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digging up all the details he could. Airport personnel had confirmed that Mike Brown had indeed successfully landed a small private jet at the International Falls airport in the midst of a blizzard and that Ty had been his copilot.
    “You were military.” She’d known the first time she’d met him that he was or had been in the service. All it had taken was a look. J.R. had been Special Forces. All those guys had a look about them. Edgy, intense, focused.
    “Right. Navy.”
    “Navy what?” Every man in uniform was a special man, but again, she had recognized him from the beginning as something more.
    He looked out over the lake, then back at her. “HSC-23. Wildcards.”
    She shook her head. “Sorry. I’m not familiar.”
    “Air ambulance. We choppered casualties in and out of combat zones in southern and western Iraq to supplement the Army’s Dustoff operations.”
    Because she’d been married to a Green Beret, she was semiliterate in spec-ops speak, but this was a new term for her. “Dustoff  ?”
    “A credo attributed to a guy named Kelly—Major Charles L. Kelly. Back in the Vietnam era.” He stopped. Shook his head. “But you don’t want to hear this.”
    “Actually, I do. Tell me about Kelly and Dustoff.”
    He shrugged. “Kelly—Combat Kelly—was commander of the 57th Medical Detachment, helicopter ambulance. He was some kind of man. ‘Dustoff’ was his call sign. When there were wounded, in came Kelly, no matter what. July sixty-four, Vietnam, he approached a hot area to pick up wounded, as usual, and started taking fire. The red cross on the bird’s fuselage made a nice bull’s-eye,” he added, with the insight of one who knows and has been under fire himself.
    “Anyway, ground support called him off over and over, but he didn’t listen. ‘When I have your wounded,’ he told them. Not long after, he was killed by a single bullet.”
    Ty became quiet and reflective for a moment. “Anyway, Kelly’s gone, but ‘Dustoff’ became the call sign for all aero-medical missions in Vietnam. And since then, ‘When I have your wounded’ has become the personal and collective credo of all Dustoff pilots who followed him.”
    While he’d said very little about himself directly, he’d revealed a lot. J.R. used to tell her about the bravery of the medical-evaccrews. Because the Army and Navy air ambulance birds have a red cross painted on their sides, the Geneva Convention rules don’t allow them to arm themselves with machine guns or mini-guns. Pilots like Kelly and Ty flew into hot zones with nothing but personal weapons—M-4 rifles and handguns—for protection against RPGs and small-arms fire. This practice was supposed to ensure humanitarian treatment of wounded during war, making aircraft, ships, corpsmen, trucks, facilities, and anything else displaying red crosses off-limits to enemy fire. Big surprise, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda—like the Vietcong in Kelly’s era—were not signatories to the Geneva Convention, so they use the red crosses as targets.
    “My husband held the medical crews in very high regard. He said what you did was the equivalent to tap dancing blindfolded into a minefield.”
    Another throwaway lift of a shoulder. “Everybody’s got a job to do.”
    He looked at her then. “Your husband . . .”
    “J.R.,” she supplied when he hesitated. “Army. Special Forces.”
    She toyed with her wineglass. Another change of subject seemed in order. “So . . . you weren’t a career man?”
    A slow shake of his head. “Wanted to be.” Another shrug. “Didn’t work out.”
    The statement begged for a follow-up, but the distant look in his eyes told her it might be best not to go there. That maybe it was a confidence he didn’t want to share and she didn’t need to hear. Not on a date that was not a date.
    Clearly, though, his military career had been cut short. She wondered if he’d been injured in some way—couldn’t tell by looking, although now that she