The Colonel Who Answered the Call

I raised Hazeline mostly alone in a house two miles outside Laclede, the same house my own parents raised me in, because her father left when she was four and never came back for so much as a birthday. I was a first lieutenant then, still learning how to run a supply company, and I remember doing homework with her over a landline from a training range in Oklahoma, sounding out spelling words between radio checks. My mother kept her through two deployments. My father taught her to drive on the same gravel road he taught me on. Laclede is a small enough town that the whole county watched me build a career the hard way, and a small enough town that half of it still remembers Hazeline as the girl who used to sell lemonade outside the Pershing statue on Founders Day, a dollar a cup, all of it donated to the volunteer fire department because she’d decided at nine years old that firefighters deserved better boots. I tell you that because I want you to understand what it meant to watch that same girl sit in a hospital bed being told by strangers that she was dramatic, when everyone who had actually known her for more than a season knew there was not a dramatic bone in her body.

By the time I pushed through the doors of Pershing Memorial it was a little after nine at night, and the statue of the general the hospital was named for stood out front in the parking lot lights, the way it has stood in that town since before I was born. A nurse at the intake desk tried to put a hand up when she saw the uniform coming through the doors too fast.