The Soldier (1) THE SOLDIER The rain ends leaving the city covered in slimy soot. Smoke from exploding bombs still linger, but the air seems to be clearing somewhat and the soldier quickly flicks the butt of his cigarette onto the cobbled street as though he’s fed up with waiting. Everywhere around him, everything he sees seems to magically contrast into varying shades of gray; the windowless buildings, the cracked street, even the trees, now stripped of their leaves and charcoaled by fire, seem to be only dark smudges of thick lines squiggled eerily across a blank canvas. War always brings with it a halo of aged bitterness and today the astringent taste of war hangs heavily, despite the rain. The soldier stands, his lean body stretching as his legs lose the kinks that settled in while he crouched, resting, in the shadows against an alleyway wall. Shadow, he knows, is nature’s camouflage, aiding and abetting at will, and the soldier is trained to take advantage of its use. A rusty piece of corrugated tin had been nailed to the roof with additional support added by a length of wood with one end buried in the mud of the street, and the other tacked clumsily to the metal, and although his hair and clothes are damp, he thankfully blesses the War Gods for the small comfort. Any storm in a shelter, he muses as he bends to pick up his pack from the ground. He stops mid-bend and concentrates on what he’d just said. Any storm in a shelter? Reflecting on the scrambled words he barks a short, worrisome laugh, wondering, and not for the first time, if this war, this constant killing, is perhaps weighing on him more than he realizes. He shakes his head to clear the cobwebs gathered there, and then grabs the pack in his left hand, using his right hand to sling his weapon over his shoulder. Hi-ho, Hi-ho, it’s off to kill I go, he chants softly, crazily, as he clumsily buckles his web gear over his shoulders. With a grunt, he finally manages the belt clip with one hand and then he sighs. A soldier’s work is never done, he decides, and glances cautiously down the narrow street into a village courtyard surrounded by the decaying remnants of what had once been a large city, but which is now only a quiet reminder of what wrath war can bring. He listens to the sounds of the city being brought down around him, (a sound like the dying of ancient trees), and the steady stream of crying he hears come from men he knows. Sighing, he tilts his tired head back onto his shoulders in exhaustion. Too much, it’ll never stop. But he knows that’s not true. All wars end, some sooner than others, it’s just a matter of when the men-who-were-the ties decide that there’s been enough killing. Today, he thinks, must not be that day. The quota’s still short, not enough body bags filled up yet. With this thought he sighs again and makes his way from the shelter of the alley. That’s why the bombs are still falling, to fill the body bags. He’s not a young man, not after so much death. In the beginning, when he’d been young and fresh and filled with stories of heroism, patriotic duty, and love of God, he’d been tall, strong, his hair had been lush and shiny. Today, his shoulders are warped, his knees ache, and his hair is graying and thin. There’s a constant knot in the pit of his stomach that feels like someone is trying to stick a hot poker through his body, and when he blows his nose, he often finds blood in the tissue. Even his clothes show wear, reflecting their owner’s fatigue. War, he smirks, and then trudges out into the street. Definitely a young mans adventure. He can smell bodies burning in the air. Even after the rain the smell is still sickly sweet, like fruit gone bad. He thinks to wet a handkerchief with water from his canteen and to place it over his nose so he doesn’t have to smell his friends burning, but then he dismisses the thought. War has familiarized him with horror, it’s caused him to become its closet friend and he accepts its honesty like a child believing in a parent’s words of love. Besides, the burning is not what sickens him most. After all, it’s only meat and but a single, distinct characteristic of war, one of many that builds a platform for future awfulness. The true horror, what makes the soldier lose sleep at night and to pull what remaining hair he has left on his head out in small, finger twisted tufts, is that men actually, willfully, and wantonly burn other men in pursuit of so-called victory. As if war is won by body count alone and not when either side finally discovers that to win a war, one side must first realize that killing—in all its monstrous form—is evil. He scans the street carefully, hating himself for becoming separated from the rest of his team. Where are they? He sees that the courtyard is nothing more than a clearing really, with a small triangle of dirt sitting square in the middle