by Rick Partlow
“Glad you caught yourself,” I told him, wiping off a fake drop of sweat. “I am unused to that sort of rough language and might have fainted dead away.”
A snorting laugh from him sounded almost as if it struggled free against his will.
“Mom doesn’t like me swearing,” he confessed. “She makes me put money in a jar every time she hears me. She says it makes me sound dumb.”
“It does.” I shrugged, more a tilt of my head than anything with my shoulders because the pack was weighing them down. “It’s easier than thinking of a more intelligent, creative thing to say. But it also frees your mind up for other things. That’s why Marines are always swearing, because we’ve usually got more important things on our mind than coming up with creative things to say, like trying not to get shot.”
“So, you don’t mind if I cuss?” he asked, a sly, teenager-trying-to-slide-by smile on his face.
“I do not mind,” I said, giving him my dad-isn’t-as-stupid-as-you-think smirk, “as long as you’re in a situation where your life is in danger and you’re trying to free up brain cells. Other than that, I’m going to have to support your mother on this.”
He sighed and seemed to sink under the weight of his pack again and I forced myself to appreciate the magnificent view of the sandstone hills giving way as we left the highlands behind and headed back toward the car. Though it wouldn’t be the western Nevada scenery I’d remember from this trip so much as the first opportunity I’d been given to spend time with my son in years.
“I hope you had a good time,” I said, wincing at the inanity of the statement even as it left my mouth. It was one of those things you said when you had no idea what else to say. “Despite the heat and the lack of signal.”
“Yeah, it was fun. I haven’t been backpacking since last year. Paul took me to Yosemite, but he was too busy this year.”
For nearly a minute the only sound was the crunching of footsteps and the rustle of a welcome breeze, but I could sense words forming, pushing against a reticence born of the years we’d spent apart.
“Dad.”
“Yeah?” I kept the reply casual, though I knew the question wasn’t going to be a comfortable one.
“Mom and Paul said Venezuela messed you up. What happened there? Why were we in Venezuela, anyway?”
“Didn’t they teach you that in school?” I wondered.
He rolled his eyes, somehow using his whole head in that way only a teenager can.
“Yeah,” he said, “but you know how teachers are. Especially my AP US History teacher, Ms. Sorrentino. Paul says she’s a huge bleeding-heart liberal.”
I barked a laugh.
“She probably is. What did your mom think of Paul saying that?”
“Oh, he would never say that in front of Mom! He knows she’d argue politics with him for hours if he did.”
Yeah, that sounded like the Allie I had known.
“Maybe it messed me up,” I said, changing tack back to the subject, not wanting to criticize my ex-wife to our child. “Or maybe I was already messed up and the war just brought it to the surface. People tend to want to blame war for falling apart, but I’ve known a lot of guys who went through the same shit and didn’t let it get to them.”
“You said ‘shit,’ Dad,” he pointed out.
“I did. Maybe because my brain was busy working on something else.”
“Like what?”
“Like how to answer your question honestly.” I tried to organize fifteen years of thoughts into something coherent. “Let me try to explain why we were there first. That’s the easier part. Venezuela is an oil-rich country, which meant it was a rich country for a long time. And at one point, a socialist government took over. And at first, everyone was happy because having all that oil money meant the government could pretty much take care of everyone and have a lot left over. But then the government decided it wanted a bigger slice of the pie and nationalized the oil industry.” I glanced at him, gauging his expression. “Do you know what that means?”
“I think?” he frowned.
“It means before, international oil companies owned the facilities and ran them with their own people and just paid taxes to the government. But afterward, the Venezuelan government took ownership of the drilling and the refining and put their own people in charge. And they found out there was a reason the people who ran the oil fields made lots and lots of money.” Another shrug. “There were a lot of other factors, but the bottom line was, the economy started to go downhill. And then a lot of people who’d been okay with the president getting reelected with no opposition for all those years decided that wasn’t okay anymore and they wanted the chance to vote for someone else.”
“And I bet the guys in charge didn’t want that.”
