Turn or Burn Read Online Free

used to them. I’d certainly forgotten what sweet slumber meant.
     
    ***
     
    Ted and I go way back. I was under his command my first few years in the Special Forces. We’d worked in Kosovo and Northern Africa together, and he’d done everything he could to help me advance. And when we returned from war zones, we’d spend time together in Seattle. His ex-wife used to take care of us. Let us sit on the porch and talk about the things no one understood. She’d let us be and show us love when we needed it. But he drove her off eventually. It was hard to avoid. The things we’ve seen can’t be shared. No one can understand, and it separates us from the innocent. A great big dividing line most often too thick to break through.
    We both left the Army at the same time and started doing private contract work. That’s when I met his younger brother, Jay, for the first time. Jay was ex-Navy, a year younger than me, and he’d been contracting for a couple years by the time Ted and I got on board. In fact, he’s the one who talked us into it. He’s the one who got us our first jobs. Despite what happened, I still have some grand memories of those days. Back then, the three of us ruled the world together. There was nothing we couldn’t do in a war zone. I pity the fool who tried to take us on.
    The deal with contracting was that it paid better and we didn’t have to follow rules. I love the Army and the Green Berets as much as I love our country, but I believed I had more to offer as a contractor than a tied-down military man. We could pick our battles and be more effective fighting them. The three of us were bouncing around Iraq long before Saddam and Blackwater were household names. Making six figures and a real difference.
    This was before the government got greedy and started paying any numbskull with a gun to get a job done. It used to be only those of us who had served could get the gig. Only those of us who had real knowledge of how to win battles, how to work with allied forces, how to produce results, how to protect. But contractors came to be in such high demand that there just weren’t enough of us, and they started taking anyone that knew how to pull a trigger. That’s why Jay was killed, because he’d been surrounded by idiots. But I was set on taking the blame and guilt to my coffin. If his death was any one person’s fault, it was mine .
    Aside from the obvious, the devastating fact about that day was I couldn’t really remember it. I could see bits and pieces but it wasn’t a memory like most. And that broke my heart. I couldn’t even give Jay the respect of remembrance. I wanted so badly to relive those hours, to analyze what we’d done wrong and how I could have changed things, but I couldn’t. Once it got ugly, I blacked out.
    So I hadn’t taken a job in two years; decided I wasn’t capable. I don’t think anyone would have argued with me. And I’d closed myself off from the world. Being responsible for a man’s death is too much for any man to handle, and the same men who had killed Jay had tortured me until I could taste death, and that didn’t help things, either. That week in Afghanistan, I was shown the dark side—something that I can’t shake. Even in my dreams. It took my soul and broke it down, like a fist crushing a cracker to crumbs.
    Yeah, I felt like those crumbs. No doctor in his right mind would ever clear me for battle again.
    I’d never be ready.

CHAPTER 4  
    “What are you doing up?” Ted asked me, coming into the kitchen with a bag in his hand. The sun hadn’t quite come up yet. Roman went over to him.
    “I got my catnap. That’s all I can do these days.”
    “Nightmares?”
    “Is that what they’re called?”
    “Got a call from my team,” Ted said, not letting me wallow in my sorrows. “King 5 is reporting protesters already pouring into town. Sounds like Battle in Seattle all over again. Remember that WTO disaster back in the