Here’s the thing about fighting—real fighting, not the choreographed kind you see in movies. If you’ve ever been in a real fight, one that goes longer than a minute, one where you’re genuinely fighting to preserve yourself, to stay upright, to keep from getting hurt worse than you already are, then you know this: two, maybe three minutes is your ceiling. That’s it. That’s all you’ve got.
Think about it. Professional boxers—men who train for months, who are in peak physical condition, whose entire livelihood depends on their ability to fight—their rounds are three minutes long. Three minutes, and then they get to sit on a stool and have someone pour water in their mouth and close the cuts on their face. Three minutes, because even the best-conditioned athletes on Earth are gassed after three.
Now imagine a hundred and fifty drunk soldiers, none of whom had trained for this, most of whom had been drinking free German beer for the better part of eight hours, fighting in the mud on a hill in Germany in January. The adrenaline carries you for the first minute. The second minute, you’re running on pride and stubbornness. By the third minute, your arms feel like they’re filled with wet sand and your lungs are on fire and every breath costs you something you’re not sure you can afford.
We were all ready to stop. Not surrender—I want to be clear about that. Nobody was quitting. Nobody was giving up. But when the law showed up, when the badges and the flashlights and the German sirens came pouring over that hilltop, every last one of us was privately, silently, profoundly grateful for the excuse to stop swinging.
The fight was over. The entertainment for the night was over. And somehow, against all odds and common sense, nobody got arrested. Not military, not civilian. No injuries required evacuation—though I’m sure the MASH unit nearby would have happily appropriated a couple of real trauma cases just to break up the monotony. What we had instead was the inventory of a proper brawl: bumps, bruises, black eyes, sore hands, swollen knuckles, and a scattered collection of bite marks.
I had two of them. Both on my left forearm.
Here’s how I earned those. At some point during the melee, one of the ground pounders tried to kick me square in the family jewels. His foot came up hard and fast, but it wedged between my thighs. Now, I should mention—I was a powerlifter back then. My legs were, let’s say, enormous. There is no polite way to describe them. They were tree trunks. And when that infantryman’s foot got caught between them, it wasn’t going anywhere.
I got him in a headlock and started wailing away. He couldn’t get free, couldn’t pull his leg out, and couldn’t reach my face. So he did what any cornered, desperate, drunk soldier would do—he grabbed hold of my forearm and sank his teeth into it.
Thank God for the battle dress uniform—woodland type, winter version. That fabric was thick. Built for German winters, not German dentistry, but it served both purposes that night. The BDU saved my arm from breaking skin. I still had the marks for a week, two purple crescents pressed into my forearm through the cloth, but the uniform held. If I’d been wearing a T-shirt, that man would have taken a piece of me home as a souvenir.
And as for company leadership getting involved in the discipline? Crickets. Dead silence. Because our leadership—our officers, our senior NCOs—had been out there with us. They weren’t watching from the sidelines. They were in the mud, throwing punches right alongside the rest of us. It’s hard to reprimand a soldier for a brawl you participated in.
The next morning. Formation. At attention.
The 1st Infantry Division Chemical Officer, LTC Roberts, stood in front of us. Every chem-dawg on that hilltop, standing in ranks, nursing hangovers and hiding bruised knuckles behind their backs. The evidence of the previous night’s activities was written on every face in that formation—black eyes, swollen lips, the general posture of men and women who had recently been in a fight and were now pretending they hadn’t been.
LTC Roberts began with the reprimand. It was stern. It was justified. It was exactly what he was obligated to deliver, and he delivered it with the appropriate gravity. We had embarrassed the unit, endangered the mission, risked international incident, and so on. We stood at attention and took it, because he was right, and because that’s what you do.
And then he put us at ease.
And then he smiled.
And then he laughed.
And then LTC Roberts said this: “I was in the mess hall this morning. Seen the results of that fight last night—all those infantry boys, looking pretty rough. Now I’m looking at you all.” He let that sit. “Looks like my guys won.”
That was LTC Roberts. That was the leader of soldiers, men and women. He’d done what he was required to do—deliver the reprimand, put it on the record, make it clear that this was not acceptable behavior. And then he’d done what a real leader does: he let us know he was proud of us without ever quite saying those words.
Then he told us the punishment.
We were being moved. North. To a resort—a real one, with actual walls and a roof—that had been closed for the winter season. The location? Near Waterloo, Belgium. Yes, that Waterloo. The site of history’s most famous final defeat.
There would be free beer. There would be live entertainment—good local bands. The chow would be civilian, still institutional, but a significant upgrade from standard U.S. Army issue. Oh, and there would be that National Guard MP unit from Tennessee. And Belgian MPs. And for daily duty? One hour of access control point guard duty.
That was our punishment. A European winter resort with free beer, live music, better food, and one hour of gate duty per day.
The Army has a peculiar definition of consequences.
