THREE WAR IS A STERN TEACHER, his father would sometimes say to him, quoting Thucydides, the sodden, light-boned man slung over Hector’s shoulder in their typical end-of-Friday-night lurch. Hector always helped him limp home from the workingman’s pub in their town of Ilion, New York, the normally sweet Jackie Brennan having drunk too much and turned a late night bitter-sour. Hector, fifteen years old in 1945, was still as sober as a ghost, despite having drunk a half-dozen grown men into stammering idiots, sleepers on the barroom sawdust. “What did I say?” Hector would repeat it, flatly and dryly. “Good. Never go to war, son. Please never do.” By the end of those evenings, with his father loaded up on the rye he had won on bets taken against Hector in drinking bouts, he would have to gird him all the way home, his father’s breath earthy and spiced with the cheroots he smoked all night and the pickled pearl onions he popped like almonds, both of which he swore counteracted the liquor. His father might sing a protest ballad like “The Dying Rebel,” but on particularly long nights he grew sweaty and pain-faced and had to stop a couple times to retch into the gutter or the thickets of some Remington Arms Company manager’s manicured boxwood hedge, and then in mumbles berate Hector for his “righteous silence,” or for the “boyish piety” of his soberness. But by the time their footfalls played on the sagging plank steps of the Brennan family porch, the boy bearing most of his father’s weight, he would sometimes say his son’s name aloud, over and over, in a kind of monkish ecstasy: Hector, my Hector. And then, if consciousness still graced him after Hector let him fall upon the parlor room sofa, he would look up and ask if he wished to hear again why he’d named him so, to call him thus instead of, say, Achilles, a more glorious appellation? “Okay, Da, tell me.” “Because a man wants a son for a son, and has no use for a champion.” After reading the epic in school, Hector pointed out to him that his namesake was killed, his city doomed to ruin, his father eventually slaughtered as well. “No matter, boy,” his father told him. “They tell us stories not to live by but to change. Make our own. Look at you. You’ll live forever, anyone with eyes can see that. Just never go to war.” Jackie Brennan, of course, could never go to war; unlike Hector, he was a wisp of a man, and had a right foot turned permanently sideways at birth, his right hand unnaturally angled as well, while smallish and stunted besides, like that of a tiny, elderly woman. But he was cleverer than most, and had he been born to a family of greater means and aspiration he might have been a state’s attorney or college professor, as he was well spoken and quick and had firm notions (for better or worse) of what people should hear. When World War II broke out and legions of Ilion’s sons signed up, his was one of the few mutterings of skepticism, if not dissent, though at first Jackie mostly kept his feelings about the war to himself, or else lectured to his weary-eared wife and daughters, and to Hector, who in fact didn’t mind listening to him make his roundabout arguments in his bright, resonant baritone. He loved him, but unlike most other boys whose love for their fathers was predicated on fear and misplaced idolatry, his was as for a favorite uncle, if deeper, a love that recognized the man’s foibles and numerous failings and saw them as distinctive rather than sorry and pathetic. But there was a limit to that view, and it came at the pub; after Jackie Brennan got his belly wash of beer and whiskey he grew overly voluble, his voice taking on a higher, more insistent pitch. The war was ever weighing on his spirits. In the pub, he might warmly address a group of young men in uniform, after not paying them any attention all night: “Permit me to buy you fellas another round of drafts, that I might hold up my head and know I did my part!” The servicemen would raucously accept and make room for him while the regulars miserably eyed one another and Hector, wise to what would happen next. Hector would sit on the periphery until his father cajoled him to come in the circle when the mugs of beer went round, with Jackie serially playing prosperous gentleman, the boastful older brother, and, finally, the knowing comrade in arms. But he had other agendas. “It’s thirst-making work, defending our land. The noblest calling.” “You got that, mister!” It was at this point that Hector would tug on his father’s sleeve, though to no avail. “But what I wish, my good lads, is that we’d do just that, instead of getting involved in every minor dispute on the far side of the planet.” “You calling Pearl Harbor a minor dispute?” one of the servicemen