Authors: Project Itoh
The official line was that this country was suffering from the same old story as found the world over: Muslims versus Christians. Of course, conflicts usually have more than one catalyst. After all, there were countries where Islam and Christianity could peacefully coexist, even when right next door. It seemed that this even used to be the case in this country, historically. A former state of the USSR that had declared independence after the disintegration of the old Communist Party, this country had taken the usual course of confrontation with Russia over natural resources, but there had been nothing to suggest that religion was going to be the cause of bitter internecine warfare. Not until a few short years ago.
How had the conflict developed so rapidly? How had the flames of hatred in people’s hearts been fanned so quickly that massacres had become commonplace? At such an exponential rate? There wasn’t a scholar in the world who had been able to come up with a convincing hypothesis.
We had to avoid an encounter with the enemy at all costs. At least until our targets were safely dead. If we were sighted, it would all be over. They’d radio ahead to our targets, who’d be spirited out of harm’s way. With our equipment and training we’d have no problem fighting our way through an enemy company or two until we reached the safety of our pick-up point. But the mission itself would be a failure.
We took a short pit stop after our second hour of marching. We’d virtually been running the whole way, and Williams was on the verge of breathlessness. I couldn’t say I wasn’t feeling it too. We lay down in a thicket, hidden from view, and our nanocoating sprang into action, blending us in with the colors of the vegetation that swirled around us. A little piece of magic that came in ever so handy when planning an infiltration or ambush.
On this occasion, though, it looked like we had become a little
too
reliant on it.
It turned out there was a pickup truck parked just the other side of the thicket in which we were hiding. Of course, our muscles all sprang into a state of high alert. Breathing silently, we became one with the vegetation around us and watched as three men clambered out of the car brandishing AK rifles. It goes without saying that they were completely oblivious to our presence. They lit a bonfire.
They didn’t seem to notice or care about the ammo in their guns. They threw their guns down right beside them, beside the fire, even though the magazines were fully loaded.
“Amateurs,” mouthed Williams. I shrugged. In this land, the qualification for being a soldier was the ability to plunder and terrorize a defenseless village when the opportunity presented itself. Training didn’t really come into it.
Having said that, we couldn’t exactly take off while they remained here, amateurs or not. And we had no time to spare if we were to make our target before dawn. So we had no ethical compunction about deciding to kill these unfortunate patrol troops who bore us no specific ill will, who hadn’t tried to harm us, and who were just trying to snatch a moment of warm respite.
The men remained completely unaware of our presence as we silently flanked them. They would also have been completely unaware of the brief flash of steel before their windpipes were slit open with surgical precision. They wouldn’t have known what happened, who killed them, or why. Even as their lifeblood poured from their throats, their eyes wouldn’t have even caught a glimpse of us. They just flickered orange, reflecting the licking flames from the bonfire in front of them. And so it came to pass that where there had been four men, there were now four corpses.
We frisked the bodies quickly. No sign of any dog tags or other ID. Then I used my knife to open up my guy’s sleeve, starting at his already blood-soaked shoulder.
As I expected, there was the slightest of bumps at a point among the muscles of his back. Completely undetectable to the naked eye unless you knew exactly what you were looking for, a bulge about the size of the fingernail on your pinkie.
I used my knife to shave off the chunk of flesh. Inside it, sure enough, was a small disc.
His ID tag.
Williams looked over at me, eyebrows raised.
The usual, huh?
he was asking. As the ranking officer, it was my call.
We were four white men standing there—only whites were chosen for this mission, for obvious reason. The soldiers we had just killed were also white. As were all those in this country who were massacring their fellow countrymen for believing in a different version of a god.
My eyes met Alex’s and Leland’s. They shrugged their shoulders:
you first, sir.
There was nothing for it. I took the protective gel out of my backpack and used it to coat the blood-soaked dog tag I had extracted from the flesh of the dead man’s shoulder, placed the tag in the palm of my hand, and gulped it down like an aspirin.
4
The truck was mounted with a .50 caliber gun, set up so that it could fire while moving. An ordinary Toyota pickup turned into a machine of war by virtue of a simple machine gun grafted onto it. The air force of this country was taken out of action shortly into the civil war, but they had somehow managed to preserve most of their radar and associated antiaircraft batteries. It seemed almost comically imbalanced that a country that managed to fight on with the vestiges of a modern air force was reduced to fielding such amateur DIY efforts in lieu of proper armored vehicles.
And so it came to pass that we were now using an enemy vehicle to speed down the very road that we had been taking pains to avoid. With the exception of our nanolayers, we had to ditch all our fancy equipment. Even our SOPMOD modular assault rifles that, like some kiddie toy with interchangeable parts, could be turned into grenade launchers or laser-guided sniper rifles.
It was better to ditch the gear than to continue on a long-winded night march through unfamiliar terrain. When it came down to it, we pampered Americans had an overprotective attitude toward our equipment that bordered on fetishistic. Our military technology was number one, we knew, and it was great that we were able to get so psyched about how awesome we were—I’ll admit I often felt a childish glee myself when faced with our latest fancy gadgets—but sometimes a person needed to forget all about what was fashionable and trendy and get back to basics.
