The night is long, longer than any stakeout, sniper approach, or torture I've endured. All I can do is hold you tight, and pray you don't bust into pieces. Because you're fracturing right now, along your seams, and I'm not sure I can keep you whole.

You sob like it's a marathon sport. But then, you've got a lot of grief and hurt to let out. It's like Hale Ceasar's French press: heat applied to a liquid under pressure. I wonder, as I cast my thoughts to the unfathomable future, what you're brewing into.

So I try to keep you whole for the first few hours, my arms locked around you and your tears and breath dampening my shirt front. I rock you occassionally, back and forth, on my creaky and crappy couch. Then it hits me that I'm only slowing your progress. You need to break, so that you can put yourself together again in a new configuration that suits what you want to be when this is done. You are trying to break, so you can become something better. It's the Basic Training mentality.

I keep holding you, but I no longer expend my will trying to stop your hurt. Instead, I wish for it to crash over you, to scatter your pieces like a tsunami scatters houses, and washes them clean, and sweeps them into a mindless numbing tide, then laps them up on a new and brighter shore. Once you decide what you want to be after this, you will make it reality.

That said, it's up to me to give you blueprints.

You're tuckered out, finally, and hiccupping plaintively when I speak my first words in almost five hours. "Come on." I get up, pulling you with me, and assist you to the door, into the hangar, and finally outside.

The sun is rising, bleeding pink and orange and tropicals into the clouds, which soak them up like guaze. I rest my hands on your shoulders, standing behind you so you can lean on something, and listen to your hiccups spread further apart. You're watching the sun's glory emptily, but slowly, by fractions, its light starts to thaw you. You regard the new day, but I regard you, trying to assess your thoughts.

You inhale with a shudder and murmur hoarsely, "Have you got any water?"

I'm slow on the uptake because your voice sounds awful. It matches your swollen face and red eyes. "Yeah, inside. You ready?"

"Not just yet," you whisper.

I understand.

After sitting you down at the makeshift bar made of cargo containers, I make us shit on a shingle, army style, and present it on a paper plate with a bourbon glass of water. You attack the food like a wolf, and it gladdens me to see your appetite coming back.

"Antibiotic," I inform you, tapping out the pill. "Pain meds," I continue, rattling out three Motrin. "And multivitamin." I take the same array every morning, sans the anitbiotic, and my body thanks me for it. You swallow the bunch with the water, your throat contracting. You exhale after downing it all, wipe your mouth with the back of your hand, and say, "Thank you."

It feels wrong to take your thanks, but I do anyway so that I don't upset you. "I'll be right back."

In the hangar, lined up against one wall, there are several lockers with the guys' names on them. I spin the combo on mine, and sure enough, Christmas has put my guns in there, bolts open and clip slots bare to show they aren't loaded. I grab them, take my cleaning kit from the shelf, and head back inside.

You've moved: you're standing in front of my meager bookshelf contemplatively. As I put down the guns, you tip Sun Tzu out of line. "I have always wanted to read The Art of War," you say, measuring your excitement. "Could never find it in Nepal, though."

I "Hmph" in reply, and start to break down the weapons. "So you can read English, too?"

You smile wryly, your teeth white against your espresso-and-milk skin. "It has been a long time."

The smile, however mixed the emotion behind it, lightens the load on my shoulders somehow.

"What are you doing?" you ask, picking your way over to me, seated at my gun bench.

I make myself stay in place, letting you test the bounds of your stitches and aches, and pull a second stool from under the table. "Cleaing 'em." The question you asked seems to be one of your favorite English phrases: in the hut in Nepal, in your silent querying looks, and now here.

You take the invitation to balance yourself on the stool with minimal wincing, and wrap your slim fingers around the spine of the book. I see a glimmer of interest that wasn't there before, and I smile. You frown at my expression. "What?"

"Nothin'," I dismiss. I take out a cleaning rod, thread a cloth through the eye, and jam it in the muzzle of my M16, scrubbing out the insides of the barrel. Too late, I worry the phallic gesture will trigger a relapse, but you don't seem to draw the same ideas as me. Maybe there's a hint of innocence still left inside you.

Dust motes drift through the air, borne on the breeze from several stand fans and the bars of sunlight shining through the windows I cut and paned myself. I work the cloth until it comes out clean, and switch to a short, thin, wire bristle brush to clear the bullet chamber and magazine slot. You watch carefully, as though memorizing every motion. You even angle your head to watch the single drop of oil from the needle on a tiny plastic bottle hit the bolt mechanism.

I don't mind answering your questions. You ask about the number of rounds the gun fires, and I explain the concept of auto and semi-auto fire. You ask why parts of it are plastic and other metal, and I tell you it makes the gun lighter. You continue to be curious as I strip and clean the pistols.

