The Children's War

by C. P. Boyko

  Formerly she had been too squeamish to loot the dead for souvenirs, but now she began to make a point of it. Each time, the approach was the dreadful part; she trudged toward the crumpled heap as toward some inconceivably gruesome evil; but each time, the horror, like fog, dissipated as she came near. She concluded that old rotting corpses were not what bothered her—and she resolved to confront a fresh one.

  One morning she heard that a member of Third Platoon had been crushed by an airdrop crate that she’d been trying to dislodge—had finally dislodged—from a tree. But by the time Sunachs arrived, the body had been carried down out of the hills by stretcher-bearers. A group of soldiers stood around the blood-splashed spot, grumbling. A piece of hairy scalp adhered to the intact crate, just below its Pineapples in Oil stencil. The sight did not much affect Sunachs—because, she supposed, she had not known the woman.

  A few weeks later, when the company was back in the rearward positions, her good friend Gedge was killed by the concussion from a shell. Sunachs spent half an hour with her body in the aid-station dugout. There wasn’t a mark on her, aside from some caked blood at the corner of her mouth. Sunachs felt desolate and angry but not afraid. Days later, when she permitted herself to think about it, she decided that Gedge’s death had been too sanitary to evoke any terror. Whereas the other bodies had looked too dead, Gedge had looked too alive. Sunachs had been unable to see her as a corpse.

  After a while, Sunachs forgot about her fear of dead bodies, and abandoned her study of them. She neither avoided them nor sought them out; she took only their bank­notes and valuables; she dreamed of them only occasionally. But when Lieutenant Farl was killed, the night they attacked the enemy outpost on Hill 68, Sunachs’s fear returned in a flood. Here was someone she loved, and his death was not sanitary.

  Farl, standing on the parapet and shouting to his troops below, was drilled in the torso by a burst of machine-gun fire. When, ages later, Sunachs and Vrail reached him, he was screaming silently, blood spurting from his mouth, his eyes as large as eggs. He kicked them with the force of a mule when they tried to put him on a stretcher. In the ghastly, spastic light of the flares, they did not realize at first that the lieutenant had been cut in half. When his body came apart in their hands, Sunachs recoiled in every muscle, and fell to the ground retching. This was the corpse of her nightmares. This corpse was still alive.

  Weeks later, Boorq came across Sunachs hacking at an enemy corpse with her bayonet. “I think they’re dead, buddy.” —Sunachs slowly backed away. “Just making sure,” she said.

  An Epitaph. —Fourth Platoon were removing spikes from a railroad. It was slow, back-breaking work, for which, as usual, they had been given no reasons. Presumably they were rendering the track unusable for the enemy, which meant that a reverse must be expected or a retreat planned—both dispiriting prospects. And this particular form of destruction afforded no opportunities for catharsis; it had none of the zest of burning down churches, booby-trapping basements, smashing valuables, or poisoning wells. Also, they had been provided with tools ill-suited to the task, they were constantly being interrupted by the trucks of a munitions column that continued to use the railway as a road to the main area of conflict, and it was midday, and hot.

  Fidget, shirtless and sweating and cursing, had been working on a single spike for ten minutes, and had nearly succeeded in prying it free with her corroded entrenching tool when a supply truck, tired of waiting, began blaring its horn at her. She ignored it, her brain meanwhile throbbing with the compound rage of the exploited laborer, the righteous martyr, and the lowly pedestrian harassed by the lordly motorist. At last she threw down her tool and tore her pistol from its holster; she would have begun firing into the windshield, but the driver had already descended. They faced each other for a moment; then their grimaces broke into grins, and they fell to grappling and yelping. They had been at the training depot together.

  Fidget and Tsetse had not been close friends, but basic training was the nearest thing to an upbringing that two soldiers could share. Each reminded the other nostalgically of home, and, erroneously, of peacetime. Smoking and teasing and marveling, they crouched in the shade of Tsetse’s truck and exchanged news, while the other drivers gunned their engines, craned their necks, and sighed.

  “Did you hear about Doakus?” asked Tsetse suddenly. —Fidget laughed, at the mere mention of this name, as if an old burden had been unexpectedly shed. “Don’t tell me she’s an officer!” This was a joke; but a charming absurdity adhered to Fidget’s idea of Doakus, making the joke seem not at all unlikely. The truth, however, was more absurd, and all too likely: Doakus, of course, was dead.

