by Weston Ochse
Mike 2 knew it better than all of them. He’d been a Baptist preacher, married with three kids in some podunkity place in Arkansas when he’d figured out one day that he was gay and couldn’t continue to live the life he lived. He divorced his wife, gave her everything, resigned from the church, and joined the Army. He could have come in as a chaplain’s assistant, but he became a grunt like me. When I asked him why, he said, “I was once a foot soldier for Christ, now I’m a foot soldier for the American people. I think both them and Christ are pretty much oblivious to my dedication, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is in here,” he’d said pointing at his heart.
That same heart gave out during a skirmish in Karbala. Mike 2 was thirty-four when he joined. He’d lost sixty pounds and was in perfect condition. But his heart had been the victim of years’ investment in pastries and wine and didn’t reflect his current state.
I held him as he died. He joked about the movie Heathers, where the burly father says to a church filled with people, I love my dead gay son.
When he saw I was crying, he cupped my face and I looked at him and in that moment, I loved him more than anyone else in the world.
“This isn’t your fault. None of it is your fault. People die. Shit happens. Don’t be that fucker who survives and feels guilty. If you survive, you should live. In Corinthians, it says, Be sorrowful, but always rejoice. Rejoice in the idea that we died with you by our side. We died with your friendship.”
And then he passed.
I realized I’d been blubbering for some time. I wasn’t sure how long, but a pool of tears had gathered on the floor between my feet. I rubbed my nose with the back of an arm and got up and walked across the room. I grabbed the ear bud and put it in. I waited silently for the person who was speaking to stop.
When they did, I began. And I told them about my friends. And I told them how much I loved them. And then I told them about the bridge and what I’d tried to do.
And then it was someone else’s turn.
The alien culture in C.J. Cherryh’s Faded Sun trilogy is very similar to the Muslim culture. Do you believe that if every soldier had read this before combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, their reactions to those countries’ peoples and customs would be different?
TF OMBRA Study Question
CHAPTER NINE
CATHARSIS.
An Army chaplain explained it as going through an event which transforms you. My platoon sergeant said it was like being eaten whole by a lion and coming out the other end more or less intact. Regardless of how one described the word, it meant pain, pain, pain, then an acceptance of pain, then spending your entire life attempting to live with a journey you never asked for but finally understood.
I’d stood with my head leaning against my cell for hours, staring at the great expanse of floor. I stood there long enough for the cold to creep into my brain, numbing it. I stood there long enough for Rodney to come again and see if I was hungry, then leave with a few somber beeps. I stood there long enough to see another of our merry troop of world saviors be dragged across the floor, his hair sliding behind him and leaving a trail of blood as our all-purpose robot pulled him indelicately by his heels across the wide, empty floor and through the door in the far wall, before returning to clean away the evidence.
I went back to my bunk and lay on the ground so that I could see the wire. Catharsis. Eaten by the war, shit out the other side, and left to stink by the side of the road. Lion shit. That was me all over. What was clearer than any other feeling was the hatred I felt for myself.
I gripped the underside of the bed. My hands slipped off the mattress at first and I had to find just the right hand holds. Finally, I was able to pull myself up in a reverse pushup so that the end of the bent wire was a mere inch from my eyeball. I was strong and fit, so holding myself wasn’t an issue. All it would take was a solid jerk and I could put the piece of wire through my eye. If I hesitated, or if I didn’t commit, I’d just blind myself. I had to pull hard. A solid jerk, like a pull up, would do it; as long as I could jam the wire deep enough into my brain it would free me from my friends. I said goodbye to Mike, Mike 2, Jesus, Todd, Isaiah, Nathan, Steve, Frank, Lashonne, Jim and Brian. I said goodbye to their memories, to their stories of home and their favorite movies and books, to their favorite foods, their tales of sexual conquest and pretences at prowess, to their fears and loneliness, their family photos, their service to their country, to their friendship and their death.
Then I jerked upwards.
Or I wanted to.
Death has many faces and I’ve seen hundreds of them. Some people believe in angels, some believe in devils, but as far as I knew, no one believed in a robot named Rodney. As I lay wracked with emotion, barely able to breathe, Rodney stood silent at the bars of my cage, my anthropomorphic needs creating a nurturing and tender being in the place of the logic-brained metal and silicon construct who was as much our jailer as he was our feeder. He didn’t beep. He didn’t buzz. He just stared.
Catharis.
Lion food.
Lion shit.
When the edge of self-pity stole into my grief, I found my way to my feet. It was hard at first, but I finally made it, like a drunken sailor getting his balance on the high seas.
And Rodney was still there.
Realization crept into my thoughts. Rodney wasn’t there to help me. It was a machine. It was there to remove me, like a piece of trash.
“What?” I shouted.
Nary a beep.
“What the fuck do you want, you fucking R2D2-wannabe? What are you waiting for, you mechanical vulture? You want to drag another one of us out? You want to witness us at our very fucking worst?”
I ran at the bars. I slammed into them before I could grab him, of course. My nose exploded with blood. Instead of covering it with my hands, I gripped the bars with the power invested in me from three wars, eleven deaths and a lifetime of suicidal thoughts.
