• Log In
• Register

"Only the dead have seen the end of war"
~Plato~

“Lieutenant?” questioned the voice on the phone.

“Yes. What time is it?” was the answer the gravelly baritone voice responded with. Rubbing the back of his hand across his eyes and picking away at the encrusted remains of sleep that still sealed his eyelids together, he looked around for the clock forgetting that he was virtually blind without his glasses.

“This is the third Battalion CQ, Specialist Kojin. We’ve begun the alert roster. Prepare to copy.”

“What time is it?”

“It’s 0329, Sir.”

“Shit. That’s early. Is it serious?”

“Sir, are you ready to copy?”

“Sure. Go ‘head.”

“’Fix bayonet,’ Sir. Repeat, this alert is ‘Fix Bayonet.’ There will be a Battalion formation with full battle rattle at 0530. Key leadership must be present at 0430 for an intel brief. How copy, Sir?”

“I copy that the shit’s hit the fan and I’m now pretty much covered in it. Is that fairly accurate?” he asked with a smile.

“Negative, Sir. This alert is ‘fix bayonet,’” replied the young specialist after a brief hesitation. “There will be a full formation with all equipment at Battalion at 0530. How copy, Sir?”

“Good copy. Bad message. Out,” he said while dropping the receiver back onto the phone base. Looking around his room while stretching, he realized that he only had an hour before he had to leave his apartment.

“Plenty of time to make some espresso,” he mumbled as he pulled on his sweat pants and stumbled his way to the kitchen for an eagerly anticipated, high-pressure caffeine burst that his mind was now singing for.

The Lieutenant walks into the empty tent. There are cots lined against the sides of the it with tuff boxes at their feet, duffle bags underneath the cots, gear hanging on hooks from the center pole of the structure, and pictures on the shelves between all the cots. One hook is conspicuously empty. He lets the flap close behind him and pauses where he stands, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. No one is in the tent. Everyone is at the mandatory briefings with the Chaplain and Commander.

Reaching forward, he gropes his way to the center pole where a light cord hangs down from the tube lighting on the ceiling. Flipping the switch, he is bathed suddenly in a stark, cold whiteness which allows him to see, but creates more secretive shadows, protectively clinging to their possessions in corners.

The third cot along the right side holds his attention. His naturally quick strides slow by the weight of his own emotions as he walks to the cot. A sleeping bag in a neat canoe roll is still there. Directly, he starts to pull the pictures from the side of the shelf which had been held there with double-back tape. He can only make it past the first two pictures before he starts to look closely at the frozen smiles accusingly gazing back at him. Happy people from a happier time, oblivious to all the horrors and anger they’d be facing in such a short time. That’s why people like pictures so much, he muses. They’re reminders of better times. They’re the things we try to find solace in on days like these; seemingly endless days when everything hurts.

“Hernandez,” thinks the LT. Shaking his head, he places the photos into the box and then places the box on top of the cot. Some loose letters on the tuff box quickly follow the photos.

Noticing his hand shake as he reaches for the loose boots and running shoes beneath the cot, he stands up straight, taking deep breaths. He knew it’d be hard. This is the moment he’d dreaded ever since first learning about the deployment. Nothing his leadership could tell him would assuage the guilt or slow the doubt spreading like a cancer through his mind. Doubt, as any leader could tell you, is death. When split-second decisions are made at the cost of lives, a moment of hesitation and uncertainty can kill you, your men, and possibly kill the men who are working in conjunction with your platoon for the overall success of the mission. The Lieutenant is scared because he’s now been exposed to all the grisly hardship of war. He didn’t doubt. He didn’t slow. He didn’t even pause to look twice at Hernandez when he was bleeding out on the passenger side of the Humvee. He reacted and moved, like anyone would’ve expected or could’ve hoped to do in the same situation. It wasn’t enough and that thought is corroding the confidence he needs to live and operate.

