A Separate War and Other Stories

by Joe Haldeman

“Sir, you better let me get the doctor, you look positively—”

  “No sweat, Fred, I, it’s happened a dozen times…before. Doctor said, he said—” Cold fist—

  Cold fist in the middle of his chest, icicle spike nailing him to the seat When did I lie down? Fuzzy grey felt ceiling looks on fire, sky-rockets, stars exploding there, door slams, door opens, Harry unclips tie and opens front of shirt.

  “What is it, sir, another attack?”

  “Maybe I’d better lay, lie down for just a minute…Harry, uh, Fred, would you come, go please and get me a glass of water—”

  Oh God sweet Jesus God the pain fuck pain Mother “Mother.”

  The left-hand side of the universe welled up crimson and faded out and Braxn sat up, rubbing his arm, then kneading his chest. Fred came tearing in with a glass.

  “It’s all right, Fred.” Braxn held up a hand, waving, refusing the water. “As I say, it’s happened—”

  Fred’s sleeve buzzed. He set the water down and talked to his bracelet. “I’m busy, damn it. What? What!”

  “Tweed’s had a heart attack. Right in front here.”

  Braxn didn’t move a muscle. “Get that dossier.”

  “God, that’s right, that’s what—” He spoke to the bracelet. “Manila folder on the seat of Tweed’s car. Get it if you have to steal the car.”

  “Guess I’d better go down. Make sure the area’s cordoned off. And have somebody grind out a short speech for me to give to the reporters.”

  “Guess Tweed’s too old for another transplant, or an implant.”

  “Probably.”

  “Hopefully,” Braxn whispered. The two of them went off to the elevator.

  Other members of the cortege were standing around, buzzing in a low murmur, mostly French and English. It looked like a theatre-of-the-absurd funeral, as if a state figure had died on cue, rows of black limousines and platoons of mourning dignitaries already arranged for; or as if the body had been on the way to its hearse and had been carelessly dropped on the sidewalk.

  The only man not dressed in black was the White House physician, wearing a conservative twill one-piece.

  “Any chance?”

  “No, Mr. President. He’s been on borrowed time and tissue for fifteen years. At his age, with his habits, it should have worn out long ago.”

  Braxn looked at the old man he had just fought with and killed. Greyish skin, blue lips pulled over a wide, surprised yawn, eyes red slits where somebody had closed them, hands dead white claws on scrawny exposed chest. Smell of cheap cigar smoke competing with embarrassing evidence of final peristaltic surge.

  A ground-car ambulance pulled up over the front lawn and, after they had taken the body away, Braxn got into the limousine directly behind the hearse and led the cortege off across the river.

  Not too surprisingly, even after a lifetime of scrupulous churchgoing, Tweed admitted in his will to having always been an atheist and wanting no part of the barbaric practice of having his bones planted in magic ground. Instead he preferred antiseptic cremation, his ashes to be scattered in the Potomac by his lifelong companion, chauffeur, manservant, Harry Doyle.

  Unfortunately, the Environmental Services Commission pointed out, that was against the law. Gently but firmly they reminded Tweed’s estate that the Potomac is not the Ganges. At least not in Washington.

  Of course, the Potomac also runs through Maryland on its course to the Chesapeake Bay. So Harry was dispatched with the urn to nearby Charles County, to go to Indian Rock and scatter Tweed’s ashes not so very far downstream from his beloved Capitol.

  (Harry, who had always hated the old man’s guts, got as far as Waldorf, where he flushed the ashes down a toilet in the men’s room of a Gulf station. Then he drove on to Indian Rock and drank a six-pack while watching the Potomac flow sluggishly by.)

  After the funeral, the tea went quite well, and even the dinner afterwards, with all the enemies and switch-hitters and unaligned, was only occasionally marred by dignified argument, strained through the teeth.

  During the tea, the West Pakistani ambassador implored Harriman to sign the draft bill. Braxn told him bluntly that the bill in its present form, tripling the draft call, would just put too severe a strain on American manpower. Besides, it would be political suicide—a Gallup taken the week before showed that 49 percent of Americans wanted us to withdraw the seventy-five thousand advisors already there…and 11 percent wanted us to throw our support over to East Pakistan and Tibet!