replied. “Last I checked, it was a dirty ambush by those rat Japs, where a couple thousand of our guys got it.” “Rat Japs indeed!” Jackie Brennan would cry. “But what conditions were in fact at play behind that horrid carnage?” his father would intone pedantically. At this point his father was already in the bag, but an audience of newcomers always inspired him, recasting his view of himself as a hardworking factory man into that of thinker, of wise man, someone whose main purpose was to bear light and truth to others, like the revered teacher he’d pictured himself becoming when he was young, before he’d entered the factory like everybody else. “Precious few of us bother to look at the bigger picture. Did the Japanese intend to conquer us? Do they still? I very much doubt it. Look at our capacity for producing arms, right here in our small town, and then multiply that by thousands. They know they can’t compete with us over the long run. So they attempt a single, stunning blow, to dissuade us from meddling further in their affairs. The scorpion and the lion. Pearl Harbor was about protecting their interests, in their part of the world, in their sphere of influence, and if we had sent them the appropriate signals beforehand, all those sailors—and now scores of thousands of others—would still be alive today.” “I’ve had enough of this,” one of the men said, slamming down the beer Jackie had paid for on the scarred wooden table. “You’re either one of those pacifists or appeasers, and I can’t stand to listen to you another second.” “Do what you will,” Jackie answered him, with an almost operatic tone of defiance. “But in fact I’m neither of those, young man. I’m an American, son, with no need for larger aims, which you will someday come to understand.” “Out of the way, mister.” “You can do me the respect of at least finishing your beer!” “Go to hell.” “Don’t you curse at me!” It was then, as a rule, that pandemonium broke loose, at least in his father’s mind, a fierce, heroic scuffle that usually found Jackie Brennan tightly hugging a soldier around his torso so the fellow couldn’t freely swing and punch. Hector jumped in and he would be beseeching the man to ignore his father’s foul curses, the proprietor and a few regulars holding the other servicemen back until Hector could tug Jackie outside and hustle him quickly down the street and toward home. Nothing too serious ever happened, though after one night when the barkeep took a stray punch in the face, Jackie was ordered to stay away for a while, which he did, without even a private protest at home. Jackie knew he was liked well enough to be tolerated for such troubles, but not much more than that, and if he couldn’t help but be a nuisance when he drank, he took great pains to make up for it, buying drinks for all the fellows on his return and not forgetting a box of candies for the barkeep to give to his wife. One night, Hector left for home by himself, telling his father he was tired. It was a slow night at the pub, foggy and damp, with no newcomers about for Jackie to sermonize or bet with for drinks. “I never heard you say you were tired,” his father said to him, suspicion marking his voice. “Not a once in your life.” “Well, I am,” Hector answered, lying to his father for the first and only time. “I just want to go home.” “Go on, then,” Jackie said, waving Hector off from his customary place at the far end of the bar, clutching the handle of a mug of ale with his withered, child-sized hand. “And tell your mother not to wait up.” Hector grumbled in assent, both he and his father knowing of course that his mother would be long asleep, being accustomed to her husband’s Friday-night foolery. Jackie only got sloshed this one night of the week, but never missed it, and his mother was glad that Hector went out with him. As planned, though, Hector routed himself toward home by Patricia Cahill’s freshly painted bungalow and picket fence (done by his own hand), and seeing the parlor room light illuminated went dir
ectly to the back porch door, which she said she would leave unlocked if the twins were asleep. It was the spring of 1945 and the long war was still going and her husband was listed as MIA. She was a stunning raven-haired Black Irishwoman with sky-colored eyes and freckles on her little nose and a curve to her hips that made him think of a skillfully turned balustrade. He’d been fantasizing about her for days, and after school he’d stopped by to be paid but she was having a tea with a friend and told him to come after dark. He had known his father would never depart the pub so early, and that his mother would not be expecting him. The thought of lingering with her in her bed electrified him, the last block or so difficult for him to