“No, they did not. And they began to crack down on the opposition, and at the same time, the economy collapsed and the whole place was in chaos. The regime held on as long as it could, but eventually, they couldn’t pay the army and at that point, there was no real government, just warring factions. And when you don’t have a government, you have a big honking vacuum, and all kinds of stuff flows in to fill that. In this case, what came to fill it was terrorist groups of all shapes and sizes. The biggest and baddest was the People’s Army of Venezuela, or the EPV.”
“EPV sounds like a venereal disease.”
“Doesn’t it?” I agreed. “It’s for Ejercito Popular de Venezuela.”
“Do you speak Spanish, Dad?”
“Pretty much. I took it in high school and all four years of college, but I didn’t really speak it fluently until after a few months in Venezuela. You gotta hear it every day, all day to really get it down. Anyway, the EPV pretty much took over Caracas and began killing everyone who tried to stand up against them, except for the Citizen’s Militia.”
“What’s that in Spanish?”
“It wasn’t anything, because the Citizen’s Militia was a fictional creation of General Carlos Martijena, a former Air Force officer who had tried to overthrow the socialists and been forced into exile. The CM was designed by the CIA for consumption by the American press and public because we wanted a local face on the opposition. And maybe that’s how we would have left it, funding the CM, running some covert ops off the books, maybe a few drone strikes…until Bayamon.”
“You mean that bombing in Puerto Rico?” He had the excitement a kid gets when you mention something that they’re familiar with. “I watched a video series about that in history.”
“Yeah. Three hundred dead, a thousand wounded. After that, we weren’t going to let the CM handle things for us anymore. And that’s when we started putting boots on the ground. Including my boots. I was a Marine infantry platoon leader with about a year under my belt in the position and I should have been promoted to first lieutenant and slipped into a company XO slot in a few weeks, which was what your mom wanted because company XO’s generally aren’t leading rifle platoons on patrols in the middle of the worst parts of Caracas…but I wasn’t going to be, because we didn’t need any company XO’s, we needed infantry platoon leaders.”
“So, tell me what happened,” he prompted, sounding like my first therapist. “What did you see there that fuck—” He bit off the end of the word, wincing. “that messed you up so much? Mom said you had nightmares and wouldn’t stop drinking the times you came home on leave.”
“She said that, did she?” I asked, trying to tamp down the festering anger. Allie had made the first move toward peace by letting me be part of Zack’s life again, and getting pissed at her for past sins wouldn’t help anything. “Well, I did have nightmares. Sometimes I still do. But you know, I don’t think I have ever since the Selenium, when I met the aliens.”
“Why’s that?”
“Someone once told me the secret to not getting messed up by the things you see in war. I didn’t listen to him back then, but now I think he was right.” I chuckled. “Come to think of it, the day he told me that might have been the worst day
I had in the whole damned war.”
“Tell me the story.”
I regarded him with a doubtful frown.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea, son.”
“Why? You think I haven’t heard worse?” His chin jutted out, red with a nascent sunburn, in a challenge to my adult reticence. “There’s videos of that shit, dad. I’ve seen kids getting killed and dead bodies with their legs blown off and their guts hanging out.”
“I know you have, Zack.” And the knowledge dragged my shoulders down with a weight heavier than the pack. “I had, too, when I was your age.” He squinted at me doubtfully and I shook my head. “Yeah, we had the internet back then, too. It’s actually older than I am. But seeing a video doesn’t tell you everything. It doesn’t tell you what a rotting body smells like. It doesn’t tell you about the cold that runs up your spine when you just know someone is aiming a gun at you but you can’t see them. It doesn’t tell you what it’s like when a kid barely four or five years older than you are now, who trusts you to keep him safe and get him home dies ten feet from you and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
I hadn’t meant to get so intense…or so defensive. Zack seemed a bit cowed and I sighed, closing my eyes for a second.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I’ll tell you what. One story. I’ll tell you one story about Venezuela. Just one, but I won’t hold anything back.”
