Full Measures (Flight & Glory, #1)

by Rebecca Yarros

War was such a spiteful bitch; she took everything we loved and handed us back a folded flag in return, telling us the honor of their sacrifice was a just and equal payment. It wasn’t.

“Grief, by its very nature, is designed to suck the life out of us because we are so willing to join our dead. It’s supposed to be this hard to figure out what to do next, but it’s that ‘next’ that makes us the living, and not our dead.”

“We’re taking it slow until you say so, because I can’t bear to hear a ‘no’ from you. But here’s your only warning: I’m going to chase the fuck out of you.”

swallowed back my tears. “When you were two and Dad deployed, you had night terrors. No one knew why, but Mom couldn’t get them to stop.” I nearly laughed. “God, they told me this story over and over. Anyway, Mom never washed Dad’s pillowcase, so she slipped it over your pillow. It smelled like him, and you slept. Once that smell wore off, she un-bagged some of his shirts that she’d saved and covered your pillow with those.”

She took out the service flag, the one that had hung in our window for years. I knew the tradition. Those with a son or, as tradition wavered, a husband deployed to war hung a simple white banner, outlined in red with a blue star in the middle. It was a matter of pride, announcing you had given something for this country, that the family had done their part. But when a soldier was lost, those blue threads of the star were replaced with gold, proclaiming his sacrifice and the grief of the family. I watched, entranced, as Grams threaded the needle with shiny gold thread and began to stitch.

“It is the business of the living to keep on doing so. We are no exception. We are not the first family to lose a man to war, and I fear we will not be the last. But we will be resilient.”

Over and over she drew the needle through the flag, leaving the blue outline of the star, all that was allowed to remain of him according to tradition. She stitched on the gold star, its shiny, reflective threads changing the definition of my father’s life from one of service to one of sacrifice. That gold star declared this one event in his life, his death, more important than all of the nineteen years that blue star had witnessed while hanging in our living room window.

“That’s the beautiful thing about time. No one stays who they were in high school.

That was the moment I fell in love with Josh Walker.

Oh God. I was in love with a soldier. I couldn’t love a soldier. I swore I never would. I would never put my heart in the hands of someone who threw his life away in a foreign country, fighting for people who didn’t even want us there, and left for months at a time. I couldn’t love a soldier. I couldn’t sit home and wait and wonder if he’d ever come back. I wouldn’t answer the door when strangers knocked. I wouldn’t fall apart. I wouldn’t hang a gold star in my window.

“I love you enough for the both of us. I can’t regret anything that brought us together.”

You were in my head the whole game. You’re in my heart every minute I’m awake. I love you December Howard.

“That from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”

“Maybe love this exquisite, this powerful isn’t meant to last forever. Maybe we’re meant to burn so brightly for each other right now to light whatever path we’re heading down, but there’s no sustaining a fire like this.”

All you’ve ever seen from our life is the bad. You’ve seen the good-byes, the moving, the distance. You’ve held my hand through deployments and cared for your siblings when I couldn’t. You’ve seen the folded flags and watched your father lowered into the ground, but you have never seen the high, what usually happens at the end of a deployment. You need to understand why it’s worth it.”

“This is what you needed to see. There is not one moment I have ever regretted loving your father. Even after losing him, I would go back and choose him all over again, and that has nothing to do with you kids. Even if we didn’t have you, the years I was able to spend with him are well worth the price of this pain.” She gestured to the reunions going on below us. “These moments, these are the ones you cling to, because it may hurt to send him away, but nothing compares to having him back. It makes you more thankful for what you have, more aware of just how precious it is.”