walk comfortably, his erection already straining his dungarees. He’d been with her once before (voraciously petting, if briefly, in her kitchen) but at that point she was the first mature woman he’d touched, and the give and savor of her body (not as firm as that of his sisters’ friends, nor as blandly scentless) was a revelation; he was drawn to the moist tang of her skin, the scant animal note at the nape of her neck, between her breasts. It had already begun to rain, and when he entered the darkened screen porch he was suddenly afraid that he’d mistaken what she’d said to him earlier, but then the parlor light went out and she descended and wound about him like a silken cloak. She was warm and naked beneath her thin bathrobe. She knelt and had hardly put him in her mouth when he helplessly came. In embarrassment he crumpled and made to get away but she gripped him and said it’s okay as long as you do the same, and it was then, at her command, that he learned to swim the slant lightless depth, make his way instead by only treading. Just before dawn he ran home in the steady rain to find a police cruiser parked in front of his house. All the lights were burning. He could see two of his sisters moving about upstairs. He went around back and heard his mother at the kitchen table telling the officers sipping the coffee she’d made that her husband and son had never not come home before. Could some drifters have rolled them and tied them up somewhere? Really, where could they have gone? It was too small a town. She didn’t have to tell the officers that Jackie Brennan had no mistress, for everybody in Ilion well knew he was an uxorious man whose infinite gratitude to his pretty wife for accepting his deformations sometimes also made him crazy when he drank, his imaginings usually centering on her infidelities (which were none), or else he’d be mopey, glum, and self-pitying. One of the policemen caught sight of Hector peering around the hedge and called out, his mother turning to see him. When he went inside, they asked where his father was and where he’d been after he left the pub but he couldn’t tell them about either thing, especially about Patricia Cahill, as one of the cops was her cousin. His mother kept asking him how he could leave his father to drink alone. Hector was silent, but was desperately worried now, too, and begged the officers that he might accompany them as they went to retrace his steps from the pub. As he rode in the police car he felt a much purer shame than anything he might have felt with Patricia Cahill, and he began to cry; he knew he should have stayed with his father, as any decent son would, most of all if that father was Jackie Brennan. How many men craved such company of their sons, for whatever reason? With him gone missing, Hector suddenly understood what he in fact was for his father, and what he should always be: his ideal figure, a body supreme, his sturdiest hand, and foot, and liver. He would never leave him again. When they got to the pub, the officers and he walked in three directions, looking for any sign of him. Then he spotted his father’s porkpie hat at the head of an alleyway between two warehouses; the alleyway led down to an old dock on the canal. The end of the dock had clearly just collapsed, the splintered edges fresh and jagged. The high water was swirling off muddily, heavy with a current; the locks had been opened upstream. “Could he swim?” asked the policeman, Patricia Cahill’s cousin. Hector shook his head. Because of his handicaps his father had never learned how, and was otherwise naturally reluctant to show himself. “I’ll call the dredger,” the other automatically said, his expression, on looking at Hector, one of instant regret. “He’s not dead,” Hector said. “We won’t be calling anyone yet,” Officer Cahill said. He was only slighter taller than Hector but he still patted him on the shoulder as if he were a young boy. “Don’t fret yet, Hector. I bet your pop’s just sleeping it off downstream.” The next day the dredger was called. His body wasn’t found for nearly a week, and then not even by the riverman. It showed up finally in a canal lock miles away, clothesless and bloated and as shiny black as an inner tube, forever traumatizing some pleasure boaters down from Canada. Hector had to travel with local authorities and identify him for the family, his mother and sisters refusing to go. Hector was certain it was he, if only from the awesome gap between the corpse’s two front teeth; his father would spit great arcing streams of beer at company picnics, these wonderfully downy, foamy rainbows, to the delight of at least the men and children. It was no doubt Jackie Brennan’s finest talent. But at the undertaker’s, that jesting font