Staff Sergeant Calvin Bledsoe has built a method and taught it to every man who ever joined his team: a patrol's work is to learn and leave. Contact means the plan has already failed. He has never lost anyone doing it that way, and he is quietly proud of that.
Then he counts something he cannot leave.
He spends days on it and cannot make the arithmetic mean anything — until he moves to higher ground and sees what the count concealed. What he now knows is worth more than five men. Everything he has ever believed about this job says go home and report it. Everything he can see says there will be nobody left to report it to.
He gets part of the message out. He does not get to finish it.
The rest is a man breaking his own rules one at a time and finding that each of them was there for a reason. He stays when he should move. He climbs ground he has always taught his men to avoid. He walks his patrol up the enemy's own road because he has run out of every other kind of answer.
He is not sure, afterward, whether he was right. Neither is his team.
