1990

It was 1990.

Paul was sitting in a hot and overcrowded bar in Comayagua, a little town just down the street from Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras, drinking his sorrows away. He'd only been in-country for eight weeks and was already ready to catch the next flight out of there. He couldn't do that, of course, so he spent his days off at the bar; a glass of whiskey clutched in his right hand and a cigarette in his left, dripping ash onto an ever-growing mountain of butts that were haphazardly stuffed into an ashtray.

Paul was hard at work at his new ritual. Take a shot, light a cigarette, huff it down while pouring another shot, toss butt, repeat. It was a recipe for success if he'd ever heard one. It was also a potent recipe for decision-making, and Paul was about to make one of the largest in his fairly short military career.

He looked down at Form 4781, sitting neatly on the bar in front of him. It was already filled out, and just needed to be submitted. But should he submit it? That was the question weighing heavily on his mind on that muggy summer afternoon.

He'd gone in as a general enlisted man. He was told that his ASVAB scores were high enough that he could do pretty much whatever he wanted to do. What he wanted to do was see the world, and he figured that the best way to do that would be in the General Infantry. Have gun, will travel, after all. Just getting to Fort Jackson felt like an epic adventure.

When he was getting shuffled off the bus with the rest of the grunts, he was bewildered by the sights around him. The base was probably the biggest complex he'd ever seen in his life. There was a big sign across the gates past where the grunts got off the bus that said "Victory Starts Here!" He felt excited for the first time in a very long time when he read those words.

Then he started his first day of PT, and victory felt further away for him than it had in his entire life. Crushing physical drills, running miles on miles every day with 75 pounds of equipment strapped to his body, jumping and rolling in the mud under barbed wire and trying to hit targets with a cacophony of gunfire going on around him while he was getting yelled at by the drill sergeant. That wasn't even the half of it. Then came the after-training routine of spit-shining the dorms, cleaning the bathrooms with a toothbrush, and praying to all the gods he could think of just to get three hours of sleep each night.

One thing he actually didn't mind too much was the shit that he got from the Drill Sergeant. He was used to assholes yelling in his face and telling him that he wasn't good enough. It was probably the only edge that he had on anyone else in his group, at least at first. Once they started training with rifles, he felt right at home.

He had been hunting as a boy a lot. He never really liked killing animals, but it was the only time he could do something with his dad where the man actually seemed like a somewhat normal human being. His dad taught him the ins and outs of gun safety when he was only seven, and he was helping pack out elk the next spring. It wasn't long before he earned his distinguished marksman medal, which he often polished and wore with pride.

By the time he was through with those fourteen grueling weeks, the belly that he came in with was replaced by solid muscle, and the endless meandering of his will had been honed into a sharply determined edge. He was going to get out there and help protect the world, because that's what soldiers do. Well, that's the sales pitch anyway, at the very least, he was going to get out there and see what the world had to offer.

Now, sitting in that dingy little bar in Honduras, he'd seen a good chunk of the world, and he wasn't really all that impressed.

South Korea was fun enough, he guessed, but the food was terrible and the way they wrote their words made him feel like he was living on an alien planet. He had been there for 18 months and actually won some kind of "Soldier of the Month" award at some point.

Heidelberg was okay, but he didn't get to spend much time away from base. After that he spent some time in Mexico, then Colorado and, finally, Honduras. In his mind, there were few things worse than a hot, sticky jungle combined with heavy equipment and constant trekking. He thought South Carolina was bad, but he had no idea what the real jungle was like.

The more places he went to, the more this strange dark feeling started to grow inside him. Soldiers see a lot of things that most don't, even in peace time. He had seen some of the worst that the world had to offer, and every day his hope for finding somewhere that he fit in faded. He had a problem, but one that he wouldn't dare share with anyone else.

His problem was that most of the people he had met were, in his eyes, idiots. They followed blindly and never asked any questions. He knew it was ironic coming out of the mouth of someone who literally signed up to follow his country blindly and not ask questions, but it didn't matter, it ran deeper than that. He had seen some of the dirtiest and poorest places on Earth, and he couldn't believe that people could live like that.

Why weren't they standing up and demanding a better life for themselves? Or, better yet, going out and making one. He didn't understand it. How could they be happy living in such squalor? The more he saw, the more he feared that he would end up like them if he didn't do something more with his life.

While his morale faded, at least his shape didn't. Well, it mostly didn't. Cheap whiskey and even cheaper Honduran cocaine will do that to anyone. That was another thing that hadn't been far from his mind since he landed in the country. He was formally introduced to The Lady in White by a buddy of his from Mexico City. It seemed like the answer to all of his problems. He started using it to keep his mind sharp when they were on patrol with Joint Task Force Bravo, but now he used it to try and maintain interest in what was happening around him.

