GAME OF THRONES: RISE OF THE DRAGON WOLF
BOOK ONE — PART 2: FORGED IN WAR
CHAPTER 2: THE MAKING OF A SOLDIER
A man who can carry anything will eventually be handed everything.
That’s not strength.
That’s just nobody knowing what’s in your pack.
Damien signed the paperwork on a Tuesday, in a strip-mall office between a nail salon and a payday lender, and told no one he was going.
The recruiter was a staff sergeant with a bad haircut and a good handshake who kept waiting for him to ask something.
Damien had already read everything.
He’d spent four months in the library and on the school’s computers going through it — contracts, timelines, training pipelines, what a person could reasonably expect and what the brochures were shading.
He knew the enlistment options better than the recruiter did.
He asked three questions, all narrow, all about the infantry contract and the airborne option, got three answers, and signed.
He could have said his reasons out loud if anyone had asked.
He’d sorted them, the way he sorted everything.
Gerald had given thirty years to it, and Gerald was the only man Damien had ever met he wanted to be like.
There was structure in it — a system with rules, and Damien had always been good at systems with rules.
There was independence, and the Hardmans would not have to feed and house a grown man out of kindness.
There was the chance to be tested against something real rather than against a heavy bag in a garage.
There was school after, paid for.
There was the possibility, faint but there, of belonging to something larger than himself.
And underneath all of it, unexamined, the actual engine: he had been nine years old and small and useless in a corner while somebody he loved was killed, and he was never going to be that again.
If the world was going to keep producing men like Dale — and it was, he’d read enough history to know it was, on every scale there was — then he intended to be the thing that stood between them and whoever they were coming for.
He drove back to the Hardmans’ with the copy of his contract folded in the glove box and did not mention it for two days.
He told them at dinner on Thursday.
He’d worked out what to say.
He said it plainly: he’d enlisted, Army, infantry, with an airborne option; he shipped in July, eight weeks after graduation; it was done and signed.
Diana set her fork down.
Gerald didn’t.
He kept eating for a moment, chewing slowly, looking at his plate, and the silence stretched out long enough that Damien felt something he had not felt in that house before — the sense of having gotten something badly wrong without knowing what.
“Well,” Gerald said finally.
“Congratulations. That’s a hard road and a good one, and you’ll do fine on it.” He set the fork down then.
“When’d you sign?”
“Tuesday.”
“Tuesday.” He nodded slowly.
“And you’ve been thinking on it how long?”
“Since about November.”
“Since November.” Another nod.
Gerald sat back in his chair and looked at him, and there was no anger in it, which was worse.
“Son, I did thirty years. I’ve got two friends still at the recruiting command and I know exactly which contracts are worth the paper and which ones’ll eat a kid alive. You had a man at this table who could’ve walked you through every line of that thing.” He tapped the table once, lightly.
“You didn’t ask me a single question. Not one, in six months.”
Damien opened his mouth and found nothing in it.
“I’m not angry,” Gerald said.
“I want to be clear about that, because I know how you take things. I’m proud of you. I’d be proud of you if you’d gone and joined the Navy, God help you.” A flicker at the corner of his mouth, gone.
“I’m disappointed. Those aren’t the same. You made a good decision, and you made it the way you make every decision — by yourself, in your head, and then you told us after there was nothing left to discuss.” He held Damien’s eyes.
“That’s the part I want you to look at. Not this time. Down the road. Because you’re about to go somewhere that will punish that habit hard, and it won’t be you that pays for it.”
“I didn’t want—” Damien stopped.
Tried again.
“I didn’t want to ask you for anything.”
“I know.” Gerald’s voice gentled.
“That’s what I’m telling you about.”
He said the rest of it later, out in the garage, with the door up and the evening coming down blue over the yard.
He didn’t make a speech of it.
He said it in pieces, over an hour, while they cleaned a carburetor neither of them needed to clean.
