A Marine For His Mum. Christy Jeffries

or in a fighter plane. Any plane or Huey would be cool, but Jake Marconi says his uncle flies a Harrier jet and I saw one when I looked it up online. I think Jake is lying because I met his uncle at Jake’s 8th birthday party and he didn’t look like a fighter pilot. Can you be a fighter pilot when your 18? Do they have fighter pilots in the coast guard?

      Its ok if your not a fighter pilot. I’ll still write you back. But you are a man right? I don’t want to have to write to any girls cause I have to be around them enough already. Do you like baseball? Or UFC? I’m not allowed to watch UFC, but my mom lets me watch baseball. The Colorado Rockies are my favorite team and I know every stat about them for the last three years. Anyway, I hope your a boy and that you like baseball and that you write me back.

      Sincerely,

      Hunter Walker

       Chapter One

      Gunnery Sergeant Matthew Cooper closed his eyes and clenched the armrests as his plane touched down onto the tarmac in Boise. No matter how many times he’d flown to obscure places around the world, he never got used to the steady decline and the rough bounce of the landing. But this time, he felt as if his entire future was skidding toward the edge of the runway.

      A couple of months ago, when he’d stormed out of his commanding officer’s makeshift headquarters with Hunter Walker’s letter crumpled in his hand, he’d been mad as hell. He’d been even more pissed off at Dr. Gregson for suggesting he participate in the ridiculous pen pal program and pairing him up with some goofy kid in Nowheresville, Idaho.

      As the seat belt light dinged off, Cooper remembered thinking that a Marine Corps base in Afghanistan wasn’t any place for him to be playing nanny-by-mail to some ten-year-old kid with an overprotective mom and no friends. It wasn’t as if Cooper had been some lonely nineteen-year-old infantry grunt who needed a morale boost. He’d been a provost sergeant who’d held some of the deadliest Taliban leaders in custody in the base brig. Before that, he’d been stationed as an MP at bases all over the world. He’d broken up bar fights, investigated assaults and murder, and even gone undercover with NCIS on a few occasions. He had no business being some kid’s babysitter or even worse, male role model.

      But now that Cooper’s tour of duty, and possibly his entire military career, was at a sudden end thanks to a random suicide bomber, that same kid and the bond they’d established over emails and letters was the only glimpse of brightness in his dark, lonely future.

      As the center aisle of the aircraft filled up with people trying to reclaim their belongings from the overhead bins, Cooper fiddled with his seat belt and longed to stand and stretch out his legs. But his knee was barely being held together with pins and screws, and he would have to wait for the rest of the passengers to disembark the plane before some airline personnel would load him up on a wheelchair and push his useless body out to the baggage claim area.

      He hated being weak and was questioning his earlier decision to allow Hunter to see him like this the first time they met. He ached with stiffness, and he was completely exhausted. He’d been traveling on a commercial airline for well over thirty hours now, with layovers in both Tokyo and San Francisco. He’d taken a Vicodin in the Frisco airport an hour before he boarded the last leg of his flight, and now he wondered whether he was in any shape to meet his young pen pal face-to-face.

      Or to allow the kid’s mom to drive him to the Shadowview Military Hospital outside of Boise.

      Crap. How had he let Hunter talk him into that? Sure, he and the chatty fifth grader had built up quite the steady stream of correspondence when he’d been stationed in Afghanistan, and then later, as he’d been recuperating at the closest base hospital. And although he wasn’t what most people would consider a believer in divine intervention, Cooper had to question the alignment of fate when the doctors in Okinawa told him that the two best options he had to recover the use of his leg would be an intense orthopedic surgery at either Walter Reed Medical Center in Maryland or the Shadowview Military Hospital outside of Boise.

      Cooper’s distal femur fracture would need to be repaired and healed before they could even think about a total knee replacement. He was looking at a long recovery time and, while he normally didn’t mind his loner lifestyle or the fact that he didn’t have any family to speak of, he figured that if he went to Shadowview, he’d at least be close to Hunter.

      How pathetic was that?

      He tried to comfort himself with the belief that Hunter needed him. The kid didn’t have any positive male role models, and while the boy’s mom probably loved him, it sounded like Hunter really needed a strong hand to get him in check. What the hell was wrong with the kid’s mother? Putting him in yoga classes and forbidding sports? Who does that to a boy? Guessing by her baking job, she was probably just as out of shape as the kid—if not more so—and too busy working to bother with taking care of her son.

      It had been a bone of contention between Cooper and his ex-wife, but one thing Cooper had learned early on in the foster care system was that people shouldn’t be having kids if they were too busy to raise them.

      That old familiar pang cramped inside his left rib cage, and he grabbed his backpack from under the seat just to give himself something to do. He winced as the forward movement added pressure to his leg, but the physical pain was at least better than the emotional pain that he’d almost let get the better of him.

      There seemed to be some sort of delay exiting the plane because nobody was moving forward. Cooper pulled the printout of one of his past emails from Hunter from his backpack and read it.

      To: [email protected]

      From: [email protected]

      Re: Surgery

      Date: Jan 3

      Wow! I can’t believe your actually coming Idaho to have your operation. How long do you have to stay in the hospital? I’ll have my mom and my Gram bring me down every week to visit you. Maybe I can hitchhike rides down the mountain too, when my mom is working. Jake Marconi said he hitchhiked once with his cousin and they went all the way to Winnemucca.

      Are you real real worried about your knee? I’d be crazy worried if I were you. They should probably award your dog Helix a purple heart or a navy cross or something for going after that bomber and saving your life like that. Will they let you still be a marine if your knee don’t heal right?

      You can still be my pen pal even if they kick you out and you’re not a marine no more. Where will you live when you get out of the hospital?

      I went to Hawaii once with Gram. You could live there. Or even better, you could come live HERE. In Sugar Falls. It would be sooooooooo cool if we could hang out all the time. I’d be the only kid in my class to actually meet his real pen pal. I think I’m the only one now to still be getting letters and emails and stuff. Please please please think about living here after you get done at the hospital. I know I said Sugar Falls was dumb and boring, but it’s not really that way if we have each other we can hang out with. We could go fishing and everything.

      You could stay with me and my mom. You’ll meet her when we pick you up at the airport to take you to the hospital. She’ll tell you that it’ll be so awesome. Please say yes!

      Please.

      Hunter

      Cooper folded up the paper, and then looked at the standard issue class picture Hunter had sent in his original letter. He almost winced at the chubbiness of the kid’s face. The boy’s mom needed to get him off the cookies and onto a physical regimen, stat. Cooper may have had it rough growing up in a one-bedroom apartment in the slums of Detroit, but at least he’d been in shape and hadn’t taken any crap from the kids on the playground. Of course, taking crap from his stepdad was another thing.

      Don’t think about the past. Think about the next step. The old adage he’d learned from his drill instructor had helped him to get past his crappy home life and rise up in the ranks. Even after his injury, he’d repeated the mantra