He Will My Shield And Portion Be
He Will My Shield and Portion Be is a story written by Himawari. It ran in Issue 50 at http://s2b2.livejournal.com/, and will be mirrored shortly at http://www.shousetsubangbang.com.
Author's notes for Wiki:
This story is set in May of 2011. It's a few months after Egypt's government was overthrown but before Libya's is, and it's a week or two after the announcement of the capture and killing of Osama Bin Laden. On December 20, 2010, the Department of Defense announced that they would be repealing the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, so by May of 2011, they were in fact in the process of retraining commanders in how to operate under the new rules. In July 2011, the DOD announced that they would no longer be pursuing any DADT-related discharges or evidence, and stated that September 20, 2011 would be the day the new policy began.
This source made me think I couldn't make a go of this story, and inspired me to try anyway:
http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2010/03/07/on-war-military-chaplins-in-afghanistan/1501/
And this 30 minute radio documentary about the role of the song "Brothers in Arms" in a variety of conflicts, including its use in a unit memorial much like the one in this story, was the other thing that inspired me to give it a shot. I never did find a piece of lyrics from the song to use as a title, but I tried about half a dozen different ones and wrote a lot of this with that song in my head.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mqp1r
I used these examples of Unitarian Universalist worship to get Kiko's words right, though I am not UU myself: http://uusaratoga.org/sample-order-of-service/
https://www.uua.org/worship/words/openings/5185.shtml
I did a lot of reading up on life at Bagram, and found a lot of videos of what it is like to walk and drive around the base, and what it is like to take cover during indirect fire. Here's someone's tour of their B-hut room:
Note the ilovebagram.com sticker on their door. I read ilovebagram.com extensively before writing this, because it's this pithy little trove of details about daily life on base. Here's someone's google map marked up with places of interest on base:
It took a while to research what the unit memorial service would entail, because there are many more examples on the internet of Army services, which usually involve the "final roll call" ritual, than Air Force services, though the Air Force does do "final roll call" sometimes, at least in domestic memorial services. I eventually found a PDF intended for religious support teams that detailed the order of events for all the standard services, and it had the kind of simple unit memorial service I describe here, but did I save the link? Nope, sorry. It was more important to indicate how all of these services blur together for Kiko, than to give you the details of what Forbes' comrades said about him. Which I hated, but I killed my darlings and gave you Kiko's perspective and left it at that. Believe it or not, I still like "Amazing Grace," because whatever version we're talking about, the version in my brain is the Ani DiFranco one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkUKARzhxUY and I am jamming along over whatever other version is actually being played.
Serious shout-outs to Kimyō Tabibito for beta-reading and infusions of awesome music as I was hustling to finish this, and to Shukyou for helping me find a solution to the awkwardness of writing a love story between two men who mostly refer to each other by their last names. Major props to my significant other S for troubleshooting my aircraft terminology and listening to me as I spent a week going "I can't write something for August but I can't stop researching chaplains at Bagram, now what do I do?"