He knew that he was running out of options, and the clock would start ticking soon. He still believed that rising through the ranks of the military would give him the life that he wanted, but it wasn't happening fast enough. He was just as poor as when he started, and actually rising through the ranks was much more difficult than he thought it would be. He only had one choice, a change of MOS. He wanted to leave the high-flying world of packing heavy shit around for the less in-your-face world of Communications. He was smart enough, he figured, and he would pass any test that they threw at him. He was an excellent organizer and critical thinker and they would be stupid not to give him the chance to prove it.

He had been at the bar for hours every night he had off for the past month, and had re-written his request a dozen times. This time, though, he was sure that he nailed it. If he got in, he'd be headed back to the good ol' USA, and finally out of the fucking jungle. No more cockroaches hiding in his bed. No more looking over his shoulder everywhere he went. No more squat toilets. It was going to be wonderful.

Unfortunately, this was the worst kind of problem for him. Usually, he knew that as long as he could influence the outcome of a decision, he would always end up ahead, but this was totally different. He wasn't even entitled to a change of MOS, and if his superiors decided not to give it to him, there would be nothing he could do about it, and that scared him. That's what made him write so many drafts of that damned form and letter.

He had to make sure that every word on the page was correct, and not only the grammar or spelling; that wasn't an issue at all. It was the wording itself that he was concerned with. He knew he had one shot to make whoever read this thing feel what he felt. Coercion was a skill that he had spent years developing, and he had finally whittled it into a knife. It wasn't as sharp as it could be, no, that would come with time, but it had to be sharp enough. These weren't small-town rubes or backwater grunts, they were the brass. They had planned and won entire wars, and he had planned and won a few arguments.

He figured that if he could impress them enough with his letter, then they would have no choice but to approve his request, and he'd be on his way to being a Coms Analyst, whatever that job actually entailed.

This would be the last time he wrote the letter or filled out the form. He had spent hours on this one, and there was no way that they would deny him. It's not like there was a war going on, and they needed as many Marksmen as they could get. There was always room for more data analysts. Those were the people who caught the real bad guys, and didn't have to do it from the front-lines. He took another drag of his cigarette and put it out on the mountain of butts. He stood up proudly,walking toward the bathroom of the bar and pulling out a small bag of white powder from his pocket. It was time to celebrate.

For all of Ruby Sue's hopes of a great escape from Texas, she hadn't actually made it that far. She was stationed at Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma. It was maybe a six-hour drive to Paris on a day with heavy traffic. Still though, Fort Sill sure beat the hell out of being back in the trailer with her mom.

It had been such a relief for her when she finally arrived in Fort Jackson for training, that she was actually happy with the brutal training that they put her through. Well, all except for one part. On one of the last weeks of training, they made all of the grunts rappel out of a helicopter. Ruby was excited to get up in the air, and she always loved roller-coasters as a kid (the few that she had actually been on at least), so she figured that jumping out of a chopper would be no big deal. She was wrong.

As soon as they opened that door and she heard the nasty whipping wind of the chopper blades, and the crackling voice in her ear, screaming at her to jump, she froze dead still.

"What in the ever-loving fuck do you think you're doin, maggot! Jump goddamnit!"

A scream in her headset from the drill sergeant brought her back to the land of the living.

"I can't, sir," she yelled out,"I'm too scared!"

She felt the reverberation of the sergeant's boots slamming on the helicopter's floor as he approached her.

"You listen here you little country bumpkin bitch! You will put your hands on that rope and you will jump out of this goddamned helicopter right fucking now, or I will toss you out! Do you get me!?"

She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth.

"Sir, yes sir!" She screamed as she wrapped her arms tightly around the rope and took that first, huge step out of the chopper.

By the time she reached the ground, she still had her eyes clamped shut and was grinding her teeth together. It was something that she would never, ever do again if she could help it. So much for being a fighter pilot.

The rest of boot camp actually went pretty well. She made new friends, saw new things and met a lot of interesting new people. Some were good, some not so much, but all of them were new. She didn't realize before just how small her old world was, and every day she spent in the Army, that horizon expanded a little bit..

By the time she made it to Oklahoma, she was a constant sight in the motor pool. She was the shy girl with the East Texas drawl, and everyone seemed like they wanted something from her. She wasn't exactly an expert on dealing with people or having friends. It was an unfortunate side-effect to growing up poor in an already poor area. Shit rolls downhill, and even the kids on welfare could rip on her and her siblings. They didn't even get new clothes for school.

