Forgotten Memories, Remembered

By: dharmamonkey
Rating: T
Disclaimer: Someone else owns Bones, but I am interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply, six if he's sporting a high-and-tight buzz cut (rawrr!).

Chapter 4: A Hot Mess

The warm afternoon sun bore down hard on their shoulders as they walked. They wore Kevlar helmets and an extensive arrangement of body armor that left their reddening faces and the napes of their necks among the few patches of skin left exposed.

Booth and Parnell were walking in the middle of the patrol group, with four Afghan trainees in front of them, and six behind them—along with Swann and Hackett, who also doubled as the patrol's rearguard.

Booth thought Parnell looked a little twitchy judging by the way he was moving on patrol. He seemed more uncomfortable in his body armor than usual, and a quick glance up at the unusually warm afternoon sun left little doubt as to the reason why.

Parnell cleared his throat and pulled his M4 carbine snug against his chest as he walked, rolling his shoulders back one at a time and frowning a little at the sound of the friction the weapon made against the front of his tactical vest. The vest was fitted with boron carbide ceramic plates on the front, back and sides to protect against small-arms fire and shrapnel, and weighed more than thirty pounds. It was made even heavier by extensions covering the groin, shoulders, upper arms and lower back, plus extra clips of ammunition, a canteen and other equipment strapped to the lower part of the vest.

Sensing that Booth had been watching him, Parnell cocked a brow and shot him a smirking look. "Maybe I spoke too soon," he said with a snicker.

"Huh?"

The comment caught Booth by surprise. His attention had been focused on the four Afghan National Army trainees walking point on the patrol and on the way their heads, eyes and weapons swept across the half-shadowed backstreet as their boots crunched against the sandy ground. Booth's dark brows furrowed hard over his eyes as he turned to the master sergeant with a slight scowl.

"About what?" he grunted, his suspicion immediately roused by Parnell's snicker.

Parnell glanced down the alley to their left, narrowing his eyes as he watched a stray cat root around in a pile of trash about fifteen feet away, then nodded to himself and turned to Booth with a grin. "You know, hmmm?" he said, reaching up with his free left hand and stroking his fingertips over the half-inch long dirty-blond beard on his chin. "Your age is showing there, Booth."

"Hmmph," Booth replied, fingering the side of his rifle's action, just above the trigger, as he reached up and rubbed his knuckles on the underside of his chin.

The Green Berets of Alpha 3623 had begun letting their beards grow out as soon as they arrived in-country. Wearing beards had helped Special Forces teams earn the respect of the Afghan National Army troops and local Afghan tribesmen whose Pashtun culture regarded facial hair as the mark of manliness. Booth frowned as he felt the scruff, knowing as he felt the prickle of his beard that there was a lot of gray on his chin. His fingers migrated up to the side of his jaw where he scratched the scraggly, uneven growth there. It irked him that the seemingly simple task of growing a beard was the one thing he was particularly ill-equipped to do, and there wasn't a damn thing he could do about it. It had always been that way, going all the way back to his mid-teens: his beard grew quickly (annoyingly so, such that he usually shaved in the evening before a date, just in case) but never really filled in on the sides.

He remembered what Bastone told him the night before ("You're gonna finish this tour with the worst, sorriest-ass looking beard in the whole fuckin' 3rd Special Forces Group") and his now customary retort to his friend's badgering ("Fuck you, Bastone"). He gave his scruffy jaw another scratch before bringing his hand back to the weapon's stock, wiggling his fingers as he felt the dust in the webbing between them and wondered if he should break down and wear tactical gloves like the other guys did.

"You should respect your elders, Master Sergeant," he told Parnell, hitching his rifle strap more snugly over his shoulder as he tried to ignore the bead of sweat that was dribbling down the back of his neck. "Every one of these gray hairs represents experience."

The Irish sergeant's blue eyes flashed bright with laughter as his mouth curved into a smirk. "Most guys put just notches in their bedposts, you know."

Booth's eyes rolled hard as he shook his head. "Not that kind of experience, you fucking douche. Get your head out of the gutter."

He paused, his brow knitting as he saw the Afghan troops slow their pace and hesitate at the end of a block. The four of them stopped and formed a huddle, conferring about something as they stood there in a tight bunch that made Booth nervous because it presented an attractive target for insurgent attack.

