An Arrogant Black Belt Threatens a Rookie Nurse in a Rural ER — Unaware She Was a Navy SEAL Officer
Chapter 19
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"Captain Reeves came down here for two reasons: the first was to give Ortiz the file; the second was to ask me to come back. Not to the teams—past that now. He wants me to build a curriculum at the Naval Special Warfare Center for Tactical Medicine. He wants me to teach corpsmen and SEAL operators what I learned in Aleppo and what I learned in the eight months I worked at a county hospital in West Virginia. He wants me to teach them that a junctional bleed under a fluorescent light with no whole blood and a brown-belt doctor screaming at you is the same problem as a junctional bleed in a valley with the sun going down. He says nobody else has done both jobs. He's probably right."Vera was quiet."I'm going to do it, Vera. I'm going to take the job. I'm going to leave Holloway County in three weeks after the federal stuff is done and the women here are taken care of. I'm sorry to leave you with the mess. I'm not sorry I came here.""You're not sorry?""Vera, six months ago a young nurse named Marisol got a bruise on her wrist that she could not tell her mother about. Tonight, that young nurse is going to be in front of a federal grand jury, and she is going to be a witness against the man who put that bruise on her, and she is going to be safe. That happens because I came here. I needed to know that disappearing didn't make me a coward; I needed to find out by accident. I found out by accident."Vera nodded slowly. Vera was crying; Vera did not bother to wipe at it."Reese.""Yeah?""Will you teach me?"Reese looked at her. "Teach you what?""Some of it. Not the shooting—the other parts. How to stand the way you stood the night they came in. How to talk the way you talked. I don't want what he did to ever happen again on my shift, and I want to know how to be the kind of nurse who could stop it."Reese took another sip of her coffee. Her mind went to Marisol with the bruise on her wrist, then to a young corpsman named Salazar who had been 24 years old and had never gotten old, then to a young Navy lieutenant named Reese Donovan who, 12 years ago, had sat in a classroom at Camp Lejeune and listened to a senior chief named Bishop tell her that the only thing that mattered in this work was that the next person down the line was better trained than you."Yes, Vera. I'll teach you. Before I leave, I'll teach you, and I'll come back here every quarter and I'll teach the night shift. We're going to start a program, you and me. We're going to call it something boring on the org chart so nobody complicates it. It's going to teach every nurse in this hospital how to stand the way I stood. Deal?""Deal."They drank their coffee.The rain stopped at 4:51 a.m. The sun came up at 6:38, gray and pale through the cloud cover.