When she was a teenager, she started finally getting some attention, but only from certain people; certain older men to be exact. The first time she learned the hard way that 'no' actually meant 'sure, do what you want' put her off of trusting any men for some time, and she knew that when they talked to her, they were only really looking for one thing.

Not that the one thing they were looking for wasn't something that she was also looking for, of course. She was as much of a hormone-fueled teenager as the rest of the grunts that came in with her, she just knew how to keep it hidden, and to use it when it would benefit her, not just for the benefit of someone else.

The more she worked in the motor pool, the more that shell went away, but every once in a while, it would come back with a vengeance, especially if someone was yelling at her. Years of dealing with her mother and the revolving door of step-dads taught her to be afraid of loud voices. Yelling almost always led to violence, and the violence was almost always directed at her.

Her first reaction to a scream was to shy away and make herself as small as possible. As you can imagine, this didn't exactly make her popular with the drill sergeants. They would start barking like the mad dogs that they were paid to be, and she would go totally stiff like an armadillo in headlights.

They would berate her about not having a spine, or being weak like other women, and she would sit with a stone face, tears in her eyes, and take it all. She was good at taking it, especially when her body got over the knee-jerk reaction that violence would follow the screaming. Thankfully, she came after the tail-end of what they called the "physical days", where the DS would toss people around or beat them instead of just screaming at them.

Still though, it made her angry. It was just one more scar that her stupid parents had left on her. It was one that she knew would never heal, no matter how hard she tried or what she did. Some hurts just don't go away.

She only talked about it once, with one person. When she first got out of basic and got shipped to Oklahoma, one of her few friends from that group, a woman named Angie who came from Detroit, came with her. They were even assigned to the same unit. Angie was the closest thing Ruby had to a friend since she was in grade school, and it didn't take long for them to share childhood stories with each other.

One day, early into their time at Fort Sill, Angie found Ruby sitting on her bed in the middle of the day, crying. It wasn't the first time she'd seen the young Texan cry, but it was the first time she couldn't figure out what the problem was.

"What's the matter, sugar?" Angie asked, getting eye-to-eye with Ruby.

Ruby dried her tears and let out a sniffle.

"Fucking Elvis; goddamned son of a bitch."

Angie accidentally laughed. She didn't want to seem callous, she just didn't expect to hear that the King of Rock and Roll could be at the center of her little southern belle's problems, and Ruby's darling Texas drawl made it seem all the more silly.

"Pressley?" Angie asked. "What did he do to you? He's been dead for like 15 years."

Ruby let out a bitter chuckle.

"Not Presley. Elvis Marshall . He was my step-daddy for a time when I was a kid. Meanest bastard ya ever met, and I mean the ab-so-lute meanest. He used ta beat the tar outta me, my Ma and my little brothers and sisters. Even now, he's fuckin' with my head. Every time I hear one of 'em bark an order at me, I hear Elvis, screamin' at me ta go get a switch outta the backyard to get whooped with."

Angie wasn't laughing anymore.

"What's a switch?"

"Like a little tree branch. Ya never been hit with a switch before?"

Angie was taken aback.

"Hell no, girl. My mom was great to me and my little brother, and I never met my dad. My mom had some boyfriends around when I was a kid, but they never stuck around for long. So this guy would just beat you with sticks?"

Ruby scoffed.

"Sticks, rocks, rulers, TV remotes, books; that man hit us with damn near everything he could get his filthy paws on. Ever had a cigarette put out on ya?"

"What?" Angie exclaimed in disgust.

"He only did it once ta me, but I saw him do it a few times ta my little brother, Jessie."

Angie could see the fury building in Ruby's eyes. If she wasn't careful, she'd be dealing with a full-blown meltdown at any moment.

"I've got an idea," she said with a smile. "I know these guys over in the 902 who can get us into the bar. Maybe that'll help pick your spirits up a bit."

Ruby sighed. "I don't know. Gotta be honest, I feel like meetin' random dudes and gettin' drunk was how I solved all my problems before."

Angie reached out her hand to Ruby's.

"Well, if it worked before, it'll probably work now, right?"

Ruby looked up to her. Angie was always kind to her, and she didn't want to let her down; besides, one night away wouldn't hurt. She took Angie's hand and stood up, then wiped away what was left of her tears. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, pushing all the memories from home into that dark little corner of her mind and letting them go. They'd always come back eventually, but she'd at least have the night away from herself.

It was fair to say that Paul didn't care much for Oklahoma. It wasn't bad; the weather was a nice change of pace and it was nice to finally be able to eat American food again, but it wasn't anything special. In fact, that was what Paul hated about it. Lawton was annoyingly average. He'd only been there for two weeks and felt like he'd already done just about everything he could do.

