by Ralph Peters
His most persistent vision of Kinshasa remained the public coupling of a big man with a woman in a red silk mask. The two of them leaned up against a doorway in a garbage-strewn alley. With no change in rhythm, the man turned his head and eyed the passing stranger with the disinterested expression of a dog.
* * *
"Yes, sir," the old master sergeant had said to him, as he guided Taylor through the disinfectant showers at the Kinshasa airfield processing detachment, "you're looking a little the worse for wear. But we'll fix you up."
The hot jets of the shower felt as though they were barely reaching his skin through the accumulated filth. The master sergeant had placed all of Taylor's uniform remnants in a dangerous-waste container. He had wanted to dispose of the matted cavalry pennant, as well. But the sudden look in Taylor's face, perhaps touched with just a bit of jungle madness, perhaps a look like the one his face had worn in the instant before he killed the bandit and the bartender upriver, had persuaded the other man to provide Taylor a special bag and receipt form that promised the item would be sterilized and returned to him.
"I suppose it's one hell of a mess up-country," the master sergeant said in a voice loud enough to reach into the shower stall with Taylor.
Taylor found it too hard to talk just yet. But the NCO went on, perhaps sensing a need in the half-crazed officer who had just walked in out of the bush, or perhaps because he was the kind of NCO who simply liked to talk — about wars and women and life's infinite small annoyances. He seemed wonderfully familiar to Taylor, a cursing, grunting, eternally weary symbol of Home. Taylor wanted to respond with words of his own. But it was very hard. It was much easier just to let the disinfectant-laced water stream down over him.
"It's a hellhole, I'll tell you," the sergeant continued. "Captain, I was in Colombia, from ninety-seven to ninety-nine, and I deployed to Bolivia a couple of times. But I never seen a mess like this place. They ought to just give it back to the Indians."
"I… was in Colombia," Taylor said, testing his vocal cords.
"Yeah? With who? I was with the Seventh Infantry Division. You know, 'Too light to fight' and all. Jeez, what a clusterfuck."
"I was with the Sixty-fourth Aviation Brigade." Taylor's hands trembled helplessly as he struggled to manipulate the big bar of soap under the torrents of water.
"Oh, yeah. Them guys. Yeah. Maybe you gave me a lift sometime."
"I was flying gunships."
"You were lucky. I hate to tell you what it was like humping up them jungle mountains. Christ, how we used to curse you guys. If you don't mind me saying. The chopper jockeys would be lifting off again before our butts cleared the doors. Of course, that's nothing to what the Navy done when the shit hit the fan with the South Africans."
"What's that?"
"You didn't hear, sir? Yeah, well. I guess you were out in the woods. As soon as the casualties started piling up— especially, the RD victims — that old carrier battle group that was sitting off the coast just unassed the area. Protecting and preserving the force, they called it. What it amounted to was that they weren't about to load any sick grunts onto their precious boats. But, I mean, what the hell? The only reason the Air Force is still flying us out is because of a presidential order. Ain't that a kick in the ass? Everybody was just ready to let Joe Snuffy die like a dog in a ditch. I guess they figured there weren't going to be any medals and promotions out of this one."
"You're kidding. How the hell did they expect us to evacuate?"
The master sergeant laughed, and the sound of it echoed through the concrete shelter. "The Air Force weenies… wanted us to book charter flights. They said it would be more cost effective. Of course, I guess they were a little gun-shy after losing twenty billion dollars worth of B-2s to a handful of cowboys. Like the Navy guys said, you got to protect and preserve the force."
Consciously steadying his hand, Taylor turned off the flow of water. As he stepped out of the narrow booth, rubbing himself hard with the towel, trying to wipe away the past four months in their entirety, the master sergeant looked him up and down and shook his head.
"Looks like you could use a good meal, Captain."
Taylor left for the Azores quarantine site on an evac run for those not yet ill with RD. Sitting in an ill-fitting special-issue uniform, with the freshly sterilized cavalry guidon in his breast pocket, he felt the greatest relief of his life as the shrieking Air Force plane lifted away from the African continent. He scanned old copies of Stars and Stripes, but even the relentlessly negative news articles could not fully suppress his elation.
In the poorly lit belly of the transport, he learned that the nuclear strike on Pretoria had been sufficient to force a South African withdrawal. The South Africans had overplayed their hand, after all. But the U.S. had lost far more than it gained. The world condemned the U.S. action. There was no sympathy, even from the nation's closest allies. Instead, the event gave furious impetus to the movement to eliminate all nuclear weapons. The Japanese used the strike as a pretext to launch a trade war of unprecedented scale. Over the decades, the Japanese had slowly forced the United States and even the European Union out of key markets, such as electronics and high-grade machine tools, and now they announced that they would no longer trade with any nation that continued to trade with the United States. It was, Tokyo said, a moral issue. The Japanese did allow that they would continue to sell to the United States, since a total embargo would cause excessive hardship for innocent people…
The American government found itself helpless. There were no made-in-the-U.S. A. replacements for many of the items that made a neotechnological society function, and without Japanese spare parts, large sectors of the U.S. economy would have ground to a halt within weeks. Warfare suddenly had parameters that the military could not penetrate with radar-evading bombers or vast fleets. Even the military machine itself had come to rely on crucial components originally designed in the U.S.A. but improved and produced more efficiently in Japan.
