Caleb lost the ring and little fingers of his left hand and a lot of the tendon function in the rest. He also lost, though nobody wrote it on any form, something harder to name. The gunner in the truck with him, a nineteen-year-old specialist from Tucson named Ruiz, had not come out of the cab. Daniel had tried to go back in for him and been pulled off by two men. He had fought them until he was on his back in the gravel with a sergeant's knee on his chest. Caleb, flat on a litter at the aid station an hour later, his hand a shapeless bundle, had grabbed Daniel's sleeve with his good hand, said Ruiz's name over and over, and said he was sorry. He had seen the culvert. He should have stopped. He should have seen it. Daniel told him nobody could have seen it. Daniel told him it was not his fault. It was the kind of thing you say that's true and doesn't help.
That was when he took the photograph out of the inside pocket of his body armor, where it had ridden since October, and put it in Caleb's hand.
He hadn't thought about it much. It was what you did. You gave a man something to hold, a reason, a picture of a door he could walk through. He had looked down at Caleb's gray, shaking face and seen a boy from Coos Bay with nobody waiting for him, and he had given him his own family to hold onto for the trip home. He had told him to go first and hold the door. He had told him to go see Claire.
He could see now that it had been the most generous thing he had ever done. He could also see it had been something like handing a starving man the key to your pantry.