus hissed sharply through the quiet lot. The big silver coach rumbled to a stop beside the curb, its doors folding open with a mechanical clatter.
"Ты всегда будешь моим мальчиком," she whispered, her voice cracking beneath the weight of nineteen years of memories.
Richard pulled back gently and smiled, his hazel eyes bright with steady resolve.
"Love you, Мама."
"Я люблю тебя, Ричард."
He picked up his duffel bag, slung it over his shoulder, and turned toward the boarding steps.
Tatiana remained where she was on the cold pavement, clutching her handkerchief against her mouth as she watched through the tinted glass of the bus window. He moved down the aisle and found a seat, stowing his bag before looking back out at her. He gave her a small, comforting wave.
She raised her hand in reply, forcing a tight, tearful smile as the mechanical doors folded shut with a sharp hiss of air. The heavy diesel engine roared to life, and the coach pulled slowly out of the quiet lot, carrying her son away into a future she could neither predict nor protect him from.
---
Diyala Province, Iraq 2010
It was hot not just hot, but blistering, unforgiving hot. It was even worse when the wind kicked up, whipping the coarse desert sand through the dark until the sharp particles stung like tiny needles against bare skin.
Richard had made that mistake the very first night he arrived in Diyala Province. No face covering, no Shemagh pulled up nothing. Tom had tried to warn him, shouting over the low throttle of the idling engines, but Richard, being the lucky bastard he was, hadn't listened. As always.
Instead of coming back to the team room with his face raw, bleeding, and pitted from the sandstorm, Richard had just brushed off his uniform, casually wiped a dusting of fine gray grit off his jaw, and smirked at the rest of the stack. Just thick skin, he'd joked. Good genetics.
Tom had just shaken his head, gruttering under his breath about "indestructible Midwestern farm boys."
Now, crouching in the suffocating shadow of a crumbling adobe wall three miles outside of Baqubah, Sergeant Richard Lemington adjusted the night vision goggles over his eyes. He had changed it years ago, not formally but Sokolov was too heavy a syllable to bark through a tactical radio when seconds mattered, too sharp on an American tongue. He'd taken the new name from the side of a jar on a pantry shelf back in Wisconsin and made it stick.
Green-tinted shadows came into sharp focus through the lenses: the rusted tin roof of the compound, the thick date palms swaying heavy in the dry heat, and the quiet, tense silhouettes of his four-man assault element stacking up behind him.
---
The heavy wooden door of the compound didn't stand a chance.
With a sharp crack, the breaching charge blew the deadbolt straight out of the rotting adobe frame, showering the threshold in gray dust.
"Go, go, go!" Richard barked into the comms, his voice clipped and flat over the radio network.
He stepped through the smoke first, his M4 carbine raised, sweeping the emerald glow of his night-vision goggles across a cramped, suffocating hallway. Behind him, Tom pushed through the threshold instantly, his weapon locked on a dark doorway to the left. Bringing up the rear of the four-man stack was Ling, her boots silent on the packed dirt floor, sweeping the blind angles with disciplined, lethal precision.
"Clear left!" Ling snapped, her voice low and sharp.
"Clear right!" Tom echoed.
"Clear rear!" Came another operative from the back.
They moved like clockwork down the narrow corridor, the air thick with the smell of cordite, stale dust, and sweat. At the end of the hall was a heavy metal-reinforced door with a sliding peephole the holding cell.
"Stack up! Breaching gear!" Richard ordered, pressing his back against the wall beside the door.
Ling slid past him with practiced fluidity, slapping a light framing charge onto the hinges while Tom covered the intersecting hallway behind them.
"Charges set! Step back!" Ling whispered, ducking out of the blast zone.
Richard triggered the detonator. A muffled thump vibrated through the floorboards, and the door swung inward on bent hinges.
Before the dust could even settle, Richard threw his weight forward, stepping through the smoke into the cramped, windowless room.
Two figures were chained to a rusted iron pipe running along the back wall two missing contractors, gaunt, dehydrated, and blinking frantically against the sudden green glare of the operators' NVGs. But as Richard scanned the room to secure the corners, a shadow detached itself from the blind spot behind the door frame. His stomach gave a lurch, like the ones he used to have back home before a bully appeared.
A masked insurgent lunged forward from the dark, an AK-47 raised at point-blank range. There was no time to shoulder a rifle. Reflex took over. Richard raised his left arm to block the barrel just as the weapon discharged.
Crack-crack-crack.
The muzzle blast was deafening in the tiny concrete room. A round tore straight through the thick fabric of Richard's sleeve and buried itself deep into his shoulder, sending a shockwave of white-hot agony tearing through his nerves. Richard stumbled back against the metal shelving unit, his breath catching in his throat as the heavy metallic smell of fresh blood filled the air.
"Contact! Down!" Ling roared, swinging her barrel around and dropping the insurgent with two precise shots to the chest before he could fire again.
"Clear the room, Clear the room!" Tom roared before coming to a stop beside Richard. "Richard!" Tom shouted, sweeping his rifle across the empty room to confirm no other threats before rushing over. "Goddamn it, Lemington, you hit?"
Richard pressed his right hand hard against his left shoulder, wincing as a strange, cooling numbness washed over the burning pain. He pulled his hand away to check the damage expecting a ragged, bleeding crater. Instead, the fabric of his uniform was torn open, but the skin beneath was all but smooth.savour a small angry graze, save for a faint smudge of dark gunpowder and a small smear of blood from the graze.
It was that same ridiculous, impossible luck again. Every damn time.
Richard swallowed hard, shaking his head to clear the dizzy spell, Tom shone the light on his slightly broken skin.
"I'm good, Tom. Just grazed the meat," Richard lied, rolling his shoulder as if shaking off a heavy cramp.
Tom stared at him through his goggles, his eyes wide with utter disbelief as he looked from the smoking rifle on the floor back to Richard's intact shoulder. "Grazed? Man, I saw the muzzle flash point-blank. You're the luckiest son of a bitch in the entire United States Army."
"Must be clean living," Richard muttered, offering a grim, tight-lipped smirk.
He turned away before Tom could ask any more questions, kneeling down beside the trembling hostages.
"Ling, secure the package. We've got two minutes before QRF reports this noise. Let's move!"
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