The Truck Driver at the VFW Breakfast
“I don’t remember the sound. I remember the windshield was gone, and the cab was full of smoke, and then it was full of fire. My door was jammed. My left leg was caught under the dash. And somebody was shooting at us from a canal berm off to the right.”
Nobody in that hall was eating. Nobody was even holding a fork.
“Here’s the thing you have to understand,” Ray said. “The rule, when you get hit, is you keep rolling. You get the rest of the convoy out of the kill zone. You do not stop. Stopping gets more people killed. Everybody knows the rule.”
He turned and looked down at my husband.
“He stopped.”
“He stopped his truck right behind mine,” Ray said. “He told his assistant driver to get down and shoot at that berm. And he got out, and he ran up to my cab with rounds hitting the road around him.”
“The door was jammed and it was hot. I mean the metal was hot. The fire was coming up out of the engine and the door handle was too hot to hold. He grabbed it anyway. Both hands. He pulled on that door until it came.”
I looked down at Mark’s hands on the table. The palms were turned down. I knew what was on the other side of them.
“He got my leg loose,” Ray said. “I don’t know how. I was yelling at him to go. I was yelling at him, go, Krueger, go, get out of here. He didn’t listen. He got me by the vest and he dragged me out of that cab and across the road, and my arm was on fire, and he put it out with his hands.”
He held up his bare right forearm. The whole room could see the scar. Shiny and pink and pulled tight, wrist to elbow.
“He got me into his truck. His assistant driver was still shooting. And then Mark Krueger drove that truck out of the kill zone with his hands burned so bad I could see the skin come off on the steering wheel. He drove two miles like that, until we got to the rest of the convoy and the medics.”
Ray stopped. He swallowed. It was the first time his voice did anything.
“They flew me out. Germany, then home. I never saw him again. I never got to say thank you, not right. Not until this morning.”
Then Ray looked at Todd. Not mean. Just plain.
“So yes, sir,” he said. “He drove a truck.”
He looked over at his boy, sitting next to Emma, white in the face.
“I’ve got three kids,” Ray said. “That’s my oldest. He’s fifteen.” His voice went rough. “His name is Mark.”
I heard Emma make a sound, a small one, like a hiccup. Ray’s boy looked up at my husband. My husband, for the first time all morning, looked up from his plate. He looked at that boy.
The boy said, “Hi,” real quiet. That was all. Just, “Hi.”
I have been a nurse for twenty-two years. I have held the hands of people while they died, and I have watched babies take their first breath. I have never in my life heard a room as quiet as that hall was right then.
Then I heard a chair scrape at the front.
It was Lyle.