Staff Sergeant Caleb Michael Strand was twenty-eight years old and came from Coos Bay, Oregon. He talked about it the way some men talk about a woman who left them, the gray water, the fog, the lumber mills mostly closed now, the jetties where he had fished with his grandfather. He joined at eighteen because there was nothing else to join. He was good with engines, the best mechanic in the company, and could diagnose a dying transmission by the sound it made going uphill. He was a little too loud and a little too funny, the kind of soldier who keeps a platoon from going under on a bad night by doing a dead-on impression of the battalion commander. He had no wife and no kids. He had a sister in Eugene and a mother he didn't talk about. The guys called him Oregon, or Coos, or Strand, and once, after he drank a whole bottle of hot sauce on a bet, the Flamethrower, a name that stuck for about a month.
Daniel had been his platoon sergeant for a year and a half. He liked him. He worried about him, in the specific way you worry about a young NCO with no one waiting at home. The ones with no one waiting take chances. Sometimes they don't see much point in coming back.
On the ninth of March, in the gray hour before dawn, the platoon was running a resupply convoy along a road in eastern Syria that had a number on a map and no name, and the third truck in the line rolled over a pressure plate buried under a culvert. Caleb was driving the third truck.
Daniel remembered it in pieces, the way you remember those things. The flash came before the sound. Then the silence, the floating. The truck lay canted on its side in the drainage ditch with smoke pouring out of the engine compartment, and something underneath had caught. He had no memory of getting out of his own vehicle or covering the distance. His next clear picture was of himself on top of the overturned cab, hauling on the driver's door, which had jammed. Two other men were with him, and the heat was coming up through the soles of his boots. He remembered the smell. He remembered getting the door open. He remembered Caleb's face looking up at him from inside, blank and gray with dust, eyes wide, and Caleb's left arm caught somewhere below, pinned. Caleb was making a sound, not a word, and Daniel had reached down with both arms and taken him under the armpits and pulled, and the arm hadn't come, and he had pulled again, and something gave, and they had come up out of the cab together and fallen off the side of the truck into the ditch, and someone had rolled them both, and someone had put a tourniquet on Caleb's arm above the elbow. The truck burned for forty minutes.