“The Army’s a good place to put a man like you. Order, standards, something to be good at. I won’t pretend it didn’t save my life.” He blew a passage clear.
“But it doesn’t fix anything. I want you to hear that from somebody who’s watched it not fix a hundred men. Discipline isn’t the same as getting better. You can be the most squared-away soldier in the battalion and still be carrying every ounce of what you walked in with. It just gets easier to hide, because everyone around you is impressed.”
Damien turned a part over in his hands and said nothing.
“Second thing.” Gerald wiped his fingers.
“You’re going to be useful over there. Extremely useful — you’re already better trained than half of what shows up, and you learn faster than anybody I’ve had my hands on. People are going to depend on you, and that’s going to feel good, and I need you to know that being useful isn’t the same as being loved. You can spend a whole life being useful and end up with nothing at the bottom of it. I’ve been to those funerals. Whole chapel full of people who respected the man and not one who knew him.”
The light went a shade further down.
“Third. That uniform is a wonderful place to hide. Best I ever found.” He said it without irony.
“Everything’s decided for you — what you wear, when you eat, who you answer to, what you’re worth. A man who doesn’t want to be looked at too close can disappear inside it for twenty years and get medals for it. Don’t you do that. It’s the same corner you’ve been sitting in since you were nine, only they give you a rifle and call it service.”
Damien’s hands had gone still.
“And last.” Gerald turned to face him fully.
“Whatever else you take from me, take this one. You talk to the men beside you. Out loud. Every time. Whatever’s in your head — the plan, the thing you noticed, the part you’re worried about — you say it, before it matters, not after. Because the day’s coming when what you know and don’t mention will be the difference for somebody who trusted you.” He held the look a beat longer.
“Alright. That’s my speech. I’ll not give another one.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t ‘sir’ me, I worked for a living.” He turned back to the bench.
“Hand me that rag.”
Diana cried, and made no apology for it.
She cried at the table and again in the kitchen and then got on with it, because that was who she was.
She said out loud that she was frightened, that she’d spent thirty years patching up other people’s children and had a very clear idea of what the world could do to a body, and that she intended to worry the entire time and he could not talk her out of it.
She cooked for two days for his last dinner.
Everything he liked, including the potatoes.
Afterward she gave him a package wrapped in brown paper.
Inside was a flat waterproof document case, olive drab, the kind that seals along three edges — sturdy, plain, not a decoration on it.
“For your book,” she said.
Damien looked up at her.
In two years she had never once touched the notebook.
Never moved it, never mentioned it, never asked what it was.
He had left it out on the dresser a hundred times, and she had cleaned around it a hundred times, and not once had she made him explain the only thing he’d carried out of his mother’s life.
“It’s the one thing you brought with you,” she said simply.
“I don’t need to know what’s in it. But you’re going to be out in the wet and the sand for years, and paper doesn’t last in that. So.” She patted his arm.
“Now it will.”
“Thank you,” he managed.
“You’ll call,” Diana said.
“Not because you owe us. Because I’ll worry either way and a phone call is cheaper than an ulcer.” She took his face in her hands, this small gray-haired woman, and made him look at her.
“And you listen. This is your home. Not while you’re a placement, not while you’re a minor, not until you turn eighteen and the checks stop. Yours. There’s a room here with your name on it and there always will be, and you do not ever have to earn permission to come back to it. Not after a year, not after ten, not if you leave badly, not if you come home wrong. You just come.”
He wrote that down later.
Not in the notebook — in his head, in the place where he kept the small number of things he was sure of.
Gerald had been building him for two years without either of them calling it that.
The running, the hills, the ruck hikes with sandbags and a bathroom scale.
The pull-up bar in the rafters.
Boxing, wrestling, the joint work.
Swimming in the cold reservoir until his hands went stupid.
Breath control lying flat on the garage floor with a weight on his chest.
Land navigation with a paper map and a compass in country Gerald knew and Damien didn’t.
