Death Card. Nick L. Sacco

of his school newspaper and yearbook. He liked to write, taking thoughts and ideas and creating colorful, visual stories for others. It was true some stories, covering a track team awards ceremony and such, were dull. He often thought of the time he was scolded after covering a National Honor Society luncheon. “Goody Two Shoes Gather for Crumpets,” was the headline he had created that earned him a trip to the principal’s office. Later in life, Charlie would describe himself as the ranking school nerd because he carried a 35 mm SLR camera everywhere. He took pictures of teachers, sporting events, and other students. One day, during homeroom, Charlie spotted the school bully sitting across the room busily picking his nose. Like most other students Charlie had been victimized by the bully. He had been pushed, shoved, and verbally abused. Silently, Charlie reached into his camera bag, retrieved a zoom lens, and waited. Charlie began to click pictures the second the bully had his finger stuck up his nose past the first knuckle. The following morning, Charlie spotted the bully in the hallway where he was teasing a younger girl about her clothing. The bully began to smile as he made the girl cry. Marching up to him, Charlie presented the bully with an 8 x 10 glossy photograph of him sitting unconcerned, picking his nose. Paper-clipped to the picture was a note from Charlie that read, “Bully anyone else and this picture goes in the yearbook.”

      After that, the tough guy began to leave everyone alone. Charlie saw the impact that photography could have when the bully never made eye contact, nor spoke to, Charlie Ashman ever again.

      Early every morning as other students played dodge ball in the school gym, Charlie worked in a converted bathroom under the bleachers developing film and printing pictures. Charlie was smart and figured out a way to make money. He would take action pictures in the afternoon of the high school jocks playing sports. He would then develop the film and print the photographs in the morning. He sold the black-and-white glossy 5 x 7 prints to the jock’s girlfriends during school. The young, love-struck girls would buy all of Charlie’s pictures and he, in turn, would use that money to finance his growing collection of cameras, lenses, and accessories.

      As a junior, Charlie worked his way onto the local newspaper in his small town in Maine. The editor, Percy Pascoe was an old-school, hard-nosed newsman who cut his teeth at the Chicago Tribune before moving to Charlie’s small town to buy the Custer Free Press. Though the town and readership was small, Percy Pascoe rode his news staff hard and edited every article and story like it was a big-city publication. When Charlie brought Percy Pascoe a story on a suspicious business fire, Percy returned it with a large red rejection stamp on the cover page. This only served to make Charlie work harder. He began seeking out story ideas and kept submitting them to the hard-nosed editor. Sometimes he got a rejection letter back, often weeks later, and other times he just heard nothing. Finally, Charlie broke through the tough exterior of Percy Pascoe when he researched and interviewed everyone he could about the possible failure of a local dam. Charlie had come home from school to find that his mother had received a phone call from Percy Pascoe. He had skipped through the small talk with her and simply left three questions he wanted Charlie to follow up on for his story. He was on the job the next morning. Charlie rewrote the article with the requested interviews and delivered it to Percy Pascoe in person. There was no fanfare, in fact the editor, Percy Pascoe, a large man, sat scanning the manuscript, ignoring Charlie who sat across the desk from him. Finally, tossing the story onto his desk, he looked sternly at Charlie.

      “I’m not paying you for this story, but I will give you a byline.”

      Charlie nodded, stuttered his appreciation and, once out the door, raced home with his good news. As promised, his article, “What if the Dam Breaks?” was the front-page story the next morning. For a week people on the street, his teachers, and even other students, complimented Charlie on the story. Charlie finally found the catalyst he needed to keep writing, and fell into a good rhythm in his storytelling. This “Charlie rhythm” helped him succeed in publishing more articles and closed the gap in his relationship between him and Percy Pascoe.

      One day, as Charlie was sitting in Percy Pascoe’s office, he noticed an index card taped to the bulletin board on the wall among pictures and newspaper clippings. Written upon it were the words, “Six Million.” Charlie got up the courage to speak and asked about its significance.

      “Six Million stands for how many Jews the Nazis murdered during World War II. I keep it there as a reminder of the evils of man.”

      Percy Pascoe continued talking about his experiences in the war. His infantry company had liberated a German extermination camp and he had seen first hand the living skeletons peering through the fences at him. The editor explained that he saw bodies piled six high and open trenches filled with the dead.

      Charlie and Percy Pascoe never talked about the atrocities again.

      Two years later, Charlie decided to take a hiatus from the journalism field to pursue a career his father, the missionary, was staunchly against. Charlie joined the army. His dad had thrown out several objections, most reinforced with detailed Bible scriptures.

      Charlie soon found himself in basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia. Here, he shed his camera for an M16A1 rifle and concealed his nerdiness with olive green fatigues. The army suited Charlie well. When he was young, he traveled with his missionary parents and his younger adopted sister, Shade, to places where they often went without food or struggled to find a place to stay. His father always reminded the family that it was God’s plan and that their needs would be provided for by God. In the army, Charlie found that he usually had three hot meals a day, a rack to sleep in at night, and a roof over his head. These luxuries changed when Charlie applied for and was accepted into the Army Ranger program. Out in the woods and swamps around Fort Brag, he slept in the rain, warded off bugs the size of poodles, ate C-rations, learned the art of combat, and earned the Ranger badge.

      Charlie got his first taste of battle in 1989 during the invasion of Panama, that ousted dictator Manuel Noriega. Panama was a fairly easy operation for Charlie’s unit. He and a company of troopers had choppered in and captured a small airfield the CIA thought Noriega might use to try to escape. When a convoy of Panamanian Defense Forces – really, Noriega’s thugs – arrived, Charlie’s squad tore them to pieces in an ambush of rifle and grenade fire. The survivors threw down their weapons and ran into the surrounding jungle faster then a raped ape.

      In 1993, Charlie experienced his second and bloodiest combat action in a corner of the world barely known to most people, Somalia. In a botched snatch-and-grab operation targeted at war lord Mohamed Farrah Aidid and his lieutenants, Charlie was one of eighty wounded in a night-long battle against Aidid’s followers. The battle would later be the subject of the movie, Black Hawk Down. Charlie would refer to it as the night an RPG rocket tried to blow his balls off.

      Raising his arm up, Charlie was checking the time on his watch when a voice interrupted him.

      “They already shut the cell service down,” he heard Maggie say. He turned to find her standing beside the pocket doors going into his bedroom. She wore one of his light blue button-down shirts, her legs long and bare.

      “I’m sure we . . . well, probably every American . . . got the same message blast right before they flipped the switch back to off,” Maggie said, snapping her phone closed. She looked at Charlie staring back at her, and it took a moment for her to register her lack of clothing.

      “I’m sorry,” Maggie said making a playful curtsy. “I’m a very bad guest. First I steal your bed, leaving you on the couch, and next I’m helping myself to your shirts. Soon I’ll be asking to borrow your debit card.”

      Charlie rose with a smile, and walked up to her, leaning close. For a moment she held her breath and crossed her arms over her breasts, thinking Charlie was moving in for a kiss. “One hell of a time to begin acting romantic,” she thought to herself. However, typical of Charlie, he merely reached around the open door and stepped back, holding a bathrobe he apparently had hung on the bedroom wall. It was three times bigger than Maggie’s thin frame, but at least it covered her up completely. “This should keep you warm,” he said. While it seemed a gentlemanly thing to do, Charlie was not only trying to protect Maggie’s modesty, but also eliminate the temptation for him to stare at her sexy figure.

      Maggie