BEIRUT, LEBANON – 1983

"Captain! Captain, sir, we got them!" A young Marine Corps Corporal called to his Commanding Officer. The capture of several terrorists belonging to a local Hezbollah cell. The bombing of the Marine barracks earlier in the campaign had soured most Marine's attitudes toward the locals and how they were handling the efforts of American and French forces. There were Marine officers that were fast earning reputations for bestriding the urban landscape of Beirut as legends in their own time. Among those legends was a twenty-seven year-old Marine Captain.

"Is Corporal Alazar here, Corporal?" The Captain asked.

"Corporal Alazar, tell these men that I want specific information about the location of the other cells in the area and the man power strength. Tell them that if they do not give me this information, they will be executed mercilessly." The Captain said coolly eyeing down each one of the seven men standing against the wall. Their weapons had been confiscated and on the ground at the Captain's feet were several Kalashnikovs and pistols.

Alazar spoke in Arabic to the men who all seemed to pummel him with responses at once. "Sir, the common sentiment is that they think you're Satan and you can fry in hell, sir." Corporal Alazar responded cautiously.

"Do you know where the liver is, Corporal?" The Captain asked calmly as he pulled his sidearm out of its holster. Corporal Alazar shook his head hesitantly. The Captain brought his pistol down, pointed it at the abdomen of one of the men and fired, wounding him in the abdomen. The man fell forward crying out in pain and bleeding profusely from the wound. "Corporal, let him bleed. I said I'd execute them, I didn't say I'd be clean about it."

"Sir, are you sure, that this is within the regulations?" The Lieutenant stepped forward.

"First off, Lieutenant, these men are enemy combatants in a war zone. Men who likely aided in the deaths of our fellow Marines when that barracks blew up. They're lucky I'm not acting on some of my more brutal tendencies. Also, yes Lieutenant, my actions fall within the parameters of the Geneva Convention, if just barely." The Captain reassured.

He turned toward the remaining six standing men. "Any one else ready to be brave? I've got seven bullets left; I can make this very interesting." The Captain smiled wickedly. A few of the men started ranting and raving at the Captain, snarling and cursing. The tall Marine just stood unaffected, even laughing at their ranting. When one of the men chose to spit at the Captain, the pistol came up again and another bullet left the chamber and entered the middle of the forehead of the offending male, sending his limp form to the ground.

"No one disgraces the Marine Corps uniform by spitting on it." The Captain commented as he lowered the gun to his side again. "Anyone else?" The five remaining men went silent. "Alazar, tell them that if I don't hear some good news in the next few minutes, none of them will survive the hour."

The Corporal did as instructed and the one combatant who appeared to be the oldest of any of them spoke up. Alazar began to translate." Sir, he says that Allah will reap his vengeance upon you for your actions here today and that you will suffer vengeance as the hands of Islam for as long as you live."

The Captain drew up his gun and shot the man between the eyes. "Maybe only as long as he lives." The Captain said as he turned his eyes on the last four men. The Captain had been in Beirut the day that the barracks went up in flames. He been only a few short blocks from the scene and he was determined to prevent similar occurrences from happening in the future. He raised the gun and shot two of the remaining men. One through the lung and the other through the heart.

The two limp forms fell to the ground. The man who had been shot through the lung was not dead. He was crying out and struggling for air like wounded animal or an old hunting dog. The sight of his fallen comrade in such a position caused one man to start talking. He began to rant happily.

"Sir, he says he has some information for you. He says that there is going to be an ambush, another explosion…" The man was silenced by his one remaining comrade who reached out to silence him. This act unleashed the boiling fury inside the Marine Captain. He reached out and grabbed the offending man by the throat and viciously hurled him to the ground and then, sinking to his knee, the Marine drove the heel of his hand at full force against the spine of the man, snapping it in half. The ensuing crack was heard by all the Marines in the area. It was a sound that was deafening, ear-splitting and soul ravishing, it told a dark tale about all that was dark about the human spirit.