All of the rest of the gear is collected. Just these personal effects remain. The pictures are in the box as well as the letters. The tuff box is locked and will be taken out after the LT is done with a final check to be sure nothing is missed. It’s bad enough the family lost their son. “They don’t need to lose his personal possessions as well.”

He sits down and stares back at the happy people in his box. He nearly retches. A cold sweat is breaking out on the back of his neck and he feels his heart pounding menacingly in his chest. The whole world seems to be focusing in on those pictures in the bottom of a box like some swirling vortex; a black hole that none can escape from. All he can do is look and feel himself being pulled further into that box with the ghost images of Hernandez.

He looks up from the happiness into a world he no longer understands. All the orders, memos, Fragos and timelines can’t patch together the crumbling visions of his reality at this point. What is the meaning behind all of it anyway? To be such a small player in the war; is it of any difference?

Looking at the cots and equipment of those who are still breathing, he wonders if any of them will be hurt, or of anyone else in his platoon will follow Hernandez to the grave. Maybe his Platoon Sergeant will collect his own things in a small box and ensure they get to his family. Maybe the CO will say nice things about him and how he always did his best and took care of his soldiers. He’d be a tragic loss in a war for freedom. What good is freedom to the dead? No one ever rejoices about someone being unwillingly freed from life.

The walls feel like they’re pushing in on him; he can’t take it in the stuffy tent any longer. He picks up his M4, cradles the box in one hand and walks to the entrance of the tent. His boots resonate like cannon fire on the hard wood planking.

Tossing open the tent flap he’s almost blinded by the light. Pausing, he slowly regains his bearings. He’s a lieutenant in charge of a Mechanized Infantry Platoon. He still has soldiers who depend on him and a wife back home who worries for him.

“LT!” he hears his Platoon Sergeant shout to him from up ahead.

“What’s going on, Sergeant? Everyone about done with the Chaplain?” he asks with his tamed southern drawl.

“Yeah. I cut out of their early and had SGT Thompson take charge of them. Once they’re done there, I told him to release them for the rest of the day so they could walk around, do some PT, call home, sleep, whatever. They just need some time to themselves.”

“Yeah. Good idea,” he says not making straight eye contact. “We doing a formation tonight or do you think we should just wait till the morning?”

“I’d say get them together tonight. 2000 should be good. That’d give them a chance to go to chow and do what they need to do. Oh! I’ve got these letters from him Hernandez as well. He’d given them to Laspendensky as a just in case sort of thing. One’s to his parents, the others are to friends and family.” Noticing the pall on the LT’s face, a look of concern finds its way onto the Sergeant’s leathery skin. “You doing ok, Sir? You look like shit.”

Looking his sergeant in the eye, he finds the simple strength to interact with the living and force the façade that he’s fine. “Yeah. Just feel tired,” he lies. “Anyway, I got all of Hernandez’s stuff boxed up. I guess all of this stuff can get taped and put with the rest of his stuff up at the Company. Be sure we get an inventory sheet with this and keep a few copies.”

The Sergeant takes the box and for a moment looks like he’s struggling with something to say. “Fuck,” he breathes out with a haze of smoke from his always present cigarette. “How’d we get here, Sir?”

“Don’t know, Sergeant. Don’t know.”

For a moment they stand in each other’s presence. They don’t have anything else to say but are glad just for company in the silence. “Well, I gotta go take this up to the Company. The CO said he’d like you to stop by later on if you get a chance. I guess he’d like to do another AAR with you.”

Rolling his eyes and grinning for lack of anything else to do he starts to walk away. “Great,” he says with obvious sarcasm.

They both move away from the tent among the rows of others identical and equal in spacing. Before long, both men are lost amongst a surging sea of desert-colored uniforms and humvees speeding along to patrols or meetings. Everything continues on as it did in the days before and as it will in the weeks and months to follow.