First aid, drilled and re-drilled, tourniquets on a dummy leg until he could do it in the dark.
Weapons handling on the back forty, slow and boring and safe.
Vehicle maintenance.
How to sleep anywhere.
How to eat when you don’t want to.
So Damien arrived at Benning in July in the best condition of his life, and lasted about four days before he found out that condition was not the same as competence.
He was near the top in most things that could be measured against a stopwatch or a target.
Ruck marches, runs, obstacles, combatives — he’d been thrown by a sixty-four-year-old man three times a week for two years and it showed.
He maintained his gear better than anyone in the platoon.
He learned drill faster than the men who’d grown up in it.
He did not panic, did not whine, did not quit, and had a tolerance for discomfort that unsettled the drill sergeants slightly.
What he could not do was work with people.
He’d take a task, understand it, and execute it — his own portion, perfectly, without a word, while three other men blundered through theirs.
Told to lead, he’d position everyone correctly and then simply do the difficult parts himself rather than explain them.
Asked a question, he gave the shortest true answer available.
Hurt, he said nothing; he ran a stress fracture in his shin for eleven days before a medic caught him limping and it became a matter of some public discussion.
By week three he had a reputation.
It wasn’t a good one.
Squared away, but he thinks he’s better than everybody.
He heard it and understood the logic and could not think of a single thing to do about it, so he did nothing, which of course confirmed it.
Marcus Campbell was the loudest human being Damien had ever met.
He came from four generations of it — grandfathers, uncles, a father who’d retired a command sergeant major and a mother who’d done twenty years herself.
He knew the culture before he arrived, knew the jokes, knew which corners could be cut and which could not.
He was fast, strong, funny, socially fearless, and he had something to prove that had nothing to do with anyone in that company: he intended to be good on his own account, not because of the name.
He found Damien in the second week, the way a dog finds the one person in the room who doesn’t like dogs.
It started with running.
Marcus was the fastest man in the platoon and had been told so and enjoyed it, and then a quiet kid from nowhere paced him for four miles and beat him on the last two hundred meters and did not say one word about it.
Marcus laughed out loud, hands on his knees, gasping.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay. That’s happening again.”
It happened again.
It happened for the next fourteen weeks.
Damien won the long runs and the rucks and combatives more often than not.
Marcus took him apart on the range — he’d been shooting since he was six, and his groups were art.
They traded the obstacle course.
Marcus was better at land navigation, which annoyed Damien deeply; Damien was better on the written tests, which annoyed Marcus more.
Their equipment inspections became a private war of escalating absurdity that ended when a drill sergeant told them both, at some volume, that he had never in eleven years wanted to fail two men for being too clean.
It was never mean.
That was what confused Damien most, in the beginning.
He kept waiting for the moment the competition turned, the way things always turned — the cold, the reason, the cost.
It never came.
Marcus lost and laughed.
Marcus won and crowed and then held out a hand to pull him up.
Losing to Marcus cost nothing.
Beating Marcus cost nothing.
He didn’t know what to do with that.
Marcus, having identified the most closed door in the building, proceeded to knock on it roughly nine hundred times.
He saved Damien a seat at chow, every single day, and put his tray down there whether Damien came or not.
He pulled him into conversations by simply narrating at him until he answered.
He shared his contraband — the good hot sauce, a sleeve of cookies from a care package — and did not permit refusal.
He asked Damien’s opinion on things, actual opinions, and then waited, at length, in silence, having discovered early that Damien had no defense whatsoever against a patient silence he hadn’t started.
He refused one-word answers.
“That’s not a sentence, Chatty.”
The nickname arrived in week five and stuck for the rest of Damien’s life.
Marcus called him Chatty because he was the quietest man in the company, and thought it was the funniest thing anyone had ever done, and never got tired of it, not in twenty years.
And when the muttering about arrogance got loud enough to reach him, Marcus put a stop to it in the barracks one night with a bluntness Damien had not expected.
