Chapter 6 - THE BOY IN THE PHOTOGRAPH
Travis requested to speak to me through his counsel.
I refused a private meeting and agreed only to a supervised interview at the installation legal office.
He arrived without the arrogance he'd carried into the Anchor Room.
There was no polished performance in his eyes now, only sleeplessness and anger looking for a place to land.
“You knew my father when he was young,” he began.
“I did.”
“You could have told me.”
“I owed you basic humanity, not my biography.”
He lowered his gaze.
“I kicked your chair.”
“Yes.”
“And I laughed when you couldn't stand.”
“Yes.”
He waited, perhaps hoping I'd make the confession easier.
I didn't.
He told me he grew up with a father who never slept through storms and never spoke about the men he'd lost.
Whenever Travis asked about Afghanistan, Daniel repeated that good Marines remembered the living and honored the dead.
Then Travis showed me an old family photograph.
A little boy stood between Daniel and his wife, missing a front tooth, grinning under an oversized camouflage cap.
It was the same child in the cracked picture Daniel had carried in the valley.
“You kept him alive for me,” Travis whispered.
“And he came home to you,” I replied.
“That isn't a debt you repay by hurting another person.”
His jaw tightened.
“I know.”
He said he'd recently received anonymous messages accusing my medals of being falsified and suggesting I had fabricated parts of the Iron Lantern rescue.
The messages began the week before he visited the bar.
“Who sent them?” I asked.
“I don't know. They came from a number that disappeared.”
He slid copies across the table.
One included a detail from my closed medical evaluation that no stranger should have known.
Someone had studied my history and chosen Travis as the instrument of a public humiliation.
I asked why he'd believed the messages.
He answered more truthfully than I'd expected.
“Because they told me what I already wanted to believe about women in uniform.”
I let the admission stand between us.
Captain Vega took the copies for examination.
As the interview ended, Travis paused at the door.
“My father kept a black case in his study,” he said.
“He never let anyone touch it.”
I looked sharply at him.
“What kind of case?”
“Metal. Burn marks on one corner.”
May you like
My memory supplied its weight before he finished.
The communications case from the second helicopter had not vanished in Afghanistan after all.