of the street. The road is cobbled in places, hard packed dirt in others. Buildings are hollow and burned, looking like half crouched predators stalking prey, and the burned out hulks of old cars dot the narrow lane like the carcasses of dead animals. The soldier guesses correctly that at one time the triangle had been grass, now trampled bare by the naked feet of once happy and smiling children whose only concern had been what they would eat for breakfast in the mornings. Men had died there, in the buildings and on the streets, and women and children too. The city is a monument to those who couldn’t hide. War rarely discriminates, and when it does it’s never in favor of those who are innocent. All too often those who huddle together too scared and too afraid to act end up smoking right alongside all the other people who are trained to die for their cause. The inequity of war is staggering in its effectiveness. He knows this and its an acceptable part of what he does, what he’s trained to do. These people, the ones who can’t hide, are just collateral damage, they’re expendables, and even though it may be morally unjust, he knows, it’s needed. Life is given to us by those who die. If not for them, then maybe he’d be the one laying in dusty old clothes with his body half eaten by the ghost hounds that haunt the streets. The soldier thinks about this and considers the probability of that outcome. Reality is more truthful when matters of life and death are involved, my life then is not so consequential than is that of, say, the president, so death tends to be selective and not, as he’d learned in school, random. If death is random, (and clearly it is not because he had been selected to come here, right?) then my chances of being eaten by dogs is no more nor no less than that of anyone else, the President included Somehow through the murk and gray fuzz that had recently begun to cloud his mind, the soldier clearly understands that life’s chances are really no chance at all, because what chance does one have when he’s been selected, rather than chosen, to carry a weapon for his country? The soldier shakes his head to clear the thought. Lately, his mind had become open to difficult plausibility’s; it’s as though someone else now lived in his mind, someone shadowy who harbored sinister motives and who had settled in unannounced to create havoc. He knows this cannot be true of course, it’s simply exhaustion setting up shop, but still, the thought that something is encroaching is overpowering, and though the soldier dismisses it, lingering doubt is always a constant companion. The mind, he knows, though often resilient, also often contrives to deceive the body, and just what consequences does that involve? He walks in a slow and controlled pace, his body at rest with muscles relaxed. There is no hurry for what he does, not in the truest sense. War—killing—is motivated by extension of cause. In his case, the motive is created long before men he’s never met involve him. The cause is non-relevant. The effect is horrific. War evolves so that nations can contest their champions. The soldier is a champion and thus, caution, coupled with a warriors learned ease, forces him to move with the wind, one cautious step at a time. The soldier heeds that caution here, now, in the open courtyard, with a myriad of hidden shelters surrounding him that could harbor death and its evil grin. He knows this because he’s trained to know this. This is what he does; he’s a soldier, and a good one. For him, the mysteries of war are really no mystery at all. He studies his surroundings with the practiced eyes of a hunter. Searching. The prey is deceitfully clever, but the soldier has been in this land for some time and is wise to their tricks, so he watches with eyes trained to pick out the extraordinary, the unusual. Across from him, beyond a wooden platform that slants into the doorway of a bombed out building, he sees a bundle of tiny sticks tied to a string dangling enticingly in the wind. The sticks are meshed together with wire in the middle, and the twigs are fanned out on either end creating an almost scarecrow like effect. It’s a curiosity and in war curiosities are suspect. The solider brings his weapon up and approaches slowly, each step so calculated that the movement appears to be routine. In fact, he’s concentrating very strongly on each step, each grouping of muscle that allows him motion. Sweat beads form on his brow in spite of the chill the rain has brought. His brown eyes dart furtively here and there, registering everything, memorizing every chunk of blown away concrete and every possible skunk hole the enemy could be hiding in. The sticks sway easily and his ears are so in tune with what’s happening, he can actually hear the wind as it softly whistles through the tiny bits of twig. As he walks, he begins to