We packed up the tent city and loaded onto a train in Fulda. The ride to Waterloo was roughly ten hours—a full day on the rails, crossing through Germany and into Belgium with eighty-five chem-dawgs who’d been in a brawl the night before.
The train had compartments—small rooms with four seats, a sliding door, and a window. Three or four soldiers to a compartment. No open seating, no mingling in the aisles. Just small, contained spaces where you could sit with the people you chose and disappear for a while.
The mood was subdued. Everyone stayed in their compartments. No one was loud, no one was celebrating, no one was reliving the fight with big gestures and war stories—not yet, anyway. That would come later, once the bruises faded and the story improved with each retelling. But on that train, the morning after, we were quiet. Tired. Sore in places we hadn’t expected to be sore. The adrenaline was long gone and what it left behind was the particular exhaustion that follows violence—not just physical, but something deeper, a fatigue that settles in your bones and makes you want to sit still and stare out a window for a very long time.
My compartment played spades for nearly the entire ten hours. Four soldiers, a deck of cards, and the German countryside scrolling past. When I wasn’t playing, I was reading. I’d brought The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant with me on the deployment—Stephen R. Donaldson’s fantasy epic about a man transported to a world he refuses to believe in. Sitting on a train headed to a destination I’d never heard of, leaving behind a hilltop I’d never forget, the book felt oddly appropriate.
The meals were a pleasant surprise. Boxed lunches and dinners were brought onto the train—not Army chow, actual food, catered and decent. We were not allowed to get off the train at any of the stops. The Army wasn’t taking chances with eighty-five soldiers who had proven, quite recently, that they could not be trusted in public. But they did set up a lounge car with snacks—sodas, chips, candy, fruit—and we were free to come and go from that. It was, in its way, a kindness. The Army feeding us well on the way to our punishment, which was itself a reward. The logic of military life defies civilian understanding.
Ten hours. Spades and Thomas Covenant and boxed meals and the quiet hum of a train carrying us north, away from the mud and the horseshoe and the Infantry battalion, toward something none of us could picture yet. Toward Waterloo.
The resort near Waterloo was everything the tent city on the hilltop had not been. Actual buildings. Actual beds. The kind of place that in the summer months would be full of European vacationers, but in January sat empty and waiting for exactly the kind of guests the Army was about to deliver: eighty-five chem-dawgs fresh off a brawl with an Infantry battalion, looking for something to do.
The Tennessee National Guard MP company was already there. The same unit that had been called in to break up our fight was now our neighbor. And as it happened, this MP company had a significant number of women in its ranks. The Army’s solution to a brawl that started because infantrymen couldn’t handle being around women was to relocate us to a nicer facility and surround us with more women. You cannot make this up.
There were Belgian MPs stationed there as well. Every morning, I took PT with them—physical training, running. Voluntarily. The Belgians thought they were going to run the American into the dirt. They had that quiet European confidence, the look that said they’d been doing this longer and doing it better. They were wrong. I was a powerlifter, yes, but I could run too, and I made sure they knew it. Every morning. It became a ritual, the kind of friendly competition that soldiers from different countries settle without a word being spoken. You just show up and go faster.
My daily assignment was one hour of ACP guard duty with the MP company—access control point, checking credentials, logging personnel in and out. The simplest, most mundane duty imaginable. Stand at a gate. Check IDs. Make small talk to pass the time.
And there was still free beer. And live entertainment. Every night. The Army had learned nothing and we were grateful for it.
That’s where I met her.
Veronica Smith.
She was from Murfreesboro, Tennessee. A National Guard MP. Divorced, with a son. She’d grown up with an abusive father and married a man who turned out to be the same kind of wrong, and then she’d had the courage to leave him—which, if you understand anything about that kind of cycle, you know is the hardest thing a person can do.
She wasn’t a woman waiting to be saved. She was a woman who had already saved herself and was in the middle of building what came next. The Guard was part of that plan. She was working toward becoming a paralegal. She had a direction and she was walking it.
Veronica was Black, light-skinned, about five foot five, a hundred and thirty-five pounds. Athletic and fit, but not in a way that announced itself—more the kind of build that comes from actually doing the work, not performing it. She was funny. The kind of funny that sneaks up on you, that you don’t see coming until you’re already laughing. And she had green eyes.
I need to pause on that detail, because it matters more than it should.
Green eyes. In all the years since, in every novel I’ve written, in every love interest I’ve created on the page, the women have green eyes. Every one of them. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t decide it. It just happened—the way certain things imprint on you when you’re young and stay in the architecture of who you are for the rest of your life. I’ve been writing Veronica Smith into my fiction for forty years without ever saying her name.
Until now.
We hit it off at the ACP. One hour a day of standing at a gate together, and within a few shifts, the conversation had moved past small talk and into the territory where you start telling someone things you don’t usually tell people. The rhythm of it was easy—morning PT with the Belgians, an hour at the gate with Veronica, free beer and a live band at night. Day after day. The best routine I ever had in the Army.