The brown buildings melted into the similar brown background of the Iraqi pastures as the patrol moved along with their procession. It was a standard day with the standard patrols. Times and locations might’ve varied, but everything else seemed the same. It was like a bad movie where the same scenery gets passed through the background over and over again. They drove along with their weapons pointed out at anyone or anything which looked less-than-friendly. No one can really tell the difference after a while. All the people, their brown brick homes with whitewashed fronts and barefoot children running around could be the same people everywhere in the country. Originality seemed to be burnt away by the glaring sun. Heat and wind melted the consciousness eventually as well. Even the most disciplined soldier had eventually succumbed to the monotony of the blanched, parched desert. Uniforms became bleached by the sunlight as skin dried and cracked like the hard soil of the country. The steadfast vigil of the sun blinded drivers and passengers alike.

The rumble of the humvee diesel engine swirling with the sounds of Eric Clapton on the portable speakers mounted on the roll bar over the front seats were the only sounds that disturbed the stillness of the dead land. “How society ever thrived here, I don’t know,” thought SPC Hernandez. He looked at the driver, and shouted over the general background noise, “What a fucked up place, huh?”

Lanninton looked back over his shoulder and smiled. His eyes were hidden behind his wrap-around sunglasses. The local children always asked him if he could see through walls with them. Everything about the liberators was so new and different to them it must’ve been like some science fiction book with a real life body count.

“Pretty fucked, man,” shouted Lanninton. “I mean, Christ. Sergeant Sanchez over in first platoon told me the other day that when they were out on the OP, there was just this dude and his fucking donkey. You know, he was just riding on it. The fucking thing, man, it just doesn’t want to go. So this guy, he just hauls off and hits it. I mean just pounds the thing in the back of the head. Whap! Just fucking hits it to make it keep walking. Sanchez and his crew, they lost it. They were still laughing when they came back down off the hill.”

“Crazy shit. That’s for sure,” said Hernandez.

“For sure.”

Specialist Hernandez got married two weeks before deploying. He’d been dating Cynthia for almost a year and was thinking of marring her when “the time was right.” However, being forced to realize that you might never return and might not be able to ask all the questions and do all the things you want to seems to prompt some people to try to pack as much of their life into what could be their last weeks as possible. For the most part, fear drives these actions. Fear of leaving things unsaid and not letting people know how much they mean to you. He married Cynthia in a very busy Justice of the Peace ceremony. There were almost a dozen other soldiers behind him waiting to do the same before the Magistrate went on his lunch break. Even now, he’s thinking of what he’ll write to her in his next letter. Each day he tries to write to her, if for no other reason than to let her know that he was always thinking about her. He wanted her to get more mail than any other wife in the Battalion. In the final few days before he left America, he wrote letters to his brother, sister, parents, best friends Pat, Amanda, and Robert. He tried to keep the letters lighthearted, but how can you write to another person you care about, tell them goodbye for possibly the last time and keep it positive? He couldn’t find the words he needed, so in keeping with his stubborn male heritage, he kept the letters short. “How are you? I’m sure I miss you. I can’t wait to get back. Hope I get back. If I don’t, just know you always meant a lot to me. Etc, etc, etc.” Believing brevity to be the soul of substance, he said goodbye and mailed them off his last night in country.

The other passenger, spoke for the first time in the past few miles as he looked over at his driver and shouts, “How hot do you think it’ll get today?”

“Don’t think I really want to know, Sir. Two days ago, Michaels had his little electronic thermostat out in the sun and it registered 156.2 Fahrenheit. I really don’t want to know how hot is anymore. I can lie to myself and be happier with whatever I decide.”

“Was it really that hot?” asked the Lieutenant.

“Yes, Sir,” answered Lanninton.

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about, Lanninton,” exclaimed Hernandez. “Everything here is just complete shit. What I don’t understand is that before the discovery of oil in this country, what the fuck did people live here for? I mean, really. Why did people live here? There’s no water in great abundances. There aren’t any massive fields for growing crops, or no livestock just roaming around. There’s just so many different places people could live and live so much easier. Life here isn’t really living; it’s just existing. Trying to survive long enough to breed and teach your kids how to shoot an AK at your neighbor or some other stupid shit.”