“Okay.” He started walking again and I hurried to catch up. “One story. I want to hear the story about your worst day.”
“Okay.” I took a sip of water from the hose attached to my shoulder strap, running back to the bladder in my backpack, buying myself some time. “But to tell that story, I have to go back to the day before.” I laughed. “Which wasn’t that wonderful of a day either.”
Chapter Two
“Shouldn’t we have them new ARV’s by now?” Chamberlain whined.
The man whined incessantly. I wasn’t sure he’d stopped since we’d landed in Caracas two months ago and I was beginning to wonder if he’d try to keep the streak alive for the whole nine-month deployment. I could have ditched him, could have asked Gunny Moore to find me another RTO. Hell, it wasn’t as if the position was as vital as it used to be, anyway. The Radio Telephone Operator was an anachronism that the Marines had yet to shed. I had a satellite radio on my belt and I could contact anyone hands-free without using the Chamberlain or his bigger, bulkier backpack rig.
But theoretically, every platoon leader was supposed to have an RTO to put through calls for fire support, air support, dust-off, and all that other good stuff you have to radio for under fire, so he or she could direct fires and movement and basically do platoon leader stuff without being stuck on the radio. The position wasn’t that important and that wasn’t a bad thing because Chamberlain wasn’t very good at it.
The downside was, I was stuck with him in my Stryker. And, as he said, it wasn’t an ARV. I was about to tell him to stop whining, as futile as that might have been, when our corpsman saved me the trouble.
“The Armed Reconnaissance Vehicle,” Hospitalman-3 Peterson droned, sounding like a tour operator at a theme park, “is being deployed in phases. We are not in phase one. The Marine Corps already divested itself of the LAV and the only alternative for our brigade would have been up-armored Humvees.” Peterson speared Chamberlain with a glare. “Would you rather be patrolling the streets of Caracas in a fucking up-armored Humvee or a Stryker infantry carrier, Lance Corporal Chamberlain? Because I value my pale, hairy ass and I don’t want to place the responsibility for its continued existence with a forty-year-old SUV that someone welded iron plates to and called it all good.”
“But they’re Army,” Chamberlain moaned, and maybe I sympathized with that argument just a bit more.
I didn’t want to argue with Chamberlain, not least because I had more important things I should have been concentrating on, but looking through the periscope at the streets of Caracas was too much like playing a video game, especially with the thermal filters on and everything glowing in fluorescent reds and yellows. I sighed, confident no one could hear it over the rumble of the giant tires on the rutted roads, and slapped the leg of the nominal vehicle commander, Sgt. Alvarez. He ducked down through the gunner’s hatch and pulled up his goggles, a question in his dark eyes.
“Let me ride the gun for a few minutes,” I shouted to him.
Alvarez seemed annoyed but he nodded because what else was he going to do? He could probably get away with telling a butterbar like me to go to hell if I told him to do something stupid or unreasonable, but this was neither, and it wasn’t like I hadn’t played vehicle commander in a Stryker before. We’d been stuck in the hand-me-down Army vehicles for a couple of months and we usually had more of the things than we had qualified vehicle commanders.
I took the comm cord from Alvarez and plugged it into the connection of my headset, mounted the platform and grabbed the gun mount for support. The wind slapped me across the face like a scorned lover, and I cursed myself for forgetting to pull my goggles on first. The ENVG-22 night vision goggles were awesome pieces of gear, like something out of science fiction, except for the big, awkward battery pack you had to wear strapped to the side of your helmet to power them. Still, barring some big breakthrough in battery life, it wasn’t likely to get any better and we were lucky to have them. They’d been in development for three years and we were one of the first regular infantry units to field them, which I think had more to do with the fact that we were on rotation to run combat patrols in Caracas and the brass wanted some feedback from the line troops.
