There is vivid imagination in thosestories; there is cleverness and intelligence and occasional wisdom. Violence on the cosmic scale and the molecular, and violence up close and personal.
Sometimes the avoidance of violence altogether.
There are aliens who seem human here, no surprise, and humans who seem alien. Soldiers who are animals or machines or abstract entities.
They all speak to the human condition, though, of which war has been an aspect for as long as there have been divisions of humanity on the basis of geography, citizenship, race, or religion. Perhaps we’ll evolve out of it before it destroys us.
For that, Albert Einstein may have had the final word on the future of weapons:
“I don’t know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
CRATERS
What they don’t tell you when you sign up is that the work takes a certain amount of trust. The driver, head covered by a half-assed turban, smiles a little too much, and when he yes ma’ams you and no ma’ams you, you can be lulled into thinking he actually works for you.
Then he opens the side door of his rusted jeep and nods at the dirt-covered seat. You don’t even hesitate as you slide in, backpack filled with water bottles and purifying pills, vitamins and six day’s dry rations.
You sit in that jeep, and you’re grateful, because you never allow yourself to think that he could be one of them, taking you to some roadside bunker, getting paid an advance cut of the ransom they anticipate. Or worse, getting paid to leave you there so that they can all take turns until you’re bleeding and catatonic and don’t care when they put the fifty-year-old pistol to your head.
You can’t think about the risks, not as you’re getting in that jeep, or letting some so-called civilian lead you down sunlit streets that have seen war for centuries almost non stop.
You trust, because if you don’t you can’t do your job.
You trust, and hope you get away from this place before your luck runs out.
I still have luck. I know it because today we pull into the camp. This camp’s just like all the others I’ve seen in my twenty-year career. The ass-end of nowhere, damn near unbearable heat. Barbed wire, older than God, fences in everything, and at the front, soldiers with some kind of high tech rifle, some sort of programmable thing I don’t understand.
My driver pulls into a long line of oil-burning cars, their engines only partly modified to hydrogen. The air stinks of gasoline, a smell I associate with my childhood, not with now.
We sit in the heat. Sweat pours down my face. I nurse the bottle of water I brought from the Green Zone—a misnomer we’ve applied to the American base in every “war” since Iraq. The Green Zone doesn’t have a lick of green in it. It just has buildings that are theoretically protected from bombs and suicide attacks.
Finally, we pull up to the checkpoint. I clutch my bag against my lap, even though the canvas is heavy and hot.
My driver knows the soldiers. “Reporter lady,” he tells them in English. The English is for my benefit, to prove once again that he is my friend. I haven’t let him know that I know parts (the dirty parts mostly) of two dozen languages. “Very famous. She blog, she do vid, you see her on CNN, no?”
The soldiers lean in. They have young faces covered in sand and mud and three-day-old beards.
The same faces I’ve been seeing for years—skin an indeterminate color, thanks to the sun and the dirt, eyes black or brown or covered with shades, expressions flat—the youth visible only in the body shape, the lack of wrinkles and sunlines, the leftover curiosity undimmed by too much death over too much time.
I lean forward so they can see my face. They don’t recognize me. CNN pays me, just like the
The woman everyone thinks of as me is a hired face, whose features get digitized over mine before anything goes out into public. Too many murdered journalists. Too many famous targets.
The military brass, they know to scan my wrist, send the code into the Reporter Registry, and get the retinal download that they can double-check against my eye. But foot soldiers, here on crap duty, they don’t know for nothing.
So they eyeball me, expecting a pretty face—all the studio hires are skinny and gorgeous—and instead, getting my shoe-leather skin, my dishwater blond going on steel gray hair, and my seen-too-much eyes. They take in the sweat and the khakis and the pinkie jacks that look like plastic fingernails.
I wait.
They don’t even confer. The guy in charge waves the jeep forward, figuring, I guess, that I clean up startlingly well. Before I can say anything, the jeep roars through the barbed wire into a wide flat street filled with people.
Most cultures call them refugees, but I think of them as the dregs—unwanted and unlucky, thrown from country to country, or locked away in undesirable land, waiting for a bit of charity, a change of political fortune, waiting for an understanding that will never, ever come.
The smell hits you first: raw sewage combined with vomit and dysentery. Then thebugs, bugs like you’ve never seen, moving in swarms, sensing fresh meat.
After your first time with those swarms, you slather illegal bug spray on your arms, not caring that developed countries banned DDT as a poison/nerve toxin long ago. Anything to keep those creatures off you, anything to keep yourself alive.
You get out of your jeep, and immediately, the children who aren’t dying surround you. They don’t want sweets—what a quaint old idea that is—they want to know what kind of tech you have, what’s buried in your skin, what you carry under your eyes, what you record from that hollow under your chin. You give them short answers, wrong answers, answers you’ll regret in the quiet of your hotel room days later, after you know you’ve made it out to report once more. You remember them, wonder how they’ll do, hope that they won’t become the ones you see farther into the camp, sprawled outside thin government-issue tents, those bug swarms covering their faces, their stomachs distended, their limbs pieces of scrap so thin that they don’t even look like useful sticks.
Then you set the memories—the knowledge—aside. You’re good at setting things aside. That’s a skill you acquire in this job, if you didn’t already have it when you came in. The I’ll-think-about-it-later skill, a promise to the self that is never fulfilled.
Because if you do think about it later, you get overwhelmed. You figure out pretty damn quickly that if you do think about all the things you’ve seen—all the broken bodies, all the dying children—you’ll break, and if you break you won’t be able to work, and if you can’t work, you can no longer be.
After a while, work is all that’s left to you. Between the misplaced trust and the sights no human should have to bear, you stand, reporting, because you believe someone will care, someone stronger will Do Something.
Even though, deep down, you know, there is no one stronger, and nothing ever gets done.
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Suicide Squadron Part I
by Martha Trumante