“You know what, Hernandez?” asked the LT.

“What’s up, Sir?”

“I know I’ve been in this country way too long because you’re almost starting to make sense.”

All of them laughed and looked back to their sectors. Mr. Clapton was just beginning a soulful guitar solo to Layla. Rock and roll was almost as good as coffee and more real than God in the long hours between sleep. Their vehicle had been reinforced as much as they could on their own. Layered brass plates they’d found in a factory had been cut to fit the floorboards with sandbags on top of them. The roof had two sheets of particleboard placed on top of the frame and beneath the canvas tarp. Between the sheets of wood was a folded Kevlar blanket they managed to barter from supply. The doors of the vehicle had been taken off to allow for better ventilation and for quicker exit should that be needed. They were only canvas anyways and wouldn’t have stopped much beyond a thrown stone. Like their Company’s Motor Sergeant, Sergeant First Class Haymaker, could be heard telling the teams, “They don’t stop bullets, but they could stop you if you’re needing to un-ass your seat in a hurry.”

Practical logic ruled the modern day battlefield. There were armored doors and hard tops on order for everyone in the Company, but everyone in the Division was ordering those same things, and the fledgling supply lines were already strained with orders from people with more priority than an Infantry Company in a remote Area of Responsibility.

The three men, who had seen more of each other in the past four months than in the whole year before, continued to lead their three-vehicle patrol through the fourth of the five towns on their route. These were called “Presence Patrols” at one point, but after people started to shoot at the vehicles, it became clear that a presence was already established and wasn’t respected. They then called them “Patrols.” Short and simple.

A few palm trees that suffered from the scorching sunlight were drooping in desperate want of a breeze or some water. Neither was coming. It was only 0830 and the temperature had reached 102. Layers of uniform, Kevlar helmets, IBAS vests with SAPI plate inserts to stop flak and bullets never add to comfort or driving enjoyment, but the uniform was used for a reason. Most would be willing to let Doc stick them with an IV due to dehydration if it meant they’d be safer on the road.

“Fuck. What a hot one,” mumbled Lanninton to himself as grit–filled sweat rolled down his face and the back of his neck. Reaching for his bottle of water underneath the radio mount in hopes of quenching his thirst, he was sorely disappointed when he discovered that his water had already heated up to the point of being mildly uncomfortable to hold on to. With a disgusted grimace, he put the bottle back down and tried to ignore his thirst for another hour till he could get some less hot water from the cooks. No matter how cool the water was when you pulled from the cooler, it was hot within one hour. Baseline rule.

It was too easy to have your mind drift away to the places and people you missed when things were so hard and miserable. Lanninton thought of his parents. On the day he had to leave for his basic training, his mother and father both had tears in their eyes. He’d never seen them cry or be overly emotional; a trait he personally believed had to do with the mid-west protestant heritage of his family. On that day when he left them and wasn’t really sure when he’d be back, they let all their barriers of pride and self-control fall. He felt strength in him surge up like a rising fire; starting from the gut all the way to his head, making his hair tingle. He felt proud. He felt like a man who was capable to climbing up any mountain and then tearing it apart with his own hands. He was proud of what he was doing. He still wanted to make his parents proud of him. Mostly, he just didn’t want to die over there in that “fucking shit-hole nation.”

The many wild dogs of this country lay around panting as they tried to force as much of themselves into the shade as they could. Once night came, all you could hear were their barks and growls. In the light, they were as inanimate as the stones under them. Breathing seemed to be a burden on days like that.

IED. That’s another one of the Army’s wonderful acronyms. An Improvised Explosive Device can be anything from a mortar round with a bit of fuse, to a tin can filled with black powder and screws wrapped in tape and rigged with a primer wired to a trigger. Some of the fancier ones didn’t even need wires to be activated. Garage door openers and doorbells were other possible killers in the new era of guerrilla warfare. No one believed such ingenuity would spring from the newfound freedoms of the wasteland of Iraq.

