Messner
Messner, who was sleeping on a stool, awoke with a start.
Out of the corner of his eye he could see Coletta, Krakauer and Ortega dancing, while Rambo, who was sitting down watching them kept to the side. In all actuality, everything was fine, except that the music was pounding in his ears and he really needed to puke.
Covering his mouth to keep from puking all over himself, he crossed the room quickly in a slalom like fashion around the other soldiers who were basically as drunk as he was.
When he got onto the street and into the cold night air however, he didn’t puke after all but started breathing again.
It had just been a false alarm. He knew better than anyone that nausea worsened when you fell asleep, but maybe it was all over with now, so he turned his attention to the street.
The city was packed with people despite the late hour, even if he wasn’t really sure exactly what time it was.
His stomach still felt a bit uneasy so he had a seat on the sidewalk and took a quick look inside the bar right behind him.
He saw Ortega dancing around like an idiot, pint in hand, spilling beer all over the place. It didn’t look like he had the slightest idea about what he was doing though.
Messner tried lowering his head and closing his eyes for a second, just to rest a bit.
As soon as he did though, visions of the helicopter wreckage they had crashed in came back along with the RPG's flying warhead white-smoke trail which had barely missed his helicopter.
I almost got blown to pieces today.
He was fully aware that still being alive was nothing short of a miracle.
Had that RPG passed three feet further to the right he wouldn’t be there now, just staring drunkenly around like that.
Linda – he thought.
He would have given anything right then to talk to “his” Linda on the phone again even if she wasn’t his anymore.
He would have told her how lucky he was to still be alive and how awesome being alive was that particular night.
Expressing it in words wouldn’t have been an easy feat at all. It was one of those things that no one in the world could understand except for whoever had actually gone through it – but he would have tried for Linda anyway. If only he could have her on the other end of the line.
It would never happen though, because Messner really wasn’t allowed to call her.
It wasn’t simply because Linda was now married and living with another man, but especially because the affair she’d had with Messner was a kind of open secret in that goddamn hospital which he’d worked in about two years ago.
Nevertheless, calling her would have been so awesome that Messner couldn’t help daydreaming about it.
He would have told her how much he loved her, how much he missed her and how tight he would have hugged her and told her about his day. A day unlike any other, when Daniel Messner had been grazed by bullets and rockets, some of his best friends had been in a helicopter crash and one of them probably wasn’t going to make it through the night. Yep. While he and the others were there partying and having fun, Jorgenson was slowly dying at the Dak To base hospital, and Messner was painfully aware of that.
They should consider themselves nothing but lucky.
A deep sadness came over him.
He missed Linda and thinking about Jorgenson made him feel bad.
His eyes became teary because even if he’d had a telephone, he never would have made the call anyways.
Come on.
In the last year and a half she had never even replied to a single letter Messner had written.
The only woman he’d ever loved his entire life was back in her husband's arms and that was the sad truth.
Messner held himself tightly as he watched people pass by on the streets. The happiness he felt about still being alive suddenly became tainted by a sense of bitterness.
There was no getting away from it, that was his life.