“So, let me get this straight,” David said. “You proposed. Again?”

Max laughed and took a swig of his beer. “Wait wait wait, not just again, but a third time,” he teased.

“Yeah okay, guys, very funny. But yes. I proposed. Again.”

“And she said yes?” David said.

I couldn’t help smiling to myself.

“Oh, she said yes all right…”

The guys laughed loudly and gave me high fives. Back on deployment our guys would spend hours of every day together. Nowadays it was a mission to just get us all gathered in one room a few times a month. Even still, Noah and Jack cancelled at the last minute and now here we were, Max, me and David, grilling up steaks and shooting the shit.

“Well, looks like a miracle to me,” David said and get raking and re-raking the coals on the fire. He would get into a legit fistfight with anyone who dared light a gas grill in his presence. He called it his ‘low-key pyromania’.

“Yeah, I know. I think it is a miracle,” I said. The late afternoon weather had that sleepy, going-nowhere quality to it. The kind of vibe where nobody was doing anything special to make something happen.

“Weren’t you the guy who said that marriage is the only war where you have to sleep with the enemy?” David said.

“Haha funny, yes I probably did. But that was a long time ago,” I said.

“Hey didn’t you also say that a wedding is like a funeral where you get to smell your own flowers?” Max chipped in. Both the guys cracked up.

“Yeah, yeah I get it. It’s true. But… I don’t know. Maybe all those years I was just killing time, you know? Waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

“For her,” I said and stared down at my beer.

This time I couldn’t help but join in them laughing. It would be hard to convince the boys I’d turned over a new leaf when they knew better than anyone what my old leaf was like. Still.

“Ah, we’re just ragging on you man. I guess I never thought I’d see the day when our very own man-whore Hugo Turner settled down,” David said with a shake of his head.

“Yup. Our little soldier’s graduating.”

I took a deep breath and relaxed into my seat. I had proposed more than a week ago but I was still on a high, checking in with Becky every few hours almost to confirm that she was still there, and not just an awesome fragment of my imagination.

“Guys, honestly? I’m pretty terrified though. I mean, I don’t really know what I’m doing here.”

Max patted my shoulder.

“You bagged a woman like Becky, man. If she’s anything like I remember, she doesn’t suffer fools. I’d say you’re doing all right.”

I took another swig.

“God, it’s weird though. It’s actually happening. She wants a huge wedding, obviously. I saw her Pinterest board. Guys - she wants a crown made of fairy lights on it.”

They both rallied around me and raised their beers to me. We all three exchanged glances and then cracked up again.

“Hey, if you’re going to get married, you might as well go large, right?” Max said. He had ragged on me mercilessly since I told him about Becky, but I knew deep down he was glad.

“Yeah, I guess. I never thought I’d say this, but I’m happy to go ahead with whatever she wants, you know? I don’t know. Nobody trains you for this shit.” Here David put down his tongues and came to sit beside me with all seriousness, and then leaned in close with his hand on my knee.

“All right now, Hugo, I’m gonna explain everything. When a man and a lady love each other very very much, they give each other a special hug, you see, and that’s where babies come from,” he said with a solemn voice. I punched his arm.

“Okay guys, cut it out,” I laughed.

“Don’t worry, we’ve got your back, man,” David said. “Your married guy badge is in the mail. Oh, but you’ll need a jar for your balls though,” he added and jumped out of the way before I could punch him again.

“Quiet down ladies, can we just talk about something serious right now?” Max said and took up the tongs himself. “Like how many strippers we’re having at the bachelor party.” David roared with laughter, but soon has his faux-serious face on again.

“No can do, big Max. You see, brother Hugo here has banged every last stripper in town, it’ll just be awkward.”

Max nodded thoughtfully.

“Okay, fine. I’ll take one for the team and take us to Vegas or something, deal?”

“Guys, seriously. No strippers.”

Max leaned in and gave me a big bear hug, patting my back. “You know we’re just messing with you, buddy. But seriously. Congratulations. I really want this to work out for you.”

“Hey guys? You know I was thinking the other day… do you remember the… pact we made?” Only the faint sizzle in the coals could be heard. It took Max ages to answer.

“Of course. How could we forget?” he said. He wasn’t the talkative kind. Hell, none of us were.