lay stiffly open and empty, and even in the chilly locker the stench emanating from it and the rest of the body gripped Hector with an otherworldly ferocity, as might some beast of the underworld, its invisible claws lifting him straight off his feet. HIS POOR FATHER WAS RIGHT, of course: he should never have gone to war. For a long time after Jackie’s death, Hector’s mother could not speak to him for his leaving his father that night, could hardly even look at him, and though she eventually showed love for him again, for the quiet years between Hiroshima and the surprise attack by Communists on a hitherto unknown city called Seoul, Hector was hoping for another war to break out. He sought a war not for the sake of fighting or killing anyone or defending his country, but for the selfish cause of punishing himself, and so proving his father right. How easily his wish was granted. It was a brief incident, involving a prisoner, that changed everything, a situation probably not too distinctive or unusual. But it would hold a firm place in his memory. It was in his first tour of duty, early spring, 1951. They were in the foothills of the Taebaek Mountains, 150 kilometers northeast of Seoul. After the chaotic opening to the war, the initial Communist invasion, and the headlong ROK retreat to the very southern tip of the peninsula, and then the breakneck American counteroffensive pushing back all the way north to the Yalu River, which was the border with China, both sides were now engaged in what was in essence trench warfare, if in the hills. The struggle was over any given (and supposedly) strategic section of high ground, the shifting of territory measured in hundreds of meters, each hill identified by only a number (and if bloody enough, eventually a nickname). The fighting was mostly night attacks, with small-scale raids by American and ROK units, and then operations by the Communists, who were now almost all Chinese, regulars in the People’s Army, attacking often in mass, near-suicidal, waves, their aim to intimidate and overwhelm with seemingly inexhaustible numbers. The prisoner was one of these. He was just a boy, in fact, fourteen or fifteen years old at most, his round moonface sprouted with only a few bristles of hair on his upper lip, his chin. Hector’s platoon had taken him prisoner after repelling an attack the night before, when the whole facing hillside cranked alive before dawn with rattles and whistles and clanging cowbells and the rabid shrieks of several thousand soldiers rushing forward in a mad pell-mell push, their burp guns alive, the sound of their feet on the dry snow like locusts devouring a field of corn. Flares were shot to illuminate the battleground, revealing that perhaps only half of the enemy was actually armed with rifles, the others bearing bayonets and sticks and even toy drums like the kind given away as prizes at fairs, the ten-cent variety with two strings with balls on the ends that one rotated to make a noise. Their first wave overwhelmed all the forward foxholes but was cut down before it breached the main line; the next ones were successively less effective, and by the fourth wave the Chinese hardly made any noise on attacking and quickly retreated after a barrage of American fire. It was all over after that. By daybreak there were many hundreds of bodies marking the hillside, mostly Chinese, the most unsettling t
hing being that a number of the American soldiers in the forward foxholes were missing, only the dead ones left to be retrieved. The survivors had been spirited away as prisoners by the retreating swarm to a fate that was known among the men (via report and rumor and fearful imaginings) to feature unspeakable tortures and deprivations and a life sentence of hard labor somewhere deep in the mines of China. It was under this mind-set that the boy soldier had been taken prisoner by others in Hector’s unit. Hector came upon them soon after he was captured. The boy was short, five foot four or so, and stalk-thin, not even a hundred pounds in his winter uniform, which had been stuffed tight with crumpled newspaper for insulation, ripped canvas tennis shoes on his sockless feet. He’d been found playing dead at the bottom of a foxhole and was beaten up badly by them, given an ugly shiner and a bloody nose and lip. One of his shoulders was dislocated. He had been found with a small brass horn, which a soldier named Zelenko now held in his gloved hand. The platoon leader, Lieutenant Bridger, was off being briefed at the field HQ. Zelenko and his buddies would have likely executed the prisoner right then, but an officer from another unit happened by and on seeing his condition reminded them that all prisoners were to be immediately processed