I won’t recite the whole of it; most of it I’d spent eleven years not saying out loud, and some of it had only been cleared for her to say that month.
The short version is this: on my third deployment, a mission went wrong in the worst way a mission can, and a small team of us went back in for people who weren’t going to make it out otherwise, and I did the job I was trained to do under conditions I am not going to describe at a dinner table.
People came home who would not have.
I came home with a hand that doesn’t fully close, which my family had been told was a vehicle door.
For that, a long time ago, in a room with no donors in it, they’d given me a medal I had never once mentioned to the people at that head table — because in my father’s house, I’d learned young that my work made everyone uncomfortable, and I’d gotten very good at making them comfortable.
