A Soldier's Pledge

He ate a cold MRE, drank from his water bottle, eased the small of his back against the side of the mountain. The sunset illuminated a jagged wall of snow-covered peaks to the west. If he hadn’t been living so long in this place of war, he would have thought this country was beautiful, but it was hard to admire the mountains when each and every day was a struggle of straight up or straight down, carrying gear that weighed close to seventy-five pounds, and wondering when and from where the next attack might come, and if he would survive it.

There was enough light remaining to work on a letter to his mother he’d been writing for the past week. He pulled it out of his pocket along with the pen, used his thigh as a paper rest and added a few sentences. “These mountains at sunset remind me of home. If this war ever ends, I could be looking right at the future ski and snowboard capital of Pakistan. Hindu Kush could become a popular tourist trap. This mountain range is part of the Himalayas, and the mountains are rugged and wild. Hard traveling. We camp when we can go no farther.”

He could hear the three Afghan soldiers talking and laughing quietly, and he could smell pot on the faint updraft. They smoked it every night in spite of rules and regulations.

“Ask Danforth for help with the haying this summer,” he wrote. “Offer him half the crop if he’ll cut it all and put your half in the barn for you. That should be enough for you to winter what’s left of the cattle and horses. Use the money I sent you to cover the missing mortgage payments. I’ll send more next month. The bank shouldn’t be hounding you like that. Clive should keep that from happening. Never mind what Otis Small tells you about anything. Otis likes to stir up trouble. Keep counsel with Kootch. He’ll steer you straight every time.”

A high yelp of pain jerked his head up. All three Afghan soldiers were picking up stones and flinging them down the slope at a running animal. There was another yelp as another stone struck home and tumbled a leggy dark-colored creature head over heels. It ran off and vanished. It looked like a dog.

“Knock it off,” he commanded just loud enough for them to hear.

The Afghan soldiers laughed, but the stones fell from their fingers and the fleeing animal escaped. Dogs weren’t treated as pets in this country, and they weren’t treated kindly. Sometimes they were used for target practice. In Kabul, herding dogs were used for dog fighting, their tails and ears cut off at a young age. They ran in packs, usually, and struggled for survival.

Jack returned to his letter home, and with what little remained of the daylight, finished it. He was folding it to slip back into his pocket when he noticed movement to his right. His eyes focused on a pair of canid eyes watching him from a clump of brush in the mountainside, perhaps twenty feet distant. The eyes were dark and wary. The animal’s coloring, thick fur, pointed muzzle and upright ears gave it the appearance of a western coyote or brush wolf. He thought it might be the same animal the Afghan soldiers had been stoning, and his hunch was proved correct when the animal moved a few steps and he saw that it was limping.

It was just a pup, maybe four months old, with that big-pawed, leggy clumsiness that had made it such an easy mark for the stone-throwing Afghans. Hip bones and ribs jutted through thick fur. It was starving. Jack reached inside his jacket and pulled out a strip of jerky. He tossed it toward the pup, who vanished the moment he raised his arm but reappeared moments later to snatch up the piece of beef. It disappeared again temporarily, then peeked warily from cover. He tossed a second strip of jerky.

There was only one reason he could think of that a stray pup would be on this mountainside. The Taliban and insurgents often used packs of dogs in their camps as an early-warning system. It was highly probable they were near an enemy training camp. In fact, one might be just over the next ridge, and this half-wild pup may have strayed from there. He glanced to where the Afghan soldiers lounged with their pipes, and a few moments later, moving in a crouch and carrying his weapon, he joined them and shared his observations with Maruf.

“Could be,” the senior platoon leader agreed, nodding. “Tomorrow we will find out.”

“I’m going up the ridge now, under cover of dark,” Jack told them. “You stay put. Post a guard. I’ll have a look into the next valley.”

He left the radio with them, a decision he was later to regret, then stashed his pack carefully beneath a clump of mountain brush. With the last of the fading light, he picked an almost vertical path up the mountainside, moving from cover to cover. At one point, the slope became so steep he was crawling upward on his hands and knees. By the time he’d ascended to the top of the ridge line, a good half mile above where he left the Afghan soldiers, he was sweating profusely and struggling to catch his breath in the thin air.

He moved cautiously forward in the gloaming, keenly attuned to any sounds or movements that would have hinted at the enemy’s presence, but there was just the cooling sweep of wind from the glaciated mountains to the east. The wind was not in his favor, but it shifted as darkness thickened. He flattened himself on the rough, stony ground and looked through his night scope into the deep valley below him.