“He’s not stuck up, you’re just boring. Man’s helped half of you fix your gear and hasn’t asked one of you for a thing. Y’all confuse quiet with mean because you never met anybody quiet.”
Damien had been thirty feet away with a bootlace in his hands and had heard every word of it, and had gone on lacing his boot, and something in his chest had done something he had no name for.
He’d told himself he participated because cohesion mattered and cohesion affected performance.
That was true in week two.
Somewhere around week seven, without permission, it stopped being the reason.
The failure came in week nine, on a squad movement exercise, and it was entirely his.
They put him in charge.
He read the terrain and the objective and built a plan in about ninety seconds that was, the instructors said later, the best plan any squad produced that day — a route through a draw the other squads all ignored, timed against a shift change in the opposing force, with a fallback if the near creek crossing was covered.
He told his squad the route.
He did not tell them why.
He did not tell them the timing depended on the shift change, or that the creek crossing was the decision point, or what he intended to do if it went wrong, because all of that was in his head and clear and he expected to be there to direct it. Follow the newest chapters on novelping . com.
Forty minutes in, the far team came from an angle he hadn’t expected and the squad split.
Damien went right, toward the fallback, because the fallback was obvious — to him.
Four men went left, because nobody had ever told them there was a fallback.
They spent nine minutes in the wrong draw waiting for a signal from a leader who had never told them what the signal would be.
By the time it sorted itself out, the exercise was over and the squad had been comprehensively destroyed.
The instructor did not shout at him.
Damien almost wished he had.
He walked over, looked at the map still in Damien’s hands, and studied it for a while — the route, the timings, the annotations.
“This is good work,” he said.
“This is better than good. This would’ve worked.” He handed it back.
“Where was it, though? The whole time. Where was this plan?”
Damien said nothing.
“It was in your head, Private. That’s where it was. It was in your head the whole time and it was excellent in there.” The instructor’s voice stayed level, which made it land harder.
“A squad cannot follow a plan you keep inside your head. You understand? Doesn’t matter how good it is. A perfect plan nobody else knows is worth less than a mediocre one four guys understand, because the mediocre one has four guys executing it and yours had one.” He tapped Damien’s chest with two fingers, once.
“Those men out there wanted to do their jobs. You didn’t let them. You didn’t get beat today. You beat yourself, and you took eight people with you.”
He walked off.
Damien stood in the field a long time.
Gerald’s voice, from a garage in the spring: the day’s coming when what you know and don’t mention will be the difference for somebody who trusted you.
It had taken nine weeks.
Marcus found him that night on the steps behind the barracks, which was the one place Damien went to be unavailable, and sat down next to him without being invited, which was the entire nature of Marcus Campbell.
“That was a hell of a plan,” he said.
“It failed.”
“It didn’t fail. You never ran it. Nobody ran it. There was no plan out there, man, there was just you doing a plan by yourself and eight guys doing a completely different thing called wondering what the hell Damien’s doing.” He stretched his legs out.
“You know what killed us? Not the route. The route was gorgeous. We died because when the far team came in, I looked left for you, and I didn’t know what you’d do, because I never know what you’ll do. And that’s not because you’re dumb. It’s because you don’t say things.”
“I said the route.”
“You said the route.” Marcus turned his head.
“Chatty. Serious question. Do you think we’re gonna think less of you if you explain something?”
Damien didn’t answer, which was an answer.
“Yeah.” Marcus nodded slowly.
“See, that’s the thing I can’t figure about you. You’ll carry another man’s ruck four miles and never mention it. You fixed Delgado’s optic and let him think he did it. You ran on a broken leg for two weeks rather than say the word medic.” He shook his head.
“You’ll do anything for anybody except let them know what you’re thinking. Which is the one thing we actually need.”
“It’s faster to do it myself.”
“Sure it is. Right up until there’s more of it than one guy can do.” Marcus bumped his shoulder against Damien’s.