Everyone had been briefed time and time again about where the devices could be placed. Under rocks or in holes along the side of a road, inside dead animals or in vehicles pulled over to supposedly repair a tire or fix an engine problem. But as so many animals died and the twenty year-old vehicles most of the populace drove were always on the side of the road with men looking under the hoods, it just wasn’t very practical to stop and check every possibility. Still, those were their standing orders and they followed them. Unfortunately, they hadn’t yet discovered that IED’s could be placed in light posts and telephone poles.

The brightness of the blast was the first thing that caught their attention. There wasn’t any time for them to move, but when they saw the light, they all knew instinctively what had happened. The shockwave from the blast blew out the windshields of the vehicle and slammed the LT and SPC Hernandez to their left as SPC Lanninton gripped the steering wheel with strength born from the adrenaline pulsing through his veins. The world was moving by in flashes. There was no sound. That’d been replaced temporally by a high-pitched whine.

Frantically, Lanninton looked around him to see if any snipers were on the roofs of the distant huts or if any attackers were closer to him on the dirt mounds between him and the dry fields. Instinct and training told him to drive out of the kill zone. He hammered down on the gas pedal and started to say a Hail Mary in his head. Droplets of blood were on the console in front of him. He wasn’t physically hurt. A quick visual inspection told him that much. He couldn’t bring himself to look over his shoulder at the two men to his right. One of them, maybe both, were wounded. If nothing else, the blast knocked them silly. Maybe they’d die unaware. There wasn’t much more a person could ask for in a situation like that. That’s when the screaming started.

“Steel 23, Steel 23. This is Steel 41. We’ve cleared the area. No sign of any hostiles. Have the Medevac standing by,” the LT hurriedly said into the hand mike trying to be as calm as possible despite the scream welling up inside of him. He tossed the mike back up to Lanninton and clambered back onto the cargo bed where Hernandez was stretched out. As soon as he was in, the patrol sped away from the ambush site to the Forward Operations Base where medical help awaited. It was only about 15km away as the crow flies, but with a poor road system and worse dirt paths, even the most direct took the patrol through fields and scrubland.

In the back of the Humvee, the LT examined SPC Hernandez. He kneeled on the bed of the troop carrier and frantically pulled open the combat lifesaver bag for any gauze, tourniquet, IV, and sterile wraps he could find. There was no morphine for Hernandez because the leadership feared that soldiers would use the morphine for less-than-professional purposes, but the pain that flamed up and down every nerve ending on the Specialist’s ragged flesh was far more than enough to blot out most consciousness. All the same, he would scream, but if it was from pain or fear no one could tell. His screams put the most gruesome horror movies to shame. Soul-wrenching yells which tore through the listeners and burned their way into dreams and flashbacks for years to come would erupt from Hernandez’s body with a ferocity equal to the metal shrapnel that tore him apart. The still desert air seemed to absorb every decibel as though it could feed off the intensity of the screams. In a land deadly to all visitors and natural inhabitants, the knowledge that another might have been claimed in such an inhospitable place seemed almost to please the singing hot wind.

The patrol moved on. In spite of all the hours they’d spent rehearsing battle drills in prep for that day and that moment, it all seemed suddenly inappropriate.

“Fuck! What the fuck!” exclaimed the LT as he fought his way back to reality to help his soldier.

Lanninton drove as fast as his vehicle would go. His white knuckles on the steering wheel belied the almost calm expression he had on his face. He couldn’t bring himself to look anywhere but forward, almost as if by not seeing the gruesome scene behind him, he could deny the reality of it. But, he was all too aware of the screams and the scrambling behind him as his LT tried to get a handle on what to do. The hand mike for the ASIP radio was clenched in his right hand as he careened down the dirt paths to the FOB where medical assets waited.

“Shit,” whispered the Platoon Leader as he looked over the soldier before him, he wondered where to begin.