A jolt of adrenaline quickened his pulse when he spotted several small mud-walled houses at least one mile distant. Tents flanked both sides of a small river that divided the narrow valley. There were twelve tents in all, and three buildings. Unbelievable that way out here in this impossible terrain he’d find a Taliban training camp. The rumors had been true.

Excitement coursed through him. It was too dark to return to his men, so he crawled back down as far as he dared in near darkness, then spent an uncomfortable night beneath the sheltering foliage of a big clump of vegetation, dozing off and on, uneasy with the noises that seemed to originate from every direction. The loose rattle of a stone, the sudden tug of wind hissing through brush, the faint murmuring from the distant river. Every small noise brought him from the edge of sleep to a state of instant adrenaline-fueled alertness, but there was no attack. No swarm of insurgents creeping stealthily over the ridge line to knife or shoot him in his sleep.

As soon as there was enough light to move, he returned to his former position. His pack was where he’d stashed it. The three Afghan soldiers were sleeping in a row where he’d left them sitting the night before. No guard posted. That sort of careless behavior could get them all killed, and he felt a surge of anger at their flouting of his orders. He checked the coordinates of his position in the GPS unit inside his pack. All he had to do now was rouse the Afghan soldiers and radio those coordinates to his commanding officer. The scouting mission would be a success, and the Taliban encampment would be eliminated within hours.

Jack shrugged into his pack and descended toward the sleeping Afghan soldiers. His furtive approach went completely undetected. As he drew near, he paused uneasily, focused hard and realized with a jolt of shock that they weren’t sleeping. They were dead. Their throats had been cut and their weapons, packs and his radio had been taken. He scouted carefully before moving closer, and for a few moments he crouched beside them, assessing how much time had passed since they’d been killed. Several hours at least, long enough for them to stiffen. Those noises he’d heard last night had not been his imagination. He was a dead man, too, if they caught him out in the open like this after sunup.

Crouching low and hugging the cover of brush, he raced the sunrise and angled down the steep slope toward the river valley far below, where he would find better cover. He moved slow enough to keep rocks from tumbling noisily down the slope, fast enough to make his thigh muscles cramp and burn. At every moment he expected a bullet to slam into him and push him into the abyss.

He was well over thirty miles north of a friendly outpost, and that mileage was measured in straight line distance. He knew from experience how hard mountain miles could be. The valleys were easier to travel but more dangerous in terms of potentially hostile encounters, and hostiles were all around him. Still, there were brown trout in that river, and timbered forests and drinking water, all powerful incentives for taking the risk. He had no other options, really.

In two hours of furtive travel, he’d gained the cover of the timber, and another hour later the river. There had been no sign of the enemy, no hint that his presence had been detected. Perhaps they thought the scouting patrol had consisted of only the three Afghan soldiers. He’d cut no fresh human sign, not even down near the river. When it became too dark to travel farther, he found a place to hole up, away from the river, tucked back into the slope in a shallow cave created when a big pine toppled toward the water. The massive tree truck gave him good cover in front. Nobody could sneak up on him from behind and cut his throat.

He shrugged out of his pack, took a long drink of water from his bottle and pulled out an MRE. He was halfway through eating it when he lifted his gaze and realized, after a few beats, that he was gazing straight into the eyes of that same stray pup he’d encountered the evening before. The pup was flattened beneath the brush to the right of the tree trunk, blending nearly perfectly with its surroundings. Its ears were erect, muzzle pointing toward him, eyes bright and wary. He took a scoop of food onto his fork and flipped it toward the pup, who waited several long moments before darting out, snatching the mouthful of food and retreating.

Jack was uneasy knowing that the pup had followed him all day and he hadn’t spotted it. The sky above him had been active with large birds, but he’d seen nothing on the ground, and he’d been checking his back trail continuously. Had he missed the enemy, too? He finished the MRE, sharing every other mouthful with the pup, who darted out immediately and snatched it off the ground. He could have eaten another meal, but there was a long journey ahead. He rummaged in the pack for the GPS unit and calculated his position. He was a little over twenty miles from the outpost. He’d only made ten straight line miles since finding his dead soldiers. Twenty more miles didn’t seem that far, but when moving carefully and trying to avoid detection, those miles would be long and slow.