  For the rest of the day, Fidget groped irritably through a fog. Doakus dead. How could that be? Fidget had seen friends wounded, probably fatally; she had seen the corpses of animals, of locals, and of soldiers unknown to her; before the war, she had attended the funerals of her grandmother, a cousin, and a schoolmate; but she had never before felt so vividly the proximity and indiscriminateness of death.

  Joan Doakus had been husky, robust, and good-looking, but so altogether without guile, conceit, or indeed introspection that everyone who met her liked her. Even her famous laziness was endearing, for it had no root in weakness, but on the contrary seemed the natural product of her implacable good humor. She could, when pressed, and as it were for a lark, double-time up a mountain under full kit; but it was more pleasant to lie atop one’s gear in the valley—so why pretend? There was something inspiring and almost invigorating in her lassitude; she took the path of least resistance as a sail takes wind. Because she never doubted her place in the universe, she had no need of a personal providence; indifferent to omens, curses, and godsends, she accepted both windfalls and setbacks with amused equanimity, tracking the flight of her own fortunes like a birdwatcher. Her serenity was contagious, and baffled and balked even the drill sergeants, who found it impossible, or perhaps pointless, to punish her. Fidget still recalled in amazement the only time they ever heard Staff Sergeant Haoubess laugh. Having found in her locker a contraband letter and photograph from Doakus’s boyfriend, he had berated her viciously for ten minutes, denigrating her patriotism, her intelligence, and even her taste in men; he had concluded, like a jealous parent, by forbidding her to associate with such a feeble, pimply, sloppy young man. Her reply from any other recruit would have drawn a court-martial. “Unfortunately, sir, I doubt I’ll ever get me as nice a man as you.”

  But in general, there had been few transgressions to punish, for everyone in the unit helped to cover for Doakus and to keep her squared away. She was for them like a pet, a sister, and a daughter. They made allowances for her; they were proud of her; she brought out the best in them.

  Her eyes blinked asynchronously. She denied that she snored. She could throw a knife with great accuracy. She was proud of her bowel movements, which were “as regular as sheet music.” She confessed to incestuous feelings for her brother, who was a lawyer and a married father. She was a born debater, and was always playing devil’s advocate—to provoke others, but also to challenge them. “No one ever got very far on one leg,” she liked to say. She believed everything, and so could question everything—especially orders. She did not smoke, but she sucked on a pipe, and liked to punctuate her pronouncements with its moistened stem. She knew one line of poetry, which she recited at every opportunity. She was twenty-one years old. She was dead.

  That night, Fidget awoke in the dark to a feeling of suffocation. She thrashed free of her sleeping bag, then lay there gasping, her mind racing haphazardly. She felt that Doakus was a problem that needed solving, but one from which she could not stand back sufficiently to even see. She slogged through a mire of repetitious platitudes: such a shame; before her time; her poor family; a better place . . . She was trying to glean something from her friend’s death, a lesson or a moral; she was searching for a vantage from which to view it, or a frame in which to place it. W
hen at last, just before dawn, she fell back asleep, she had arrived at no conclusion; but the troubled part of her mind had exhausted itself, so that she felt an illusory repose, as of satisfaction. Probably everything is all right after all, she thought, and her thoughts went no deeper.

  But in the morning, she seemed to be in possession of the answer. She recalled what Tsetse had said when asked how Doakus had died. “Who knows? Probably a shell, like everybody else.” Then she had offered in extenuation this fact, which Fidget now saw as the woman’s epitaph: “She wasn’t much of a soldier, I’m afraid.”

  That day the First/Fourth replaced the spikes they had removed the day before. No one knew or wondered why.

  The Cook-Up. —After three days of footslogging through tangled forest concealing treacherous terrain, C Platoon lost radio contact with command. Lieutenant Ryyss called a halt and conferred with Culverson, the radio operator.

  “It’s because we’re down in the valley,” she told him. —“We were in a valley yesterday,” Ryyss observed. —“Yes, but there was cloud cover then.” —Ryyss said nothing, betraying neither understanding nor failure to understand. —Gently Culverson explained, “The transmission bounces off the clouds, which extends your range.”