“Look. My old man used to say a squad’s not eight guys who can each do the job. It’s eight guys who can do the job without stopping to ask. That only happens if everybody knows the whole plan. All of it. Including the part where it goes bad.”
They sat there a while.
Somewhere across the company area someone was getting yelled at about a foot locker.
“I don’t know how to do that,” Damien said.
It came out very quietly, and it was the most honest sentence he had said out loud to another human being since he was nine years old.
Marcus didn’t make anything of it.
That was the mercy of him — he took the enormous thing and set it down gently and did not point at it.
“Then that’s what the next nine weeks are for,” he said.
“Start small. Say the second thing you think of instead of just the first. I’ll do the rest of the talking, I’m good at it.”
He got better.
Not quickly, and never completely, but measurably.
He started briefing before he moved.
He’d stop the squad and say the route and then the reasoning, then the trigger, then the fallback, in short flat sentences with no wasted words, and men who had thought he was arrogant discovered that when Damien did speak there was nothing in it but usable information.
He started giving pieces away — handing off the compass, letting Delgado run the near side, standing back with his hands empty and watching somebody do a job worse than he’d have done it and not taking it from them.
That was the hardest thing he had ever learned to do.
It felt like negligence for a year.
He learned to ask.
Small things first.
Cover me here.
Check my count.
Look at this and tell me what I’m missing.
Each one cost him something and none of them cost what he expected.
And he learned, mostly from Marcus, a set of facts that contradicted almost everything eight years of foster care had taught him: that competing with someone could be a form of affection; that you could argue with a man in the morning and eat with him at noon; that asking for help did not reduce you in anyone’s eyes; that people could see your worst — your silence, your stubbornness, the fact that you’d run yourself into the ground before admitting a weakness — and choose to stay anyway.
They started saying it, by the end, in that half-joking way: Campbell and Morales.
Nobody said one without the other.
He graduated near the top of the company.
The pipeline opened in front of him the way it opens for men who test well and don’t quit: infantry training, then Airborne, then an assessment slot with a selection program most of his class would never be offered.
Beyond that, further out, the specialized schools, the regiment, the units that don’t advertise.
He read every course description the way he’d read the enlistment contract, and he built himself a map of the next ten years, and for the first time in his life the future was something he was walking toward instead of something he was bracing for.
Marcus got orders that ran close alongside his.
Neither of them said much about it, but neither of them was surprised, and both of them had gone out of their way to make it happen.
The last event was a night ruck, twelve miles, full weight, and they ended it the way they had ended nearly everything for four months: side by side and hating each other for the final mile.
Damien crossed a stride ahead.
Marcus dropped his ruck, sat down on it, and pointed a finger at him with what breath he had left.
“That’s the fatigue. That’s a fatigue win, that doesn’t count, I want it noted.” He wiped his face with his sleeve.
“Next time I’m taking you. Airborne. Somewhere with hills. I’m gonna beat you so bad they’ll have to write it down somewhere official.”
A year ago Damien would have said nothing at all.
Nine weeks ago he’d have said okay and let it die there.
He shrugged his ruck off, sat down on it beside his friend, and looked out at the treeline going gray with the first of the light.
“You’ll have to run the hills, though,” he said.
“You always shorten your stride on a grade — you did it at mile eight and it cost you about forty seconds. You lean back instead of forward. If you fixed that you’d probably beat me on any course with vertical in it, and then I’d have to hear about it for the rest of my life.” He glanced over.
“So I’ve decided not to tell you.”
Marcus stared at him.
Then he threw his head back and laughed, loud enough to draw a shout from somewhere down the line, and shoved Damien hard enough to nearly put him off his ruck.
“He talks!” Marcus hollered at the empty morning, at the treeline, at nobody.
“Four months! Four months and the man makes a joke!” He shoved him again.
“Say something else. Say anything. I’ll wait right here.”
Damien didn’t.
But he was still sitting there when the sun came up, on a ruck, next to somebody, with nowhere he needed to disappear to.