Finally, she taped the new dressing down. “It’s over. You did good.” Graves fell back against the pillows, gasping for air. He released his grip on her arm. “Sorry,” he wheezed. “I I grabbed you hard.” “It’s okay,” Sarah said. She stood up and began to tidy the tray. She reached for the blood pressure cuff to check his vitals.
As she reached across him, her scrub top shifted. The sleeve of her undershirt, which had been pushed up during the struggle, rode high on her bicep. Graves’s eyes, groggy with pain, drifted to her arm. He saw the red marks where his fingers had dug in. But then he looked lower to the inside of her forearm. There was a tattoo there.
It was old, the black ink slightly faded to blue, sitting stark against her pale skin. It wasn’t a butterfly. It wasn’t a flower. It was a skull. a skull wearing a shredded helmet superimposed over a pair of crossed ka bar knives and underneath in jagged gothic script was a set of numbers and a motto 27ths war pigs.
Valkyrie graves stopped breathing. The room seemed to sworn he knew that logo. He didn’t just know it. He had designed it 20 years ago for the second battalion, seventh marines, the war pigs. The unit he commanded during the bloodiest push into the city. But it was the word underneath that stopped his heart.
Valkyrie. Nurse. Graves whispered his voice trembling in a way the pain hadn’t caused. Sarah was busy writing on the whiteboard. Yes, Colonel. Where? Where did you get that ink? Sarah froze. Her back was to him. She stood perfectly still for a count of three. She slowly pulled her sleeve down, covering the skull.
She turned around. Her eyes were no longer just tired. They were fierce. “I got it in a shop in San Diego,” she said dismissively, before I realized tattoos were a mistake. You’re a liar, Graves rasped. He tried to sit up. That’s a unit tattoo. 27ths, my unit. And Valkyrie, that was the call sign for the forward surgical team attached to us in sector 4.
The ones who came in when the medevacs couldn’t land. He looked at her face. Really looked at her. He stripped away the wrinkles of the last 10 years, the lack of sleep, the hospital lighting. He tried to picture her covered in dust, wearing a helmet, screaming over the sound of rotor blades. You’re not Sarah, he whispered. I mean, you’re not just Sarah.
Sarah sighed. It was a sound of defeat. She walked to the door and clicked the lock shut. You need to rest, Colonel. Tell me, Graves shouted, finding his command voice. Who are you? She walked back to the bed. She rolled up her sleeve, exposing the ink again. She pointed to a small jagged scar running through the skull’s eye socket.
You don’t remember me, sir, and I didn’t expect you to. I was wearing a balaclava and goggles most of the time, and you were usually unconscious. She leaned in close. I’m not the one who held Miller’s intestines, Colonel. I’m the one who reached in and clamped your femoral artery when you took that shrapnel in Mar. I’m the one who sat on your chest in the back of the Humvee and punched you in the face to keep you awake because you were trying to die on me.
Graves stared at her, his mouth slightly open. Doc, he whispered. Doc Mitchell. They called me Stitch back then, she said with a sad smile. But yes, I was the Navy corsman attached to your detail for Operation Phantom Fury. The realization hit Graves like a physical blow, the woman he had just verbally abused, the woman he had thrown a picture at the woman he had dismissed as a weak civilian.
Leave a Comment