The soldiers who had been living in the parallel universe that is war now had to try and remember what it was like to go shopping at K-Mart. How much does a Snickers bar cost again? And so it came to pass that the men and women warped by the battlefields of Iraq wouldn’t be allowed to return to the real America without passing through the virtual one first.
The human psyche is a fragile thing. The more you dwelt on the people that you’ve killed, imagining the lives that they led and would have continued to lead had you not killed them, the more likely it was that you’d suffer emotional scarring. Which meant that we in Special Forces were particularly susceptible to this sort of thing—after all, unlike the ordinary soldier who fired into the crowds, we killed individuals, face to face. So much more stressful for us.
Or maybe the likes of Williams and I only thought this way because we were Americans, cosseted and wrapped up in our little Western ethnocentric bubbles. There were plenty of places still left in the world where life was cheap or even completely without value. I knew this. I’d been to them.
In fact we were entering just such a hellish place right now, penetrating the darkness in our sleek black aircraft. We were hurtling down toward the badlands below, and when we emerged we knew we would be entering pandemonium. A scene of unimaginable tragedy that was somehow tinged with manic glee.
A scene right out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, in other words.
The intercom from the cockpit sounded inside my ear: “We’re five minutes into enemy airspace, but no sign of antiaircraft fire and no response from their missile systems. We’re proceeding smoothly, and all signs are we’ll avoid enemy detection. Looks like we’ve caught them napping, gentlemen.”
All operatives on this sort of secret mission had internal transmitters and hands-free receivers built into our bodies. Other high-tech devices too: software to pick up and decipher the faintest of murmurs, so that what’s imperceptible to our surroundings is decoded and transmitted to the rest of the team. This reconstructed speech sounded nothing like your real speech of course. It was an artificial representation of what you would have sounded like, an imaginary construct that existed somewhere between your voice box and the speakers that it was relayed to.
“Our Stealth Paint strikes again. It’s absorbing all the radar,” Williams said nonchalantly. “If it weren’t for our IFF telling our guys back on the ground our position, I doubt they’d be able to spot us either.”
“Ten minutes till drop. Start wrapping yourselves up, boys. And good luck.”
“Here we go.” I patted Williams on the back. He headed into his pod without another word. The reason the pods were matte black was not to block detection by electromagnetic rays, but rather to block infrared. The loadmaster blasted out “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” by Jimi Hendrix over the speakers. Psyching us up for battle.
I thought what I always thought when I watched the men around me climbing into their pods: they’re getting inside their coffins.
The dead who crawl back into their coffins. With their faces painted for camouflage they looked just like zombies. As if they were corpses reanimated by a voodoo spell and only now finally returning to their caskets where they belonged. As I watched the guys all around me lumber into their pods I couldn’t help but notice their glazed expressions, blank like so many dead fish.
Voodoo Child. I guess the loadmaster must have been thinking the same thing? I glanced over at him to see if I could read his expression, but his face was obscured by the oxygen mask he was now wearing to cope with the increased g-forces.
I decided to join the others and stood up to head to my pod. The rest of the unit were already ensconced in their own pods, arms folded across their chests, braced for impact. From my vantage directly above they looked more like real corpses than ever.
A scene from a movie flitted into my head. 2001: A Space Odyssey. The scene in which the astronauts in suspended animation were silently killed off by the computer, one by one.
I entered my pod and adopted the posture of a dead man. I crossed my arms across my chest like the Pharaohs of old. I looked up through the hatch to see the ceiling of the cargo bay, lights shining down on me. I could hear my own breathing resonating in the casket. I was a corpse. A corpse and a horseman of the apocalypse, ready to wreak a trail of death and destruction on the unsuspecting lands below.
Then out of nowhere I was overwhelmed by a bizarre wave of emotions.
“Pressurization in the hold commenced. Five minutes until guided ejection. Prepare for blastoff.”
Complicated emotions. Something like sadness, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on them.
I saw my mom in her hospital bed, lying sideways, eyes closed.
Embalmed, ready for her eternal sleep, and smiling.
The hatch door to my pod slid shut silently and smoothly, and the moment it sealed me off from the outside world I felt the reverberating thud of pressurization. Sound disappeared from the world, and all was darkness. This was what it was like to be buried.
Yes. I was now experiencing my mom’s death for myself. That’s why I was suddenly so overcome with emotion, I realized. That was why this high-altitude drop, normally so routine for people in my line of work, had taken on monumental significance.
There was a high-pitched creaking sound from the outside of the pod. The cargo bay was starting to lose pressure.
“The cargo bay is now fully decompressed. Three minutes until blastoff. Release rear hatches.”
Motors roared into action, and shortly afterward the locks were opened. The Seaweed’s belly opened up. The loadmaster was buffeted this way and that by the air currents streaming in through the open hatch, but those of us inside our pods heard and felt nothing.
“One minute until blastoff. Commence countdown.”
I wondered if this was how my mom went too. Being shut off from the light as the casket finally closed, then sealed into place with nails. On the journey to who-knows-where, trapped shut inside a box, buried for all eternity. Is that what happened to Mom—to all people, anywhere, since time immemorial when people first started sealing their dead in caskets?
The countdown continued inside my mind, but I wasn’t feeling the exhilaration I usually did just before a drop.
“We have blastoff. Godspeed to you all.”
I heard the thud that came with release: both heavy and gentle at the same time. Then gravity disappeared.
I was at the mercy of the laws of physics. Specifically, the law of gravity.
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