War Stories

by Andrew Liptak

  I myself was horizontal and aspiring to be subterranean. I managed to get my pistol out and cocked, but realized I didn’t want to do anything that might draw attention to us. The machine gun was spraying back and forth over us at about knee height. Maybe they couldn’t see us; maybe they thought we were dead. I was scared shitless.

  “Frenchy,” I stage–whispered, “we’ve got to get outa here.” He was trying to wrap his finger up in a standard first–aid–pack gauze bandage, much too large. “Get back to the trees.”

  “After you, asshole. We wouldn’t get halfway.” He worked his pistol out of the holster, but couldn’t cock it, his left hand clamping the bandage and slippery with blood. I armed it for him and handed it back. “These are going to do a hell of a lot of good. How are you with grenades?”

  “Shit. How you think I wound up in Graves?” In basic training, they’d put me on KP whenever they went out for live grenade practice. In school, I was always the last person when they chose up sides for baseball, for the same reason—though, to my knowledge, a baseball wouldn’t kill you if you couldn’t throw far enough. “I couldn’t get one halfway there.” The tree line was about sixty yards away.

  “Neither could I, with this hand.” He was a lefty.

  Behind us came the “poink” sound of a sixty–millimeter mortar, and in a couple of seconds, there was a gray–smoke explosion between us and the tree line. The machine gun stopped, and somebody behind us yelled, “Add twenty!”

  At the tree line, we could hear some shouting in Vietnamese, and a clanking of metal. “They’re gonna bug out,” Frenchy said. “Let’s di–di.”

  We got up and ran, and somebody did fire a couple of bursts at us, probably an AK–47, but he missed, and then there were a series of poinks and a series of explosions pretty close to where the gun had been.

  We rushed back to the LZ and found the command group about the time the firing started up again. There was a first lieutenant in charge, and when things slowed down enough for us to tell him what had happened to the major, he expressed neither surprise nor grief. The man had been an observer from Battalion and had assumed command when their captain was killed that morning. He’d take our word for it that the guy was dead—that was one thing we were trained observers in—and not send a squad out for him until the fighting had died down and it was light again.

  We inherited the major’s hole, which was nice and deep, and in his rucksack found a dozen cans and jars of real food and a flask of scotch. So, as the battle raged through the night, we munched pâté on Ritz crackers, pickled herring in sour–cream sauce, little Polish sausages on party rye with real French mustard. We drank all the scotch and saved the beer for breakfast.

  For hours, the lieutenant called in for artillery and air support, but to no avail. Later, we found out that the enemy had launched coordinated attacks on all the local airfields and Special Forces camps, and every camp that held POWs. We were much lower priority.

  Then, about three in the morning, Snoopy came over. Snoopy was a big C–130 cargo plane that carried nothing but ammunition and Gatling guns; they said it could fly over a football field and put a round into every square inch. Anyhow, it saturated the perimeter with fire, and the enemy stopped shooting. Frenchy and I went to sleep.

  At first light, we went out to help round up the KIAs. There were only four dead, counting the major, but the major was an astounding sight, at least in context.

  He looked sort of like a cadaver left over from a teaching autopsy. His shirt had been opened and his pants pulled down to his thighs, and the entire thoracic and abdominal cavities had been ripped open and emptied of everything soft, everything from esophagus to testicles, rib cage like blood–streaked fingers sticking rigid out of sagging skin, and there wasn’t a sign of any of the guts anywhere, just a lot of dried blood.

  Nobody had heard anything. There was a machine–gun position not twenty yards away, and they’d been straining their ears all night. All they’d heard was flies.

  Maybe an animal feeding very quietly. The body hadn’t been opened with a scalpel or a knife; the skin had been torn by teeth or claws—but seemingly systematically, throat to balls.

  And the dry one was gone. Him with the pointed teeth.

  There is one rational explanation. Modern warfare is partly mindfuck, and we aren’t the only ones who do it, dropping unlucky cards, invoking magic and superstition. The Vietnamese knew how squeamish Americans were, and would mutilate bodies in clever ways. They could also move very quietly. The dry one? They might have spirited him away just to fuck with us. Show what they could do under our noses.

  And as for the dry one’s odd, mummified appearance, the mold, there might be an explanation. I found out that the Montagnards in that area don’t bury their dead; they put them in a coffin made from a hollowed–out log and leave them aboveground. So maybe he was just the victim of a grave robber. I thought the nearest village was miles away, like twenty miles, but I could have been wrong. Or the body could have been carried that distance for some obscure purpose—maybe the VC set it out on the trail to make the Americans stop in a good place to be ambushed.

  That’s probably it. But for twenty years now, several nights a week, I wake up sweating with a terrible image in my mind. I’ve gone out with a flashlight, and there it is, the dry one, scooping steaming entrails from the major’s body, tearing them with its sharp teeth, staring into my light with black empty sockets, unconcerned. I reach for my pistol, and it’s never there. The creature stands up, shiny with blood, and takes a step toward me—for a year or so, that was it; I would wake up. Then it was two steps, and then three. After twenty years it has covered half the distance and its dripping hands are rising from its sides.

