It was still with me, wasn't it? The emotional baggage of that duster-frag beneath Fort Lewis, the op that had cost me my arm and Hawk, Rodney, and the others so much more. I was still fragged up by it. My timing was gone, my instincts were . . . well, were they fragged, or was it just that I didn't trust them? I didn't know. When that first gunshot had gone off next to my ear, the emotions that had paralyzed me hadn't been the emotions of the moment—if that makes any sense at all. They'd been loaded with resonances of the emotions of those distant moments when friends had been dying around me and when my left arm had been fried to charcoal. Somehow I'd never really recovered. It was as if I'd lost much more than my arm in Fort Lewis. Part of my self-image, part of my worldview, perhaps . . . part of my soul? It was that loss which hadn't allowed me to put it all behind me and move on.