The news media blustered about an economic Pearl Harbor, running their newspapers on state-of-the-art presses built in Yokohama, or broadcasting their commentaries over Japanese hardware to high-definition television sets made by Panasonic, Toshiba, and Hitachi. There seemed little hope for a second Battle of Midway in the near future. Certainly, even a strategic military response was out of the question, not only due to the debacle suffered by U.S. arms in Africa and the anti-U.S. sentiment prevailing worldwide, but also because the Japanese home islands' Space and Atmospheric Defense Complex — SAD-C — was far more sophisticated than were the partially deployed U.S. space defenses, which had both inspired and provided the initial technology for the Japanese effort.
The U.S. received the blame for everything, including the spread of Runciman's disease. Smug at America's humiliation, the European Union quickly forgot its initial support for the U.S. intervention. There was a sense that the Americans were finally getting what they deserved, and the Europeans congratulated themselves on having effectively dismantled the North Atlantic alliance back in the nineties. War, the Europeans declared, would no longer solve anything, and they pointed to their own miniaturized military establishments — barely large enough for a good parade — as cost effective in a world where the crippled giants of both East and West were equally condemned as failures. The fundamental thrust of Euro-diplomacy seemed to be to reach a market partition of the world with Japan and the less-powerful Pacific economies, even if appeasing the Japanese required significant concessions. After all, the Europeans rationalized, their home market would remain untouched by the agreements, and, at heart, the European Community had become almost as introspective as China.
The only thing for which the Europeans were not ready was Runciman's disease — and the crippling effect it had on the world economy, as well as on indigenous European production. Only the Japanese managed to initiate truly effective quarantine measures, sealing off the home islands but continuing their export trade through a vast clearing
house on the island of Okinawa.
Taylor paged through the casualty lists, unwilling to look at them too closely yet. And he could not bring himself to study the accounts of lost engagements in detail. Even as he read, his resistance was growing. He had survived— and his country would emerge from all of this as surely as he had emerged from the jungle.
He finally tossed the dog-eared papers aside when one headline summed up the depressing jumble of reports:
THE END OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY
He remembered little of the Azores. Just the monotony of the tent city where every evacuee had to remain for ninety days, moving from one "sterile" subsection to another, and his surprise to find that he had been presumed dead and that he had been posthumously awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross on the strength of his last radio messages, which had been recorded by a U.S. Military Intelligence outfit. He remembered listening to the ranting of a fellow captain, a Military Intelligence officer named
Tucker Williams, who swore that he was going to live for sheer spite just so he could beat the service back into shape. Taylor half-listened to the man's tales of how Military Intelligence had corrupted itself in the quest for promotions—"We stressed the jobs that brought tangible rewards in peacetime, command, XO, operations officer, everything except the hard MI skills. And when the country needed us. we went to Africa with more commanders and XOs and S-3s than you could count, but without the analysts and collection managers and electronic warfare officers it takes to fight a war… and I swear to God I'm going to fix it, if I have to pistol whip my way up to the Chief of Staff…" Taylor was not certain what his own future would hold. He suspected he would remain in the military, although he was not sure now that he was the right man for it, in view of his battlefield failure. But he wanted, above all, a chance to prove himself, to get it right. To atone.
He did not worry about Runciman's disease, even when two other officers in his tent came down with it. He was convinced that he had some sort of natural resistance. If Africa had not cut him down, the Azores certainly were not going to get him. Then he briefly awoke to his own screams and abdominal pains of unimaginable ferocity. For the first few moments he managed to tell himself it was simply the multiple parasites for which the Army doctors were treating him. Then the truth bore down upon him, just before he lost consciousness.
Beyond the initial shock, he remembered virtually nothing of the disease. It was merely a long sleep from which he awoke with the face of a monster, where once the mirror had reflected an overgrown boy.
He was lucky, at least to the extent that his faculties were not impaired. The battery of tests given to all survivors revealed no deterioration in his mental capabilities whatsoever. Later the Army even offered him plastic surgery, as they did to every soldier who contracted RD in the line of duty. In the wake of the plague years, plastic surgeons developed fine techniques for repairing disease-damaged skin. The results were never perfect, but the work allowed you to sit in a restaurant without disturbing those around you.
Taylor never submitted to the treatment. In the years of our troubles he wore a lengthening personal history of medals and campaign ribbons on his chest. But when he was alone in front of the mirror, it was his face that was the true badge of his service, and of his failure on a clear morning in Africa.