The remaining man told the Marines all about the planned ambush for a troop convoy several miles down the road. The Marine Captain took a breath, realizing that the information that he had secured had saved over 200 lives. Six men for more than two-hundred, any one you looked at it, in his mind it was a fair trade. That didn't stop him from leaving a small part of his humanity on the ground in Lebanon

WASHINGTON – 1999

Jim Grant rose up out of bed after a fitful sleep. There were actions of his past that terrified him when he looked back on them. Had he really been that young, that hot-headed, and that brutal? He was coated in a thin sheen of sweat and he was gasping for air. His heart was racing wildly. He got up out of bed and put on his bathrobe and slippers. He ran a hand through his hair as he walked through the apartment. So much was racing through his mind. He'd relived so many of the events of his career over and over in his mind.

When it came down to it. He was just another O'Grady Marine. That was how he rationalized it in his mind. It wasn't the only way. There was a reason that his copy of the Third Geneva Convention had taken up residence in the pocket of this robe. He paced through the apartment. The thick carpet of the floor quieting his footsteps. More than twenty years of his life had been devoted to the Corps but in reality it had been so much more than that.

There were parts of his humanity in scattered parts of the globe. In Lebanon, in Iraq, in Somalia, in Panama, in Liberia; they were everywhere and every time he lost another piece, he could feel a little bit more of the shadow consume him. He had padded across the carpet of the living room in the bulldog slippers that David had bought him for his last birthday, until he stood in the doorway of his son's bedroom.

At eight years-old, the world was so simple for David Grant. Well, relatively simple. Jim was still doing some serious explaining for his little disappearing act in the Albanian bush the previous summer. Jim leaned on the doorframe. He laughed to himself under his breath. David was so much like he was at eight. He breathed and bled Marine green and could whistle the Marine Corps Hymn in his sleep. David was in a more dangerous position though. David's life, his perceptions had been built on his dad the Superman. What would happen the day that David found out the truth? David had a father and in Jim's mind that threatened his son's entire world. How could a man who was so tormented by the ghosts of his past actions be the hero to a boy who was the personification of innocence?

Jim walked into his son's room and knelt down next to the side of his bed. He let his hand fall lightly through his son's hair. "Don't be like me, son. Be a doctor, be a JAG, be President, but don't be me. You deserve the world my boy." Jim whispered quietly.

Angie Harris stood in the doorway to David Grant's room. She stood and watched the man that she loved talk to his sleeping son. She wasn't a fool. She knew that he was harder on himself then anyone could ever be on him. She knew that Jim was the kind of father she'd always prayed that her children would have. A good and honest man. Jim Grant was like George Bailey from It's a Wonderful Life, the kind of man who was always willing to give of himself. Even if it killed him. It damn near had on several occasions.

During his last check-up with the orthopaedist at Bethesda, the doctor had decided to comment that Jim had more fault-lines on his physique than California. There were more scars that people didn't see though. The kind of scars that woke him up at 0219 on a Saturday morning and left his pillow coated with sweat. "He's like you, you know? When he knows he can sleep in, you could roll a convoy through this room and you wouldn't wake him up." She smiled drowsily.

"I don't know, Angie. Sometimes this all doesn't seem real. I look down at my hands and I see the hands that taught him how to ride a bicycle, but if the lighting changes ever so slightly, I see the hands that snapped the neck of a sixteen year-old Panamanian guard outside of Noriega's compound." Jim turned his hands as the moonlight streamed in the window behind him.

"You see the father but you also see the soldier, the Marine, the protector. You think that he's naïve; he knows both sides of those hands too. He just knows, thanks to the kind of father that you are, that those hands will only ever be there to comfort him." She walked across the room and began to gently stroke his back. "Now come on, your Uncle Peter taught me how to make that Tennessee Apple Cider the right way. I'll make you a cup and then we can go back to bed."

