Free January Dawn by Cody Lennon

drill?
    “Yeah.”
    “For the life of me, I couldn’t get it down. I had a hard time learning the steps and the timing, but after I started watching you I started to get it. After a few days, I was doing it as well as you. And remember how you used to get mad at me every morning because I couldn’t make my bed correctly? I watched how you did it. I copied everything you did. By the end of the week, I was making my bed by myself. It was the same with a dozen other things, in class or in the barracks, whatever it was, I looked to you. The Army is something very different from what I’m used to and knowing you has made that transition a lot easier.”
    Alex pinched at the bridge of his nose, rubbing away the last of his tears. “Yeah, my dad made me make my bed with hospital corners since I was seven years old. He’s real old school. He even did the whole bounce a quarter on the bed test.”
    “Sounds rough.”
    “Only when he was home. He was usually off on deployment. He would leave my mom to take care of all of us children. All six of us. When he came home for the last time, things changed. They started sheltering us more. They made us stop seeing some of our friends, my dad stopped talking about the military, and he took us out of the military school and put us in a private school. I was too young to understand at the time. I would get angry and get into arguments with my parents a lot. By my junior year I wanted to get out of there and run away from it all. Looks like I didn’t run far enough,” he said, standing up to hang his towel on the hook outside the shower stall.
    He seemed to appear somewhat similar to his old self now and I thought he was ending the conversation, so I held my crutches upright and pulled myself to my feet. My job here is done.
    “Hey, thanks…for listening,” he said.
    “Someone close to me once told me that every once and awhile we need somebody to pick us up off our knees and tell us that the sky isn’t falling and that we need only to open our eyes to see it.”
    Mr. Jeffries did that for me more than a few times. He pulled me back from the brink of self-destruction and gave to me the gift of life. I miss you Mr. Jeffries, wherever you are .
    Alex thought about that for a moment and then shot me an inquisitive look.
    “What’s your story?”
    “You’re not the only one running away from something,” I said, not wanting to say anything more. For a second, I felt that I could talk to Alex and tell him the truth, but the feeling passed. My life was my burden and nobody could help me with it. I had to deal with it on my own.
    Alex nodded understandingly, slipped out of his boxer shorts and stepped into the shower. I took a shower in my usual stall at the end of the room and made it to my rack a minute before lights out.
    As I lay in bed, I was comforted with the fact that I had helped someone in need. When I looked into Alex Redman’s eyes, I could see that I had gotten through to him and that he was back on the right track. I could sense something else in him too, something swarm, something satisfying, something concrete. Whatever it was, it got Alex’s motor running again.
    For some odd reason that I couldn’t explain, that conversation with Alex elevated me from my depressive slump. A wave of hearty cheerfulness flowed through me as I lay there staring up at the ceiling. A smile slinked across my face. I had a warm bed, a solid roof over my head, a full stomach and now, a new friend.
    I could get used to this life .

Chapter 6
March 12
    We had been walking for nearly three hours after being dumped out the back of an armored personnel carrier and told to find our way back to base.
    It was one of our final field exercises, meant to test all that we had learned. The entire platoon was taken miles into the woods surrounding the base and scattered about pell-mell, sometimes in twos, sometimes in threes, the rest in singles. They gave us a twelve hour time limit to return to