The 22’s had thermal imaging built into them like the older 8’s, but they also had some shit-hot computer software that even the periscopes on the Strykers lacked. Standing in the open hatch, the warm breeze of a summer night in Caracas not doing a damned thing to cool me down, I could have been looking out at the city at high noon. The thermal and infrared filters didn’t turn everything to a pale green or light it up with the colors of its internal heat. Instead, the 22s meshed it all together with a state-of-the-art computer animation program that painted everything in perfect, shadowless detail.
It was unnatural, not the sense of a video game cut scene like with the periscope, but instead as if I had stepped into a Japanese animation version of hell. Think of the worst slum in the worst part of the worst city you’ve ever had the displeasure to visit, then multiply it by a hundred and you’d still be shy of the horror that was Caracas. Row houses slouched glumly, shoved together like refugees in a train car, some collapsing with the pressure. Blackened ruins interrupted the regular spacing, bad teeth in a rotting smile, and the people who lived in them were the lucky ones. They had a roof over their heads.
The streets were crowded with the others who lacked even a cracked and collapsing roof to call their own, the ones who huddled beneath the cover of whatever overhang they could find and tried to last the night. The beggars who would have thrown themselves in front of our short column of Strykers if they hadn’t found out the hard way that we wouldn’t stop for them. The prostitutes who would sell themselves for a half of an MRE and weren’t worth that much, their dresses little more than rags hanging off skeletons. And worst of all were the children. They had hollow eyes and hollow faces, like they were already dead and didn’t know it yet. If there’d been shadows, if there’d been darkness, it would have been bad enough, would have seemed like a nightmare. But it was as brightly lit as a carnival midway, every detail of every pockmarked cheek and tangled hair jumping out at me.
Cars lined the streets, ten or twenty or sometimes forty years old, patched together in multicolored quilts of metal, some rusted out in spots, covered in Bondo in others, yet none would move again. In a nation awash in oil, gasoline was impossible to get. The only ones driving were us, the Citizens’ Militia and the EPV. Well, and the nominal Venezuelan Provisional Government that we’d supposedly put in charge of the country. They got whatever they wanted as long as they made
the right noises to the press.
And yes, I am that cynical at twenty-five years old after just two months in Caracas, why do you ask?
“Bravo Four-One Actual, this is Bravo Six-Three, do you copy? Over.”
Sgt. Alvin Gregory, First squad leader. He was in the lead Stryker, just ahead of mine, and most of what I could see to our front was the ass-end of his vehicle. It was a very impressive ass-end, for all that I didn’t like using Army hand-me-downs. As for Gregory’s ass-end, I hadn’t honestly noticed, but I assumed his wife liked it.
“This is Four-One Actual,” I replied, touching the send button on my shoulder. “Good copy. Over.”
“We got a roadblock ahead about a kilometer. Looks like a bunch of wrecked vehicles dragged into the middle of an intersection and we got some tires burning in the gaps between them. Over.”
“Shit,” I murmured but didn’t transmit.
I scanned the street around us. No turn-offs, no alleyways. The last intersection had been a klick behind us and there was barely room for our column to fit through the disabled vehicles on either side, much less turn around. And suddenly, no people. The beggars, the wanderers, the prostitutes, even the kids had disappeared. Only vacant, boarded storefronts. This wasn’t some random roadblock set up by the locals to shake down some money or food.
“Hold up here, Six-Three, over.”
“Copy that. Out.”
The end of his Stryker got a lot closer until my driver hit the brakes and I came against the trigger housing of the ancient M2 fifty-cal on the turret mount. I didn’t let go of it, swiveling the barrel off to the left of the lead vehicle with one hand, then touching a control on my radio to switch frequencies.
“Bravo Four-Two, this is Bravo Four-One Actual, you copy?”
“Yeah, I copy like a son of a bitch,” Moore growled. “This is a fucking ambush, L-T. Fucking over.”
Moore wasn’t just a Marine, he was what I imagined a Marine was when I’d been a fourteen-year-old.
“It is,” I agreed. I agreed with Gunny Moore a lot, which was why he’d kept me around. “And they expect us to get bogged down in it right here, which means they have forces getting ready to cut us off from behind. Over.”