Fort Bragg
It was night and outside it was thundering.
The roof of the hut was dripping and the drops were annoyingly falling on the faces, necks and ears of the recruits, who were shivering inside their sleeping bags.
As they lay on their camp beds, they fell into some kind of coma status that had little to do with sleep. Every one of them did, except Ortega.
He was the only one awake.
Instead of sleeping he was sat on his camp bed.
“Coletta has a fever. He can't do it” he said to no one in particular. Hearing Ortega talking on his own, Jorgenson was the only one to wake up.
He walked up to him barefoot.
“I think that Coletta has a dislocated shoulder, other than the fever” Ortega added.
Jorgenson didn't reply.
He reached Ortega and started looking to Coletta.
The head of the half-Italian, half American Coletta - a long range weapons specialist - stretched out of the sleeping bag with his eyes closed, almost tightly shut and careless of the rain drops coming from the ceiling onto his face.
Brown haired and nice looking, Coletta looked younger than his age and had a good guy's face.
His shut eyes were flickering under their eyelids.
He was delirious, not just dreaming.
“If only there wasn't no rain in here...” said Jorgenson, wiping his forehead dry.
“Johnny says it's on purpose” replied Ortega.
Jorgenson turned to him, as if to be sure about what he had just said.
“Yes, yes... He says that they pierced the holes on purpose in the roof, in order to let the rain come in”
“No... I can't believe this”
The two stayed in silence for a while, looking at Coletta tossing and turning in his sleep.
“My back hurts – Ortega said -. When we lifted that pole, inside the river... I think I lifted it wrong”
Jorgenson – who had helped Ortega to get out from the water when he had passed out just for while holding that pole - didn't reply.
“My shoulders hurt and my ankles too, Jesus Christ... Even my balls are in pain”
“Let's go to sleep. Even tonight they won't let us sleep more than two hours, and the others are in dream land already. Fuck, they fell asleep the way people usually pass out. We are the only two still awake”
“No” Ortega said.
Then he added:
“Help me”
They pulled soldier Coletta out of his sleeping bag and he didn't even wake up.
They then discovered that he had got inside of it with his wet clothes still on, as was obvious for someone out of his mind with fatigue and fever too, as Coletta surely was in that moment.
So they undressed him, they dried him and put on some dry, clean clothes, like a child.
He sometimes grumbled something, and nothing more than that.
Then they put him inside Ortega's dry sleeping bag and stopped to look at him.
And yet, Ortega wasn't satisfied.
“Take a poncho. No, take two and pull the strings out of them”
One was enough.
They hung the poncho between two crossbeams, so that no more raindrops would fall on Coletta.
Now he would sleep warm and dry, or at least for the next two or three hours.
Coletta might even recover, if only he could sleep a whole night... But that would never happen and both Ortega and Jorgenson were well aware of that.
Coletta's test was going to end and there was nothing they could do to avoid it.
Then the two recruits got back inside their sleeping bags.
Ortega went inside Coletta's wet one, and it gave him a shiver.
Then Jorgenson broke the silence again.
“How the fuck do you do it?” he said.
“Do what?”
“Doing what you just did. You could have two, maybe three injuries between the shoulder, ankles and back. You have two eyes that make you look like if you're dead already . How the fuck can you think about the others?”
“Just sleep”
“Trautman is a psycho. He never stops saying bullshit, while he tortures us”
Ortega opened his eyes.
“Coletta is useful” said.
“What?”
“I need him for my mission”
“What the fuck are you talking about, Ortega?”
“Just sleep, Jorgenson”
The two stayed in silence for a while, then adjusted themselves inside their sleeping bags, to finally sleep for real.
Outside, the rain was trickling over the sheet roof when a couple of bolts of lightning lit the small dormitory.
Only after a long pause the two rolls of thunder finally came, as low and far as the rumbles of a distant stomach.
“Ortega?”
“Yes?”
“You are a leader for sure”