Reunion Briefing

This story was originally published in Day One, a weekly literary journal dedicated to short fiction and poetry from emerging writers.

On the eve of his mid-deployment leave from Iraq, Wyatt David Hayden is afraid. He’s afraid—and rightly so—that he’ll get killed at any second, in one of the many terrible and violent ways possible during war. He’s afraid that he won’t die, and that instead he’ll return home to his unborn son and the hopeful and undeserved love of his wife. And he’s afraid that, unable to cope with either the unbearably unpredictable or the terrifyingly domestic, he’ll make a third choice: to take his own life as so many of his fellow soldiers have.

With so much bound by luck and so little by choice, Hayden kills time, readying himself to leave the hell he calls home to go to a place he no longer belongs. Revealing and honest, Reunion Briefing offers a harshly lit view of the futility of war.