Kurt looked down at the frost for a long moment. Then he took one slow step toward Dale.
I’d known Kurt Ostrowski for eleven years. He’d stood at my wedding with a carnation pinned crooked on his lapel. He’d eaten my chili at a dozen Packers games. He’d hunted my grandfather’s ridge every November since Brad first brought him out there in a borrowed truck.
I’d never once seen him look the way he looked that morning, standing at the edge of Grandpa’s cornfield in the gray light with frost on his boots.
Behind him, Mike Pruett and Russ Lindahl stood with their rifles slung, breath smoking in the cold, their eyes moving from me to the three blaze-orange hats in the trees and back again.
Dale didn’t move. He stood next to me at the foot of the old wooden ladder stand with his empty hands at his sides and his gray beard frosted white at the chin. He was fifty-eight years old and stood about six-two, and he had the stillness of a man who’d been in rooms far worse than a cornfield.
Kurt stopped about three feet from him. He studied Dale’s face, then the faded patch sewn on the left shoulder of Dale’s canvas hunting coat: a black horse head on a yellow shield, a diagonal stripe across it.
“First Cav,” Kurt said quietly.
Dale’s eyebrows went up a fraction. “That’s right.”
“Desert Storm?”
“Desert Storm. Then Iraq twice.”
Kurt stood there for a long time, breathing white clouds into the cold. Then he pulled off his right glove, finger by finger, and held out his bare hand.
“Twenty-fourth Infantry,” he said. “Ninety-one. I was nineteen.”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
TAP ” READ MORE ” 👇