  Ryyss looked at the sky resentfully. He had been a lieutenant, and platoon leader, for only five days, and he felt the disconnection from higher authority as keenly as a severed thumb. For three days he had received orders every eight hours to continue marching for another eight hours. Now, in the absence of new orders, was he to stop, or to go on? Of their ultimate objective he knew only that they were to rendezvous with D, E, and F Platoons somewhere near Burzgao, still two or three days away if they maintained their current speed. He could send Culverson and a squad back up the hill to reestablish radio contact, but if anything happened to them, if they got lost, he would be without a radio, without orders, several days’ march from a friendly position, and at two-thirds strength—less, in fact, for they were already seven soldiers short of a full platoon. Alternatively, he could lead everyone back up the hill, but that would mean a delay of five or six hours. If the sky were to become cloudy in that time, he would actually do better to stay put. He was reluctant, however, to order a rest. New to command, he did not feel that he was doing his job unless his troops were active—which was why they had marched so far, and slept so little, in the last seventy-two hours.

  Privates Kellek and Tolb came forward to ask permission, if there was time, to pick some berries they had spotted in the vicinity. —“You’ve identified them?,” Ryyss asked. “They’re edible?” —“Yes, Lieutenant,” said Kellek. “That is, I performed the combat-pragmatic edibility test on them.” In fact, Kellek had curtailed this test, which normally required two days and involved gradually increasing one’s exposure to the potential food source, from handling to tasting to holding in the mouth to chewing and finally to swallowing. What Kellek had done was eat a handful of the berries the day before; today she felt fine, or in any case no worse.

  The request gave Ryyss an idea. He knew that everyone was fed up with the ABC rations, which some joked had not just Already Been Cooked, but Already Been Chewed—or even, in the case of the despised pineapples in oil, Already Been Crapped. Florze, their de facto field cook, had subjected the nutritious but flavorless contents of the zippered packets to a variety of preparations: she had stewed them, fried them, boiled them, cooked them down to sludge or to cinders, made soup or tea from them, and roasted them on skewers over burning plastique; she had requisitioned for spice or seasoning every available substance, including rifle grease, antifogging gel, malaria pills, aspirin, shaving cream, and the faintly perfumed antiseptic napkins from their first-aid kits; and she had combined the rations every way possible, in every permutation and in every ratio: she had mixed coffee with sausage, brandy peaches with pork noodles, curried beans with carrot cake, sugar and cinnamon dumplings with fish balls, and, on one memorable occasion, all the above fried into a massive omelette. No preparation, however, could alleviate the monotony. And the monotony had only been exacerbated by the latest airdrop, which, due to an oversight or to whimsy, had contained nothing but pineapples in oil.

  Lieutenant Ryyss called the platoon together. Placing his hand on the trunk of a tree, he said, “This is platoon HQ. Be back at HQ by thirteen hundred—that’s a little over two hours. Bring back whatever food you can find. This is not an exercise. This is victualing in the field. Travel in pairs or small groups. Remember: Leaves of three, let them be. And, uh, no toads or snakes. That’s all. Don’t get lost. Dismissed.”

  Within five minutes, the woods all around were crackling with rifle shots, and Ryyss realized that he should have imposed fire silence. He did not think that there was enemy in the area, but one never knew. Popping a week-old quid of tea leaves into his mouth, he pulled out his maps and studied them moodily, and needlessly.

  After firing their rifles a few times to relieve tension, the soldiers fanned out, for the most part singly, to each pursue their own private act of foraging, hunting, or leisure. Osini spent an hour constructing a snare with communication wire, and an hour peacefully watching it. Laskantan climbed a tree and, no other prey being visible, followed the movements of her fellow soldiers through her sights. Vrail discovered a deer run, which she followed on tiptoe for several miles, knife in hand. Culverson sat in the shade and peeled a hundred sumac shoots, most of which she ate. Sunachs, Raof, and Klipton, independently, found secluded dells in which to masturbate and nap. Sergeant Montazo, a few steps at a time, stalked a pheasant all the way to its roost; then, lowering her field glasses for the lunge, she blindly seized a stone instead. Frustrated, she tossed a grenade into a pond, and collected as many of the dead fish that floated to the surface as she could carry.