for interrogation. They assented, but after the officer left, Zelenko said they should keep him a bit before transferring him up to field command; he was their first prisoner, after all. There were a handful of grunts from the platoon present, including Hector, who was off sitting on the icy ridge of the next foxhole. He disliked Zelenko, who was also from a small town in upstate New York, a carrot-haired loudmouth who was a dependable soldier but who had begun to subtly bully their tentative college-man lieutenant to send certain squads of men—Hector among them—on the night patrols. Hector didn’t mind the more dangerous missions, for someone had to go and he’d begun to accept that by fate or nature he was strangely, miraculously, impervious, but he didn’t like the idea that Zelenko’s whim should determine anyone else’s destiny. With another soldier holding a rifle on the prisoner, Zelenko stepped up from behind him and placed the horn’s end right next to his ear and blew as hard as he could on it. The prisoner dropped to the ground as if he’d been shot in the temple, screaming and holding his ear. “That’s for keeping us up every night with that crazy chink music,” Zelenko said, he himself wincing from the sharp blast. The others were wide-eyed, chuckling. The Chinese often played an eerie, atonal operatic music as well as a suite of popular Western songs and slick propaganda through the night on loudspeakers. The boy was crying silently now with his mouth agape, squeezing on his ear. He was in terrible pain. Zelenko pulled the boy back up on his feet. He was covering his ear, but Zelenko slapped his hand away. “You’d think all these lousy chinks would be half deaf already,” Zelenko said, and then blew the horn hard into the same ear. “And that’s for Gomez.” Gomez was his buddy, killed a week before. They’d found his body dumped on the bank of a frozen stream. He’d been tortured and then shot in the back of the head. Zelenko blew again. The boy crumpled to his knees, crying miserably, and Zelenko had his buddy, Morra, wire together his hands behind him so he couldn’t shield himself. Then he blew the horn again. He did it three more times, and with such vehemence that his face grew flushed, as if he’d inflated a roomful of party balloons. But on the last one the boy hardly flinched. The ear was dead. This angered Zelenko, and he struck the boy sharply with his pistol. The boy fell like a tablet of stone. Fresh blood pocked the snow beside his head where he lay. His narrow eyes were open, his lips moving slowly and mechanically but making no sound. Zelenko was leaning over him with the horn to start on the other side, balling his chewing gum to plug his own ears, when Hector suddenly rushed him, knocking him over, sending him sliding on his back a dozen feet down the hill. “What the fuck!” Zelenko cried. Morra jumped him and Hector punched him once, hard, in the kidney, and the man fell to the ground. The others stood aside as Hector lifted the prisoner. The platoon knew him to be unhesitating in battle, vigilant and tireless, never cowed under fire, and no one made any move to stop him. He could lead a squad or even the platoon, if he weren’t so laconic. The boy groaned heavily when Hector slung him over his shoulder, and then lost consciousness. Hector carried him up the path that curled around the hill to the reverse slope, where the field HQ and mobile hospital were set up. Zelenko cursed at him, shouting that he was a stupid mick, a dirty queer, a chink lover, but Hector ignored him. After the prisoner’s wounds were dressed and his arm relocated in its socket by a medic, Hector took him to the command post. The officer in charge had Hector search the prisoner again, and when he did he found something hidden in a rip in the lining of his jacket. It was a tiny notebook; a photograph was tucked inside. He gave it to the officer, who had the interpreter inspect it. But it was nothing; just a personal diary. It was written in Korean, and apparently the boy contended he was a southerner, first conscripted by ROKs before being captured by Communists and reconscripted again, but the interpreter either didn’t believe him or didn’t care; he was a Communist now. The interpreter handed the diary and the photograph to the officer, who glanced at them quickly before tossing them back to Hector. While they interrogated him, Hector examined the writing, its lettering very neat and small, and then the photograph. It was clearly a portrait of the boy’s family, his parents and himself and other siblings. What surprised him was how well dressed they were, respectable and attractive, and that they wore Western clothing, suits and dresses. They could easily be one of the Remington Arms Company