  Accordingly, the next day Braxn vetoed the bill, as almost everybody but Tweed had expected. The veto was quietly but with lightning speed approved by the House.

  A compromise bill, doubling the draft quotas, had been introduced earlier. It fizzled out by negative vote on engrossment and third reading.

  The third and final draft bill was a complicated mess of new apportionment criteria, full of obfuscatory rhetoric and pages of figures. But if you sat down with a blue pencil and an adding machine, you’d find it boiled down to another compromise: essentially providing for a 1997 draft call of eighty thousand rather than sixty thousand.

  “This bill here,” Braxn said, tapping the folder with a pencil, “is about the best you’re going to get out of this Congress. I’m not sure that you’ll get even this, though. I, for one, need more justification than Pakistan.”

  “You’ve got it, sir!” The man who said it was a burly, bullet-headed, handsome soldier with so many stars on his shoulders that he only had to call one man “sir.”

  “The general’s right, Mr. President.” The secretary of defense was a slim, bland-looking man who looked as if he might be an insurance executive or the dean of a small law school. In fact, he had been both. He had never been a soldier. “We realize you probably haven’t had time to read the entire report—”

  “I’ve read it. I’m still not convinced.”

  “Well, it convinced me,” the secretary said. “We’ve got to think of the future—”

  “—in the light of the 1995 Geneva Accords, especially,” the general interrupted. “We’re going to be headed for bad trouble if—”

  “Wait, wait.” Braxn waved a hand at both of them. “I understand the argument. You assume there will never be another Two Chinas War; that the Geneva Accords forbidding the use of…certain weapons in international conflict, make our technologically oriented weaponry obsolete. That we ought to retool downwards, train fewer troops—no troops, eventually—in the use of sophisticated weapons…in effect, ‘detoxify’ our military back to, hell, all the way back to World War II—”

  “Sir, that’s not it at all. Begging your pardon, sir…we plan to keep the modern weaponry in the event that the Accords break down. But more and more men have to be allotted to Infantry and regular Artillery if we’re going to be able to cope with these brushfire wars with backw—with small countries.”

  “And to be baldly frank about it,” the secretary said, “we need Pakistan, we need to not only stay there but increase our involvement, up to fourfold—otherwise, we aren’t going to have the nucleus of experienced noncoms and officers we’ll need if a real war comes up.”

  “I think you’re both unduly alarmed. General, approximately what percentage of our forces are combat veterans?”

  “Well…sir, damn it, nearly sixty percent. But that doesn’t mean anything! Most of those men got their combat experience in the Two Chinas War…and you can’t blame them for thinking in terms of nukes and lasers and disruptors—not bullets and C-6 and lousy five-hundred-pound bombs! They’re just plain ill equipped—”

  “Then haul ’em back and teach ’em, General! Oh hell”—he tossed the pencil down on the bill—“I assume you both know that this bill is going to pass, whether I veto it or not. By the narrowest of margins, of course; the Senate wants a stronger military, but it doesn’t want to seem hawkish to the folks at home. To the people who are going to be drafted.

  “I’ll think about it. I’ll keep thinking about it. Gentlemen, I hate to
seem abrupt, but we just aren’t getting anywhere. Besides, I have some very important handshaking to do…”

  Both men rose. “Well, thank you for taking time out to listen to us, sir,” the general said. “Again, I urge you to—”

  Braxn cut him short with a wave and a smile. “I may. Good-bye.”

  As soon as the men disappeared, Braxn took out his pen and looked at the document, without seeing it. I wonder if either of them understands, he thought, that it’s not really a military question at all. It had to do with his relations with Congress. Since he had gotten to the presidency essentially through a governorship, he didn’t have many real friends in the legislature.

  There would be a lot of noise when the public deciphered it and found out that it meant larger draft calls all around. He could make them pass it over his veto, and come out lily white. Or he could sign the damn thing and take some of the heat off Congress.

  The old-fashioned flat-nib fountain pen scratched loudly on the parchment. Anachronisms, Braxn thought, and he punched his secretary’s desk.