Alex was driving. I was sitting shotgun, keeping an eye out for anything that might be a threat while simultaneously trying to maintain a casual demeanor so that no one looking in at us would suspect anything. The fatigues we’d stripped from the dead soldiers and were now wearing had bloodstains all over them, of course, but they were in such a filthy state to begin with that a bit of water from our canteens was enough to rinse out the worst so that the rest more or less blended in.
“It’ll be no time at all to our destination in this baby, sir,” said Alex. “I wonder what’s written on the side of this pickup, though?”
“It’s Japanese,” I answered. I’d minored in the language back in college, and as a result I’d once been assigned to train up a section of their army. What was it called?
Ji-eh-tai
or something. … Anyway, the lettering on the side of the truck seemed to suggest that it had once been used by a tofu shop called Fujiwara. Would a Japanese tofu shop ever have imagined that their old, beat-up vehicle would have a new lease on life as a makeshift armored vehicle in a civil war in the boondocks of Eastern Europe?
“They’re called
kanji
, aren’t they, the letters, sir? Pretty cool language,” Alex said.
“Sure, when you can’t read them they’re more like a work of art than lettering, I suppose.”
“So you’re saying that they seem cool only because I can’t read them?”
“You could say that, yeah,” I said. “In the same way that it’s easy to reject a foreign culture you don’t understand, you can also end up putting it on a pedestal. Using words such as ‘exotic’ and ‘oriental’ to describe something as being cool, when really all you are talking about is a cultural code for some sort of ‘other’ compared to what you’re used to.”
“I think I understand,” said Alex. “So a foreign language isn’t just another language, it’s also
foreign
, is that what you mean, sir? More like a pattern or motif on a textile rather than language as we know it?”
“Something like that. Semantic bleaching, that’s what they call it when words lose their meaning—although I suppose it’s a little different if the words never
had
any meaning to you in the first place. Imagine a Scrabble board when the game’s being played in a language you don’t know. The whole board is just going to look like an abstract work of art to you, isn’t it?”
We often played Scrabble back at base. Many a long afternoon was made shorter by the spell that magical fifteen-by-fifteen grid cast on us as it filled up with words. Williams, for example, was constantly pestering me to play just one more game. He always lost. And he always went into a snit afterward. His regular lament went something like this:
“Okay. So they say the average American knows forty-five thousand words. Forty-five thousand! So why can’t I even think of enough words to fill a pissant board fifteen squares wide?”
Incidentally, the highest-scoring word ever sanctioned in Scrabble once came up in a game between Williams and me. I was the one who played it, of course.
Quixotry
, derived from an old Spanish novel. A furious Williams refused to accept it until it had been double-checked in two different dictionaries. Whether because he genuinely didn’t believe it or just didn’t want to concede the ridiculous score it gave me—365 points on that single word, was it?—I don’t know.
I’ve never lost a game of Scrabble in my life. Not ever, since my first-ever game against my mother when I was eight years old.
Looks like I’ve brought up a right little philologist. You and words are just made for each other.
I remember my mother saying this to me when I was a teenager. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms before, but it was certainly true that I always had a certain affinity for words. I remember thinking it was both strange and hilarious that a few little words could change a person so completely. People could become enraged by words or brought to tears, or have their emotions buffeted this way and that. Words were so
interesting
.
I never saw words as a mere means of communication. What I mean by that is that I didn’t just “see” words, but I also felt them, viscerally, their weight pressing down on me as if they were matter. To me, words didn’t just connect people, words
bound
people, restricting and regulating their actions in very real and meaningful ways, even if the people using the words were completely oblivious to this fact. I sensed this, just as a mathematician could conceptualize and grasp an imaginary number as clearly as a real one. They say that physicists don’t think in terms of words, and that Einstein didn’t arrive at his Theory of Relativity just by stringing together words and formulae. Rather, it all just came together in a much simpler place, a primeval space, outside the scope of human language and number systems.
I can sort of relate to this. I perceive words as a sort of landscape. It’s hard to explain the feeling to other people. After all, it relates, in a most fundamental way, to how I perceive the world around me. And what people perceive as “real” varies from person to person, mind to mind. The ancient Romans never debated the meaning of taste or color, for example.
Just as I can conceptualize words, there are people who can conceptualize and relate to abstract concepts such as “nationhood” and “race.” I could no longer do this myself, probably because I was jaded by a job that essentially came down to killing people for the sake of this very same “nation.” Maybe the words were just too overwhelmingly powerful for me, who knows? All I knew was that words such as
nationhood
,
race,
and
community
were just that, as far as I was concerned—words. And even if I could conceptualize them as words, they weren’t concepts that I could relate to my real, everyday existence.
A corollary to this was that people who
did
have their own vivid, holistic idea of what a word like
nationhood
meant could do my thinking for me. These people would be part of the establishment, Langley or Fort Mead or Washington, thinking hard about what
nationhood
meant and ordering me to kill people on its behalf.
I’m sure that the same went for the leaders of the various insurgencies in the country that we were now in. They had the ability to perceive that “their country” and “other countries” were distinct entities, and this enabled them to act accordingly. After all, if you couldn’t draw a line between “us” and “them,” how could you label anyone the “enemy”? Oh, sure, it was easy enough when someone was physically in front of you, threatening violence, a clear and present danger. But to demarcate clear boundaries along the lines of race or religion, and moreover to label anyone on the wrong side of the “us and them” divide as enemies worthy of being killed? That took some serious willpower, or at least a concerted effort to conceptualize “reality” in a very specific way.