He squeezed my hand and shook his head. “No, I want to. I… Listen, whatever we did — or tried to do — after high school doesn’t make up for what we did to you, but I kind of want you to know we tried.”
I yanked my hand away, feeling like I’d been burned by his mention of what had happened between us. “What does your time in the military have to do with me?”
He took my hand again, rested it on his knee, covered it with his. “We wanted to do something good. We wanted to…” He trailed off, like he couldn’t find the right words.
Or like he was afraid to say them.
“Redeem yourselves?” I suggested.
He shook his head. “I don’t think anything would do that. But we wanted to dosomething, something to prove we weren’t total pieces of shit.”
“Even Rafe?” I hated myself for asking but the question was out of my mouth before I could stop it.
“Even Rafe.” He sighed. “That’s what we thought we were doing — something good — when we first got to the desert. A lot of it was handing out food and supplies to locals, talking to the kids, hearts-and-minds shit in between the occasional raid on an underground safe house.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“It wasn’t. It was actually good. The people were nice. They were…” He shrugged. “Just people. But Sandoval was always pushing, ordering us to do things that were against the rules, getting off on how much damage we could do when we were supposed to be helping.”
“What did you guys do about it?” I asked.
“We went along at first, on the small stuff. We should have spoken up from the beginning, but when you go through training with these guys, when you deploy with them… they’re like family. Snitches get stitches and all that.”
My stomach turned and I pushed away the rest of my grilled cheese. I had a feeling this was going to get really bad.
“Anyway,” Jude continued, “we looked the other way until we couldn’t.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I don’t know why I asked. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know.
“I’m not going to… I can’t…” He ran a hand over his head and I heard the scratch of his short blond hair against his palm. “There were some villagers… We thought they were harboring one of the terrorists, one of the guys who’d taken out a member of our unit with an IED the week before. Sandoval was on the fucking warpath when we went in there, except once we got there, it was just women, old people, kids… But Sandoval didn’t care.”
I swallowed the bile rising in my throat. “What did you do?”
“Rafe, Nolan, and I didn’tdoanything.” I hated the relief that flooded my body when he said it. I already knew my roommates were bastards. Why did it matter that they weren’t indiscriminate killers? “But we couldn’t stop Sandoval and the others. So we filed a complaint with JAG. There was an investigation, but when we agreed to testify against Sandoval, he claimed accusations had been raised againstus. It was all lies, retaliation for blowing the whistle, but he got some of the other guys in the unit to commit perjury and testify, and that’s how we ended up with a dishonorable discharge. We were lucky we weren’t sent to Leavenworth.”
I sucked in a deep breath and exhaled it slowly, trying to calm the beating of my heart. I could see it: soldiers in the desert, houses in a dusty village, innocent people surprised by a bunch of scary men holding weapons, a volley of gunfire cracking through the dry desert air.
Horror on horror on horror, close enough to touch.
Too close.
“Rafe has PTSD,” I said, finally getting it.
Jude nodded. “Although he’s too proud to get therapy so they can actually treat it.”
“That’s…” I shook my head. I’d been about to say it was dumb, but I was feeling pretty humbled in the Rafe department. Sure, he was still a bastard, but he wasn’t the devil. That titlebelonged to guys like Sandoval and the people who followed him. They’dkilledpeople. Innocent people. “How often does he have nightmares?”
“Not too often anymore,” Jude said. “Not that I know of anyway.”
I reached out to touch his face. “I’m sorry.”
He covered my hand with his own and stared into my eyes. “It’s hard not to feel like we deserve it because of what we did to you.”
I shook my head. “That’s not how it works. Honestly, I wish it was. I wish people who did bad things got punished for them. But I don’t know… it seems to me like this life is just controlled chaos. Bad people get away with bad shit all the time.”
“That’s the whole point,” he said. “I don’t want to be one of the bad guys.”
“Then don’t.”