  “Send in the Scouts and feed me the speech.” He turned up the gain slightly on the receiver built into his eyeglass frame. This was the last formal appointment of the day.

  It took about ten minutes, parroting the words and actions that his secretary fed to him. Twelve Eagle Scouts in full regalia, their scoutmaster in mufti. Braxn amused himself by imagining what the spindly little man would look like in the traditional shorts and Teddy Roosevelt hat. From Harriman’s memory he dragged up a half-century-old image of Wally Cox playing Mr. Peepers.

  After they had gone, he punched Fred’s combination.

  “Oh, hello, sir.”

  Without preamble: “I signed the goddamn thing.”

  Fred nodded soberly. “No choice, really. Let’s hope Congress handles it right.”

  “Well, I’m knocking off for the night.” Braxn reached for the switch.

  “Oh wait, sir, just a second…one thing, uh, might not be too…uh.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, one of my men got the dossier on Tweed, slipped it off the backseat while everybody was watching the old man die. I checked it over, though, and the last page is missing. A Xerox of an old photostat of his Army psychiatric profile.”

  “You rechecked the car?”

  “We took the damn thing apart, couple of hours ago. No sign.”

  “I guess we just sit tight. What about the helicopter pilot?”

  “No sweat…we found him this morning, holed up in a fleabag hotel in Philadelphia. He was scared, sir, really almost out of his mind. He was sure we’d killed Tweed and were after him. We persuaded him otherwise.”

  “Not too convincingly, I hope.”

  “Naturally not. We also purchased the article from him, just as a safeguard. Ten thousand bucks—about a tenth what he was going to get. Took the money out of the party’s campaign fund, chalked it up to ‘ghost writing.’”

  “All this and a lousy sense of humor, too?”

  “Yes, sir,” Fred said with a little smile.

  After they punched off, Braxn returned the draft bill to its black leather case and gave it to his secretary on the way out, instructing that a courier run it over to the Speaker’s office. He knew the old geezer wouldn’t be there this late, though: probably over at II Caesars’, soaking his brain.

  His wife met him at the door, trading him a glass of chilled Tavel ’88 for his coat. They were still in the downstairs apartments; Braxn knew that Harriman would have wanted to stay there as long as possible.

  “Hard day today, dear?”

  “Hmmph.” He sat down in an overstuffed recliner. “Conferences. Audiences. Two secretaries, four congressmen, a general, two ambassadors, and twelve Macedonians in full battle array. Actually, I think they were Boy Scouts.”

  “Sounds exciting.”

  “It was, I must have woken up twice. What’s for dinner?”

  “Oh, Rosa’s fixed something special.” She spoke into her watch. “Rosa? When may dinner be served?”

  She put the watch up to her ear for a second. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  He had just picked up a copy of the Star nitefax. He refolded it along the original crease and tossed it down. “Let’s go. I could eat a can of dog food.”

  “That won’t be necessary for a while, I hope.”

  While they were walking to the dining room, the world shimmered and split again.

  It was dawn in Barisal, the least likely time for an ambush; besides, most of the fighting had been confined to the city proper, so the Americans we’d been so glad to get out of those damn streets let the gooks fight for their own city said this goddamn jungle patrol was gonna be a picnic fuck you colonel wish you were here with

  “Is something wrong, dear?”

  “No, I—I just stood up too fast. Drinking too much coffee, not enough sleep, I guess.”

  Jesus Christ did we ever walk into it a classic box from three sides heavy .65-calibers sprayed tiny anvils, making a ceiling of lead never more than three feet off the ground. Men were screaming in pain to the left and right, and just ahead Lieutenant Hernadez was thrashing around in the elephant grass with a sucking chest wound.

  “Excellent,” Braxn said, chewing mechanically. “Tell Rosa I wouldn’t trade her for a Lib majority in Congress.”

  “Take it easy, Lieutenant—I SAID TAKE IT EASY—there.” He got the man to stop squirming long enough to stop the sucking with the plastic from the bandage wrapper Okay, now the bastard’s chest might fill up with blood, but at least I won’t have to listen to that horrible shhik-shhik

  “Well, if any Dixiecrats come by, we’ll tell ’em it’s Taiwan duck…”

  Now the bandage over the plastic and run the strings behind the lieutenant’s back God they could have made these strings a little longer where the fuck is a medic “Ten-six! Ten-six, God damn it!” Down flat, burst of fire seeking out his voice…

  “You really do seem distracted, dear.”

