A Soldier's Pledge. Nadia Nichols

      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.

      “You’ll be okay,” he reassured her. Those words had haunted him ever since his sister’s visit while he was at Walter Reed.

      * * *

      “SO, THAT’S WHY I’m here,” he said, returning to the present and looking across the campfire at Cameron, who had listened quietly while he told the story of a soldier and his dog. “I told her she’d be okay. I lied.”