“Steel 41, this is Steel 23. What’s your current location and condition of the casualty? Over,” came the comparatively serene voice over the FM.

“Fuck! Sir! They wanna know how Hernandez is doing.”

“He’s fucking bleeding out! Drive faster, Lan.”

“I’ve got it hard to the boards, Sir.”

“Steel 41, this is Steel 23. Did you copy my last? What’s your current location and condition of the casualty?”

“Steel 23, this is Steel 41. We’re about 10 K out. Casualty is bleeding bad,” he spouts into the mike. “Sir, can you stop the blood? I’ve got this going as fast as I can,” asked Lan as he looked over his shoulder to the LT.

More screaming burst from Hernandez as one of the many ruts in the road shook the vehicle with bone-jarring intensity.

“Fuck, Lan! Keep your eyes on the road and talk to them on the mike. I’ve got enough to deal with,” he shouted and tore open a gauze packet with his teeth and one hand while the other was keeping Hernandez from sliding around too much. He paused and looked for where to begin. He’d already cut open the shirt to get a better idea of the extent of the injuries but that only reinforced the fact that the small aid bag wouldn’t be nearly enough to keep the torn man alive for long.

“Steel 41 this is Steel 23. Come in. Over!”

“23, this is 41. We’re about 5 kilometer out, closing fast. Call the gate and let them know we’re almost there. I think can see it now.”

“Just keep awake, Hernandez. We’re getting you back as fast as we can,” said the LT as he put the gauze over the right side of the abdomen where blood was freely flowing. Smaller red holes dotted the side of the body. Some of the ones on his chest had small bubbles of blood growing. Pierced lung. Sucking chest wound. The wounds continue up the body and fortunately spared the arteries and veins in the neck, but weren’t as merciful with the face. What was left of his nose and cheek on the right of his face were barely hanging on. The eye was gone; replaced with a jagged hole. One piece of shrapnel entered below the cheekbone, bored through the flesh and bone, then erupted out of the eye socket expelling the orb with it.

“41, this is Steel 23. We already got the gate cleared and waiting. The bird is here. Get to the heilo pad next to the Aid Station as fast as you can. Doc has his A-team waiting to take over. Over.”

“Like they need to tell me to go fast,” mused Lanninton under his breath.

“Lan, drive the fuck faster!” Panic had started to set in. The Army taught him to fight fear and rely on training to carry him and hopefully his soldiers through any day like this. He worked feverishly to apply pressure and gauze to the wounds on the torn body in front of him.

Above all of them, a few wisps of cloud set in the pale blue sky were moved along by a soft, and very rare, cool breeze. Despite the high temperatures, none of them noticed.

“Everyone ready?” asked the Battalion medic. Greeted with a stoic silence and a few head nods, he continued. “One, two, three, lift.” The men hefted the stretcher and quickly rotated it and began to walk to the awaiting helicopter. On cue, one of the flight medics, a Staff Sergeant who has seen more blood in the past eight months of his deployment than most hospital workers do in a decade. His eyes are gray. Not just gray, but flat. There was no emotion showing in them anymore. He, like so many before him, has found a quite place within himself he’d hide in when faced with the horrors of the war. He still has three months to go before his unit begins its redeployment preparations and movement. Once back home, he hoped to still be able to pull himself back out of that quite place in his mind, but each day, after being forced to seek solace further and further down into that still place, he wasn’t sure he even remembered what it was like to be a normal person and feel what it’s like to be normal.

“What’s his condition?” asked the flight medic.

“Bleeding internally, sucking chest wound, the eye is gone and the sinuses are severely damaged. Pretty good chance of cranial trauma. His other eye’s pupil has started dilating. His liver is torn up bad. We’ve given him three bags so far, but he’ll take everything you’ve got.” The laundry list of injuries continued for several more seconds. As they neared the helicopter, the flight medic simply nodded his head and motioned for the doc that he knew all he needed to know. The Lieutenant, who along with Lan was two of the four carrying the stretcher, could only process fragments of the conversation. Key words like “internally,” and “dilating” were salient enough for his conscious mind to grab hold of when everything else around him seemed too viciously impossible. At any moment, he expected Quinton Tarrintino to come out from behind a HMMWV with a megaphone shouting, “Cut.”

