“Time to wake up, sir. Fifteen minutes until blastoff.”
Having said what he needed to say, the loadmaster left me to my thoughts.
Blastoff. No kidding—that was the right term. These days HALO-style anachronistic parachute maneuvers have been superseded by Intruder Pods: sleek, high-speed pods that kept electromagnetic waves down to a minimum, making detection by enemy radar virtually impossible. The cargo hold in which I sat was lined with a row of black cylinders, like giant ballpoint pens, and the maintenance staff were primed and ready to go. I looked around at my surroundings in the belly of the Flying Seaweed Craft to see the other guys from my unit hustling and bustling all around me.
“Dude, how the hell do you sleep in the middle of this giant pneumatic drill?” Williams shouted as he approached me. “That turbulence back there bashed the hell out of us.”
I told him I hadn’t noticed.
“Jesus Christ. I’ve never seen anyone who could zone out like you can. I bet you can’t even feel your own dick when you have a boner.”
It wasn’t surprising that the Flying Seaweed Craft was shaking so much; it was a warplane after all. It wasn’t set up to be a luxury passenger liner. The actual technology involved in these craft might have improved by leaps and bounds, but amenities for the comfort of the poor infantry who actually had to ride on the bloody things remained rock-bottom priority. Welcome to my world.
The Flying Seaweed Craft were a weird oblong shape in order to reduce their electromagnetic footprint to an absolute minimum. It was only because of the sophisticated piloting software that they were even able to fly at all. And when it was almost a miracle that they could even take off, let alone not crash, there wasn’t a lot of time left to worry about how smooth the ride was.
“I don’t know about me feeling my dick, but I’ve never had any complaints from your mom,” I fired back at Williams. “Anyhow, don’t you have other things to worry about, like getting ready for the drop?”
“Nice one. And speak for yourself, dude. I’m all set. I’m just hoping you’re not going to fuck anything up too badly.”
“Funny, your mom also said that last time I saw her …” I answered, as Williams sat down next to me. Truth be told, Williams wasn’t so much a trash-talker as a shit-stirrer. He’d gossip about anything, trying to take you into his confidence over the stupidest things. Who’d picked up a new piece of ass, what perversions so-and-so was into lately—the more banal the gossip, the more likely he was to be there whispering it in your ear like a girl.
“By the way, Clavis, what’s your honest opinion about our orders on this mission?” he asked me.
Now, this was actually a question that had been troubling all of us. Not that anyone had voiced it publicly, of course. Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die, such was our unwritten law. For most of us anyway. Considering he was supposed to be elite Special Forces, Williams had this abnormal fascination with trivia and an unusually loose tongue and casual manner to go with it. As a result, we were always being treated to gems such as “Did you know that Charlize Theron witnessed her own mother shoot her father dead when she was fifteen years old? Actually saw it happen right in front of her own eyes?”
“Who knows,” I said, noncommittal. “It’s going to be tight. Taking two targets out simultaneously isn’t easy at the best of times. Unless they both arrive at the appointed rendezvous spot at exactly the right time, there are a lot of variables that could mess things up.”
“No, dude, I’m not talking about the logistics,” said Williams, who was somewhat antsy now. “I’m talking about Target B. The American?”
“Well, there are Americans all over the world,” I said, and then I looked at him and sighed. “Or are you trying to say you have no problem killing the little brown people of the world, but that your conscience troubles you when it’s a fellow countryman’s neck on the line? Is—”
“Hell, no. He’s one evil twisted sonofabitch of a countryman. My conscience is just fine,” Williams said, cutting me off. “It’s just there’s something about his profile that’s bothering me. It’s like there’s some vital clue that’s been whitewashed out of the report that we were given. I’m not the only one saying this either—the other guys think the same, that it’s impossible to work out what sort of person he is. We just can’t get a mental image of who he is.”
“Other than being one evil twisted sonofabitch of a countryman, you mean.”
Williams shrugged his shoulders. “Well, that part’s not hard to figure out, is it? Our job is to go after the bad guys. If this guy is our target, it stands to reason that he must be evil, right?”
A nice, simple worldview. Williams still believed, after everything, that his country could do no wrong. Of course, this sort of tunnel vision was fostered by the job. Demanded, even. Without it, how would one be able to face strangers, look them in the eye, and kill, kill, and kill again?
The easiest way to make sure that you could sleep at night with a clear mind and an unburdened conscience was simply not to think too hard on things. A simple ideology for a simple mind.
When you’re standing at an ethical crossroads, sometimes it’s easier not to look before you leap.
To be thick-skinned is to be enlightened. So aim to develop a thicker skin than the next man.
Embrace the tautology: we’re right because we’re right.
An ordinary soldier has to kill that undefined, undifferentiated mass called “the enemy” in order to protect himself. And although in Special Forces we might have seemed more like high-tech, elite assassins, in many ways our role was closer to that of the ordinary soldier. The only difference was that it was our job to go one step further, to define and to differentiate that enemy for operational purposes. But it was still easier all around if, emotionally, we treated them as that same undifferentiated mass that the common soldier was firing at, so that the weight of all the individual lives we snuffed out didn’t rest too heavily on our shoulders.
Some soldiers still broke down, of course. Think back to the time when the US drafted in counselors by the hundreds in order to try and rehabilitate their troops stationed in Iraq before sending them home for reintegration into society. They set up repatriation camps where those on deck to return to the States would be able to experience a simulated version of American society. That’s how Baghdad came to be one big US-themed summer camp.