“You know!” I craned back my head and laughed. As it rang through our prison, it slid towards a cackle. But I couldn’t help it. The realization was too much. “You know about the wire! What is it? Did Mr. Pink and the rest of you have a pool? Was I next? Were you waiting for me to kill myself so you could pass each other money and laugh about how fucked up we are?”
“Shut the fuck up,” someone yelled.
“Fuck you! You shut the fuck up, you fucking fuck!” I glared at Rodney, now fully anthropomorphized into everyone I ever hated. “You think a few sad tales of woe from the rest of these suicidal rejects is going to make me end it all? Do you really think I’d be so weak that I’ll kill myself just to pleasure your sadistic ideas of saving the world? Hey, I have an idea. Let’s pick the most fucked-up soldiers from every corner of the planet right at the moment they’re about to kill themselves, then tell them they can save the world, only to lock them up in some godforsaken prison beneath the most godforsaken state anyone’s never been from. And hey! Just to make sure, let’s have each of our sorry asses weep into a magic tablet that can cure all of our wounds if only we believe that we deserve to live, that our friends deserved to die, and that God didn’t make some immense fucking mistake, you know, like he did when he invented cyanide, midget bowling, internet porn and starving people in Africa.”
“Dude, we can hear you,” a man’s voice shouted.
“Will you please shut up?” someone else said, the words barely intelligible amidst her sobbing.
I backed away from the bars. My hands and arms were shaking. I felt something wet on my face. I reached up and wiped away blood from my nose.
Rodney turned around on its tracks and headed out of the room by its usual route.
I guess they’d seen what they wanted to see.
I guess they’d had enough.
I staggered back to my bunk and curled up, my hands between my thighs, facing the wall. I let my nose bleed, the cold wetness the only thing that reminded me I was alive, a dull ache in the very center of my soul.
Sir Winston Churchill
CHAPTER TEN
“BETWEEN FEELING SORRY for oneself and pure hatred is a chasm of responsibility few cross. Feeling sorry is the easiest of emotions, allowing a person to believe that it was the enemy, the victims, and the universe that had conspired to cause an action, rather than something they did. To get through to the purity of self-loathing, however, one must tread the treacherous path through realization and truth, reliving and recounting what it was they’d done that had caused the actions to be true. And it is only through this journey that a man or woman can truly find themselves. Although they’ll face self-hatred, it is a mirror which can be broken, and once shattered, provides a path through self-realization, allowing the person to live free of the action with an understanding of their own limitations.”
I awoke and sat up, wondering who’d been speaking. Then the voice came again.
“Between feeling sorry for oneself and pure hatred...”
I reached up and grabbed at my ear, only to find that the earpiece had been replaced. I snatched it away and stared at it, wondering how I’d come to be wearing it. My eyes darted to the shelf where I’d left it. Of course it wasn’t there. I checked the bed and saw that it was perfectly made. Then I remembered my bloody nose. There should have been a stain on the sheet. I felt at my face, but there was no blood. I got up, ignoring the stiff complaints from my legs, and padded to the mirror. My face was clean. In fact, it had been shaved. I felt at my nose. It still felt tender, which gave me some relief. At least I wasn’t imagining the whole event. But I knew someone had been in my cell without me knowing. To clean me up meant they’d have to have used drugs. I rubbed my hand across my face and stared at the eyes in my metal reflection. They looked clear. I felt good, actually.
Then the full memory of what I’d almost done came back to me. I closed my mouth and gritted my teeth. I ran the water, putting my hands under it just as they began to shake. I held them beneath the flow as I stared into the mirror and met my own gaze, the words coming back to me.
“Although they’ll face self-hatred, it is a mirror which can be broken, and once shattered, provides a path through self-realization, allowing the person to live free of the action with an understanding of their own limitations.”
I realized I could recount the entire passage. It was part of me now. How many times had it played while I was unconscious? What other things had they fed me—fed us—unconsciously?
“Mr. Mason. I’d like you to come with me, please.”
My gaze shifted to where Mr. Pink stood outside my cell. As I watched, the bars disappeared into the floor and ceiling. He regarded me for a moment, then turned and walked away. I hurriedly dried my hands and followed him. Instead of turning to my right, which would have been the way I came in, we turned to the left, heading for a door at the far end of the great room. Mr. Pink moved at a fast clip, his wingtips ticking quickly across the floor. I tried to keep up as best I could, but my mind was still trying to come to terms with the sudden change. My universe had grown from the size of a cell, to the size of this big room, and would soon explode to the size of total freedom. Check that. While I might be allowed out in the world, I was pretty certain my leash would be on, perhaps tightly wrapped around Mr. Pink’s fist.
I glanced at my neighbors, seeing them for the first time. They were all asleep on their beds. Some on their backs, with an arm thrown across their foreheads, some on their stomachs, some on their sides, curled like they were children. The rooms were identical, the only difference the occupants.
