Forever Damned (Damned of the 2/19th - Book 20/Series Final) - Finished

Just a Beer

Tidewater Tavern
Astoria, Oregon
United States of America
0150 Hours
18 October, 2004

The Tidewater was a tidy little place for a place that had been a shithole when I had first started working there. My job interview had consisted of teaching me to pour beer and then the owner sitting there with friends and watching me for my first few nights. She had been less than thrilled when I had vanished for six weeks because of Kilo-61, but the bartender that she had hired to replace me had let the meth-heads and his friends come back in. She had been thrilled I had returned.

When I had come back so had the better patrons.

Sure, I'd had to break a few faces, methheads never learned unless they were still injured when they sobered up. Then they needed reminded, which I had no problem doing.

Now the bar, formerly a place where tweakers, herion junkies, and scumbags came and drank and thieved, was brightly lit, polished, and a safe place to drink.

Word had gotten around fast that I was not a man to be fucked with among the lower element.

The owner, she didn't know much more than I was a quiet guy who handled things quickly and quietly, no longer using brute force but rather deescalation tactics to make sure that fights did not break out.

The Sunday evening crowd had left, leaving me alone in the bar for the last few hours. The fog had rolled in early in the afternoon and still shrouded the whole town. Astoria was closer to a city than a town, but it was sleepy all the same, the port used for little more than fishing boats and the occasional yacht or small ship. There was a small Navy presence, a Naval Air Station, a fighter wing from the Oregon Air National Guard that mainly kept shipkillers in their bunkers, and a Combat Engineer Army National Guard unit.

I knew people from all of them, but they didn't know me. Unlike a lot of vets, I never mentioned my prior service. Two engineers drinking beer at the bar one night had spotted my old tattoo, the 3rd CosCom patch with "2/19th SWG" above it and "83-91, 1st 20 and Last Man" beneath it. They'd asked, but I had pulled my sleeve back down, given them each a free beer, and told them that it was drinking time, not talking time.

Both of them had looked young as hell. One was a pretty big guy, and he'd tried to press me after a few more beers, but I'd stared him down, making sure he could see the patch over my left eye, the scars on my face, and the steel teeth implants I showed him with a feral smile.

He came back from Iraq in July, quiet and without the bluster and macho bullshit I'd seen the last time he was there. I let him stay after closing, giving him free beer, and didn't say a word. I felt like he needed that.

I already knew what had happened. His whole squad, including the guy he'd been drinking with a few years before, had been killed in an RPG ambush in Afghanistan. He didn't need to talk about it, he needed to sit in the dim and quiet and process without people telling him he needed to talk about or being reminded that his friends had all died while he had lived.

That would become more and more common. People thought that buying a yellow ribbon magnet to slap on the back of their SUV meant they supported the War on Terror, but I'd never seen people more removed from war-time than my fellow Americans.

The clock kept ticking, and I was aware I was drifting slightly. The anti-psychotics that the VA prescribed to me did that to me. A 'known side effect' they called it.  My thoughts would short circuit and I'd drift for awhile when I had been thinking of military things.

Heather called them "Lethe Kisses" and she was right. It kept me from remembering.

Remembering who I had been. Remembering Atlas. Remembering 2/19th. Remembering Desert Storm. Remembering Kilo-29 or Kilo-61. Remembering anything too traumatic. Remembering what I had done in those dark places and terrible times. Remembering the wounded, the dead.