Vectors of Vengeance

August, 2014. Yokosuka, Japan. US Naval Forces Base. USS Shenandoah (LCC 21)

Jessica “Cricket” Squire stifled a scream as piercing pain roused her from nightmare terror. Chisels driven by powerful, uncaring hands ripped into her ankle bones. She bore the agony in silence, a dominance over suffering that she had learned under the most vicious attacks of her North Korean torturers. 

Not six months ago. 

Still as stone, Cricket dissociated mind from body, as if her soul hovered over a corpse freed from agony. She had taught herself many such defenses while curled up naked in the hell-black hold of the torture boat, waiting for the next assault. The psychic armor had kept her alive, and almost sane.

The stabbing ankle pain settled into a deep throbbing ache, a welcome reprieve from the horrific nightmares. 

Cricket’s eyes opened to the familiar confines of her new home, a small gray windowless stateroom aft on the second deck of USS Shenandoah, flagship of the United States Seventh Fleet, moored in home port, Yokosuka, Japan. As her eyes accommodated to the dim ambient light, she twisted in the narrow rack to check the time. The chisels returned with a vengeance, gouging into the bones, forcing Cricket to squeal in pain. She bit her lip to hush herself, lest her captors hear her cry. 

But no stinking commandos loomed in the darkness. Relieved, Cricket looked at the clock’s illuminated numbers: 4:00 AM. Three hours since the last Vicodin.

Tolerance. As the doc predicted. Dare not take another pill so soon. 

She must remain alert for the morning report, to generate the operations plans and prepare to fight an imaginary war that could never compare to the ongoing fracas within her own body and soul. Cricket worried that the narcotics and sedatives made the nightmares more vivid, but she needed to control the pain. The doctors who had treated her at Tripler Medical Center in Hawaii had tried to put her on another six months of limited duty, or LIMDU, thinking that she was not yet well enough in mind or body to return to the operational environment. 

I would have died on LIMDU. Here I am alive.

The more she ached, the more alive she felt, and the more committed she was to survival—and vengeance. 

“Failure is not in falling down but in staying down.” Or something like that. I get up, or I die.

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