II. "The Glorious Cause"

PART TWO

   Gabriel Audaz awoke with a start.  He blinked away the moment’s disorientation.  He didn’t even remember falling asleep.  It was a symptom of his body he didn’t understand.  Despite a decent amount of rest, energy from a good meal, and a self-conscious effort to stay positive and awake, Gabriel had succumb.  School plays, big exams with the weight of his future riding on a dozen or more rows of scantron bubbles, even dates he’d let himself get talked or dragged into would result in the same phenomena: nearly insurmountable, embarrassing drowsiness.  If he became nervous enough, Gabriel would find himself sliding down a yawn-filled tunnel toward dreamland.

    For a long minute after being stirred by a sudden shudder of turbulence, Gabriel felt extremely awkward.  That gnawing embarrassment from his recent youth persisted until a new noise reached his ears.  He glanced down the length of the noisy Osprey until his halo-green eyes found a soldier heaving into a soggy paper bag.  Just like that, Gabriel’s unease about his nervous narcolepsy diminished far from the front of his mind.  He wondered briefly in the impending action his company was about to face would shock his system, finally waking him up in the mad waves of his anxiety.

    “Thirty seconds!”

    Gabriel Audaz, a newly promoted corporal in the United States Army Airborne, looked up at his commanding officer.  He took a deep breath, trying to ignore the sound and smell of the soldier upchucking everything he’d ever eaten into the small, white bag gripped like a life line in his white-knuckled fingers.  A second later the signal was given and Gabriel rose uneasily to his feet.  He had been training for this moment for the last six months.  The fact that it had arrived was not easing the terrible fear crawling through every trembling muscle in Gabriel’s body.

    The already dim, mustard yellow and dingy orange lights of the grease, kerosene, and vomit-smelling steel world around the standing soldiers suddenly went dark.  A piercing red glow instantly replaced the fleeting darkness.  Outside the bulkhead, Gabriel could hear the deep, droning, steady whirr of the powerful propellor engines.  He was trying to listen beyond the awesome horsepower driving each rotor blade around in racing, blurred circles through the chilly, dark sky.

    “What are you most afraid of?”

    Gabriel looked over his shoulder at the paratrooper behind him.  “Huh,” he asked over the din of the plane.  The soldier peered at him strangely, annoyed to be dragged out of his own thoughts by the surprise query.

    “Gabriel...”

    Gabriel turned his head and blinked in surprise.  Where in one moment he had been on a V-22 Osprey flying into enemy territory in southern Afghanistan, Gabriel Audaz suddenly found himself staring into the face of his best friend.  He recognized the scene from over a year before the present late night in the armored plane.

    “You can’t avoid the question,” she said, trying to look him in the eyes.

    Gabriel brushed loose strands of his soft, black hair off his brow.  It was another nervous tick, though that one easier to control.  It was also breezy.  They were sitting in the sand, the waves crashing nearby against the beach.  A blanket of stars twinkled above them before being erased in a pocket of clouds hanging in the western sky above the ocean.  Lightning lit the rolling, gray masses whose tops were climbing high into the distant sky.  An occasional rumble of thunder found its way to the sandy shore line.

    “I’m not,” Gabriel had finally said.  “I’m just thinking...”

    “About the answer?”

    Gabriel glanced at his best friend, then away from her.  He looked briefly over the sand to the wind-whipped flames of a small camp fire dancing in the frequent gusts pushed off the churning waters.  Their friends were laughing and playing around the amber and yellow light.  “I guess,” he had said distantly.  He let his gaze fall back to the sand in front of him.  “...About...how to answer, too,” Gabriel continued hesitantly.

    “I’m not sure I understand.”

    The environment suddenly changed.  Gabriel blinked, his mind back to the present, to the line of soldiers standing in the aircraft.  The ramp at the tail of the plane was opening.  Eddies of cold, dirt-scented air mixed with the engine exhaust shoved and wound their way up the length of the flying vehicle.  The red lights on the bulkheads shifted to green.  They were jumping.  The time to fight or die had come.

    “I didn’t think it was that complicated a question,” Gabriel’s best friend had said.  The two of them had decided to play truth or dare, only without the dares.  They were graduating high school in a matter of weeks and they didn’t want to part ways without knowing everything they didn’t already about one another.

    Gabriel knew she had suspected a secret he had been keeping inside of himself.  The question about his fear had been another way to get through the locked door around his heart.  He wanted to tell someone, but then, simultaneously, he absolutely did not.  Giving it a voice, a description with clearly defined words would make it real.  He was afraid of what his world would become after that.  And yet, that fear was still less than another.

    A strong tap on his shoulder brought Gabriel’s mind forward again.  He nodded his head and tapped the shoulder in front of him.  The status check went up the line of soldiers to the commanding officer waiting near the door.  Behind that man, the dark sky suddenly became bright and alive.  A fiery burst consumed the view beyond the ramp.  The concussion slammed against the ear drums of the soldiers almost as hard as it hit the plane.  Everyone in line braced themselves as the Osprey jumped and rocked from side to side.  Gabriel watched the view past the open ramp.  He saw the other planes in the convoy dive and pitch away from the exploding rounds beginning to pepper the air.

    “Do you have an answer,” she had asked.  Her name was Isabella Faroe.  She had been in love with Gabriel since the seventh grade.  They had tried to date once.  The failed attempt  had led to a short-lived division in their friendship.

    Gabriel remembered looking up at her..  “I do.”

    She had smiled warmly, laughing away her frustration.  “Then tell me.”

    The line on the plane was moving.  They were jumping.  Gabriel followed close behind the soldier in front of him.  Their aircraft rocked once more.  Gabriel, along with those around him, struggled to stay standing upright.  The bulkheads shuddered noisily.  The blistering hot hiss of pulverized shrapnel and debris brushing against the fuselage was disconcerting as Gabriel and the remaining soldiers approached the open ramp.