managers’ families, except that they were Oriental. The boy was only very briefly interrogated. The intelligence officers had already collected enough information from some other prisoners and aerial reconnaissance over the last week about the strength of the enemy forces. The officer told Hector they had no use for him: he was just a bugler anyway, one of their many expendables. Normally, he would have been sent along with other prisoners to a rear holding area at battalion before being transferred to a POW camp, but there were very few enemy (only two others) taken alive from the assault, and with the promise of an even larger human-wave attack that night, and with no transport available or forward holding area or cell, no one could be interested in his final disposition. “So where should I take him?” Hector asked. The intelligence officer didn’t look up; the other officers in the tent ignored him, too. Hector didn’t ask again. He knew this meant he should walk him back to the forward line and, at some point, shoot him. It happened all the time, and was practiced by them and the enemy alike. So he did walk him away, the kid trudging miserably ahead of him. He didn’t look back or try to engage or beseech him, which Hector was glad for. He’d killed at least a half-dozen of the enemy in firefights, a couple at very close quarters, but it was always just the flash instinct or response, and he had never had to think the killing through mechanically. Where to stop to do it; whether to have him kneel or stand; whether to give him a moment to prepare or do it without warning; shoot him in the body or the head. The boy was skinny and short but his shoulders were quite broad and Hector tried to focus on this, the suggestion that he was a grown man, a genuine soldier. But it was no use; he looked like any boy wearily ambling home. The early April day was quickly warming and the temperature had risen to forty-five degrees and Hector became uncomfortably aware of the paired alternation of their schussing feet on the softened snow, a rhythm soon to be soloed. Maybe it would have been better (for himself) to have let Zelenko have his way; it would be over already and he would be in the dugout now, warming up his canned rations over a Sterno, maybe cleaning his rifle, writing his short weekly letter to his mother, in which he never said anything new or described much in detail but wrote anyway, in general terms, about the weather, the food, if only to get to signing his name, so she would know he was alive. They reached the point where the path turned and led around a large, outcropped boulder. Hector told him to stop. The boy did so. He offered the diary and photograph to him, but the boy refused, shaking his head. “Take it, okay? I don’t want it.” The boy kept sh
aking his head, as if he understood that to do so would be his end. For it was his end. It was surely here that Hector ought to do it, if he was going to do it at all; there was something of a precipice as the path jutted out, below it a five-meter fall-off to a natural shallow bowl in the hillside. After he fell into it Hector could simply leave, would not have to drag the corpse someplace else, and it would be over. But he didn’t want to do it. Why should he? Maybe he ought to let him go, let him run away and say that the prisoner had escaped. But suddenly the boy turned from him and stepped closer to the edge. He wiped his eyes and then simply stared out into the valley, the bright, snowy hills starkly etched against the flat blue sky. It was as if the boy, too, now recognized the suitability of the spot. He must have long realized he wasn’t meant to survive this war. He wasn’t even meant to kill, bugler that he was. On the other side of the hills were his comrades, thousands upon thousands of them, regrouping and resting before another wave attack tonight, and Hector could almost hear the boy thinking about his fate, whether it was better to die like this, one-to-one, rather than sprinting forward in the darkness in a suicidal throng, with just a tin horn in his hand, screaming with a primal fear, his body tensed for the smash of bullets. Hector stepped closer to him. He leveled his rifle at the boy, the barrel nose a mere foot from his bloodied ear. He’d graded out as a sharpshooter but his hands felt numbed now, the gun hollow and light in his grip. The boy’s shoulders tightened, anticipating the shot. But there came voices on the path behind them. It was Morra and Zelenko. Zelenko’s eyes lit up on seeing them in such a pose, but before he could say anything the boy recognized his tormentor and leaped from the spot. He landed down in the well, just as Hector had pictured he would. He began screaming like a child. One of his