  Braxn took off his glasses and polished them with his napkin.

  “Really nothing, Linda…but I wonder if you could get me an aspirin?”

  Captain Brown crawled up through the fog and smoke, moving on his back like a swimmer trying to do a backstroke with his shoulders. “Fall back and get me a medic.” His left hand cradled his right, blood gushing from the stump of a thumb. “Hernandez KIA?”

  Jesus Christ by the book all the way “Not yet, sir. Just about.”

  “No wonder we haven’t got any fuckin’ support, get me his maps, they’re in the right leg pocket. Then GET THAT—”

  Braxn stared at a forkful of rice, then levered it into his mouth. “Oh, thank you, dear.” He washed the tablets down with ice water.

  The medic was in a shallow depression behind a stand of saplings, bandaging a tall Negro flanker whose lower jaw was shot off, thick blood drooling around the pressure bandages.

  “Where you hit?”

  “Not me, Doc—the captain’s bleeding pretty bad from a hand wound and Lieutenant Hernandez got shot in the chest—”

  “Motherfucker musta stood up.”

  A burst of machine-gun fire rattled through the saplings. The medic cringed down, but the big Negro just lay there, eyes filming.

  “Fuck ’em both.” Doc pushed a morph-plex syrrette through the dying man’s sleeve, blood-slick and shiny. “Let’s go.”

  “—just a combination of a headache and a stomach ache.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be taking aspirin, then.”

  An artillery spotting round popped maybe two hundred meters away. The captain was lying beside a dead radioman, talking on the horn while he looked at the map. “Drop one-zero-zero and fire for effect, one-two over and out.” He hung up. “You fellas better dig a deep hole. That’s comin’ in right on top—”

  “Oh, now look! You’ve got that orange sauce on your sleeve. Let me take some cold water to it before it sets.”

  She patted at the stain. �
�Are you sure you’re feeling all right?” she asked nonsensically.

  O God Jesus Christ make it stop the ground fell away and slapped back, twice, four times so loud so loud you didn’t hear it with your ears but with your lungs and guts and bones and balls—

  Braxn rose from the table and supported himself with a hand on the chair back. “I’m going to lie down for a while.”

  “Let me rub your back.”

  “No!—no, finish supper; I’ll just lie on the couch for a—”

  “TEN-SIX—DOC! Ten-six?” Look at Doc over there without a head he was always a lazy fucker wonder why it doesn’t hurt I always thought it’d hurt so much but you can’t put ’em back in they keep slipping around and between your fingers almost no blood…

  “I better call Dr. Dean…” “No, no, it’ll…pass.” “I’ll call him.”

  so weak Holy Mother Mary of NO I’m not gonna I don’t wanna God God it hurts now maybe if I put some dirt on my hands they’ll “TEN-SIX” they won’t slide out so easy and I can stuff Holy Mary God of shit fuck it hurts, what’s the use

  Not as easy as it used to be but the involuntary telepathic link helps—push…

  Braxn was lying in a stand of elephant grass, grey-white smoke clinging to the ground around him, the soft yammer of battle sounds whispering in his ears. Bluish bloody intestines spilled out of a foot-wide wound in his abdomen.

  He willed his hands sterile and carefully rolled the guts back into the abdominal cavity. With his fingers and his mind he debrided the wound and held the bloody lips of it together for a few seconds until it healed. He cleansed himself internally against peritonitis, then fixed the broken eardrums.

  Now for the larger problem. Could he still affect the rate of subjective time flow? He concentrated on slowing down this little corner of the universe. Make it lazy. Come on, Reality, isn’t it hard to support a war? So much noise and confusion. Easier just to let it all…run…down…

  A machine gun about ten meters in front of him was firing at a hysterical cyclic rate—dubdubdubdub—belt-fed, rattling off a thousand rounds per minute. After about a hundred rounds it started to signal the results of Braxn’s efforts.