"I think you're just trying to get me into bed." Jim joked as he got to his feet.

"Damn, you caught on to my plan. What ever will I do now?" Angie joked as she took him by the arm and led him out of the room.

"Well, you could just take me to bed." Jim smiled weakly.

"Naughty Marine." Angie tossed back as they walked back across the apartment.

MEKONG DELTA – 1968

"Ensign, sir, I don't like the looks of the neighbourhood around these parts." The Chief Petty Officer stated as the SEAL team moved through the swamp.

"As opposed to the rest of the country, Marks?" The Ensign replied.

"Point taken, sir. At least we don't have to put up with Jack on this mission, that son of a bitch scares the crap out of me. He's like something out of a Hitchcock movie." Marks commented as they waded through the swamp.

"What exactly are we supposed to be doing, sir?" Petty Officer Jorgen asked as the thick night of Southeast Asia cloaked their movements.

"Reconnaissance in a forward area, Petty Officer. High Command reports Charlie activities in this sector have increased recently and it's endangering supply routes to our troops in the north." The Ensign replied as he ensured that even the sounds made be his men moving through the water were hushed.

There were little tributary streams and rivers all through the country and the one that they were following now brought them remarkably close to the Cambodian border.

In Ensign AJ Chegwidden's mind, something seemed different about this war. He'd heard Korea vets say the same thing about that war. That it wasn't the same, that it wasn't like all the others. There was supposedly something different about this war and event the one before it that made the American people turn their back on the government that they had always turned to in times of crisis. Maybe the problem with Vietnam was that it came on too soon in the wake of the Kennedy assassinations, first John and then Bobby.

Didn't they understand? Was it ignorance that was merely masking itself as righteous outrage? They said that the administration was targeting African-Americans with the draft. Maybe they were but it wasn't his place to play politics. In the jungle, the colour of your skin was unimportant. You all bled the same and you all died the same and when it came down to it, that's what mattered. Ensign Chegwidden didn't make distinctions; the only thing that mattered was the trident on the uniform.

There were massacres in this war. There were massacres in every war. Say what they like about it, D-Day was technically a massacre, at least to any who lost someone on those beaches. The rice paddies and marshes and jungles were horrid conditions in which to fight a war. Curse the whole damn country. The average lifespan of a Second Lieutenant dropped into a hot LZ in this country was sixteen minutes. Someone at twenty-one or twenty-two could only be expected to live sixteen minutes around here. You want to talk tragedies? There was a prime example.

There was a small village along there route. It was expected to be a Victor Charlie safe haven, so were a lot of the villages in the interior of the country. The closer you were to Cambodia or just the further you were from Saigon, the higher the mortality rate was. When they came upon the village, or what remained of it, the place was still smouldering from an obvious Napalm attack that had occurred earlier in the day. There were burned and charred corpses strewn across the ground.

The Huts, which had stood earlier in the day were now piles of ash and sizzling pieces of wood that still stood semi-erect. What was hardest to face though were some of the bodies. The young women and children were the worst. AJ Chegwidden was no fool. He'd been in country long enough to know that young women and even boys as young as nine could be VC, but that didn't make seeing their bodies any easier. Napalm was one very effective tool when it came to morale. The problem was that not just the other guys felt like shit after witnessing its effects.

At the village along the river, there were few survivors, young girls, no more than six. If they were any other demographic, they could be shot as VC sympathizers, but AJ Chegwidden didn't have the heart to issue that order. Not when he saw that they were standing over the corpse of their dead friend. She had been hit with the worst of the Napalm attack. The skin had been burned from the side of her young face, exposing her nerves, muscles and bones to the elements.

It was a heartbreaking scene. War was full of them. Still, they didn't teach you anything at the Academy to deal with them. So, AJ Chegwidden motioned for his team to continue on up the banks of the river to their eventual destination. Knowing that every time he closed his eyes, the image of those two little Vietnamese girls hunching over the body of their dead friend would be tattooed to the inside of his eyelids.

