The Lifesavers (Esquire)
The storm came with snow and then sleet over snow and then snow over sleet. It will keep coming. More than a foot so far. Already it has bent trees over power lines and swallowed mailboxes and dragged cars off roads. Corvus had her own car towed home the other night, just before she lost power. The rooms went dark and then the water pump shut off and then the air began to chill. She hacked away ice from the car with a knife, just to make the drive the next morning, down the hill and into town for work.
She knew she would not be able to get back.
She booked a motel room, has spent the last two days there, slept little, walked to work, walked back. Tonight will be her last shift this week. She trudges to the call center once more. The snow comes up past her boots. The streets are dark now, empty of others. Two moose cross in front of her, heading, it seems, to the highway.
She arrives to the call center just before midnight. She greets a colleague seated in another office and clomps down the hallway where Christmas lights are strung along the walls. She finds her cubby. She keeps extra socks here and a microwaveable pot of soup in case she is trapped come dawn. It has happened before. The soup is for everyone. She removes her boots. …
If the Fire Goes Out (Esquire)
See the man. His beard hangs with ice. He reeks of smoke and burnt plastic. He stokes the dying fire. Around him in the gloom smolders what he’d known and cherished and what that fire turns now to ash: his cabin, his home, his dream of living quietly here in the Alaskan wild. His dog is nowhere to be found.
He rises, stumbling forth for more wood. The snow lies chest high, too deep to travel far. The nearest road is some 45 miles off. His closest neighbor is an abandoned cabin a mile into the bush. It will take him days to cover just a quarter of that distance. If he falls through ice and into streams he will surely freeze and die. Even if he tries, he has no map to know the way.
The Valley, they call it. Matanuska-Susitna. Carved by glaciers and cupped by three mountain ranges beside a river that makes its way to Anchorage. But the man is up country even from here and it is December. Out here, no man or woman or dog ought to leave its home in December.
The man limps down an embankment. His muscles are weak from carrying logs. A ligament in his knee is torn from shoveling snow. He wears only pack boots over long johns. He has also rescued from the fire a flannel shirt, a wool sweater, a cotton long-sleeve, a summer jacket, a down jacket, food cans, sleeping bags, blankets, and a rifle. ...
Mike Conner v. The Pain (Esquire)
He sits in his truck atop a hill in Boring, Oregon, where he can feel the summer breeze through the window and see the sun at its meridian over the fields and the snowcapped tip of a distant Mount Hood poking into a cloud-dotted sky. He sits here and thinks about cutting off his feet.
His legs are barely his anymore—just fused cadaver bone and metal. Nearly half of six-foot-four, 225-pound Mike is steel and titanium: the majority of his legs from his knees down, his shoulder, his elbow, his wrist, his back, and his spine.
The Pain comes from his feet.
It starts in his soles and his mangled toes, which are missing knuckles. It surges up his ankles, which he can barely flex—they’re just bone on bone, no joints, no cushion—up his atrophied legs, where the bones still have holes in them and where one is shaped like an S. It climbs his rebuilt spinal cord, up past a small stimulator fitted near the vertebrae and designed to reduce pain signals that find his brain. They shoot up his legs and spine and, when the battery gets low, find his brain anyway. The Pain: a five-hundred-pound sack of sand on his back. …
Survival Flight: 24 Hours on Call With the Nation’s Most Elite Medical Unit (Men’s Health)
Walter Chupek is ready to die. He has been ready to die for months. He breathes as if a plastic bag has been pulled over his head, and each day it clings tighter. Last night, he couldn’t cook dinner. Today, he feels like he’s being stabbed. He tells his wife, Becky, he’s just going to lie down for a nap, but really he plans to lie down and die.
As he collapses, Chupek asks God to please end his suffering, please just let him die. If God does not see fit to let him die, Chupek prays, then perhaps God can give him a lung, just one lung, to replace the cancerous one, hardened and diseased from years at the dump breathing in that burning green sludge.
Just then, the phone rings in the kitchen.
Nearly three hundred miles away, as Walter Chupek, 65, prays from a bed in Davison, Michigan, a man he will never know has met his own God.
A hospital patient, having decided once that, should he suddenly cease, his organs be divided among the living, has fulfilled his promise. ...
The Savior Elite: Inside the Special Operations Force Tasked with Rescuing Navy SEALS (Esquire)
“RAMP DOOR!”
The jumpmaster screams the command over the roaring engine, and the back hatch of the HC-130 aircraft yawns open into night. A cold wind enters the cabin. It brushes past the seven soldiers seated in rows, sending stray pieces of paper, fabric, and tape fluttering in the thin air. In front, the team leader looks out past the ramp door. He can see nothing. A low blanket of clouds blots out the moon and stars and erases the distinction between the black sky and the black Atlantic Ocean beneath. He turns back to his men, each strapped with over a hundred-and-fifty pounds of gear. Their faces are lit only by the lambent glow of chemlights.
“STAND UP!”
The seven soldiers rise. At the next command—“HOOK UP!”—they clip their parachute line to a red steel cable running over their heads.
Fifteen hundred feet below, their target: the Tamar, a commercial shipping vessel two thirds into its voyage from Baltimore to Gibraltar. Earlier that morning, there had been an explosion onboard. An unknown ignition had set fire to four sailors working inside the hull. …