whistle a tune of his own, something his mother had taught him years ago when he had still been wearing Keds on his feet and Farmer Green Jeans denim pants with patches on the knees. He tries to synchronize his lament with the whistling of the wind but the wind is a slippery old soul who’s not easily caught, and so, beaten, the soldier stops. Beyond him, behind the buildings that watch carefully at his back, the incessant bombing stops for a moment, as if understanding the duel being played out between the soldier and the sticks and allowing them, grudgingly, their solitude. Even the controlled popping of distant rifle fire ends, perhaps from sympathy, or from the more arcane sense of simple deconstruction. The overt act of taking apart of lives. The soldier and the ever so scornful sticks are alone in this tiny battle within a battle within a war, each an unwilling participant on the page of a very thick book, and he moves closer, understanding the fear that has seized him as he goes. His mouth is dry, his hands wet, and the sound of his own breathing amplified. His heavy boots scatter stones in his path and they click and clatter away amazingly quietly. Five feet from the entryway he stops and swallows hard. He sees the figure, laughing at his fear now, and beyond the figure, obscured by the gray half-light of the low cloud cover, he imagines seeing barely formed images blanketed in the gray of the overcast sky. Crawling things? Mewling, kitten-like things crab-walking on the hard packed dirt floor? What monsters can a bunch of twigs conceal, for surely they conceal something else what purpose would they serve? Perhaps it’s a warning or a threat, something the locals left behind so that others may recognize it for its purpose? Or is it something sacred and not to be interfered with? Four feet now and from here he can still see the scarecrow, its lifeless arms and legs battling the rain fueled wind, and his arms ache from holding his rifle in the point position for so long, his eyesight blurring from sighting down the barrel to long. But his training makes him well aware of what could happen if he relents and just walks away. The curiosity that is too much an oddity to be anything other than a peculiarity would remain, and its use, it’s meaning, would simply vanish. What worth then is a soldier if he cannot reconnoiter? Reaching out a pink, almost leathery tongue to try and wet his lips, he decides that it’s now or never. Somewhere past the jagged wall of the building is the scarecrow figure, and beyond that is anything—or nothing at all, and which of the two are you really afraid of finding? It’s time to sink or swim, get or shit. It’s time to earn a paycheck. Quickly, sliding the last few feet to the doorway, he slams against the doorjamb with his backside taking a nasty bruise on the hip and he thrusts the barrel of his M-16 into the darkness of the room. Scanning the area quickly by moving the barrel of his rifle in a left to right fan-like motion, he’s surprised to find—nothing. The room is bare. The soldier mentally gives himself the all-clear sign. Next to him, a window is cut into the front wall adjacent to the front door with its glass having long since been blown away. It’s from there that the scarecrow twig thing first beaconed him with its mysteries. And below the window, is a crude infants cradle that looks to the soldier to have been hewn from the trunk of a single tree. It’s bare, not even a blanket remains as a reminder of its use. The soldier’s eyebrows contort into an unspoken comment. That’s Fine craftsmanship for such backward people, he thinks, and steps warily into the room. Directly over the cradle and tied with string to a roof support, the scarecrow like stick figure shifts mockingly. The soldier grins and lowers his weapon. It’s a child’s play thing; a hand made mobile meant to entertain its curious observer. Smiling, he walks over and with a dirtied hand festooned with blood-encrusted nails he pulls the toy free. For a kid, he thinks. A baby. He looks around the empty room and sees that the far wall has been knocked down, debris litters the floor and a pile of what looks like human feces sits rock-hard in a corner. The place looks long since deserted. I wonder what happened to it. Killed? Did the family make it out in time? Distracted by the thought the soldier places the toy into his blouse pocket, glad that he has no monster to confront. War really is a bitch, he thinks, and moves to clear the rest of the building. Ten minutes later the building is cleared and the soldier moves back outside. With the exception of the cradle and a soiled and torn mattress found in an interior room, (and the pile of shit in the corner), no existence of recent human occupation had been found. Whoever had lived there before the craziness had started had already bugged out. Gone. Maybe