  The doctor gives me tranquilizers. I don’t take them. They might help me stay asleep.

  WARTIME SYSTEMS

  In the Loop

  Ken Liu

  WHEN KYRA WAS NINE, HER father turned into a monster.

  It didn’t happen overnight. He went to work every morning, like always, and when he came in the door in the evening, Kyra would ask him to play catch with her. That used to be her favorite time of the day. But the yesses came less frequently, and then not at all.

  He’d sit at the table and stare. She’d ask him questions and he wouldn’t answer. He used to always have a funny answer for everything, and she’d repeat his jokes to her friends and think he was the cleverest dad in the whole world.

  She had loved those moments when he’d teach her how to swing a hammer properly, how to measure and saw and chisel. She would tell him that she wanted to be a builder when she grew up, and he’d nod and say that was a good idea. But he stopped taking her to his workshop in the shed to make things together, and there was no explanation.

  Then he started going out in the evenings. At first, Mom would ask him when he’d be back. He’d look at her like she was a stranger before closing the door behind him. By the time he came home, Kyra and her brothers were already in bed, but she would hear shouts and sometimes things breaking.

  Mom began to look at Dad like she was afraid of him, and Kyra tried to help with getting the boys to bed, to make her bed without being asked, to finish her dinner without complaint, to do everything perfectly, hoping that would make things better, back to the way they used to be. But Dad didn’t seem to pay any attention to her or her brothers.

  Then, one day, he slammed Mom into the wall. Kyra stood there in the kitchen and felt the whole house shake. She didn’t know what to do. He turned around and saw Kyra, and his face scrunched up like he hated her, hated her mother, hated himself most of all. And he fled the house without saying another thing.

  Mom packed a suitcase and took Kyra and her brothers to Grandma’s place that evening, and they stayed there for a month. Kyra thought about calling her father but she didn’t know what she would say. She tried to imagine herself asking the man on the other end of the line what have you done with Daddy?

  A policeman ca
me, looking for her mother. Kyra hid in the hall so she could hear what he was telling her. We don’t think it was a homicide. That was how she found out that her father had died.

  They moved back to the house, where there was a lot to do: folding up Dad’s uniforms for storage, packing up his regular clothes to give away, cleaning the house so it could be sold, getting ready to move away permanently. She caressed Dad’s medals and badges, shiny and neatly laid out in a box, and that was when she finally cried.

  They found a piece of paper at the bottom of Dad’s dresser drawer.

  “What is it?” she asked Mom.

  Mom read it over. “It’s from your Dad’s commander, at the Army.” Her hands shook. “It shows how many people he had killed.”

  She showed Kyra the number: one thousand two–hundred and fifty–one.

  The number lingered in Kyra’s mind. As if that gave his life meaning. As if that defined him—and them.

  §

  Kyra walked quickly, pulling her coat tight against the late fall chill.

  It was her senior year in college, and on–campus recruiting was in full swing. Because Kyra’s school was old and full of red brick buildings named after families that had been wealthy and important even before the founding of this republic, its students were desirable to employers.

  She was on her way back to her apartment from a party hosted by a small quantitative trading company in New York that was generating good buzz on campus. Companies in management consulting, financial services, and Silicon Valley had booked hotel rooms around the school and were hosting parties for prospective interviewees every night, and Kyra, as a comp sci major, found herself in high demand. This was the night when she would need to finalize her list of ranked preferences, and she had to strategize carefully to have a shot at getting one of the interview slots for the most coveted companies in the lottery.

  “Excuse me,” a young man stepped in her way. “Would you sign this petition?”

  She looked at the clipboard held in front of her. Stop the War.

  Technically, America wasn’t at war. There had been no declaration of war by Congress, just the president exercising his office’s inherent authority. But maybe the war had never stopped. America left; America went back; America promised to leave again some time. A decade had passed; people kept on dying far away.

  “I’m sorry,” Kyra said, not looking the boy in the eyes. “I can’t.”

  “Are you for the war?” The boy’s voice was tired, the incredulity almost an act. He was there canvassing for signatures alone in the evening because no one cared. When so few Americans died, the “conflict” didn’t seem real.

  How could she explain to him that she did not believe in the war, did not want to have anything to do with it, and yet, signing the petition the boy held would seem to her tantamount to a betrayal of the memory of her father, would seem a declaration that what he had done was wrong? She did not want him to be defined by the number on that piece of paper her mother kept hidden at the bottom of the box in the attic.

  So all she said was, “I’m not into politics.”

  Back in her apartment, Kyra took off her coat and flipped on the TV.

  …the largest protest so far in front of the American Embassy. Protestors are demanding that the U.S. cease the drone strikes, which so far have caused more than three hundred deaths in the country this year, many of whom the protestors claim were innocent civilians. The U.S. Ambassador…

  Kyra turned off the TV. Her mood had been ruined, and she could not focus on the task of ranking her interview preferences. Agitated, she tried to clean the apartment, scrubbing the sink vigorously to drive the images in her mind away.

