Flashed!

Ambush-1

Ambush

His name was unpronounceable to the enemy.

The Americans from the MASH unit called him “Triage” because he hung around the medical tent whenever the wounded were flown in. Most of the soldiers thought him a petty thief, a vulture preying on the dead and dying. They laughed when he showed up, and teased him when there were no locals among the wounded. “None for you today,” they said, nudging each other. They thought he didn’t understand their language.

He saw no reason to inform them otherwise.

Beyond the pitched tents ringed with barbed wire and camouflage netting, the jungle grew like crazed hair sticking up from the earth at all angles. Triage hid among the foliage, keeping out of the war. His forays into the American camp had started as a search for food—he visited when the choppers came because in the noisy rush of activity, he was mostly ignored. But his curiosity got the best of him, and he wandered into the operating theater, a blank look on his face, absorbing everything he could see and hear and smell until he was chased away.

One man took a liking to him, a young MP who lowered his gun whenever Triage appeared. He had a quick smile that was nothing like the jeering grins of the others, and it was he who gave Triage his name. The MP was a tow-headed country boy with full lips and eyes as blue as the night sky, so exotic, so different from anyone Triage had ever seen before. The name on his jacket read MacMurphey. Triage spent hours alone in his hut, sounding out that word until it rolled flawlessly from his tongue. The first half he got right; after that, it sort of fell apart. So the man was simply Mac in his mind.

Mac thought he visited the camp to look for someone, a wounded relative or a dead friend, and there was something in his eyes that made Triage look over the incoming with a cursory glance, as if to prove him right. “One day, Tri,” Mac told him, clapping a hand on Triage’s shoulder, “You’ll find who you’re looking for, I promise.”

The hand on his back was hot and heavy, and Mac seemed to have forgotten he placed it there. Triage didn’t dare move; he didn’t want to lose that touch, the first he’d had in months. Inside his chest, his heart swelled, and in the confines of his loose dungarees, his neglected c**k did the same.