Looking back down at Hernandez as they bounced their way to the open side of the Medevac, he could barely distinguish where the skin, bone, clothes, and sterile gauze began and ended. Everything was pushed together in some sort of hellish jigsaw puzzle. Hernandez himself was fading in and out of awareness. The morphine, shock and blood loss were creating a warm cocoon for his ravaged soul to hide in. “What’s left of his face looks peaceful,” thought the LT before he realized that he’d been staring.

“LT! Sir!” It was Lan who was shouting at him from across the stretcher. “Are you ready to lift, Sir?” His face was as white as the dirt and sunburn he always seemed to wear allowed him to be. In spite of his outward panicked expression, he’d moved deftly and surely ever since the IED. Never once did he question what he needed to do. He was always there, ready to help.

Nodding dumbly and stammering some affirming reply to the faces now turned to him, he tightened his hands around the handle of the cot and again, on the Doc’s count of three, lifted with what little strength there was left in his shoulders. Up until today, he’d never realized how much 200 pounds of man and equipment could actually weigh, even with three others helping to carry the load.

Doc and the flight medic clambered in the bird with the cot. They finished tying it down with the straps bolted to the floor of the cabin and shouted a few words back and forth before coming to some conclusion.

“This isn’t a fucking social hour,” thought the LT. “Get him out of here.” Every second seemed infinitely more precious to him now than when he first woke that morning. He could feel the shock of each tick from his watch’s second hand reverberate along the nerves in his body which felt about as tight as violin strings.

At last when Doc jumped out, the flight medics in the black hawk seemed to collectively take a breath and then lean in to Hernandez. The quickness with which they prodded and checked every inch of his wounds amazed those who still had the stomach to watch. It was almost like witnessing the precision movements of mechanical arms at an auto plant as they went to work assembling the body of some luxury sedan. The same remote efficiency seemed to have been bestowed on those men in the Medevac bird in a quantity most humans couldn’t conceive of. The blinding sting of the sand as the blades of the black hawk lifted off forced everyone to close their eyes. For a moment all anyone could hear was the frantic pounding of their hearts in their ears as they collectively held their breaths till the momentary disturbance was past. The blood that had dripped to the ground from Hernandez as he was carried to the bird was now totally obscured and consumed by the twisting ground. Snakes of dirt and glass wound their way into everyone’s faces, ears, eyes, and clothes. There was never any escape from the filth of this place.

Watching the bird lift off into the blue sky, the last image he’s able to see before they’re too high for his vision is the flight medics looking at each other and shaking their heads in their resigned, mechanical way.

Still mystified by the black dot moving along the horizon, the LT was pulled back to reality by the sounds of gagging and something liquid-based hitting the ground. Lan vomited.

“It’s ok,” said the LT to the PA and his few medics still standing around. “I’ve got him. Oh, Doc. Could you have my Platoon Sergeant meet me outside the Battalion ALOC if you see him?”

“No problem.”

“Thanks.” Placing a protective arm on the shoulder of his soldier, he starts to walk them back towards the tents where the rest of his platoon resides. Desperately searching for something hopeful or meaningful to say, he searched through all the memories of war and action movies he’d ever seen, trying to remember some sort of inspiring speech made by the hero when everything else seemed bleak.

“Hernandez is in good hands.” That was all he could come up with. He looked at the soldier that seemed to be shrinking further and further into himself and realized that the quiet-spoken young man next to him wouldn’t ever be the same. “How many of us really will be after something like that,” he thought.