He slipped the GPS onto his belt next to his water bottle, wanting to keep it near. He was exhausted but unable to relax. He rested sitting up, using his pack for a backrest, draping his sleeping bag over his shoulders like a blanket and cradling his weapon in his lap. He closed his eyes but knew he wouldn’t sleep. He couldn’t get the image of those three dead Afghan soldiers out of his mind.

A noise roused him in the middle of the starlit night, a low, almost inaudible warning growl coming from the pup. He gathered his legs beneath him and let the sleeping bag slide off his shoulders. He was lifting his weapon and preparing to rise to his feet when the night exploded around him and all hell broke loose. Lightning and thunder, muzzle-flashes and bullets, an ambush on his position and no place to go except straight into it. He dove forward, rolled and came up all in one motion, firing at the nearest spit of flame, then raking the muzzle to the right and triggering another burst. He jumped over a fallen form, crashed through the brush and ran like a jackrabbit, zigzagging and dodging.

How many were there? Four? Five? He wasn’t going to stick around to find out. Another movement to his right, and he swung his weapon and fired another short burst, kept running. Felt something sting the calf of his leg and pushed on. He’d always been a good runner, and he ran now as he’d never run before. He could hear shouts coming from behind him, nothing up ahead. He dodged among trees. Slowed down when the canopy closed out the starlight and the darkness became too thick. Sped up when he could see the ground again.

He ran as if his life depended on it, because it did. He ran until he had to slow down, catch his breath, and even then he kept moving, walking fast, pausing from time to time to listen for sounds of pursuit over the pounding of his heart. He heard nothing but that meant nothing. They could be right on his heels. They were stealth fighters, and they were very good at it.

For over two hours he pushed hard. He paused only once, to check the burning in his calf. His pant leg was soaked, his boot full of blood. He had no idea how bad the wound was, nor was there time to find out, but he knew the bone wasn’t broken and counted himself lucky. If the bullet had struck bone, they’d have had him, and he’d be dead right now. He tied his bandanna around his calf to try to staunch the bleeding, then angled toward the river, and when he reached it he walked in. The water was frigid. He continued downriver in the shallows along the water’s edge. This wouldn’t slow his pursuers much, but they might think he’d crossed the river. He’d walk like this as long as the night covered his movements.

Too soon the sky began to brighten, and he lost the cover of darkness. He scouted ahead, searching for places where he could leave the river without leaving tracks. He stripped off his jacket and wrapped it around his lower leg when he came to an outcropping, and then climbed onto it. The ledge ran back far enough to get him off the immediate shoreline before ending in a choke of brush. He kept his jacket around his leg while he was on the ledge to prevent a blood trail, and removed it only after he was well into the brush. He moved back into the woods and kept moving, but his head wasn’t as clear as it should have been, and he could feel his strength failing him.

They could be right behind him, but he had to hole up. He found a place where he could make a stand if he had to, and he pulled his jacket back on because he was cold, really cold. He thought he’d just rest a while, listen and watch his back trail and be ready to fight if they caught up with him. He would stay alert because to sleep would be fatal. Disciplined vigilance was his only chance.

Don’t fall asleep.

That was the order he gave himself just before he passed out.

* * *

HE OPENED HIS eyes on the bright dawn, and the sight of the grayish-colored pup lying beneath the brush with him, almost within touching distance, head on its paws, watching him. “Back in Montana the ranchers would use you for target practice,” he muttered. “They don’t care for coyotes.”

His calf was throbbing, his head ached, he was desperately thirsty and sick from all the adrenaline, but he was still alive and the enemy hadn’t caught up to him. Yet. He ate some jerky for breakfast, drank water from his bottle, tossed the last three strips of dried meat he fished out of his pocket to the pup, figuring he’d make it back to the outpost within hours. He left the bandanna tied over the wound, pushed awkwardly to his feet, took up his weapon and started out. He could barely hobble, but he was sure once he got moving his leg would limber up and travel would get easier. When he looked back over his shoulder, the pup was following him, no longer trying to hide. That day the hours passed in an endless and painful blur, but there was no sign of the enemy.

Or the outpost. He was traveling far too slowly.