"Why so interested?" I ask, not unkindly.

You give me a 'duh' look that is apparently universal. "Because I want to know what you know."

What, you mean how to kill? How to take a life in stride and sleep like a baby at night, over and over and over again? How to think about head shots, and kill zones, and ambushes and traps and the disgustingly creative ways to get information out of somebody? "You want to know, huh?"

I must've sounded darker than I meant to, because you quieten down. I sigh. I didn't mean to shut you down. I leave the guns out to dry, hop off the stool, and tell you I'm going to take a shower. Before I do, Doc Gary's words about suicidal tendencies echo through my mind. Disbelief and a little anger rise in me. Oh, no. Uh-uh. I refuse to believe that you would do something that stupid. You want to live, right? I can take a lot of things, but suicide watch ain't one of them.

You're carefully sliding off your stool, grimacing, when I turn back around and take you firmly by the chin with my thumb and finger. You stiffen, and your eyes get big with fear and sharp with caution. "Am I going to have to lock these up?" I ask you deliberately, motioning towards the guns.

Your eyes roll over to the weapons, then back to me. "No," you say, as deliberately as me. Maybe with hint more pissed off.

I probe your eyes for anything resembling guile and find none. I drop my hand. "Good." And feeling slightly bad for scaring you, even so little, I stride down the hall to the shower, grabbing a green wool blanket from storage.

The hot water is just this side of scalding, and it feels a-fucking-mazing. Usually, if I'm not ready to collapse, I shower down after mission. Didn't happen yesterday, of course, but it was worth the wait. Call it therapy, if you will. Something about getting off all the grime makes your soul a little less heavy.

Speaking of heavy...I prop my arm on the shower wall and rest my head against it, letting the water flow down my back. I feel bad for getting stern with you, but something inside me couldn't stand the thought of you blowing your own brains out. Honestly, in most any cases, if someone wants to die by their own hand, that's their business and their prerogative, with the exception being the guys. Maybe that's because I don't care about anyone else, not really.

You're the first person outside of my brothers in arms family that I give a rip shit about. And ain't that a burden to give?

I marinate under the water until it starts to turn cold and step out, wrapping the makeshift towel around my waist. Normally, I would simply walk out naked and get my clothes from the storage room, but I see that going over like a fart in church, what with you being far too familiar with male anatomy.

It takes me a minute to find you in the open room, but when I do, my heart squeezes a little. You're passed out on the couch, one boot on the floor and the other dangling off the end, with Sun Tzu laying open and face down on your chest.

You must have registered the shower cutting off, and it rouses you. Your eyes open and you take me in this time, flitting from scar to face to tattoo and back again. I wonder if I should let you see my messed up body, the roadmap of my life marked permanently on my skin. Again, that wall of appropriateness looms. Should I walk away? The idiocy of the thought strikes me. What, I can see you completely naked and at your worst condition, not just once but multiple times, and you can't even get a good, long look at me with a towel? Doesn't seem fair. That would imply your body and dignity means less than mine, and I won't have that.

You smile thinly, and I realize I'm close to making you uncomfortable. I move on, select and don an army trainee shirt, basic pants, socks and boots. At home, unlaced boots are the closest I get to fuzzy slippers.

When I step out you're dozing again. I make a quick pot of coffee on the stove, having forgotten it earlier with breakfast. With the mug o' mud steaming in my hand, I stare at your prone form taking up my couch. Your hair is strewn wildly, and the book on your chest rises and falls in time with your breathing. The fans whir softly, just barely losing out to your snores. All quiet on the Western front. An odd peace falls over me and I sip the black coffee.

I marvel for a minute how easy it is to exist in the same space as you. My home, such as it is, is my inner sanctum and my refuge from the world. I can count on one hand the number of times anyone has stayed over an hour, and all of them were the guys. I don't abide by many luxuries in life, but privacy is one of them. Having someone here, constantly, should be a taxation. But it isn't. Aside from emergency trips to the free clinic, your presence is...soothing. Like a was cog missing in the wheel of my life, making it stutter, and you replaced it and made the action smooth.

The couch is short, so I tap your boot to wake you. You move it to make room, and I reach down to lift both of your feet onto my lap by the laces. After a pregnant pause, during which I infer you aren't opposed to the setup, I pick up the remote and turn on the TV, then the news.

Your eyes widen, and I remember you were raised in a jungle. "Was this in your stories?" I ask, trying a teasing tone.

You pick up on it and grin the prettiest grin. "No."

We watch the tube for a while, break for a lunch of peanut butter sandwhiches, and pick up a marathon of some sitcom. I answer your questions about the culture you're witnessing for the first time. I pass you a mug of coffee, tempered with sugar, which makes you smack like you don't recognize it. The rest of the day slips by.