The most ironic part was that he found Cointel to be about the same as Oklahoma. Some aspects were fascinating, but none of what he was personally doing mattered at all. Most of his time thus far had been spent getting systems training and drinking away his free time with his team, and that night was set to be more of the same.

He and his friend Jose took a couple of girls from the motor pool up on an offer for free drinks if they got them into the bar. He hadn't been laid, without paying at least, since Seoul, and it was something to do. He wasn't trying to lay anything on strong until he could suss out his chances for success. Despite the new body and confidence his training had given him, he was still an awkward, chubby kid at heart, and that wasn't easily changed.

After they'd all sat down and got their drinks, Angie introduced them to her friend Ruby. She was a short and quiet girl with a kind smile, but Paul could see sadness in her eyes. They reminded him of the last time he saw Janice. He pushed that thought as far from his mind as possible; now was definitely not the time to be thinking about his little sister.

Awkward small talk always dominates first meetings, but after a few beers and two rounds of pool, everyone was feeling pretty friendly. After awhile, Angie and Jose had both wandered off somewhere, leaving Pual and Ruby alone at the bar, taking shots.

They got to talking about how much they hated Oklahoma, but they both agreed that it was better than where they came from. They started telling each other about their hometowns. Paul was fascinated by everything Ruby said, even though her accent made it harder to understand her with every shot they took. He couldn't believe that someone could actually come from a place like that and not end up being a monster.

Then, it was his turn to share. After hearing about some of the horrible things that she'd gone through - quite a few he was sure she'd never have told him if they hadn't been drinking so much- he didn't know how his story could ever stack-up. Sure, his parents sucked, but they were nothing compared to what she had gone through. Well, there was one thing, but that wasn't for her. That wasn't for anyone.

If he couldn't go bad, he'd have to go good, but what good was there? He barely graduated high school and dropped out of college. He worked for a few months in construction but was terrible at it. He had a total of zero previous relationships that lasted longer than two months. He was starting to think that he was just like Oklahoma; painfully average.

He didn't have to be painfully average, though. He could be whoever he wanted to be. This girl didn't know him; hell, she'd never even been within a thousand miles of Montana! He could be anyone he said he was, and she wouldn't have any reason not to believe him. He could be a chameleon.

He'd start small. He told her that he was captain of the debate club for three years, and had served as the personal assistant to the governor over the summer. They were all half-truths; those make for the best lies.

He told her that he joined the Army because he wanted to do his duty and serve his country and because his father was jealous and did nothing but hold him back. A little true, a little false. Then, he said that he'd been awarded Soldier of the Month in Seoul and was asked to come back to the States as an asset. He actually did win Soldier of the Month once, but it wasn't exactly a high bar to reach.

When it was all over, he noticed that she was smiling, and then she broke out in laughter.

"Just what's so funny?" he asked.

"Ya sound like you're makin an award speech," she said, wiping tears from her eyes.

She liked him. He was full of shit for sure, but she figured there was probably little nuggets of truth peppered in there somewhere. At least he wasn't boring or ugly. No, that was the old Ruby talking. The old Ruby didn't have many standards outside of not being related and having a full set of teeth. The old Ruby got called the town whore by her own mother on an almost daily basis. The old Ruby needed to stay dead, but that didn't mean that she couldn't at least give the guy a chance.

"For real this time. What's your deal?" she asked, taking another shot and struggling to remain sitting straight.

Paul stared her down; she was smarter than he thought, bolder too. Maybe something actually interesting could happen. His drunken mind was stuck between two choices: full truth or a reduced lie.

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

"I'm here because I don't want to end up like my dad. He's a bitter, mean-spirited cynic who blames the world for his problems. I want something more, and I know that I can get it if I try."

A reduced lie it was.

Ruby smiled and put a hand over his.

"See, how hard was that?"

It wasn't hard at all.

They spent the next few hours pounding drinks and keeping the conversation alive. Time started to blend for both of them, until they found themselves alone in Paul's truck. They'd lost track of Angela and Jose hours before, but neither could even think about it, all they saw was each other.

Paul wanted more, but Ruby wasn't sure. She brought up the old Ruby again to herself. Hooking up with someone on the first date - if it even got that far - was something that the old Ruby would do, and she knew what happened when old Ruby was at the wheel. But this wasn't just a hookup, right? She felt it in her bones. Something was different about this one. So, for what she promised would be the last time, she let her defenses down and the old Ruby came out to play. They fell asleep in the truck and were almost late to report-in the next morning.

Neither of them were sure what to say. There had been a lot of drinking, and between them both they could piece together just about everything that happened the night before. The only question was where to go from there. After an awkward conversation filled with a few pauses that may have been a little too long, they decided to go on an actual date and see how things went.