they got a better war offer from another country? The soldier considers seriously, after all, aren’t they losing this one? From the street the soldier listens as bombs fly overhead. They’re ba-ack, he thinks, in singsong fashion, half remembering a line from a favorite movie as he cocks his head curiously to hear the steady tattoo of rifle fire being spent about a click away. For about the hundredth time he wishes he had a radio so he could contact his team. The radio had been lost with Hanratty though, and it wasn’t likely that either the radio, or the radioman would ever be working again. There had been a firefight with lots of bullets, screaming, and men dying. Some of his team had made it to safety, the soldier included, but Hanratty hadn’t been so lucky. That’s where the soldier had begun his list—with Hanratty. The radioman had been gut shot and had died in the soldiers’ arms while crying for his momma. The skirmish, a quick, violent clashing of titans had occurred hours ago, maybe eight clicks west of the soldiers’ current position, and what had been left of his team had fled east, away from the city. The soldier had been cut off from the rest of his men and had wandered west, forced to avoid foot patrols and fly-bys by enemy helicopters. Along the way he’d encountered others of his kind, men who carried the flag and who killed with little empathy for those they killed. Many of those men had died too as they encountered more of the enemy; dark, little, chattering men in robes and long beards who talked monkey-talk and who could kill exactly like the men who carried the flag in their hearts. But Hanratty had been the first on the list and the soldier had continued to add to it as he made his slow trek across the burning sands of desert to this city, or village, or whatever it was that these curious little fellows in their long beards called it. Eighteen men in all had made the list. Eighteen men who had died in his arms while he patiently cajoled their names and bits of their lives from them before dying. Hanratty he’d known already. Short, squat, square shouldered with enormous, bruising forearms, he’d been a bear of a man from the state of Florida who’d enlisted because his father had been a soldier, and his Grandfather had been a soldier, and two of his uncles had been soldiers. “It’s what we do.” He’d once told the soldier as they shaved without benefit of mirrors or water. “It’s how we die.” The soldier always thought that Hanratty should have been a rock instead of a soldier because only rocks have the reserve to cause the stream of water to turn aside, and being a soldier wasn’t good enough for a man who believed in family before honor. Honor brings death too often and family keeps good men alive. Others he’d known too: Kuslik, Hanks, Petersen, McGoff, Timmons. All good men; too good to have their insides spilled out onto the ground of this wasted non-land with all its wealth stored up underground. But war takes even the most grand of souls and the War Gods had decided, in all their twisted and morbid sense of logic, that these men, these hero’s who walked a line too fine to even describe, should end up nothing but a few lines chiseled into granite headstones. Pitiful loses all. And somewhere along the dead line of men that the soldier had tried to coax life back into, he realized that the list had developed of it’s own accord. It was alive, writhing angrily in the back of his mind, spilling out over his rational mind to fall limply yet so very much provocatively into that part of the brain that catalogues, stores, defines and files. It was like information being downloaded at an amazing rate of speed for a purpose whose significance was so misty and transparent that the soldier could never get a firm grasp on it’s importance. But the list was there and its very existence meant that it was there for a purpose, for without purpose there can be no existence. And so the soldier had kept the list safe in his head, away from fire, water, or anything else that could destroy it. And while he skillfully made his way to this point, he had added to the list from those he met along the way until he had the lives of eighteen men stored away up there, easily accessible when needed, never forgotten as he pushed forever west hoping to meet up with someone, anyone, who could just get him back to where he belonged. The list is important, he knows, he just doesn’t know for what reason it’s so important. But he’s a soldier and he’s been taught patience, and when it’s time to understand, he knows, he trusts, that the War Gods will smile on him. The soldier smiles now as he pats his pockets until he finds his cigarettes, he pulls the pack free and with one hand he digs out his Zippo and thumbs the flame to life. Flies buzz as he puts the flame to tobacco, and then he’s inhaling the thick acrid