MCLEAN, VIRGINIA – 1999

AJ Chegwidden's eyes flung open and he brought his hands up to interlock his fingers behind his head. That war had indeed cast some long shadows over his life. The inability to get over 'Nam had ultimately cost him his marriage and more nights than not it was costing him his sleep. He got out of bed and decided to go for a walk around the house. There was nothing on TV at 0224 so he didn't bother. He walked into the kitchen and made himself a Hot Toddy.

He walked out into the living room with his drink and walked over to the trophy case that had baseballs and baseball cards and pictures from his old days. He saw the picture that had been taken on July 4th, 1968 with his SEAL team. They were all gone now. Charlie Marks was the last one, that happened during that Gayle Osborne fiasco a few years back. God, it hurt to think about that in this house. The steps outside were where Laura Delaney had died at Osborne's hands.

PTSD. He didn't want to think about it, but it affected a lot of Vietnam vets. He'd seen the effects, as they controlled the lives of people that he had known to be vibrant and lively individuals. He didn't have it, well, that might be a self-diagnosis but he'd never really shown any symptoms of it; other then the dreams. But to be haunted like this was common for someone who had seen as much as he had over the years. The death, the destruction, the carnage, his mind had to find someway to let it all out and a few dreams at night when he was most susceptible was probably only a measured response.

He sipped at the piping hot drink in his hand. Dreams. The word used to mean a song from the seventies that he had heard countless times. The lyrics were certainly telling. Thunder only anthems, when it's raining. Well, maybe that's what brought the dreams back now with such intensity. This year, there'd been a lot of rain around him. He'd watched Rabb and MacKenzie run off to Russia and almost get killed. He'd watched Rabb and Grant run off to Syria after MacKenzie and almost get themselves killed. He'd watched Rabb, MacKenzie and Grant run off to Germany with Clayton Webb and almost get themselves blown sky high.

That had to be it, watching his friends go through such completely perilous adventures and being anchored to a desk the whole time. It had to be killing him. As a SEAL and even as a surface warfare commander he was at liberty to help his people when they needed him but he hadn't been with them in Syria or Germany and he'd only just gotten to Russia in the nick of time. There could be little doubt that in his life this year, there had been a lot of rain for AJ Chegwidden. The dreams were thunder, a reverberation of a part of his life were lost in the looming grey clouds of his memory.

He set the empty cup down on the counter and looked out the window. How fitting, it was raining outside. With a self-deprecating smile, he chuckled once under his breath and padded off back to his bedroom. He lay on his bed for a few minutes and just stared up at the ceiling. Thoughts raced through his head but he thrashed through them until his mind existed in silence. His life, his memories of a life in the service were a thunder that only anthemed when it rained.

Harm tossed and turned in his bed, well into the night. His mind raced and left his soul restless. His mind was first clouded with visions of his father, of his going down in the Vietnam jungle in 1969. Of his last moments, trying to protect that woman from Russian soldiers and getting shot. His father had died, a stranger in a strange land. A veritable outcast. Alone, without the people that he loved, because they were thousands of miles of tundra and an ocean away. The images flashed through his mind like some great ghoulish slideshow.

Then his mind shifted, he was at a different time, but the jungle was the existing atmosphere. The familiar approach of Laotian border guards, the rattle of rifle fire, it was a familiar scene that he had lived so many times in his dreams after living it once in his waking hours. Beads of sweat traced lines down his forehead, he saw bullets riddle Gym's body, he saw her die right in front of his eyes as he was pulled back into the jungle, away from a woman that he wasn't sure that he loved but was sure that he abandoned. She'd died with her mother, she wasn't alone but she was abandoned and he was sure that was his fault.

