Rachael Van Horn, fifty-six years old, lives by herself in a two-bedroom house at the southeast corner of Rosston, Oklahoma. Although the town is on a two-lane highway that runs east and west across the Panhandle, it offers no services to travellers. Prairie surrounds it. Rachael’s fenced-in yard adjoins twenty acres of pasture she owns, in which she keeps four cattle: Raffi, a black-and-white steer with only one horn, and three Black Angus two-year-olds. Phoenix is the Angus bull, and Freya and Cow Polly are the cows. The steer and the three Angus may be the happiest livestock in Oklahoma. When Rachael comes to the fence, they run across the pasture and contend jealously to be next to her.

At the time of the fires that burned thousands of square miles of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas in 2017, Rachael already owned Raffi, who was then a small calf. Her pasture was spared, but cattle that had burned to death, or almost to death, dotted the prairie for miles around and bunched up against the remaining fences. Rachael sometimes wept as she drove by them. Most of the ones that survived were too far gone to save. When Rachael was out helping a neighbor shoot his injured animals, she saw three badly burned Angus calves that she thought might make it, and the rancher who owned them said that she could have them.

Rachael brought the calves to her place and bucket-fed them, called a vet to treat them, put salve on their burned foreheads and lips and on the stubs of their burned-off ears, and built a small wading pool that she filled with a saline solution and walked them through twice a day in order to soothe their burned feet. The pain they were in distressed her so much that she drove to Pueblo, Colorado, and bought liquid THC—marijuana extract—to give them. After they began taking the THC, she noticed that they got hungrier, started to eat more, and put on a lot of weight. The calves gradually got better. She spent endless hours doctoring them. She had been in Iraq for three years and was present at the mess-hall suicide bombing near Mosul on December 21, 2004, which killed twenty-five people. She was continuing to deal with her post-traumatic stress, and the calves became part of the process.

She did not brand any of them, or castrate the bull, because she did not want them to suffer any more pain. The three Angus and the steer are frolicsome animals, like imaginary cows in a children’s book or a cartoon. Rachael says that they will never be sold and will spend the rest of their lives in her pasture.

Rachael—it seems wrong to call her Van Horn, because she is now a celebrity in northwest Oklahoma, and everybody calls her Rachael—was born in Ipswich, England. Her father, a career Air Force pilot who flew F-105 jets in Vietnam, was stationed near Ipswich, and in many more places after that. Rachael can’t count the number of schools she attended between kindergarten and twelfth grade. She thinks it was about eight. Her father wanted her to join the Air Force and become an officer like him, but after the family moved to Edmond, Oklahoma, in the early nineteen-eighties, and Rachael enrolled in Central Oklahoma College, she instead joined the Army Reserves. The specialties she chose to train for were transport logistics and truck-engine repair.

She married and divorced three times. With her first husband, she had a daughter, Johnna, in 1987. (Johnna is now married and has a three-year-old daughter, Eva.) Outside of Reserve duty, Rachael worked at all kinds of jobs, from feedlot hand to veterinarian’s assistant to John Deere truck- and tractor-parts salesperson, but the job she kept returning to was newspaper reporter. Starting in the mid-nineties, she wrote for papers in Enid, Oklahoma, and Shreveport, Louisiana, where she moved with her second husband. Later, she was hired by a woman she knew from the Reserves who had become the editor of the Woodward News, in Oklahoma. She still contributes to that paper at least once a month.

Of medium height, Rachael is a gray-blond, green-eyed woman with even, white teeth and strong-looking arms and shoulders. Somehow, she appears different every time you see her; in fact, I’ve never known anyone with such a differing repertoire of looks, or personae. One of those is a severe military type she refers to as Sergeant Van Horn, with the accent on the “Van.” Her eyes change when she is Sergeant Van Horn, and become gimlet-like and fierce.

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Being in the Reserves involved going through the same boot camp as regular recruits. During training at Fort Jackson, in South Carolina, a drill sergeant sexually assaulted her one evening when she was alone in a laundry room. He ran off when he heard somebody coming, but she saw who he was. She did not report the assault. Near the end of boot camp, when she was taking a proficiency test, she recognized him as the officer who was conducting it. With a gimlet look, she let him know she knew him. When she should have failed on a technicality, he passed her.

She served in the Reserves for twenty-one years and retired just before her unit was called up for duty in Iraq. By then, her daughter was about to go to Emory University, which costs upward of fifty-five thousand dollars a year. Because of her military experience, Rachael got an offer from Kellogg Brown & Root to work in Iraq as a civilian liaison for construction projects in the villages. She needed the hazard pay to help with the tuition, so she accepted. The job took her to Forward Operating Base Marez, by the Mosul airfield, where she was in charge of recreation, morale, and welfare. On the day of the bombing, a colleague asked her to come along with him to lunch, but she was with an Iraqi assistant who had not yet received security credentials. She told her colleague that she had to get the Iraqi “badged,” and went to the credentials office to do that. After waiting awhile with the Iraqi, she decided to run up to the mess hall and get them both some sandwiches. She had just opened the mess-hall door when the explosion occurred.

She remembers the blood on the uniforms, the female soldier with her arm blown off, and the constant repetition of call letters on her radio as the distress signals went out and people tried to find those who were missing. Immediately after the bombing, a wave of anger ran across the base, and the Iraqi assistant feared that he would be shot. She stayed with him and several other Iraqis all night, playing tic-tac-toe and drawing pictures, so that she could vouch for them. Later, she learned that the colleague who had asked her to lunch had been among those killed. The base held a memorial gathering for the victims, but she hardly had time to grieve, or even to take in what had occurred. She stuffed her feelings down and kept going.

Investigators thought at first that the explosion might have been from a mortar round fired outside the base. The discovery of fragments of a torso and of an explosives belt pointed to a suicide bombing. Apparently, the bomber had dressed in an Iraqi National Guard uniform and gained admittance to the mess hall with other Iraqi troops. Reports in Arab-language newspapers said that the bomber was not an Iraqi but a Saudi, of the large al-Ghamdi clan, three members of which took part in the September 11th attacks.