legs was clearly broken, the foot craned grotesquely back behind him. “Man, you spooked him!” Morra shouted. “Just listen to him wail.” Zelenko said, “What you gonna do now, Brennan? He’s your prisoner, isn’t he?” Hector pushed past him and hiked down, with Morra and Zelenko trailing him. When they reached the boy he wasn’t crying out anymore, but rather breathing rapidly, wheezing through the spit and phlegm webbing his clenched mouth. The well was in fact a collection of fallen rocks; the snow had veiled the stones. Besides his leg, something had burst inside him. Hector unslung the rifle from his back. He unlatched the safety. It was not a question anymore. The boy had shut tight his narrow eyes and was ready. But then a sudden pressure pinched at Hector’s head and the world seemed to twist and when he opened his eyes he was lying on his side in the damp snow. Morra had his rifle. His helmet had been knocked off and had rolled a few turns down the hill. His head rang with a harsh note, but he felt almost silkily disembodied, too, like he was at last a little drunk. He sat up. The two soldiers were propping up the boy, who was crying miserably again, for they were taking turns prodding his broken leg. “We’re square now,” said Zelenko to Hector, seeing him stir. “Hope it hurt. Now stay put.” “Yeah, right,” Morra said. “Now, this, on the other hand, will hurt a lot.” He stepped with his full weight near the break of the boy’s leg. What came from him then startled all of them, clearing the foul cloud from Hector’s head. It was a transcendent cry, the voice more piercing and pure than a mere body could have ever alone mustered. Then he fainted. “Shit,” Zelenko said. Morra said, “I thought these damn gooks had staying power. But I got smelling salts.” They tried it and the boy startled as if he’d been roughly roused from sleep, half getting up like he wasn’t injured at all. He’d collapse and they’d hold it under his nose until he jumped up again, though each time he jerked with less violence, until at last he flitted oddly, like a broken marionette. He was silent, too, in a state well beyond pain. Zelenko tossed Hector a bayonet across the snow. “He’s all yours now.” Morra protested, saying he wanted to finish it, but Zelenko made them go. They took up their weapons and hiked up the incline to the path. Hector heard them march off. Later, a couple of days on, in an informal contest of bare-fisted boxing that an unusually warm stretch of weather brought on, he would beat both men bloody, dispatching Morra quickly and easily, Zelenko with more effort, reshaping his features to near unrecognizable, only stopping when several others jumped him. Afterward the lieutenant asked him to transfer out, and Hector complied, requesting the Graves Registration Unit, for he didn’t wish to commit or witness any more killing, figuring, too, that the dead were dead, and would always stay that way. But death, he would come to learn, was in fact a tendency. Inevitably the dead came back. The boy, for one. For after Morra and Zelenko left, the boy began to talk to him. Of course Hector assumed he was speaking Korean or maybe Chinese but in fact it was English, broken and mumbled, heavily accented, but somehow Hector was certain he understood. No live, he was saying. No live. He didn’t have much more than a few moments left, for he was going to die soon anyway, and yet he was insistent. Hector stood up and hefted the bayonet and the boy nodded to him, smiling weakly, snorting with the promise of final liberation. A new light shone from his eyes. A sheer living gleam. And though not wishing him more suffering, not wishing him more pain, mercy as simple as a nothing push on a blade, Hector could not make himself deliver him. He flung the bayonet down the hill. The boy began to cry. Hector retrieved his helmet, trying not to hear him. The boy was now saying something different, his voice barely above a whisper. Hector patted his pockets, for a piece of candy, food. He offered his water canteen. The boy shook his head. He gestured with his eyes for Hector to come closer. Hector knelt and leaned in and the boy suddenly grabbed at his belt, snatching a grenade. Hector wheeled back away from him, but he was slipping on the side of the shallow well. The boy held the pin. To pull it would be to live a few more seconds. But he waited for Hector to get his footing, waited for him to hike up to the path. At the top he peered down and the boy was gazing skyward, perhaps waiting for him to gain distance, perhaps already blind with the nearing oblivion. Hector sprinted away, getting nearly all the way back to the rear line before he heard the distant, blunted blast.
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