Free Quest for Honor by David Tindell Page A

about that,” Mark had said, and his Afghan National Army interpreter had struggled with that one, finally coming up with something that sounded like the Pashto version of “ Inshallah,” the Will of God.
    It would be a short hop to Langdon, but not necessarily a safe one, so Mark was glad to see the Blackhawk helo was fully armed and manned. In a real hot zone he’d have an escort of one or two Apaches, but this would do for now. The warrant officer pilot snapped off a salute when Mark approached. “Need a ride somewhere, Colonel?”
    “You can drop me off at Langdon, Mr. Witz.”
    “Roger that, sir. Step inside and the flight attendant will show you to your first-class seat. Keep your tray in the upright position until we reach our cruising altitude, and have a safe flight.”
    Mark was helped aboard through the port side door by the gunner and strapped himself in to the only empty seat. Mark could remember a time when sacks of mail would fill supply choppers, but now there was only one small sack that looked like it had some packages. Most of the troops relied on email, which they could access when they rotated back to Roosevelt. Along with the mail, the bird would carry other, more vital supplies to the twenty men at Langdon: food, bottled water, spare parts, and some ammo crates. Mark would be the only soldier getting off at the last FOB.
    The crewmen were finishing up the loading when Mark suddenly remembered when he’d first heard the name Solum. He hadn’t thought about it since leaving his office, but that’s how it worked sometimes. This particular memory was nearly forty years old, but now it came back to him with near-perfect clarity. He remembered his father speaking the name….
    “You okay, sir?”
    Mark blinked away the tears that were about to come, seeing the door gunner looking at him through his shaded visor. “Yeah. I’m fine.”
     
    He remembered the day: Memorial Day, 1972. Sunny and warm, and his dad, Ed Hayes, had taken him and Jim to the veterans cemetery near County Stadium in Milwaukee. Dad was quiet on the drive from their house in the suburb of St. Francis, and that was unusual for him. He always had the radio on, always a ballgame or a country station, and he would sing along, although not too well. Ed Hayes was a carpenter, not a singer. He was a baseball fan, too, and had taken his boys to the ballpark a few times to see the Brewers. But the team was out of town that day, so Mark was puzzled when they drove past the stadium with its vast empty parking lot. In a few minutes they parked along a side street and walked a block to the first cemetery Mark had visited since his grandfather’s death, four years earlier.
    He remembered the lush green grass, and all the crosses, hundreds of them, all over the rolling hills. Mark was only seven at the time. Jim was eleven, old enough to remember Grandpa Hayes’s funeral. “They bury dead people here,” Jim said to him, “like they did Grandpa.”
    There were a lot of people there that day, and Jim said it was because it was a special day, they’d talked about it in school on Friday. All these crosses were for guys who died in wars, he said. Vietnam for sure, and there were big ones a long time ago.
    “Dad was in one,” he said. Jim was whispering, because Dad was walking ahead of them, slowly but purposefully, and this seemed like a place to be quiet, even though Mark heard birds singing like they always did on sunny days.
    “He was? Was it Vietnam?” Mark wasn’t really sure where Vietnam was, but there were people on TV who talked about it all the time and usually they were yelling.
    “No, the one before that. Korea. I saw his medal.”
    “Yeah? Where is it?”
    “In his foot locker, down in the basement.” Mark didn’t know how that could’ve happened, because there was a big padlock on it, but Jim must’ve found the key. He was pretty smart.
    Dad stopped, looked closely at the row of headstones to their left, and