He couldn't help but wonder if the task with which he and his men were charged—to transform a ragtag herd of Afghan farmers into a skilled, self-sustaining fighting force capable of keeping Taliban extremists and their Al-Qaeda allies out of their country—wasn't really a fool's errand after all.

He watched them standing there in their old-style, four-color U.S. Army surplus camouflage jackets, olive-drab trousers and green Kevlar helmets without the fabric helmet cover Booth and his comrades wore, shaking his head at how their mismatched uniforms was a perfect metaphor for the slapdash manner in which the ANA itself was cobbled together. It didn't help that Alpha 3623 and the ANA company they had been training were summoned to reinforce coalition forces in Marjah not three weeks after the Green Berets arrived in Qūryah to take over the training duties from their predecessors in Charlie Company.

While Booth found the ANAs to be brave and unafraid of either fighting or hard work, he worried that their indigenous commanders, the lieutenants who led the company's platoons, were inexperienced, unfocused and ill-equipped to command heterogenous units comprised of men from various tribes and provinces across Afghanistan. The looseness with which the Afghan lieutenants led their ragtag platoons worried Booth more than anything else, and he puzzled over how to help the ANA unit leaders consolidate their commands.

With a frustrated sigh, Booth shrugged off the thought as he saw the ANAs ahead of him break up their huddle and continue on to the next block of mud-brick buildings as they made their way towards one of Marjah's largest markets.

He scowled as another bead of sweat dribbled down his temple and caught on the edge of his burgeoning beard, which only made the scruff feel even itchier than it did before. Raising his arm, he scratched at his jaw and grunted as he glanced down the alley to his left. "If it's this warm in fuckin' April," Booth groused, his eyes swiveling over to watch Parnell survey the street ahead, "then how fuckin' miserable is it gonna be when we actually hit summer?"

He could see Parnell's forehead crease as his brows flew up at the question. "Are you fuckin' kiddin' me?" he asked. "This place blows in the summer. You get it all here—cold as shit in the winter, hot as fuck in the summer. And no chance of a six-pack to cool ya down, either. What I'd do for a nice cold one at Miller Time..."

Booth simply sighed and wiped another annoying drip of sweat off the back of his neck, drying his fingers on the dusty thigh of his trousers and realizing all he'd managed to do in the process was make a smear of sweat-mud on his fingers.

"Gloves," Parnell said with a faint smile. "You should try 'em."

The ANAs hesitated again, driving the heavy mantel of Booth's brow to slope low over his dark eyes. "Get up there and find out what the fuck the problem is, huh?" he said, indicating with a quick jerk of his chin for Parnell to move up and check on the Afghans. "What a fuckin' mess," he muttered to himself as he watched the tall, long-legged master sergeant jog up the block. "A hot fuckin' mess."

He wiped his sweat-dotted forehead with his hand, not caring anymore whether he was smearing dust on himself in the process. Disengaging his rifle's safety with a flick of his finger, he rubbed his prickly chin with the back of his hand, glanced over his shoulder and whistled to Swann and Hackett, gesturing for them to bring their men forward, then began to make his way towards Parnell and the Afghans at the end of the block.

As he listened to the hard crunch of rock-strewn sand beneath his boots, he couldn't help but wonder why the hell he allowed that Colonel Pelant to talk him into reenlisting.

"Fuckin' A."

A/N: I love soldier banter, don't you?

Even though these sketches are set in the "universe" of characters and places I used for my story "Killing Two Birds," I believe they are plausible even in the canonical context, since the show has told us very little about what happened to Booth in Afghanistan (especially before H.B. came along). Oh, and the beard thing? If Booth was a Special Forces soldier deployed to Afghanistan in early/mid 2010, he almost certainly would have grown a beard, because that's what the Green Berets did. (Don't believe me? Look it up.) So, for some of his time in the 'Stan, soldier!Booth would have been a very scruffy Booth.

In any event, I hope you're enjoying these little sketches of Booth's life in the Army (2010 edition). Let me know what you think of these pieces, and if they're of any value to you. Share your thoughts as I've shared mine. Consider leaving a review.

Editorial note: Yet another round of effusive praise for the generous efforts of FauxMaven, who ruthlessly roots out redundancies and run-ons as she helps me tighten these little pieces.