     A sound like air suddenly and loudly being sucked through a straw made every heart skip a beat.  It was a noise that was so fast it didn’t seem real.  It was replaced, only a second after it was first heard, by a the deafening pop of a devastating explosion.  All eyes were on the Osprey behind their own.  Each soldier still in the jump line watched with unblinking focus as the swollen, steel bird rolled uncontrollably onto its side.  Fire and smoke stretched out of the molten, shattered interior of the crashing plane.

    Gabriel thought of the sound before the explosion.  He knew it had been a missile.  He had been scared to death of jumping out of the aircraft and into the open battle below.  But after watching the other plane be destroyed so fast, so mercilessly, Gabriel was now even more afraid to stay on board any longer.  The sentiment seemed to be shared by everyone still on board.  The remaining soldiers moved hurriedly toward the ramp, leaping into the open night sky with racing pulses and their hearts in their throats.

    It was finally Gabriel’s turn.  It happened so fast and seamlessly he barely had time to realize or think about it.  One moment he was a few steps away from the ramp’s edge.  The next moment there was nothing under his feet.  The icy-cold air was howling past his ears, the wind buffeting against the gear strapped tightly to his body.  Compared to the din of the plane soaring away above his opening parachute canopy, the world around Gabriel suddenly seemed so quiet.

    His mind drifted back to that night on the beach.  “I’m afraid...” Gabriel had begun to say.  “...I mean, really afraid...of...failing to act.”

    Isabella frowned.  “Huh?  I don’t understand.”

    Gabriel leaned forward, the soft sand spilling off of his hands as he had brought them up, folding his arms on top of his knees he had braced against his chest.  “The things happening inside of me, the feelings I have that won’t go away-”

    “Sweetie, it’s okay,” Isabella had said reassuringly.  “They’re natural.  It is just who you are...or will be, starting to come out.”

    “That’s the thing.  I don’t know who or what that is.  I want to know but I also want to do the right thing.  I’m joining the army, Izzy.  And, I know...this stuff...doesn’t matter anymore.  Not officially.”

    Isabella watched her best friend carefully.  “But?”

    “But I’m not ready to give these feelings, these thoughts a voice or name yet.  I’m in complete conflict.  I...I want to be as honest as possible in my life; with you...with everyone.  With God, especially.  Yet, I can’t help but keep this inside and I’m so, so very afraid that I’m going to die before I can accept who and what I am.  Before...before I can finally put my demons to rest.”

    Gabriel remembered Isabella appearing to think for a long moment.  Finally, she grinned at him then scooted through the sand on her haunches.  She hugged her best friend tightly.  “Do you want to pray with me?”

    Gabriel remembered nodding.  A sharp, swift noise that became a deafening crackle interrupted his thoughts.  He looked up past the canopy of his parachute.  A few seconds had gone by since he’d leapt out of the advancing Osprey.  Another transport had been hit.  It’s frame was lost to sight behind a white-hot plume spraying molten steel airplane parts over the frost-covered terrain.  All at once, the late-night sky seemed to come alive again.  The sea of descending paratroopers were dark silhouettes against a  breathtaking backdrop of exploding mortars, anti-aircraft fire, and the ever more frequent vapor trails of ground-launched rockets.

    The ground wasn’t getting closer fast enough.  The engines of one of the Osprey’s revved up loudly, the sound climbing over the mire of chaos blending together into one awful, nightmarish noise.  Gabriel looked up again into the swaths of blistering fire and choking smoke.  Paratroopers were leaping madly out of the dying plane rolling onto is mangled side, fire consuming its blown-open cockpit to the passenger compartment.  Gabriel watched the horror of the hell-spawned scene.  Wrapped in searing flames glowing brightly, his peers fell out of the deadly storm.  From a distance they looked just like any other pieces of debris.  But Gabriel knew those were people he had seen and spoken to, people he had eaten beside, people he had trained with.

    Suddenly, there were more screams, cries of bloody agony echoing throughout the crowded sky.  Between each heart-wrenching bellow, Gabriel was beginning to detect the source of the pain.  It became very clear when a bullet meant for his life zipped hotly by his ear.  A tracer round rocketed away into the sky to his right.  Gabriel watched it appear then vanish in an instant.  Just beyond its path, something changed in the dark.  It took a moment for Gabriel to realize it was another paratrooper.  The soldier’s parachute had been hit by the spray of bullets from the ground.

    Gabriel looked down, trying to fend off the panic beginning to set in.  He was almost there, the small, dry patches of brush throwing web-like and sinewy shadows across the dirt in the sky-consuming explosions high above his canopy.  Another few seconds and he would be on the ground.

    Then, something went wrong.  Gabriel heard the clinking of metal above him.  There was the way the wind shifted and sounded as if bouncing and rolling off of an object free falling through the sky.  Gabriel looked up.  He managed only a fleeting second to catch a terrifying glimpse of the flailing body before it hit the top of his parachute.  The swift, smooth descent to the dusty floor under his boots became a breathless drop.

    First, the parachute-wrapped soldier, barely alive, collided with Gabriel.  The unstoppable force knocked him onto his back.  In a panic, Gabriel and the unknown compatriot rolled over each other as the ground spread out on all sides around them.  Gabriel felt the air rush from his lungs at the moment of impact.  An overwhelming wave of pain barreled unstoppably through his body.  Gabriel remembered smelling sand and burning airplane fuel raining out of the sky.  He remembered the feeling of the darkness closing in, blocking out the glow of the fires above him and the sounds of bullets erupting from smoking rifles all around.  As he blacked out, Gabriel wondered, for an instant, if we would be waking up again.