smoke into his lungs. Replacing the lighter he unshoulders his pack and sits on it, taking a break in the middle of the square. His feet hurt. The bane of the grunt, he muses, enjoying the smoke. If it’s not the back, it’s the feet, and if it’s the feet, well, you might as well shuck it in. What’s a soldiers worth if he can’t march? About a plugged nickel, he decides, and turns his head to keep watch on the narrow street out of the courtyard. For the briefest of moments he sees eighteen shadows wavering in the distance like memories being dredged up from the basement of his mind. He shakes as a chill marches along his spine. From the sky comes the misting of rain. Not hard rain like before, but spray, like from the ocean. It’s as if the War Gods have graciously smiled upon the two warring tribes and have grudgingly allowed them only a very small inkling of their wrath. The soldier knows that they can be very malicious at times, forsaking benevolence for might, forgoing silence and replacing it with awe inspiring hell; they’re like fairies in the old tales, mischievous and damning when needed, affable and friendly when it suits their designs. The soldier hates the War Gods. They are spiteful, hateful Gods who torment rather than love. But he also understands them. After all, he is their servant and as such it is his place to understand their wants and needs. Quietly, he acquiesces and with a nod of his head as if to say, okay, okay, I’m going already, he stands quickly and gathers his pack from the ground. Once again he buckles it around his waist so that the web belt fits snugly across his belly and he does a sudden mental check of his list to make sure it’s still there, to confirm that everything is in order. Satisfied that his men are still with him and that they haven’t wandered off someplace to lurk teasingly in a corner of his mind he has no use for, the soldier picks up his rifle and moves easily through the court yard, this time being sure to keep watch on the silent buildings. They’re like lidless eyes, he thinks, staring at the gaping holes left by mortar rounds in the faces of the buildings. They’re watching me because they think I killed them. He abruptly stops and stretches his arms wide to either side of him, his rifle suspended by the slight crook of his right elbow. In the gray of the light, the image is Christ-like, the supplication symbolic. Without preamble he begins to whisper a prayer. The words come out slow and cautious because praying does not come easy to him anymore, it’s as foreign to him as is the blood soaked ground he walks, and he stumbles through the words like a child reciting the ABC’s for the very first time. The experience for him is--cleansing, though not comforting, and the soldier thinks to include his men from the list, but in the end he simply stops because he feels silly standing in the misty, gray afternoon praying to a deity he no longer believes in. Instead he drops his arms and damns the hell that has brought him here. I’ll never leave because the War Gods don’t want me to leave. He reaches for a cigarette, finds a dry match and blesses the angles that fire the smoke. Behind him, something scuttles into the darkness of a building and he spins around in a single fluid motion, his rifle at the ready, and his eyes slip into the killing shadow that he’s come to loathe. Patience, he’s learned, is part of killing, so he stands his ground, his weapon at the ready with the cigarette soaking up the mist. Something moves. The soldier narrows his eyes as he looks through the front sights and he frowns. Movement again like the fluttering of arms and the soldier fires a three round burst of ammunition into the building just opposite of him. The bullets rip through a curtain blowing in the breeze, the sound of the fired rounds bouncing off of the building walls, sounding grotesquely like children laughing. Once again the soldier exercises patience and waits. He’s been trained to react rather than to think, because thinking can get you killed and reacting can save your life, or so say the War Gods, and the soldier adheres to those words very strictly. They are his mantra. So without thinking the soldier fires another round into the curtains, this time running on full auto and the firing pin strikes an empty chamber in only a few seconds. This time its his own voice that cheats away quickly into the echoes and the sound is cheap, canned, theatrical, laughter. Maniacal. As if the soldier has separated from his body and allowed some thing to take over. His is the laughter of a man gone too far too soon and with little or no way of ever coming back. In every psyche there is a hastily scrawled line that one should never cross for fear of never being able to return, and right now the soldier is straddling that line.
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