They’d made it several hundred meters before Lan pushed away from the Lieutenant and ran behind a tent. Confused by the sudden burst of speed, the LT started after him until he again heard that same wet choking sound coming from where Lan had just stopped a moment before. There wasn’t too much left in him after the first time, so this episode didn’t last as long. He just respectively stood a few feet behind the soldier, and patiently waited for him to stand up. He watched the back shake as Lan’s abdominal muscles squeezed out all the remaining food and liquid. Even after he’d spat out the last bit of foul-tasting liquid, his shoulders still shook. It took a moment for the transition to sink in, but the impact it made was immediate – Lan was crying. They were silent tears, honestly shed for a friend.

“Lan?” the LT said in a voice more like a croak. “It’s ok.”

Without standing up or looking around, Lan managed to pull himself together enough to ask a single question before he was once again overcome by his grief. “Why is the world full of so much hatred?”

It was question that many leaders were asked and had asked themselves since leaving the comfort and safety of the lives they loved. It was the thought that prompted many frustrated men to doubt the worth of all the actions of the past year, and the thought which brought the philosopher in all but the most hardened screaming in outrage to the surface. Most notably, it was a question without an answer. In the depths of that philosophical riddle, the Lieutenant, who a year ago thought the world made sense, stood silent as he watched a grown man cry. It took more strength and courage than he could’ve guessed it would to simply reach out and place his hand on the back which was once again moving rhythmically with the effort of controlled breaths.

“There’s a whole world of good things too, Lan,” he said to the man who in that moment was no longer a subordinate or a soldier next to an officer – just another man caught in grief.

“The problem is,” he continued, “most people are too stubborn to change or just find it easier to hate and lash out even when the changes could be good for them.”

For the first time in long moments, Lan looked up at Lieutenant Knapp. All the color had apparently been forced out of him with the rest of his breakfast. What looked back at him was a face that seemed almost skeletal. The eyes were sunken and surrounded by swollen lids from crying. His cheeks and the skin around his neck seemed tight like he hadn’t eaten a decent meal in months. Paired with his naturally large ears, long face and pointed nose, he looked like some horrific hatchling born into a dark and sinister world.

“Do you think there’s any hope for any of us?” asked the soldier.

“I’ve got to. If there isn’t, what the hell good is it to even bother breathing.”

Hoping he hadn’t said something stupid that’d make his shaken fellow contemplate the dark path of suicide, he gently helped him stand and continue walking to the tents. Over by the motor pool, he could hear shouts as the Alpha Company maintenance team was, again, tossing around a football to see whose brown t-shirt could be soaked the most after fifteen minutes of minor exertion. Today was the championship where SPC Hawthorne, PFC Ware, and PFC Michaels were going to determine, once and for all, who had the most efficient sweat glands. Entertainment, in any form, was always welcomed.

Four kilometers away, the local school the Battalion had repaired, and refurbished with books, desks, blackboards and a playground that helped to win over many still-doubting citizens of the good intent the soldiers had for their future, was breaking for the hot noon hours. The boys in their buttoned shirts and pants and the girls in their uniform dresses were now making their way back to their homes. One year ago, the school didn’t have money to pay their over-worked teachers. Now, the Battalion made sure they, along with the town’s police department and hospital were being paid their fair share every week. All of this came from the American tax dollar, but even the most skeptic soldier couldn’t fault the payment of five dollars a week per person to give these children with such wide smiles and inquisitive eyes a chance for a better future. Yet for the Lieutenant and his soldier, all the good that was being done around them was overshadowed by the fact that they had witnessed the cost of the next generation’s opportunities. The chance for them to learn to spell and make a better future for themselves and their families came at the price of a devil’s bargain, and there were more than enough souls deployed to keep that hoofed reveler satisfied. As they kept walking, the wind picked up again, drying the sweat and grime on their uniforms and skin. It was the closest thing to a cooling breeze that anyone would feel for many months to come. Some others might have enjoyed it, but the two mourners couldn’t feel it. They were already trying to dig down past their emotions and simply keep walking. Some days, that was all a person could hope for. Some days that was all a person would receive.

Discuss this Article

Have an opinion, a question, or correction? Leave comments for this article in the discussion area.