The Colonel Who Answered the Call

I was standing in the receiving line at a dining-in at Fort Leonard Wood, my dress blues pressed and my silver eagles catching the ballroom light, when my phone buzzed against my hip for the third time in two minutes. I almost let it go to voicemail again. Then I saw my daughter’s name on the screen a fourth time and stepped out into the hallway before the aide could finish announcing the next guest.

“Mom.” Hazeline’s voice came out in pieces, like she was building the sentence out of parts too small to hold together. “Come get me. They hurt me.”

I have commanded soldiers through things I will not describe to my own mother. I have stood in rooms where grown men flinched at the sound of my voice. None of that prepared me for the particular kind of stillness that came over me in that hallway, the stillness of a mother doing math she never wanted to learn. Three hours from Laclede. Two hours if I drove the way I wanted to drive.

“Where are you,” I said. Not a question. An order I was giving myself as much as her.

“The hospital. Pershing Memorial. Please, Mom.”

I did not go home to change. I got in my car in my dress blues with the ribbons still pinned over my heart and drove west out of Pulaski County into the dark, and every mile of that drive I thought about the day almost twenty-six years ago when I held Hazeline for the first time in a base hospital not unlike the one I was driving toward, and promised her, the way every new mother promises, that nothing would ever get to her that I couldn’t stand between.