Sloban was dead because of Captain Marshall, and that Reza could not forgive. Maybe Marshall hadn’t pulled the trigger himself but he was responsible nonetheless. Sloban had been through some bad shit downrange. Very bad shit. The kind of bad shit that people wrote books about. The kind of shit that ended up in the Army’s Lessons-Learned database that no one paid attention to. But it was also the kind of bad shit that the Army liked to pretend didn’t really fuck people up in the head as much as it really did. Because hell, every soldier should be able to see their buddy get their legs blown off and come home just fine, right? Add in that Sloban’s wife had run off with his brother—how was that for family loyalty—and Marshall’s relentless push to throw Sloban out of the army for misconduct—and the kid had finally just snapped. It wasn’t going to be easy facing his commander. Reza reached into the glove box for the flask. He wasn’t so stupid as to risk getting an open container violation riding around on post with a vodka bottle in his truck.