And then we were given a three-day pass.
Three Days of Naughty
We went by train. All of it—every destination, every leg of the trip—by rail. Two soldiers with three days of freedom and a network of European trains to carry us wherever we wanted to go. No car, no itinerary, no plan beyond the next platform and the next departure board. Just the two of us and Bavaria rolling past the window in winter.
There is something about trains in Germany. The rhythm of the wheels on the track, the countryside sliding by—villages and fields and church steeples appearing and vanishing like scenes from a story someone else is telling. The hours between stops where there is nothing to do but talk, and the talking becomes the thing itself. That’s where people fall for each other. Not at the destinations. On the way there.
We went to Nürnberg first. If you were ever a GI in Germany, you know about the Wall. Not the Berlin Wall—the other one. Frauentormauer, just inside the old city gates, a block or two of windows where the working girls displayed their wares. The thing was, it was built right into the old medieval city wall—fortifications that had stood since the Middle Ages, originally designed to keep invaders out, now repurposed for an entirely different kind of commerce. It was legendary among soldiers, one of those places every GI knew about whether they’d been there or not. Veronica and I strolled by it, just to be able to say we did. Two soldiers on a three-day pass, walking past the windows, laughing, checking a box. That was Nürnberg.
Then Rothenburg ob der Tauber. The Christmas market was long gone, but the town still looked like one—half-timbered houses, the lights still strung along the old streets. Rothenburg is one of the most beautiful small towns in Europe, a medieval postcard frozen in amber, and walking through it with Veronica felt like stepping outside of the Army, outside of time, outside of everything that had brought us to that country in the first place. For a few hours, we were just two people in a fairy-tale town, pretending the world was as simple as it looked.
And then we went to Dachau.
There is no graceful transition from a Christmas market to a concentration camp. There shouldn’t be. We took the train from the beautiful to the unthinkable, and when we arrived, the weight of the place settled on us like a change in atmospheric pressure. You feel Dachau before you see it. The air is different. The silence is different. It is a place that remembers what happened there, whether you want it to or not.
I was an American soldier standing on ground that American soldiers had liberated forty-one years earlier. Veronica was a Black woman standing in a place built on the premise that some human beings were less than others. Neither of us said much. There wasn’t much to say. Some places don’t ask for your words. They just ask you to stand there and feel the full weight of what human beings are capable of doing to each other.
We left Dachau quieter than we’d arrived. The train ride back was different from the ones before—less talking, more sitting close, more watching the countryside pass in silence. Some experiences bind people together not through joy but through shared gravity.
Those were the three days. Not the brawl—though that’s the story I’ve spent all this time telling you. The title was never about the fight. It was about her.
It was maybe the best forty-five days of my Army career. The mornings running Belgians into the dirt. The hour at the gate. The evenings with free beer and a band. The spades games that never seemed to end. The AFRC tours that showed us a Europe we’d never have seen on our own. The trains. The Wall. Rothenburg. The weight of Dachau, shared. Veronica.
The military gets it right every once in a while. When they cancelled that FTX and gave us what they gave us—the tours, the entertainment, the resort, the freedom to be young soldiers in Europe with time on our hands and just enough supervision to keep us alive—they got it right. They didn’t mean to. Half of it was accident and the other half was damage control. But the result was forty-five days that I have carried with me for the rest of my life.
And then it ended, the way everything in the Army ends—with orders.
We went back to Fort Riley. I barely had time to unpack before the paperwork came through. Orders to Johnston Island—a speck of coral in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, eight hundred miles southwest of Hawaii, where the Army stored its chemical weapons. Nerve agents. Mustard gas. A two-and-a-half-mile-long atoll at the edge of nowhere. It was, in every conceivable way, the opposite of a winter resort near Waterloo with a green-eyed woman from Tennessee.
The Army giveth. The Army taketh away.
I think I would have married that woman. I don’t say that lightly, and I don’t say it with the kind of romantic nostalgia that inflates things over time. I say it because I knew, even then, that what we had in those forty-five days was something most people spend their whole lives looking for and never find. But we didn’t have more time. The Army didn’t give us more time. And Veronica went back to Murfreesboro, to her son, to the paralegal career she was building with her own two hands. And I went to Johnston Island, to a coral rock full of chemical weapons in the middle of the Pacific. And that was the end of it.
Except it wasn’t. Not really. Because every time I sit down to write, every time I create a woman on the page and give her a sharp wit and an athletic frame and a strength that comes from surviving things that should have broken her, I give her green eyes. Every time. And I know exactly why.
REFORGER 1986. Certain Sentinel. The best worst time of my life.
— the end —
Every story here is true the way a war story is true: it happened, and it got better every time it was told.