The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice Read Online Free

lesson about what to do in case you catch fire, a phrase he had taught his own kids. He thought he would take off his shirt and throw it over her to smother the flames, so he hurled down his gun and tore off his helmet and body armor, but he had forgotten that he wasn’t wearing the regular uniformblouse, big and loose and made of thick fireproof material. The tight-fitting military-issue shirt he had on that day would be useless against the flames.
    The platoon leader, a twenty-six-year-old lieutenant named Matthew Pathak,yelled for the soldiers to get Loyd into the stream, but he quickly realized the flames were too high for anyone to get near her, so he filled his helmet with water and shouted at the others to help. Jack Bauer was already standing in the water. When he’d seen the flames, his first thought had been that he was on fire, so he’d run and jumped into the little stream. Now he and Cooper and the soldiers knelt and scooped helmets full of water toward Loyd. They tossed handfuls of dirt and sand to quell the flames. She had been standing hunched over like a bending branch and now she fell. The medic was saying something, drawing closer, reaching for her ankle. Cooper grasped her other leg. With Jack Bauer and another interpreter, the men pulled her across the dirt toward the stream and lowered her into the water. When the flames were extinguished, they lifted her out and gently laid her on the sand.
    She was shaking. They cut off her body armor and what was left of her clothes, and she lay there in her underwear in the dirt, small and frail and shockingly exposed. She looked so tiny, Cooper thought.He pulled her watch off her wrist and the melting rubber stretched hot and elastic like Silly Putty. He would remember this later, physical evidence of how fast and completely the world had changed, how things were normal until suddenly they weren’t, so that one minute your friend was standing there smiling and talking, and then she was on fire and no one could get to her, and then you had to dip her in a gutter to put the fire out, and now she was lying almost naked in a place where you hardly ever saw a woman outdoors, let alone unclothed. Cooper felt an immense tenderness for her and a growing, directionless rage. Jack Bauer, shocked by her nakedness,unwound his cotton scarf and began to layit over her body, but the platoon medic told him to stop. Her skin was too hot. The fabric would stick to her. A few feet away, the ground was still burning.
    The medic quickly went to work. When they’d pulled her out of the water,he had thought she was dead. Her body had started to freeze up, but now she was telling him she couldn’t feel anything in her arms. Cooper was afraid to look at her.
    ‘I’m cold,’ she said. ‘I’m cold.’ And then: ‘You guys got the flame out really quick. Does it look bad?’
    ‘It just looks like a bad sunburn,’ Cooper told her.He was lying. The only parts of her that weren’t burned were her ankles and feet, where her boots had covered her skin. Her face and thighs were a deep reddish pink, and there was faint gray charring on her cheeks, as if someone had rubbed her skin with coal. Maybe it isn’t that serious, he thought, God, I hope it isn’t. Gently, he lifted off her helmet and found her hair wet and dirty but otherwise untouched. Loyd took meticulous care of her hair, lugging footlockers of products into the desert and brushing it until it shone.
    ‘Your hair looks perfect,’ he told her. ‘You’re about to go through a very difficult struggle. You can ask God for help.’ Cooper was a lifelong Mormon, but Loyd had told him she wasn’t sure she believed in God.
    ‘I was mad at Don,’ she murmured with the ghost of a smile. ‘I hope it didn’t ruin our prayer.’
    She was talking about the surprise of the patrol, her tiredness, and her momentary frustration with Ayala, and she was teasing, Cooper realized. She was still there. But she started shaking again. She