  As she had grown older, Kyra had read and seen every interview with other drone operators who suffered from PTSD. In the faces of those men, she had searched for traces of her father.

  I sat in an air–conditioned office and controlled the drone with a joystick while watching on a monitor what the drone camera saw. If a man was suspected of being the enemy, I had to make a decision and pull the trigger and then zoom in and watch as the man’s body parts flew around the screen as the rest of him bled out, until his body cooled down and disappeared from the infrared camera.

  Kyra turned on the faucet and held her hands under the hot water, as if she could wash off the memory of her father coming home every evening: silent, sullen, gradually turning into a stranger.

  Every time, you wonder: Did I kill the right person? Was the sack on that man’s back filled with bombs or just some hunks of meat? Were those three men trying to set up an ambush or were they just tired and taking a break behind those rocks by the road? You kill a hundred people, a thousand people, and sometimes you find out afterwards that you were wrong, but not always.

  “You were a hero,” Kyra said. She wiped her face with her wet hands. The water was hot against her face and she could pretend it was all just water.

  No. You don’t understand. It’s different from shooting at someone when they’re also shooting at you, trying to kill you. You don’t feel brave pushing a button to kill people who are not in uniform, who look like they’re going for a visit with a friend, when you’re sitting thousands of miles away, watching them through a camera. It’s not like a video game. And yet it also is. You don’t feel like a hero.

  “I miss you. I wish I could have understood.”

  Every day, after you’re done with killing, you get up from your chair and walk out of the office building and go home. Along the way you hear the birds chittering overhead and see teenagers walking by, giggling or moping, self–absorbed in their safe cocoons, and then you open the door to your home. Your spouse wants to tell you about her annoying boss and your children are waiting for you to help them with their homework, and you can’t tell them a thing you’ve done.

  I think either you become crazy or you already were.

  She did not want him to be defined by the number on that piece of paper her mother kept hidden at the bottom of the box in the attic.

  “They counted wrong, Dad,” Kyra said. “They missed one death.”

  §

  Kyra walked down the hall dejectedly. She was done with her last interview of the day—a hot Silicon Valley startup. She had been nervous and distracted and had flubbed the brainteaser. It had been a long day and she didn’t get much sleep the night before.

  She was almost at the elevator when she noticed an interview schedule posted on the door of the suite next to the elevator for a company named AWS Systems. It hadn’t been completely filled. A few of the slots on the bottom were blank; that generally meant an undesirable company.

  She took a closer look at the recruiting poster. They did something related to robotics. There were some shots of office buildings on a landscaped, modern campus. Bullet points listed competitive salary and benefits. Not flashy, but it seemed attractive enough. Why weren’t people interested?

  Then she saw it: “Candidates need to pass screening for security clearance.” That would knock out many of her classmates who weren’t U.S. citizens. And it likely meant government contracts. Defense, probably. She shuddered. Her family had had enough of war.

  She was about to walk away when her eyes fell on the last bullet point on the poster: “Relieve the effects of PTSD on our heroes.”

  She wrote her name on one of the blank lines and sat down on the bench outside the door to wait.

  §

  “You have impressive credentials,” the man said, “the best I’ve seen all day, actually. I already know we’ll want to talk to you some more. Do you have any questions?”

  This was what Kyra had been waiting for all along. “You’re building robotic systems to replace human–controlled drones, aren’t you? For the war.”

  The recruiter smiled. “You think we’re Cyberdyne Systems?”

  Kyra didn’t laugh. “My father was a drone operator.”

  The man became serious. “I can’t reveal any classified information. So we have to
speak only in hypotheticals. Hypothetically, there may be advantages to using autonomous robotic systems over human–operated machines. Robots.”

  “Like what? It can’t be about safety. The drone operators are perfectly safe back here. You think machines will fight better?”

  “No, we’re not interested in making ruthless killer robots. But we shouldn’t make people do the jobs that should be done by machines.”

  Kyra’s heart beat faster. “Tell me more.”

  “There are many reasons why a machine makes a better soldier than a human. A human operator has to make decisions based very limited information: just what he can see from a video feed, sometimes alongside intelligence reports. Deciding whether to shoot when all you have to go on is the view from a shaking camera and confusing, contradictory intel is not the kind of thinking humans excel at. There’s too much room for error. An operator might hesitate too long and endanger an innocent, or he might be too quick on the trigger and violate the rules of engagement. Decisions by different operators would be based on hunches and emotions and at odds with each other. It’s inconsistent and inefficient. Machines can do better.”

  Worst of all, Kyra thought, a human can be broken by the experience of having to decide.

  “If we take these decisions away from people, make it so that individuals are out of the decision–making loop, the result should be less collateral damage and a more humane, more civilized form of warfare.”

  But all Kyra could think was: No one would have to do what my father did.