“That all feels like forever ago,” David said absentmindedly.

“Yeah.”

We all three sat in silence for a moment, each in our own thoughts.

“You know, it kinda felt at the time that it was mostly Jack’s idea. I mean, I could see where he was coming from but… well, this whole thing with Becky got me thinking about it all again.”

“Yeah? What’s on your mind?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Don’t you guys ever…don’t you wonder if we should have played the whole thing differently? I know my promise was that I was going to stay positive, no matter what. I just filed that whole mission away and stopped thinking about it. But what if that was the wrong thing to do?”

I watched as David threw the steaks onto the grill and they hissed a little.

“Well… it’s over now, Hugo. We can’t go back and change the past.”

“I know. I just wonder if we were stupid to agree to keep quiet about it.”

David looked at me with concern all over his face.

“Dude. There’s no question. Nobody can ever know about what happened over there.”

I nodded but I didn’t feel like dropping it. We had barely spoken three words about that damned mission since we’d been back. But more and more, that didn’t feel so good.

“But they put hundreds of innocent lives at risk—”

“Hugo…”

“Let me finish. It doesn’t bother you?”

“Of course it bothers me. Shit, how could it not? But what are you going to do about it now, huh?”

I chewed my own lip. The first surprise of the mission was that we were on home turf – something we as SEALs weren’t exactly trained for. The second surprise is that we weren’t combatting terrorism or carrying out some classified rescue mission or capture of a targeted trafficker. Nope, we were infiltrating groups of rednecks who were distributing pamphlets and stirring up hate crimes. We all thought it was a joke at first. But that was surprise number three: though the problem certainly was bigger than we gave it credit for, interrupting a bombing by a dangerous neo-nazi group was only the cover story. We weren’t there to stop the “National Legacy” from blowing up a local clinic. We were there to draw attention away from why the building needed to be destroyed. And that it was us who would destroy it.

It was the perfect storm of misinformation, counterintelligence and good old fashioned fuckups piled up so high nobody was sure who the bad guy was anymore. Our team neutralized what 90% of the chain of command thought was our real threat. But to do that we’d have to get close… and see what was really going on. By then, it was too late. They discharged the entire team, ‘debriefed’ us and assured us that the US government necessarily carried out operations that were beyond the understanding of our forces. We were given money and told to keep quiet. But we knew what we’d seen. And worse, we now knew to call into question every other mission.

“Our own government knowingly participated in the deaths of hundreds of innocent people,” I said quietly. “We did. We participated in it…”

“Oh grow up,” David said and tossed the tongs to the side. He roughly wiped his hands with a cloth and sat, scowling.

“We didn’t know.”

“But now we do.”

They both stared at me.

“What’s gotten into you, man?”

What was I going to say? That a weird sex-filled romp in the forest with an old flame and a wolf bite to the neck had suddenly given me a fully formed moral compass where I never had one before?

“Just tell me you know it was wrong,” I said to them both. “Right? We saw the facility they were hiding. We saw the bodies…”

“Hugo, be very careful…” Max said in a threatening tone. The same tone they’d used on us when the mission was abruptly ended. It was somewhere far away in my memory now. But it didn’t take much to bring those thoughts to the surface, to remember the utter horror and disbelief at what we all saw that day. We had burst into a back room, fully armed and ready to capture and eliminate who we had been told was a priority threat to national security, infamous Bruce Gartman. But Gartman wasn’t even there that day. By pure chance, we saw what we weren’t meant to. Bulging, swollen eyes. Grey flesh. And the smell…

“You’d better drop this, Hugo” Max said. It wasn’t said as a warning, but with affection.

“I know, it’s just that… it still stays with me. What else is going on? I know you guys think about it.”

Their silence confirmed it. David got to work turning the steaks and they sizzled again. Maybe I should have kept my big mouth closed. Maybe wanting to do right by Becky was rubbing off and now I wanted to do right by all those people…

“Dude, how about a refill?” Max said and waggled the empty beer bottles at me. I got up to go to the kitchen to fetch more. They were right, of course. Nothing could be done. We were civilians now, back at home, and the mission was long gone. David was playing step-daddy to a couple of cute kids, Max was turning into a real Mr. Moneybags with his gym and most hilarious of all, I was getting hitched.