I paused when I saw Michelle. With her arms no longer covered, I saw the complete topography of her agony. The cuts at her wrists were only the latest she’d inflicted upon herself. I could hear my own breathing as I counted the scars, arrayed like tick marks from her elbows to just below where a watch would go. Each cut had been made with such precision that once healed, they were geometrically perfect representations of her pain? Why were some people cutters and some not?
It was as if Mr. Pink could read my thoughts.
“Some are unable to put into words the emotions they are feeling. The responsibility you feel for eleven of your fellow soldiers dying is something you can grasp. Not everyone can understand so clearly why they want to kill themselves, or why they’re so depressed.”
I glanced at him sharply, but his attention was solely on the sleeping form of Michelle. I drew my gaze up her arms and let it caress the curve of her jaw. She appeared to be so peaceful in her sleep.
“You’re able to compartmentalize your pain and anguish and bring it out when you need to. It’s more common with male soldiers than it is females. Female soldiers often feel the need to redeem themselves for what they view as their faults. Most often that comes in the form of pain. Whether it be as simple as a rubber band they continually snap against their wrist, or something more dedicated, like young Private Aquinas.
“The physical pain also provides a brief respite from their self-loathing. With the pain comes momentary forgetfulness, and also, interestingly enough, endorphins, which can become quite addictive.” Mr. Pink turned to me. “Good thing you decided to jump off a bridge. Imagine deciding to jump off the bridge a hundred times and actually doing it.” He turned back to Michelle. “That’s what she felt every time she hurt herself.”
He looked at me, his face implacable with his dead, expressionless eyes. “Cut, cut, cut,” he said, miming slicing his forearm with a razor blade. “All the pain in her little overwhelming universe lined up in a row.”
He turned and continued toward the door.
I hastened to follow, noting that I passed two cells with no one in them.
The successes.
Or failures.
I guess it depended on one’s point of view.
In the second-to-last cell, two men dressed in yellow jumpsuits had a young man sitting on the bed, clearly unconscious. One of the men helped him upright, while the other used an electric shaver to remove beard growth.
I felt my own face and remembered realizing that I’d been shaved before I’d awoke. How had they done this to me? To all of us?
Then it hit me.
I followed Mr. Pink through the door.
“You’re gassing us,” I said to his back.
“Makes it easier for the therapy to work. Don’t feel so worried. We’re not exactly making this up as we go along, you know.”
This stopped me. “Really? So you have another underground bunker with a thousand messed-up soldiers to fuck around with?”
This made him pause. He turned and pointed to a door to his right. “Go through there. Get changed. We’re airborne in twenty mikes.”
“Where we going?”
“Dothan, Alabama.”
“What for?”
“A young man who scrubbed floors on the night shift at a local supermarket decided to take all of his weapons into an elementary school and kill twenty-three children and five teachers before turning his guns on himself.”
Oh, Jesus. “And what does it have to do with us?”
“The invasion has already begun. I want to show you. I want you to understand.”
“Why me? Why spend this time on me?”
He turned and walked down the hall. “We’ll be airborne in eighteen mikes. You need to hurry.”
Live for something rather than die for nothing.
General George S. Patton
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IF THERE’S ANYTHING worse than the site of a school massacre I’m not aware of it, and I’d seen man-created misery at its very finest. We’d landed in Fort Rucker in a TF OMBRA jet. Two dark green Suburbans were waiting for us. I got into the second one with Mr. Pink. The first carried three men who looked like they spent their lives playing video games. The glance I got of their hi-tech equipment made me wonder if that was what they were doing even now, as their SUV made concentric circles around the event site.
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I did as I was told. I stood tall, silent and still, wearing army boots, 5.11 tactical camouflage pants, a black TF OMBRA polo shirt, a P229 on my right hip, and dark glasses. They’d given me a comms unit that fit into the back of my belt and had a wire to my ear, much like a Secret Service agent. And everyone left me alone. I stood a few feet back from Mr. Pink, following him as he processed through the authorities, his TF OMBRA badge as effective as anyone else’s.
Miss Anne Cloverfield Elementary School was founded in 1928 as an all-black school for the children of field laborers. Named after the suffragist who turned her fight to help the plight of poor children everywhere, it was through guilt, guile, and manipulation that she convinced the plantation owners to pony up enough money for what had been in the day the best school for black children in the county. Fast forward past Governor Wallace and Selma and America’s decision to have a black president and Miss Anne’s, as the community came to know it, had become a magnet school, bringing the best and brightest of all races through its doors.
Which is why the entire world watched, stunned, not understanding the capriciousness of a universe that would allow a lone gunman to walk into the school and kill so many innocent children. That this same crime had been replicated in different states over the years made it beyond tragic. It should have been stopped. Some wanted to arm the teachers. Some wanted to post guards at every school. Some wanted to pull their children out and home school them. The only thing everyone could agree on was that they were sure it wouldn’t happen to their children.
Although the shooting was past and the families had been notified, news reporters and concerned citizens still filled the school’s parking lot.
“What exactly are we doing here?” I asked, leaning forward to engage Mr. Pink before I remembered I wore comm gear.