Another flash and the pictures of his mind moved again. This was a scene he had relived time and again as well. A familiar approach to the Seahawk. A familiar blurriness of vision, a familiar voice that was his RIO, telling him that his approach was coming up short. All of which was followed by the sensations of being caught in his ramp strike. Of the F-14 fading into flames. Of emergency teams springing into action, of it all and still there was Mace, dead on the flight deck. A man and a friend who had trusted Harm with his life had died because of it and died alone.

There was another shift, this time it was the desert, but the F-14 was still present. The pilot was familiar and he was good. It took a while for his mind to adjust but then he realized who it was when he heard the voice. Luke. Luke Pendry's last moments on this earth, that was what he was witnessing right now. He saw the Aptern fail and tossed the plane into an invert. He watched as the plane went into the dive that ultimately ended his friend's life. Luke Pendry too had died alone. Without Annie or Josh near him, in fact he had left them behind, much the way Harm's own father had died. Another flash and Harm tossed for the last time in his sleep.

It was a dreary night. It was a familiar pier. Harm saw Diane get in her car and then the scene went black. He heard the shots ring out and a part of his soul bit back at him. The images of his mind went to the crime scene that he had been called out to. The thoughts and feelings that raced through his mind as he unzipped the body bag and saw Diane lying there. The red blood staining a white uniform that she always wore with such pride. Diane Schonke had died. Harm had blamed himself for years, he always believed that he should have gone to the pier that night but he had decided against it and now, the very existence of that memory was as a vulture picking at the remnants of a tortured soul.

Harm shot up in his bed in a cold sweat. He looked to his left to see Mac slumbering peacefully in her side of the bed. God he loved her in a way there were no apt words to describe. He slowly climbed out of the bed and walked across the apartment. He walked into the living room and pulled up a cushion on the couch. He pulled up the fabric under the normal place of the cushion and pulled out a shoebox. He sat on the couch and opened the top of the shoebox.

Inside were memories, times he vowed that it was better not to look back on, there was just too much pain there. He pulled out a few old pictures and postcards to look them over again; this was just too much trouble. After a few minutes, he felt a soft hand caress his shoulder. "I rolled over and you weren't there." Mac pressed her lips into his hair.

"Bad dreams, sorry." Harm responded, tearing his eyes off the photo only momentarily.

"So this is her. No wonder you looked like you'd seen a ghost when we met." Mac picked up a photo from the box.

"Mac, I'm sorry, I should have told you so much earlier, I mean you're the woman I love more then anything in the world. You of all people needed to know about this. Mac, you have to know, that everything I've ever said, ever done, ever felt, it was always about you." Harm pleaded with her. "It was you that helped me make my peace with Diane." He covered her hand with his.

"I know, Harm. I found the shoebox one day when I was vacuuming. I figured you would tell me when you thought the time was right. I won't tell you I wasn't self-conscious but I knew you loved me and I knew that I loved you and more importantly, that I've never felt how I feel when I'm with you and that there was nothing false about that." She wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her head against his chest.

"You're amazing, you know that?" Harm kissed the top of her head.

"I have help." She lightly began to stroke his chest. "Now, come back to bed. If we don't get enough sleep tonight, we won't be up for our run tomorrow morning."

"You make it sound so appealing." Harm chuckled as she took him by the hand and led him back toward the bed.

"Well I was considering seducing you into my bed, but then I realized one thing that kind of nixed that whole idea." Mac chortled.

"And what was that?" Harm smiled as they crossed back into the bedroom.

"It's your bed, too." Mac slid back under the covers. "Now if you don't get that cute Navy six back in here, I can't be responsible for my actions."

"I love you, oh God, I love you so much." Harm wrapped his arms around Mac and spooned back up against her.

"I know and trust me, my big strong Navy soon to be hubby, the feeling is oh so mutual." Mac ran her hands along his strong forearms. The two of them fell asleep against the pillows of the bed, as the rain and thunder echoed against the windowpanes and asphalt streets of DC.