  Others had some success too. Kellek and Tolb returned with several quarts of berries. Sergeant Gijalfur, covered in gore, came back with some animal’s antlers, in lieu of any more edible part, for there had not been time to drag the carcass back to the headquarters tree, and no mere piece of meat would have done justice to the beast’s size. Solzi succeeded in netting two chatty, brightly plumaged birds, which she refused to let Florze butcher. Pannak and Boorq, grinning triumphantly, brought back nine bludgeoned hares on a string. But the most popular catch proved to be Narran and Alcott’s bucketful of worms and beetle grubs, which, crushed to a paste and flavored with some of the gingerroot and laurel leaves that Florze had found, made delicious burgerlike patties.

  By the time they had finished eating, it was late afternoon and the sky had clouded over. The radio was working again, and Lieutenant Ryyss received his orders to continue marching towards Burzgao. The platoon had to admit that, though he would never measure up to Lieutenant Farl, Ryyss was not such a bad guy after all. He even allowed them to sing a little, till they began the ascent out of the valley.

  “We’ve got tanks for shooting guns and guns that shoot

  tanks;

  We’ve got bombers that drop bombs on anti-aircraft.

  But a gun that riddles hunger I’d wield with thanks,

  Or a bomb that blasts fatigue or boondoggles daft.

  Weapons galore have we got in store

  For friends and for good jobs well done;

  Imagine what fun inventing a gun

  That kills loneliness, fuckups, and war!”

  At dusk they walked into an ambush.

  Pannak, Vrail, Florze, and Culverson were killed.

  Ryyss blamed himself, and the cook-up, which had made everyone lax and complacent.

  Classroom Ambush. —Two Words hated new fucks. She also hated generals, MPs, KPs, and journalists; she hated husbands, cooks, civilians, and all the leprous cunts of Second/Third Platoon; and she had her trademark “just two words” to say about the air force, who were “a bunch of blind and titless brain-dead cocksucking shitpigs.” But for new fucks she felt a special contempt, as pur
e and consuming as fire. New fucks were repugnantly fresh, well fed, and spruce, and they made the old fucks look shabby and ill by comparison. They kept themselves and their gear clean and tidy, as if they were still on parade-ground. They were cocky and inexperienced, a deadly combination. On patrols they were loud and clumsy, and invariably took unsighted cover, from which they could provide assistance to no one. They accepted witlessly all the official propaganda about the progress of the war, the righteousness of their cause, the superiority of their weaponry, the gratitude of the locals, and the craven ignobility of the enemy. Worst of all, they knew nothing, cared nothing, about the soldiers, wounded and dead, that they had come to replace. Two Words curated a secret ledger of the members of First/Fourth Platoon, and, to her, each new name inscribed therein was an attack on history; each new arrival represented the desecration of a beloved friend’s memory.

  New Fuck Nebel was a quintessential example of her class. She buffed her boots, wore her helmet in the bunker, and stood watch with bayonet fixed. She couldn’t wait to get into a firefight; she couldn’t wait to blast the brains out of some invaders’ skulls. Two Words, listening to this, gritted her teeth for a minute, then exploded. “What the fuck do you know about a firefight, pussy fuzz? What they tell you at basic; what you’ve seen in the movies. You don’t know shit about shit, so why don’t you shut your fucking spunkguzzler.” —To avert a brawl, Christmas Tree defended Nebel. “She’s just a little trigger-horny, T.W. She’s got the whore’s itch. She’ll get over it. Give her a break.” —Two Words ignored this. “And ‘invaders’? What the fuck do you know about motherfucking invaders? There are exactly two kinds of enemy soldiers you’re going to see in this war: the dead ones, and the ones trying very hard and very skilfully to fucking kill you. I’ve got exactly two words of advice for you: stay the fuck away from all of them, and you’ll be a whole fuckload better off.” —Nebel objected, “But it’s our job. It’s our duty. We’re trained, and ready, and paid to kill the bitches.” —“Don’t even,” said Two Words. “The shit coming out of your mouth makes me want to puke out of my fucking ass.” —“Aw,” said Nebel, “you’re just scared.”