2
Los Angeles
2008
First Lieutenant Howard "Merry" Meredith, child of privilege, stood among the dead. The medics had moved on, shrugging their shoulders, leaving him alone with the boy he had just killed. There were plenty of casualties, on both sides, although he did not yet know the exact number. Voices called out orders, as the Army began to put the street back in working order. But for Meredith the familiar commands and complaints were only background noise. Another helicopter thundered overhead, drawing its shadow over the scene, while a mounted loudspeaker instructed the local residents to remain indoors. The wash of air from the rotors picked over the loose fabric of the dead boy's clothing, as though sifting through his pockets. Well, there would be time for that too.
The color of blood was far softer than the tones of the boy's costume. The garish rejectionist uniform of the streets. Meredith would not even have worn those mock satins and gilt chains to a costume party. They were almost as foreign to him as the lush, loose prints worn by the Zairean women had been. He wanted no part of them.
And yet, they were a part of him. In a way that he could not understand, in a manner intellectually suspect, perhaps only learned, imagined, imposed. The dead boy's eyes appeared swollen and very white in their setting of black and deep maroon. Far from achieving any dignity in death, the boy looked like something out of an old, vulgar cartoon. The moronic minstrel who chanced upon a ghost.
No connection, Meredith insisted. It's bullshit.
It occurred to him that the light was very good. It was an off-season light, soft, yet very clear. The smoke of the firefight had withered away, and there was almost no smog in a city come to standstill. The slum was almost picturesque, when you discarded the baggage of your preconceptions. A poor neighborhood in some handsome southern place. Drowsing, in a very good light. It seemed unreasonable to Meredith that he could not see his way more clearly in a light of such quality.
Merry Meredith, child of privilege, born to confidence, handsome and markedly intelligent, fumbled to put his pistol back in its holster. He turned away from the boy he had killed and began to call out orders to his men. His voice had the brilliant confidence of an actor stepping back out onto the stage while his life crumbles behind the curtains.
He had come a long way from Ann Arbor, where the first serious prejudice he had encountered was that of his parents against his choice of a career. He always thought fondly of his parents, grateful to them for so much, sorry only that he had never managed to find the time to sit down with them as an adult and explain why his life's path had needed to diverge so markedly from theirs. Anyway, he had not possessed the words. So much of it was a matter of feelings, of intuitions.
The plague had swept through the ranks of the university's professors with a ferocity that seemed to seek revenge for finding the dormitories emptied of students. Whether the victim was liberal or conservative, a mathematician or Chaucerian scholar, Runciman's disease had shown a great appetite for knowledge. His father had been a historian whose lifework consisted of reinterpreting the history of the United States through the eyes of its minorities, while his sociologist mother had labored to explain the statistical problems of a black population from which her own background, education, and standard of living had kept her utterly separate, despite the color of her skin. The plague had called them in swiftly, as though starved for their expertise, before a son returning from the confusion of Zaire could take them in his arms one last time.
When he remembered his parents it was usually in terms of a golden, astonishingly untroubled childhood, or in the light of scenes where their exasperation, anger, and very best intentions struggled against his desire to go to West Point. He set his face in a near smile, recalling their well-meant reproaches: Where had they gone wrong? Where had they failed? How had they been so inept in the transmission of their values that a son of theirs would want to become a military officer? Had he declared himself a homosexual or perhaps even a drug addict, they would have felt far less a sense of parental inadequacy. They even reached the point where they were willing to let him stay home and go to Michigan. He could even continue to play football…
Well, he had played football, on the first winning team West Point had fielded in a decade. And the child who had been forced to hide his toy soldiers from his parents the way other children hid only partially understood works of pornography became an officer in the United States Army. His parents had come up to the Point for his graduation, but his mother wept helplessly and his father's face bore the stoical look of a man whose son had just wed the town harlot.
Then his childhood ended. Two days before he graduated from the
Military Intelligence Officer's Basic Course at Fort Huachuca, his orders were amended to send him to the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg. He was to proceed directly, without home leave. Almost his entire class found themselves in the same boat, as the Army struggled to flesh out at least a few key units to full strength during the Zairean crisis. At Fort Bragg he underwent emergency in-processing, signed for his field gear, and loaded onto a transport aircraft to join his new unit, which had already deployed to Kinshasa.
He had been excited, and only occasionally did his stomach suffer a quick tinge of fear. He was going into combat. All of his training would be put to immediate use. A range of dramatic, if nebulous, opportunities seemed to open up before him.
But he did not see combat. Instead he remained in the grubby, diseased environs of Kinshasa, sitting behind a bank of intelligence work stations that glowed with multicolored electronic displays and did absolutely nothing to alter the outcome of the campaign.
But he learned. He learned the emptiness of the things he had been taught in school about war, and, above all, he seemed to learn the depth of his Americanness. Despite his rebelliousness, his parents had managed to imbue him with a residual belief that there must be some magic in his African heritage. Their casual iconography promised an untutored wisdom about life, a deeper, richer humanity, and a natural splendor beyond compromise, beyond the reach of the cold, pale refugees from the Northern Hemisphere.