That evening he made his way back to the river to refill his water bottle. He drank his fill crouched by the river, knowing that would be the only supper he got. That night was colder than the last. When he awoke, stiff and aching and chilled to the bone, the pup was within hand’s reach, lying right beside his injured leg. When she saw he was awake, she raised her head off her paws and tensed, ready to flee at the slightest aggressive move from him. He extended his hand slowly, and she sniffed it. He touched her for the first time, a light stroke that brushed the black-tipped hair along her back while she remained rigidly motionless and watched him steadily with those dark golden eyes. He stroked her for some minutes, slowly and gently, and as he did the wary caution left her eyes and was replaced by something else entirely, and from that moment she was his.

That day his progress was slow and halting, and he rested often. If he was still being followed, the enemy would have picked him off by now as he hobbled slowly along. That evening he drank his fill again at the river and wondered if the pup would stick with him when he had no food to offer. The temperature dropped and snow fell during the night, and in the morning, the pup was lying on top of him, her nose tucked beneath his chin, warming him with her body. That day his progress was slower than the day before. His strength gave out, and he collapsed at dusk. He could travel no farther. He knew he was within striking distance of friendly territory, and his last conscious thought was how important it was that his unit get those GPS coordinates.

His discovery by a scouting party the following morning caused quite a stir, not only because he’d been out of radio contact for so long that they’d just about given him up for dead, but also because he was being so fiercely guarded by the wild pup who refused to let anyone approach. It took some doing by one of the scouting party to drag her away. He made a noose from a belt, attached it to a long pole and slipped it over her head. Two of the party returned to the outpost and brought back a stretcher. By that time Jack had roused enough to tell them about the pup and make them remove the noose from her neck. They loaded him onto the stretcher, and she dogged their heels all the way back to the outpost. She shadowed him in the medic’s tent and followed him when they transferred him to a waiting truck. He was barely aware of any of it.

“The medics say your leg’s infected and needs surgery,” Lieutenant Dan Royce said as they slid the stretcher into the bed of the truck. “We’re transporting you to Hatchet. They have a better setup there. That wild dog can’t go. You know the rules,” he said when the pup tried to climb into the bed of the truck.

“Sir, that dog’s the only reason I found that Taliban training camp. She saved my life.”

“I didn’t make the rules, Parker, but I have to enforce them. You can’t keep the dog.”

Ruben Cook, who had helped carry Jack back to the outpost and was standing with a group of soldiers, said, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of her for you.”

Jack looked at him, dizzy from the morphine. “She saved my life,” he repeated. “Treat her good.” He reached out one hand to the pup as she gazed at him with that intense golden stare.

“I’ll be back,” he told her as Ruben replaced her makeshift collar and pulled her out of the truck.

It was over sixty rough road miles to the next outpost. Jack didn’t remember much of the journey itself or the surgery that followed. When he woke up, he thought he was still out in the bush, hiding from the enemy, and an experienced army nurse talked him back to reality. The following morning the same nurse roused him gently and said, “Sergeant Parker? There’s something you should see.”

She helped him out of bed into a wheelchair and pushed him to the door of the tent. Outside the mobile hospital, a crowd of medical staff had gathered to stare at a starving, half-wild pup who had just limped into the camp. “One of your men forwarded a message for you yesterday,” the nurse explained. “He said that your wild dog got loose and chased after your truck when you left the camp. None of us ever thought it would make it this far.”

Jack spent five days at the mobile army hospital unit. His “wild dog” stayed under his cot, shared his meals and accompanied his every movement. When he returned to his unit, the pup’s presence was discreetly ignored by his commanding officer, especially when less than two months later she alerted the outpost to a hostile intruder wearing an improvised explosive device. Her growling caught Jack’s attention, and he exited the mess tent just as she sank her teeth into the intruder’s leg. Jack tackled the hostile, who was subdued, arrested and later tagged as a Taliban trainee. He was sixteen years old and wearing an IED that had failed to detonate.

From that point on, Jack’s wild dog became the camp’s highly regarded mascot. Jack worked to teach her basic commands, which she picked up quickly, but she never took to any of the other soldiers. They nicknamed her “Ky” because she looked like a coyote, and tempted her with the choicest of tidbits to gain her trust, but her loyalties belonged to Jack. She would answer to no other.

Jack began to worry about her fate, should he be killed in action or shipped stateside. While his unit was on leave in Kabul three months later, he contacted his sister and began the arduous process of getting Ky safely back to the United States. It was a process that took months but was ultimately successful. When he last saw her, Ky was huddled in a dog crate at the airport awaiting shipment to his sister in Montana. Her intense yellow gaze was fixed on his face, and her expression was one of fear and anxiety.